TIL В 1998 году, через 2 года после инцидента в Варжинье, была создана видеоигра, изображающая большинство тем и историй, которые мы знаем из «Момента контакта».

Taken from Wikipedia:
> Incidente em Varginha (also released as The Varginha Incident and Alien Anarchy) is a 1998 Brazilianfirst-person shooter game developed by Perceptum. The game is based on the Varginha UFO incident, in which three people claimed to have seen an alien in the city of Varginha, Brazil.

The game looks faily advanced for 1998. Im curious in what extend were the story of the game influenced by the storys in the media. Could it also be that the develpoers based it on an a more down to earth event, that happend at the time and attached an alien element to it. And since the game was released in brazil, some folks in the city played it and developed «false memories» from playing it since it is considered fairly lifelike for the time?

This was made two years after the incident occurred, so the story was already out by then. Can you make this easier to digest and point out which specific pieces of information in the video game originated with that game? My guess is none and they just made a game based on an alleged real event, but if that’s wrong, please correct.

And even if it was correct that a detail here and there from the story did originate with that game, this still wouldn’t be proof of anything. There is a strange phenomenon in fiction in which it has the appearance of predicting future events. This has even spawned an entire conspiracy subculture known as «predictive programming.» It happens all the time. It turns out that these are mostly just cherrypicked coincidences, but it’s interesting because they can be very convincing if you weren’t aware of how it works.

For example, the pilot episode of *The Lone Gunmen*, which aired months before 9/11, predicted 9/11 quite accurately, as did many other films and shows. [Here is a video showing all of the times fiction predicted 9/11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0vSZRkdzJM). Sometimes it’s scary accurate, and sometimes the details are slightly off. It’s disturbing at first, but what is actually happening here is that an enormous amount of fiction is being created all the time, the vast majority of which does not predict future events. You only notice it when it does predict something just by chance. And that’s it.

To make things a little more confusing, there is a minor kernel of truth to the predictive programming conspiracy theory, though. Richard Thieme — *The Only Way to Tell the Truth is in Fiction- the Dynamics of life in the National Security State*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdsJulQdUcg

Very interesting, I’m brazilian and now I just remembered reading about it at the time. It was very hard to find. I’ll try downloading it, although being a MS-DOS based game, I’m not sure it will run on windows 7.

Oh hey, Civvie11 made a video on this and *that’s* where I first heard about it lmao

Ahh yes, the time the aliens made some dude become a hospital shooter, I remember that day very well in Brazil

Actually looks really sophisticated for its time, an open world shooter with scripted events that’s not on rails.