Children at Escola ████ describe identical figure in coordinated drawings

A school counsellor at a primary school in the Varginha region asked two unrelated classes to draw "something you saw or dreamed about this week" in early March 1996, as part of a routine wellbeing exercise. She had given the same prompt for years without notable results. The drawings she received that week were, in her words, "the only ones that ever stopped me at my desk."

Twenty-three of the drawings depict a brown bipedal figure of consistent proportion, with three protrusions on its dorsal surface and red ocular features. The proportions are sufficiently consistent across the two classes that an art teacher consulted for analysis described it as "a single figure drawn from a single shared memory, not a copied figure." The classes had not seen each other's work.

The remaining drawings in the two classes depict family members, pets, and weather, in the proportions one would expect from the prompt.

The counsellor photographed each drawing before returning the originals to the children. The photographs were placed in her personal archive, where they remained until her retirement in 2008. The school identifier and the children's names were redacted by the counsellor herself before the photographs were released to a regional researcher in 2010.