Call of Chicago: Our Man in Manaus

“I have anticipated my narrative because I do not wish to recur to the horror more than is necessary.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914)

In 1914, former President Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, along with the Brazilian Colonel Cândido Rondon and the naturalist George Cherrie, descended the unmapped Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt, deep in the unexplored Amazon rain forest. The ordeal nearly killed Roosevelt (and did kill three men of the expedition), and he never truly recovered from what he saw and did there, dying in 1919. Kermit and Cherrie mounted another expedition to Tibet in 1925; Kermit explored the Burma-Chinese hill country with his brother Theodore Jr. in 1928. Kermit committed suicide in Alaska in 1943. Cherrie apparently made peace with his experiences, dying in Vermont five years later.

The Roosevelts used their influence to establish the ONI’s P4 desk during World War I, and when Theodore Jr. became Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1919, he opened his father’s secret journals. When he and Kermit returned from Burma in 1929, he read the Innsmouth report and noticed the parallels between the Dagon cult there and what his father saw and did at the Lagoa das Sombras in the interior. The Roosevelt family became the backstage patrons of P4 and then of DELTA GREEN: Kermit, Jr. served in the OSS and then the CIA.

But what DELTA GREEN knew in those early days, MAJESTIC learned. Where Theodore Sr. saw only horror, they saw an opportunity. MAJESTIC teams went into Brazil searching for the Azathoth-fragments from the Tunguska-like Rio Curaçá and Rupununi “bolide crashes” of 1930 and 1935. MJ-10 partnered up with the Brazilian Air Force’s (FAB) “H Traffic” office after its foundation in 1954, and MJ-5 guided that office’s investigation of the 1957 Itaipu Fort UFO incident and revealed very limited pieces of the truth to the H Traffic teams.

The results of that investigation (and Kermit and Cherrie’s findings in Tibet) drove the eventual MAJESTIC approach to Brazil: Project FARM TEAM. MJ-10 spearheaded the plan, to partner with the Brazilian military in fully exploiting the Unnatural—and in fully exploiting Brazil. Brazilian recruits could staff entirely deniable units of MJ-3. Brazilian jungles could host MJ-8 research. If MAJESTIC didn’t assist the 1964 military coup in Brazil, they certainly benefited from the resulting dictatorship.

The “lead mask” case in 1966, the August 1967 UFO flap, the “Dino Kraspodon” contactee case in 1968: MAJESTIC fully works (or runs) them all through Brazil’s new UFO office, SIOANI, headed by Major Gilberto Zani de Mello out of the 4th Air Zone of the FAB in São Paulo. MJ-10 head Gordon Gray has his suspicions of the Greys: let the Brazilians be the experimental subjects to see whether he’s right. In short, MAJESTIC plans to turn Brazil into a research colony—ironically, the same thing the mi-go plan to do with America.

Fortunately for Brazil, DELTA GREEN and MAJESTIC don’t always see eye to eye. And DELTA GREEN has a man in Manaus.

DG Friendly: José Roque Ribeiro Bastos, Sr.

Roque Bastos served in the FAB in WWII, flying P-47 Thunderbolts in Italy and receiving multiple decorations for heroism. After the war, he became a test pilot eventually specializing in helicopters, organizing helicopter-borne search and rescue missions from his airbase in Manaus.

In 1956, a DELTA GREEN team on the trail of Karotechia survivor Dr. Gunter Frank inserted into Brazil, looking for Frank’s plantation headquarters. They found one of his offsite laboratories instead, built around a cabrito escuro grove, where he experimented with the milk of Shub-Niggurath to cure his cancer. When the DELTA GREEN team hit, they found a version of Frank built entirely of cancer, a horrendous monstrosity—and called for extraction when their bullets and grenades did nothing. Then-Captain Bastos arrived just in time to see “Frank” explode into a grunting, tentacled creature as big as his Bell H-13 Sioux helicopter. He assisted in laying down a napalm barrage that destroyed the facility, evacuated the two surviving DELTA GREEN agents, and by the time he landed in Manaus that morning he was a dedicated hunter of the Unnatural.

DELTA GREEN kept in touch, especially as ExComm became suspicious of the increased MAJESTIC activity in Brazil. Bastos’ contacts and allies had their own suspicions of the MJ-10 and MJ-5 teams; some of them held positions relatively high up in the BAF. They tasked him to head Brazil’s elite PARA-SAR airborne search and rescue squadron, established in 1963 in Rio de Janeiro. Major Bastos himself moves around the country keeping in touch with his “Shepherd” teams, hand-picked to keep alert for MAJESTIC attempts to suborn his unit. He spends as much time as he can spare in Manaus, where he keeps the records and photos from his clandestine CALHA NORTE project, tracking the Unnatural in the Amazon, and listening for the call from DELTA GREEN.

Note: The son of the real-life Maj. Roque Bastos is a dedicated RPG gamer, who finally figured out how to explain his passion to his father by using the Delta Green setting as an example. His father wanted to play his first game of Delta Green in the Vietnam era, but died of pancreatic cancer in December of 2020 before they could make it happen. The son got in touch with Pelgrane after that, hoping to get a copy of the sold-out The Fall of DELTA GREEN; we hooked him up with a limited edition copy. The Brazilian Air Force is honoring Maj. Roque Bastos in a ceremony this Sunday. We hope this DG-canonization of his father honors him as well.

Check out Maj. Bastos’ character sheet, written up by his son, here.

The Fall of DELTA GREEN adapts DELTA GREEN: THE ROLE-PLAYING GAME to the GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying system, opening the files on a lost decade of anti-Mythos operations: the 1960s. Players take on the role of DELTA GREEN operatives, assets, and friendlies. Hunt Deep Ones beneath the Atlantic, shut down dangerous artists in San Francisco, and delve into the heart of Vietnam’s darkness. Purchase The Fall of DELTA GREEN in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.