Marcia Graciette and her mystery box (Joe Fex/Ape-X Research)

A Los Angeles-based contactee with purported psychic powers, Maria Graciette billed herself as a countess and former Miss Portugal. A true renaissance lady of the new age, Graciette authored Astrology and Your Sex Life (1965) and recorded an LP called Astrology, Know the Language of the Stars.

As Graciette once informed The San Bernardino County Sun:

“Since I was a little girl, I’ve been able to see auras around people. When I was very young, my teacher gave me a mysterious box and told me never to lose it. I’ve had the box for a long, long time!

“I had always used it in my studio to store things. It was by accident that I discovered the mysterious power of the box. I had thrown some pictures in the box and when I took them out I could see auras around the figures in the image. I have always been able to see auras in photographs, but now it seems to me that it is much easier to read the auras in an image when it has been placed in the box…I do not know what it is, I cannot explain it but when I write a statement on a sheet of paper and put it in the box, the statement is always true.”

Graciette was a guest speaker at the 1966 Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention in addition to a number of other ’60s saucer happenings such as Daniel Fry’s Understanding Conventions. At the “Understandorama” in Harmony Grove, California, in November 1964, Graciette hosted a forum called “My experiences aboard a spaceship”—although I could find little in the way of specifics regarding Graciette’s purported UFO contactee experience.

Throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Graciette made a series of psychic predictions that often found their way into the pages of The National Enquirer. Here are some tantalizing highlights:

*A UFO base, thousands of years old, would be found deep in the Mexican desert.

*Vice President Quayle, attending a World Series game, would impulsively interfere with a play.

*A meteorite would crash into the White House Rose Garden, placing President and Mrs. Bush at risk from radiation.

*Actor Tom Cruise would lose his hair due to a stress-related illness.

As for her title of Miss Portugal—and of being some sort of “Countess”—the excellent Mexican UFO website “Marcianitos Verdes” could find no evidence to back up these claims and suspected that Graciette  had constructed them out of whole cloth.