A Brazilian man claimed he turned 126 last week, which would make him the oldest person to ever live by nearly a decade.
Jose Aguinelo dos Santos, a son of slaves, said he was born on July 7, 1888, just months before Brazil abolished slavery.
“The truth is that you just keep getting older. You take each stage at a time,” he told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. “If I got to this age it’s because I’ve lived a lot, that’s all.”
Aguinelo has been living in an old-age home in the city of Bauru since 1973, when he was 85.
The long-ago-retired farm worker showed up at the home with no ID. His age is based on testimony Aguinelo gave to a judge in 2001 when the home finally asked him to produce some kind of ID.
The home wants to conduct advanced carbon tests that could prove Aguinelo’s approximate age.
“This is very important,” said the old-age home’s president, Jose Roberto Pires.
“We believe the world’s oldest ever person is living here with us, and this is the only way we can really prove it.’
But the exams would cost $27,000 and the home can’t afford it right now.
“We are trying to see if we can get donations to this exam,” the home’s psychologist Mariana de Fatima Canassa da Silva told the Brazilian business journal Exame.
If Aguinelo really is 126, he’d surpass Japanese citizen Jiroemon Kimura who died in 2013 after 116 years and 54 days on this earth, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Aguinelo has lived this long despite smoking a pack of cigarettes each day for the past 50 years.
He takes an appetite stimulant each morning, helping him down four meals a day — usually rice, beans and pasta. Aguinelo does not suffer from any hypertension or memory problems.
The centenarian walks without a cane but does need help taking a bath. He struggles to speak but managed to offer these opinions:
- On family: “I had a wild older sister who was always coming down on me. She hit me every week. Her name was Maria.”
- On religion: “I don’t want to say anything about that. Everybody’s going to die.”
- On previous girlfriends and his lifetime of bachelorhood: “They [gal pals] would come and they would go.”
If Aguinelo really is 126, he would have been born when the White House was occupied by America’s 22nd president, Grover Cleveland.
He would have been 26 when World War I broke out and 65 when Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the British throne.
Aguinelo would have been 52 when Brazilian national hero and all-time soccer great Pele was born.
Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent