# The Official UFO Night [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 075 · 1986 Published: October 12, 2026 One moonlit night in 1986, a tower controller in São José dos Campos watched colored lights hang over the city, the founder of Embraer chased them in a twin-prop Xingu, and Brazil scrambled five armed fighters after radar plots that slid onto their tails and vanished when they turned. The Air Force’s confidential report called the phenomena “solid” and credited them with “a certain intelligence.” ![Photograph of a gray delta-winged Mirage jet fighter parked on a concrete apron under a clear blue sky, its canopy raised and a boarding ladder at the cockpit; the tail carries a leaping-jaguar emblem near the tip, a green-and-yellow fin flash, the marking “F-103E,” the letters “AN” and the serial “FAB 4913,” and “FORÇA AÉREA BRASILEIRA” is painted along the fuselage, with a low line of trees on the horizon.]() Mirage IIIEBR (F-103) FAB 4913 on the apron at Anápolis Air Base in 1995. On May 19, 1986, this airframe flew as Jaguar 116, the Mirage in which Capt. Armindo Viriato de Freitas locked his radar onto a target that pulled away even when he went supersonic. Photo: Rob Schleiffert, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** May 19–20, 1986 - **LOCATION:** São José dos Campos and the coast of São Paulo state, and the skies around Anápolis, Goiás - **REPORT TYPE:** Aviation encounter - **RESOLUTION:** [Unexplained]() - **RECORD STATUS:** Air Defense Command, 1986: “solid” and intelligent; unexplained ## The story ### A Monday of promotions Monday, May 19, 1986, was a big day for Ozires Silva. The retired Air Force colonel who had founded Embraer, Brazil’s aircraft maker, and run it for years, spent the day in Brasília with President José Sarney, who named him president of Petrobras, the state oil company. That evening he flew home toward São José dos Campos, the aerospace town in the Paraíba Valley between São Paulo and Rio, in an Embraer Xingu twin turboprop registered PT-MBZ, with Alcir Pereira da Silva, a 37-year-old pilot who had worked at Embraer for six years. The Air Force’s record names Alcir as the pilot; the newspapers, in 1986 and since, have put Ozires at the controls, and one clipping from that week manages to call each of them the pilot. In the control tower at São José dos Campos airport, Sgt. Sérgio Mota da Silva, 28, was on duty alone. The weather he later wrote down for the Air Force was nearly perfect: a clear sky with two-eighths of cirrus, and a low layer of haze to the north and northeast. Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão, who flew through it later that night, described a cloudless sky and a full moon. Sources: [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [40 anos da noite em que caças da Força Aérea perseguiram 21 óvnis]() · [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Agência Estado’s “Invasão aérea” (May 22) and “Uma estranha missão de Ozires”]() · [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Parte · report of Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão (“Jambock 07”)]() ### ‘Welcome to the flying-saucer festival’ When the lights first appeared depends on who is counting. Sérgio’s written statement for the Air Force put it at 21:30 Zulu, 6:30 p.m. local time: “a point of light over the city in the northwest sector of the aerodrome and two other points near the outer marker” of runway 15. They looked “the size of the head of a matchstick,” mostly red but shifting to yellow, green and orange, and they did not move; he watched them through binoculars and with the naked eye. On the tapes released decades later, he can be heard describing the first one: “There’s something here in the northwest sector of São José. A little beacon, man, but… I’m looking hard, the thing is stopped: not going up, not going down, not going left or right, it’s just sitting there. No, I’m looking, it’s not a star, no. It’s a beacon… just a little point of light. Weird little thing. It’s high. Now it’s gone into the haze.” The Folha de S.Paulo dates his first sighting to about 6 p.m., while he was handling the departure of a Rio-Sul airliner; the BBC puts it at about 8 p.m., with Rio Sul flight 703 for Rio, and has him phoning Guarulhos tower to ask whether any aircraft was heading his way. None was. By the time Brasília called, he had a greeting ready: “Brasília? Good evening! Welcome to the flying-saucer festival.” “It’s crazy here,” he went on, in the Folha’s transcription of the same call; “the ones I could see kept changing color, to red, yellow, blue, lilac. It was a whole festival of colors.” At one point he counted thirteen. He told the BBC in 2022 that when he dimmed the runway lights, the objects came closer, and when he turned them up, they drew back. “Whether they were trying to interact with me, I don’t know. What I know is that they behaved intelligently.” Sources: [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [Controller logbook transcripts, April 30 to May 29, 1986, with a copy of the COpM I report]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() · [40 anos da noite em que caças da Força Aérea perseguiram 21 óvnis]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [“Brasília? Boa noite! Bem vindo ao festival dos discos voadores”]() ### Big red stars over the Serra do Mar At 9:03 p.m. the Xingu, coming in from the north at 6,000 feet to land, told the tower that it could see the luminous points, and at 9:08, the controllers’ log records, it “decided to head for the targets”; as the plane approached, “they moved away and vanished, appearing later near MBZ.” Alcir’s statement to the Air Force was sober. He had seen two red points of light over the coast, on the 150 radial of the São José VOR, moving from east to west; he could not judge their speed. “They looked like big red stars.” The plane suffered no interference of any kind. To the newspapers he gave more: “There were at least two of them in the air… They were reddish lights, very strong and very different from stars or airplanes, that changed position quickly without leaving any trail; they simply disappeared from one point and appeared somewhere else.” Once, he said, São Paulo control warned that the objects were right behind them: “we made a 180-degree turn in the direction indicated and saw nothing, but they reappeared a little farther ahead, over the Serra do Mar, with a light so strong it could not have been any reflection.” Before the chase, one paper reported, Ozires had joked: “People talk so much about flying saucers, but I’ve never seen one and I’d like to meet one up close.” Meeting two real airplanes along the way, the crew asked them to signal and watched their landing lights blink three times, “while the light of the unidentified object stayed intense and steady.” By the BBC’s account, when Ozires announced he would try to close in, Alcir was less keen: “Everybody who tries to chase one of these things ends up disappearing, you know?” The light vanished as soon as the plane began to maneuver. The Xingu landed on Embraer’s apron at 9:40, thirty-five minutes late, after nearly half an hour of pursuit by the press’s count. Sources: [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Agência Estado’s “Invasão aérea” (May 22) and “Uma estranha missão de Ozires”]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() ### Plots that would not form tracks Air defense had been listening since 8:15 p.m., when the Brasília area control center told the military operations cell, COpM I, that the São José tower was seeing lights over the city and that São Paulo approach had radar contacts near the airfield. What followed, in the controllers’ handwritten log, is a scramble against a target that would not hold still. At 9:01 the long-range air defense radar at São Roque was asked what it saw: “nothing was plotting.” A video recording of its screen was requested and failed because of “technical problems”; later the recording of the Gama radars near Brasília was delayed because one of the recorders broke down. Then a sergeant at the area control center relayed that PT-MBZ had told São José tower its landing “was being impeded by the luminous points crossing in front of it.” Maj. Ney Antunes Cerqueira, the 37-year-old chief of the Air Defense Operations Center, ordered the alert at Santa Cruz Air Base near Rio activated at 9:39 p.m., vectoring on plots that, the final report admitted, had not “constituted definite radar echoes.” At 10:10 the approach radar at Anápolis, in Goiás, reported a slow echo west of its beacon, heading west; the Gama radars saw only a few plots that “did not even form chains.” The Anápolis alert went at 10:11. At 10:24 the center tried to call out the crew of a KC-130 tanker in case the fighters needed refueling in the air. Alcir, meanwhile, could not reach air defense from Embraer, whose switchboard blocked long-distance calls; he phoned from home, and the log records his call at 10:40. Sources: [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Agência Estado’s “Invasão aérea” (May 22) and “Uma estranha missão de Ozires”]() ### Jambock 17 over the sea 1st Lt. Kleber Caldas Marinho, 25, was in his quarters in the officers’ village at Santa Cruz when the call came at 10:27. At that hour, he said in 2026, he knew it was unlikely to be training. Seven minutes later his F-5E, FAB 4848, callsign Jambock 17, was in the air, its radar off and its navigation lights dark, with a controller guiding him toward São José dos Campos. Sent on toward the coast, he saw “a very strong light, which clashed with the whole scene” off to his right, low, at one to two o’clock. He turned toward it, switched on his radar without orders, and got a contact dead ahead at 10 to 12 nautical miles, “which matched the visual.” It drew away beyond his radar’s 20-mile reach. Between his first sighting at 17,000 feet and his last at 33,000, he wrote in his report, the object went from low off his right, at one to two o’clock, to high at twelve. He looked away for a moment “to avoid any kind of night-vision illusion” and, looking back, saw “3 distinct colors, green, red and white, which pulsed,” until white won out. His instruments did something odd: some 200 nautical miles out over the water, where his DME should have shown its red failure flag, the needle swung 10 to 20 degrees right toward the object and the display read 35 or 36 miles, returning to normal only when he turned for home. “I’m reporting that apparently it can’t be an aircraft, OK?” he radioed. “Or an airplane, because of its performance as far as speed goes, OK, and also because of where it’s flying, OK?” At the press conference he said he had followed it 200 miles out over the Atlantic. “I wasn’t afraid because I like the unknown.” Near minimum fuel, he turned back and landed at 11:37, after a mission of an hour and three minutes. Forty years later, a retired airline captain, he still could not explain it: “It moved regularly, it had its own light and it moved consistently. That leads me to believe there was something intelligent operating that object.” Sources: [A ‘Noite Oficial dos Óvnis’: há 40 anos, caças da FAB perseguiram objetos não identificados]() · [Parte · report of 1st Lt. Kleber Caldas Marinho (“Jambock 17”)]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() · [Jets chase UFOs over Brazil in 1986]() ![Photograph of a camouflaged F-5E Tiger II fighter in green, tan and brown with a black nose cone and the number 24 on its nose, standing on a concrete ramp with its canopy raised, in front of a long pale hangar under an overcast sky.]() An F-5E Tiger II of the 1st Fighter Group at Santa Cruz Air Base in July 1995, flown by the 2nd squadron, sister to the 1st “Jambock” squadron whose F-5Es 4848 and 4849 flew that night. Photo: Rob Schleiffert, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() [CC BY-SA 2.0 · Rob Schleiffert]() ### Jaguar 116 goes supersonic At Anápolis, Capt. Armindo Souza Viriato de Freitas, 31, was alert pilot number one. He was activated at 10:15 p.m. and took off at 10:48 in Mirage F-103 FAB 4913, callsign Jaguar 116. A visual search at ten o’clock found nothing. Then, after a 180-degree turn, his own radar picked up a contact at 13 nautical miles and locked on. “At that moment I was holding .9 of speed,” he wrote, “and the target was maneuvering in a zigzag, and the distance now held constant, now decreased or increased, until at 6 NM from the objective (I was already supersonic, M 1.05) the distance began to increase very rapidly until the lock was lost.” He got other locks and lost them; the closest he came was two miles, turning constantly to the right, and he never saw a thing. The weather, he added, would only have helped: in that moonlight any aircraft would have been visible. On the tapes, when he asked whether the other fighters were getting the same thing, the controller answered: “Affirmative. Same conditions: there’s a contact, you get close to the contact and it increases the distance.” In the papers after the press conference, he said the blip zigzagged “at 80-degree angles” and “I know of no aircraft capable of turning like that.” By 1993 his estimate had grown. Telling TV Globo that the target had reached Mach 15, he said: “If there is an airplane that can develop that speed, I don’t know of it.” Sources: [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() · [“A celeuma da noite de 19 de maio de 1986” · Boletim nº 168/173]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() ### Thirteen on his tail Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão, 29, should not have been flying at all. He was not on the alert roster; he had stayed at Santa Cruz to study for a flight-test exam, and when the alarm sounded he kept studying, thinking it was training, until a soldier came to say they needed another pilot. He took off at 10:50 in F-5E FAB 4849, Jambock 07. Air defense told him about five contacts closing on his nose at 20 miles. He saw nothing, on a night so bright, he said later, that “you could see the Paraíba Valley, all the way to São Paulo.” The contacts reached five miles and then, he wrote, ended up at his six o’clock. “Now they’re behind you, following you,” the controller told him, “as if they were flying on your wing.” In the Air Force’s words, the “striking fact” of his flight was “the appearance for a moment of thirteen plots at the aircraft’s tail.” He was ordered into a 180-degree turn to the right and found only empty, moonlit sky. South of São José his own radar began to misbehave: “On the radar screen there are these striped streaks, sort of diagonal. That’s not normal.” After half an hour of searching, he saw a red light toward the sea, in the direction of Ilhabela. “It was like the light on top of a building. It stayed still, didn’t change color, didn’t blink and didn’t move.” Ground radar confirmed a contact there, and he went supersonic; he was told it was moving at his own speed. At minimum fuel he gave up and landed at five past midnight. “It was the biggest frustration of my life,” he said twenty years later. “The light I saw could have been a boat on the horizon or, who knows, really something else. But it’s rash to reach any conclusion.” Sources: [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [Parte · report of Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão (“Jambock 07”)]() · [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() ### ‘The plot is always at your six’ Two more Mirages went up from Anápolis. Capt. Rodolfo da Silva Souza, 32, took off at 11:17 in FAB 4918, Jaguar 98, and spent some forty-five minutes being vectored at a target the Anápolis approach radar could see and the air defense radars could not. It moved “without a defined pattern,” he reported, at up to about 200 knots, until the ground radar’s plots merged; “afterwards it reappeared in a position 20 to 30 NM from the last plot.” He never saw it on his own radar or out of the canopy. “For sure, if it’s a real target, it isn’t lit, OK?” he radioed. “It’s dark, because I’m practically visual with the ground.” His controller had noticed a pattern: “OK, kid, the plot is always at your six o’clock, OK? When you turn, it’s always turning in front of you, it comes at you, passes over or under you, we can’t detect altitude, and it sits on your tail the whole time. When you turn, it disappears from the position and always reappears in front of you.” After landing at seven minutes past midnight he asked the line mechanics whether they had seen or heard anything over the base other than an F-103. The answer was no. Capt. Júlio Cézar Rozenberg, 32, followed at 11:36 in FAB 4917, Jaguar 107, and was vectored three times at a target maneuvering near the base, once passing within a mile of it, without a radar lock or a glimpse. He had half suspected the F-5Es were staging a mock attack and would switch on their lights. “And me of all people, someone passionate about the subject, saw nothing!” he said in 2006. “But I came close.” His landing at 12:30 a.m. ended the official record of the chase. Two more fighters had been readied on the ground; within thirty minutes of the alarm, the Air Force later noted, seven armed interceptors had been available. Sources: [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() ### ‘As if to say, I’m here!’ Others saw lights that night, by their own later accounts. By a saucer society’s digest of the papers, the crew and all 27 passengers of a Votec flight near Araxá saw a round, intense light, white, green and red (one clipping put the Votec sighting on the Wednesday, with 21 passengers), and a Transbrasil flight over the same region also reported one; a TAM Bandeirante pilot told Brasília that something was approaching him on what looked like a collision course. At about 1 a.m., a jet pilot named Otto Nogueira said a point of light “prettier and much bigger than the morning star” paced him for more than 700 kilometers between Brasília and Salvador, and that his onboard radar showed it too. Around 3 a.m., the crew of a Varig Boeing 707 freighter bound from São Paulo to Rio was asked by the controller whether they could see traffic at eleven o’clock, then told, “For your information, it is a UFO.” Captain Geraldo Souza Pinto said he saw it at that moment: a strong light, “like a white beacon.” “At the very moment they asked us whether we could see the traffic and I said no, it flashed, as if to say: ‘I’m here!’” The controller called the target moving to their right at “something above Mach 5,” then closing again: “Three miles, two, one… Varig, the traffic is merging with your airplane’s plot.” The crew looked up and down and saw nothing. On the ground, at about 9 p.m., the photographer Adenir Britto of the Vale Paraibano newspaper, sent into the paper’s courtyard by an anonymous call (“There’s a flying saucer over the paper”), shot multicolored lights with a 500-millimeter lens. A month later, he told the BBC, two officers from the Aerospace Technical Center arrived with the American ufologist James J. Hurtak and took the negatives, to be analyzed by NASA, Hurtak said. They were never returned. In 2026 Luiz Silva, then an Embratel manager, told the Folha he had been having a draft beer at the Ilha Porchat lookout in São Vicente when “a big red cigar, bigger than a Boeing” crossed the coast. Sources: [“A celeuma da noite de 19 de maio de 1986” · Boletim nº 168/173]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [40 anos da noite em que caças da Força Aérea perseguiram 21 óvnis]() ### Hunters turned hunted The Air Force did not keep the night secret for long. Air Minister Octávio Júlio Moreira Lima told President Sarney during a state dinner at Itamaraty for Napoleón Duarte, the president of El Salvador; Sarney, Agência Estado reported, listened “interested and curious.” On May 21 the minister briefed reporters at the presidential palace, and on May 22 the papers were full of it. Electronic warfare was possible but “remote,” he said; there had been similar events on Cindacta’s screens, “but nothing resembling this in magnitude,” and the pilots’ reports were “fantastic.” “For several minutes,” one paper quoted him, “things were reversed. Called out to chase, the FAB fighters came to be chased by the unidentified flying objects.” Ozires, taking office at Petrobras, found that reporters wanted to talk only about saucers. “I am not a lunatic,” he said. Starlight distorted by pollution, he allowed, might explain points of light, but starlight did not show up on radar. And, sheepishly: “They’ll end up saying the president of Petrobras tears up money.” On May 23 at 4:30 p.m. the ministry held a press conference with the five fighter pilots, Alcir, Maj. Cerqueira and the controllers. “It is not a matter of believing or not,” Moreira Lima said. “We can only give technical information. The suppositions are many. Technically, I would tell you gentlemen that we have no explanation.” In the English version of the transcripts later circulated, he added: “Radar doesn’t have optical illusions.” Cerqueira called the objects “Unidentified Aerial Movements” moving at between 250 and 1,500 kilometers an hour. The minister promised a full report within thirty days. Sources: [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Agência Estado’s “Invasão aérea” (May 22) and “Uma estranha missão de Ozires”]() · [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Folha de S.Paulo’s “Ozires Silva confirma ter visto pontos luminosos”]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [Jets chase UFOs over Brazil in 1986]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() ### Solid, and somehow intelligent The report was finished on June 2, 1986, eight confidential pages signed by Brig. José Pessoa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, acting commander of the Air Defense Command, and then not released for twenty-three years. It opens modestly. Given “the limitations of time and of specialized knowledge about events of this nature,” the command would confine itself to “a simple narration of the facts, so as not to give room for speculation involving the Ministry of Aeronautics.” It concedes that Brazil’s air defense depended on radars built for air traffic control, “not specific to air defense,” on which weak targets had to be picked out by hand. Then, after the chronology, it lists the traits of the phenomena: they produced radar echoes on the ground system and on the interceptors’ radars at the same time, with visual confirmation by the pilots; they ranged from subsonic to supersonic speeds and also hovered; they flew from below 5,000 feet to above 40,000; they were sometimes seen as white, green and red lights and sometimes showed no light at all; they could accelerate and decelerate abruptly; and they turned in constant radii and sometimes in undefined ones. Its conclusion is the sentence that made the case famous: “this Command is of the opinion that the phenomena are solid and reflect a certain intelligence, through their capacity to accompany and keep distance from the observers as well as to fly in formation, not necessarily crewed.” There is an odd footnote. The report cites as its authority a 1978 note by a previous air minister, Joelmir Campos de Araripe Macedo, ordering a classified register of UFO reports. Kentaro Mori found that the note justified itself with the story of a Luftwaffe “Sonderbüro 13” that had studied foo fighters, a hoax the French ufologist Henry Durrant later admitted planting in his 1970 book to see who would copy it without checking. The British researcher David Clarke called the minister “the biggest fish Durrant hooked.” Sources: [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [OVNIs e a Aeronáutica: O que não querem que você saiba]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() ![Scan of a typewritten page in Portuguese stamped “CONFIDENCIAL” at top and bottom, listing items a to f about radar echoes, speeds, altitudes, lights, acceleration and turns, followed by numbered conclusions and a signature block for Brig. do Ar José Pessoa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque.]() The last page of the Air Defense Command report of June 2, 1986, with the six traits of the phenomena and conclusion 3: “the phenomena are solid and reflect a certain intelligence.” Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0249. A Brazilian official act, excluded from copyright by Law 9,610/98, article 8, IV. [Image source]() ### Magnetic anomalies, space junk and ghosts on the scope Explanations arrived quickly. In 1986 Brazilian newspapers floated a meteor shower, reflections of the full moon, ball lightning, radar malfunction, space debris and spy planes. The British satellite watcher Geoffrey Perry pointed to boxes of refuse ejected that night by the Soviet Salyut 7 station, said to have re-entered over central-western Brazil. Brig. Cavalcanti told Veja it “could have been space debris, but it wasn’t only that,” since falling debris keeps a constant speed and direction, and the radar targets had ranged “from very slow to extremely high.” Electronic warfare kept surfacing. The minister called it remote; Kleber said in 2006 that he had asked in his report for a check on whether an aircraft carrier off the coast, or an aircraft jamming the radars, had been nearby, and that nothing he suspected was confirmed; Jordão, decades later, offered a spy plane injecting false plots as his own guess. In 1991 the Air Force’s public relations chief told the ufologist Rafael Cury, in a letter of September 18, that the conclusions pointed to “magnetic anomalies that turned into plots,” and that no visual contact had justified them, a claim the 1986 files contradict. Kleber rejected it in 2006: “It was something solid. They say there’s a lot of magnetic anomaly in that area, but I don’t believe that’s it.” Moreira Lima, still unconvinced either way in 2006, said: “In the time of the cannibals, a lightning bolt was a message from the gods… If physics doesn’t explain it today, it will certainly explain it tomorrow.” The Varig captain who saw the flashing light conceded that pilots see illusions: “I myself have lost count of the times I’ve seen Venus appear in strange ways.” On the Metabunk forum in 2024, posters suggested flares, unreliable radar and pilots chasing ghost plots. Sources: [Jets chase UFOs over Brazil in 1986]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [A noite oficial dos UFOs]() · [Brazilian UFO Flap of 1986 – “Night of Lights” / “Official UFO Night”]() ### Echoes, tapes and a fortieth anniversary The lights did not stop on May 20. Over the next week, the files show, Brasília’s controllers took calls from a student who had seen lights, from soldiers watching them over Corcovado and Niterói, from Santos, where the air base was flooded with calls, and from the tower at Ribeirão Preto; much of it was lost, an officer admitted, “for lack of doctrine” in handling such reports. On May 27 an airliner reported being paced by lights; on the night of May 28 the São José tower watched a light rise fast and vertically, then hang still, while a plot showed on São Paulo’s approach radar. A controller’s memo of June 24 transcribed a logbook entry in which a pair of fighters 70 miles north of Anápolis, after asking whether their contact was a “ghost,” chased a light that changed from green to white and red to Mach 1.2; at the debriefing the pilot said it had opened from 8 to 20 miles in about five seconds. The report finally came out on September 25, 2009, among Air Force UFO files sent to the National Archives. The eight tapes of May 19 followed in October 2015, after the ufologist Edison Boaventura Júnior, who had traded thousands of leaked Air Force documents to the Archives in 2009, pressed it to waive a fee of 30 reais a minute; Cerqueira had told an interviewer in 2006 that the tapes “probably don’t even exist anymore.” TV Globo’s Fantástico aired them for the thirtieth anniversary in 2016. Ufologists have built a larger legend around the documented core, with 100-meter objects, an 11-kilometer mothership and two thousand cadets watching from Guaratinguetá, none of which appears in the files. The Air Force says it has no specialists to investigate such phenomena and has sent everything to the Archives, where the UFO collection is second in popularity only to the records of the dictatorship. “I will certainly never forget that May 19,” Cerqueira said. Sources: [Of. nº 07/OOP/C-130 · “Assunto: OVNI,” with the report of public sightings phoned in on May 23–26]() · [Controller logbook transcripts, April 30 to May 29, 1986, with a copy of the COpM I report]() · [Controller’s memo of June 24, 1986, transcribing a logbook entry, and the ministry’s “Fatos atuais” timeline of May 19]() · [“Brasília? Boa noite! Bem vindo ao festival dos discos voadores”]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [Aeronáutica libera gravações de diálogos da ‘noite oficial dos óvnis’]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [40 anos da noite em que caças da Força Aérea perseguiram 21 óvnis]() ## The evidence ### The paper trail Few UFO cases anywhere have an official record as full as this one. The National Archives’ Air Force UFO collection holds the Air Defense Command’s report of June 2, 1986; the COpM I chief controller’s report of May 27, with minute-by-minute times for every aircraft and the statements of Sérgio and Alcir; the controllers’ 34-page working file, with the handwritten log, a sheet of the five fighters’ serials and takeoff and landing times, intercept forms and telexed debriefs from each pilot, and the list of who sat at the press conference; the Anápolis base’s file with the reports of the radar operator and the three Mirage pilots; the signed reports of both F-5E pilots; CINDACTA I’s cover letter forwarding eight recorded tapes; and logbooks showing lights before and after the night. The tapes themselves have been public since 2015. The ministry also clipped the press coverage, and a Brazilian saucer society’s 1986 bulletin preserves the ministry’s own timeline and the papers’ digests of the press conference. What is missing is equally telling: the radar video recordings were requested but São Roque’s failed and Gama’s started late when a recorder broke down, and the times of Kleber’s sighting and Viriato’s radar contact had to be estimated because the tape had not logged them. Sources: [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() · [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() · [Of. nº 07/OOP/C-130 · “Assunto: OVNI,” with the report of public sightings phoned in on May 23–26]() · [“Brasília? Boa noite! Bem vindo ao festival dos discos voadores”]() ### What the radars saw The documents are frank about the radar evidence’s weaknesses. The chief controller concluded that everything his center saw came as plots, which “never came to constitute tracks”: about twenty in all, most around São José dos Campos. The Anápolis approach radar’s data “did not coincide” with the Gama air defense radars, and the Anápolis Mirages were vectored on plots the approach radar alone could see. The long-range São Roque radar saw nothing when asked at 9:01 p.m. The final report itself warns that the network’s radars were built for air traffic control, with targets initiated by hand and returns too weak to start a track, and that the Santa Cruz alert was launched on plots that were not “definite radar echoes.” Rodolfo’s target vanished when the ground radar’s plots merged and reappeared 20 to 30 miles away, the kind of behavior that posters on the Metabunk forum later put down to unreliable radar. Against this stand the moments of agreement the report stresses: Kleber’s and Viriato’s onboard radars locking onto targets where the ground radar placed them, and, for Kleber, a light seen in the same place. Sérgio, for his part, says the eyes and the radar often disagreed, and that only simultaneous confirmations were counted. Sources: [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() · [Parte · report of 1st Lt. Kleber Caldas Marinho (“Jambock 17”)]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [Brazilian UFO Flap of 1986 – “Night of Lights” / “Official UFO Night”]() ### What the pilots saw None of the five fighter pilots described a shape. Kleber saw a bright, pulsing light and held it on radar; Jordão saw a steady red light toward the sea and, at another point, two white lights he decided were an antenna’s warning lamps; Viriato had radar locks but no visual at any point; Rodolfo and Rozenberg saw nothing at all, though Rozenberg passed within a mile of where the plot was. The Xingu crew’s official statement describes two red points that “looked like big red stars”; only later press accounts and Ozires’s 1986 interviews add an elongated body “perhaps the color of a fluorescent lamp.” The sky was clear and bright with moonlight, which the pilots offered as a reason any aircraft would have been visible, and which also means the lights they chased were seen among stars and coastal lights, often at or near the horizon. The Varig captain who watched a light flash on cue admitted that he had often seen Venus “appearing in strange ways.” Sources: [Parte · report of 1st Lt. Kleber Caldas Marinho (“Jambock 17”)]() · [Parte · report of Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão (“Jambock 07”)]() · [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() · [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [A ‘Noite Oficial dos Óvnis’: há 40 anos, caças da FAB perseguiram objetos não identificados]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() ### How the story grew Many of the famous details come from later retellings rather than the 1986 files. The tower’s first sighting is dated 6 p.m., 6:30 or 8 p.m. depending on the source, and the ministry’s press timeline said 8:50. The documents put the thirteen plots behind Jordão’s F-5E; some 1986 papers gave them to Kleber, and the six-and-seven split is reported both ways. Kleber’s pursuit is subsonic in one tape-based account and supersonic in his own later memories; Viriato’s Mach 1.05 in his report became Mach 1.3 in the BBC’s retelling and a Mach 15 estimate in his 1993 television interview. Rodolfo told an interviewer in 2006 that the moon was not visible, contradicting his own 1986 report of a clear sky “and moon.” The Xingu’s two red lights, pursued on the pilot’s own initiative, grew in the press and in ufologists’ chronologies into three objects in formation, a thirty-minute chase and three landing attempts, and one paper’s first report had “20 objects like big ping-pong balls” moving at over 4,300 km/h. The report’s phrase about turns “with constant radii and other times with undefined radii” is often quoted in English as “sharp 90-degree turns”; the right angles come from pilots’ press comments, not the report. The canonical count of 21 objects is more precise than anything in the files, where the chief controller counted “about twenty plots” that never formed tracks. Sources: [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() · [Controller’s memo of June 24, 1986, transcribing a logbook entry, and the ministry’s “Fatos atuais” timeline of May 19]() · [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [“A celeuma da noite de 19 de maio de 1986” · Boletim nº 168/173]() · [Noite dos discos voadores]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() · [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() ### Status and evidence note The Air Defense Command’s report, written two weeks after the event by officers with access to every log and pilot, did not explain the night and judged the phenomena solid and in some way intelligent; the Air Force has never formally revised it, though its spokesman put the plots down to “magnetic anomalies” in 1991, and today it says it has no specialists to give an opinion. The evidence consists of the confidential reports and logs now in the National Archives, eight tapes of radio and telephone traffic, the contemporary press and press-conference transcripts, and interviews with the participants in 2006, 2022 and 2026. No photograph or film from that night has been published with a clear chain of custody, the radar screen recordings failed, and the negatives taken from the Vale Paraibano photographer were never returned. The case is a radar and visual report, with no claim of a close encounter, and remains unexplained. Sources: [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() · [A noite oficial dos UFOs]() · [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() · [“Brasília? Boa noite! Bem vindo ao festival dos discos voadores”]() ## Timeline - **12 MAY 1986:** A week early: the Anápolis tower watches a strong white-and-reddish light north of the field for ten minutes, and a private plane confirms it. - **19 MAY 1986 · ABOUT 6:30 PM:** Sgt. Sérgio Mota da Silva, alone in the São José dos Campos tower, sees a red point of light over the city and two more near the runway’s outer marker. - **8:15 PM:** Brasília’s area control center alerts the military operations cell: the São José tower sees lights, and São Paulo approach has radar contacts. - **9:03 PM:** The Xingu PT-MBZ, carrying Ozires Silva home from Brasília, reports the lights; at 9:08 it turns to pursue them. - **9:39 PM:** Maj. Ney Cerqueira orders the alert at Santa Cruz Air Base after the Xingu’s landing is reported “impeded” by luminous points. - **10:10–10:11 PM:** Anápolis approach radar reports a slow echo; the Anápolis alert is activated. - **10:34 PM:** Lt. Kleber Caldas Marinho takes off from Santa Cruz in F-5E FAB 4848, Jambock 17. - **10:48 PM:** Capt. Armindo Viriato de Freitas takes off from Anápolis in Mirage FAB 4913, Jaguar 116. - **10:50 PM:** Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão takes off from Santa Cruz in F-5E FAB 4849, Jambock 07; thirteen plots later appear on his tail. - **AROUND 11:15 PM:** Kleber sees a pulsing light off the coast, locks it on radar and follows it out over the Atlantic. - **11:17 PM:** Capt. Rodolfo da Silva Souza takes off from Anápolis in Mirage FAB 4918, Jaguar 98. - **11:36 PM:** Capt. Júlio Cézar Rozenberg takes off from Anápolis in Mirage FAB 4917, Jaguar 107. - **11:37 PM:** Kleber lands at Santa Cruz near minimum fuel, after 63 minutes. - **20 MAY 1986 · 12:05 AM:** Jordão lands at Santa Cruz after chasing a red light toward Ilhabela. - **12:30 AM:** Rozenberg lands at Anápolis, the last of the five; the controllers’ record closes at 12:32. - **ABOUT 3 AM:** A Varig 707 freighter is told the traffic at eleven o’clock “is a UFO”; its captain sees a light flash. - **20 MAY 1986:** Ozires Silva takes office at Petrobras; the air minister tells President Sarney during a state dinner at Itamaraty. - **22 MAY 1986:** The story breaks nationwide after the minister’s briefing at the presidential palace. - **23 MAY 1986 · 4:30 PM:** Press conference at the Ministry of Aeronautics: “Technically, I would tell you gentlemen that we have no explanation.” - **23–28 MAY 1986:** Lights are reported over Rio, Santos and Ribeirão Preto; on May 28 the São José tower sees a light climb vertically and stop. - **2 JUN 1986:** The Air Defense Command concludes that the phenomena are “solid and reflect a certain intelligence.” The report stays confidential. - **18 SEP 1991:** The Air Force tells a ufologist the plots came from “magnetic anomalies.” - **25 SEP 2009:** The June 1986 report is released through the National Archives. - **OCTOBER 2015:** The eight tapes of May 19 become freely available; TV Globo airs them in May 2016. - **MAY–JUNE 2026:** On the fortieth anniversary, Kleber Marinho tells O Globo that what he saw “has no explanation.” ## Sources & interviews - [Relatório de Ocorrência · Of. nº 008/CMDO/C-138]() — Brig. José Pessoa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, acting commander, Comando de Defesa Aérea · Brasília, June 2, 1986 · 8 pp., confidential · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0249 - [Parte s/nº · “Possível aparecimento de OVNI em SBSJ e SBAN”]() — 1st Lt. Francisco Hugo Nunes Freitas, chief controller, COpM I, CINDACTA I · Brasília, May 27, 1986 · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0262 - [COpM I working file for May 19–20, 1986: controller log, aircraft and serials sheet, intercept forms, pilot telexes and press-conference list]() — Centro de Operações Militares I, CINDACTA I · 34 pp., confidential · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0263 - [Of. nº 07/OOP/C-130 · “Assunto: OVNI,” with the report of public sightings phoned in on May 23–26]() — Col. Manoel Carlos Pereira, commander, CINDACTA I · Brasília, May 29, 1986 · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0252 - [Controller logbook transcripts, April 30 to May 29, 1986, with a copy of the COpM I report]() — CINDACTA I · Brasília, May 29, 1986 · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0253 - [Parte · report of 1st Lt. Kleber Caldas Marinho (“Jambock 17”)]() — 1º Grupo de Aviação de Caça · Santa Cruz Air Base, May 28, 1986 · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0254 - [Parte · report of Capt. Márcio Brisolla Jordão (“Jambock 07”)]() — 1º Grupo de Aviação de Caça · Santa Cruz Air Base, May 28, 1986 · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0255 - [Of. nº 01/SCOAM/C-046 · “Acionamento do Alerta,” with the reports of the Anápolis radar operator and the three Mirage pilots]() — Col. João Fares Neto, commander, Anápolis Air Base · May 27, 1986 · confidential · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0256 - [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Agência Estado’s “Invasão aérea” (May 22) and “Uma estranha missão de Ozires”]() — Ministry of Aeronautics clipping file · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0257 - [Press clippings, May–June 1986, including Folha de S.Paulo’s “Ozires Silva confirma ter visto pontos luminosos”]() — Ministry of Aeronautics clipping file · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0258 - [“A celeuma da noite de 19 de maio de 1986” · Boletim nº 168/173]() — Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos sobre Discos Voadores · January–December 1986 · press digests and the ministry’s timeline · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0259 - [Controller’s memo of June 24, 1986, transcribing a logbook entry, and the ministry’s “Fatos atuais” timeline of May 19]() — CINDACTA I · Arquivo Nacional, BR\_DFANBSB\_ARX\_0\_0\_0260 - [A noite em que 21 óvnis invadiram o espaço aéreo brasileiro e foram perseguidos por caças da FAB]() — André Bernardo · BBC News Brasil · January 14, 2022 - [Objetos voadores não-identificados nos céus do Brasil]() — Mariana Raad · Força Aérea nº 43, 2006 · interviews with the pilots, Maj. Cerqueira, Brig. Moreira Lima and the Varig crew · PDF formerly hosted by Ceticismo Aberto, via the Wayback Machine - [A ‘Noite Oficial dos Óvnis’: há 40 anos, caças da FAB perseguiram objetos não identificados]() — O Globo interview with Kleber Caldas Marinho · reprinted by Tribuna do Sertão, June 14, 2026 - [40 anos da noite em que caças da Força Aérea perseguiram 21 óvnis]() — Fábio Pescarini · Folhapress · reprinted by TNH1, May 16, 2026 - [“Brasília? Boa noite! Bem vindo ao festival dos discos voadores”]() — Portal Vigília · November 2015 · on the release of the eight tapes of May 19, 1986 - [Aeronáutica libera gravações de diálogos da ‘noite oficial dos óvnis’]() — Fantástico · TV Globo · May 22, 2016 - [Noite dos discos voadores]() — Wikipédia · Portuguese-language article quoting the tapes as transcribed by Rodrigo Moura Visoni, “A Noite Oficial dos Óvnis,” Aeromagazine 301, June 2019 - [Jets chase UFOs over Brazil in 1986]() — Patrick Gross · UFOs at close sight · after Antonio Huneeus, with the press-conference statements transcribed by Claudeir Covo, Basílio Baranoff’s chronology and the U.S. Defense Attaché’s message - [A noite oficial dos UFOs]() — Marco Antonio Petit · Revista UFO, “UFOs: Liberdade de Informação Já” campaign site, c. 2004 · via the Wayback Machine - [OVNIs e a Aeronáutica: O que não querem que você saiba]() — Kentaro Mori · Ceticismo Aberto · August 15, 2010 - [Brazilian UFO Flap of 1986 – “Night of Lights” / “Official UFO Night”]() — Metabunk forum thread · October–December 2024 Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Lights that Hunted Colares]() — Nine years earlier the Brazilian Air Force sent a team with cameras to the Amazon to chase lights of its own, and that file too ended up in the National Archives. - [The Tehran Intercept]() — Ten years earlier, two Iranian Phantoms went up after a brilliant light at night, and, as in Brazil in 1986, a U.S. attaché’s report carried the story to Washington. - [The Washington Flap]() — Radar plots over a capital, jets scrambled into an empty sky, and a Pentagon press conference that followed, as Brazil’s did in 1986. - [Red Lights at Ten O’Clock]() — Seven years earlier in Spain, an airliner diverted by red lights and a Mirage F1 sent up after them, with the official files declassified fifteen years later. - [The Saturn over Trindade]() — Brazil’s Navy had its own famous case in 1958: photographs of a ringed disc over a remote island that reached the president and a confidential inquiry. - [The Varginha Encounter]() — Ten years later in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s most famous alien story, built on witnesses on the ground rather than radar logs. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Death of Captain Mantell]()