The rumor moved west along the water
In the second half of 1977, stories of dangerous lights spread through fishing settlements in Maranhão and Pará, following the coast and river country toward the Bay of Marajó. The names changed from place to place—aparelho, the apparatus; luz vampira, vampire light; and finally chupa-chupa, the sucker—but the core story remained: a luminous body approached at night, projected a narrow light, and left the person beneath it weak, numb, burned, or marked. Colares, an island municipality reached across estuarine water from Belém, became the episode’s most famous center.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicosArquivo Nacional libera relatos de brasileiros sobre supostos Ovnis
A town began waiting for an attack
Fear reorganized the nights. Residents stopped fishing after dark, gathered in groups, lit bonfires, made noise, and fired rockets toward the sky. The SNI summary describes crowds making noise and setting off fireworks to frighten away what they called the beast. The rituals were improvised civil defense against something nobody could define. Sleep became communal; every light over the water arrived already loaded with the previous night’s stories.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicos
The patients at Wellaide Carvalho’s clinic
Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, then responsible for the health unit in Colares, became the case’s crucial medical witness. In a confidential 1977 intelligence summary, she described four patients who presented not only acute fear but weakness, dizziness, tremors, headaches, superficial first-degree burns, and minute openings in the skin—near the neck in the men and above the left breast in the woman. She found no evidence that blood had literally been removed. The phrase chupa-chupa expressed what frightened residents believed the lights were doing, not a laboratory result.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicosArquivo Nacional libera relatos de brasileiros sobre supostos Ovnis
Claudomira and the green light
Among the accounts preserved in the military material was that of Claudomira Rodrigues da Paixão. She said she awoke on October 18 to a greenish light entering her room, felt heat and a needle-like sensation near her left breast, and found herself unable to call out or move normally. A relative’s scream broke the spell of the moment. Her story became one of the rawest examples of the chupa-chupa pattern: an ordinary room abruptly flooded with color, paralysis, a small wound, and the conviction that the light had selected a person rather than merely passed overhead.
Sources: Registros de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summary
The doctor looked up
Carvalho’s role did not end at the examination table. She told Air Force interviewers that on October 16 and 22 she had watched a silent luminous metallic object maneuver over the waterfront between six and seven in the evening. She described it as cylindrical, almost conical, moving rapidly and irregularly. The intelligence file matters because it records this testimony in November 1977, while the wave was still underway—years before later television interviews made her a familiar voice in the legend.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicos
Operation Saucer arrives
Local officials appealed for help, and the First Regional Air Command in Belém organized an intelligence mission. Captain Uyrangê Bolívar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima led field operations; Sergeant João Flávio de Freitas Costa became a principal observer and rapporteur. The first formal phase ran from October 20 to November 11, followed by another deployment from November 25 to December 5. They carried cameras, binoculars, radios, and surveying equipment, established observation points, interviewed residents, and spent humid nights watching the same horizons that had emptied Colares’s fishing grounds.
Sources: Registros de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryOs OVNIs no Arquivo Nacional
The lights entered the military log
The surviving observation register is not one story but 130 numbered entries gathered across fifteen Pará localities from September 2, 1977, through November 28, 1978. Its pages list times, bearings, colors, apparent shapes, movements, witness information, photographs, and sketches. The drawings include points of light, cylinders, inverted-plate profiles, barrel-like forms, and luminous bodies with colored zones. Some reports came from civilians; others record what military teams themselves watched. The variety is as important as the repetition: Colares produced a family of phenomena, not one consistently described machine.
Sources: Registros de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Os OVNIs no Arquivo Nacional
A photograph at impossible speed—and the morning star
One early team photographed a light that an observer estimated at about 3,000 meters altitude and roughly 30,000 kilometers per hour. The spectacular figure depended on an assumed distance and visual timing, not a measured radar track. When the film was developed, it showed bright, unresolved blobs. The team chief compared the strongest image with a photograph he had deliberately taken of the Estrela d’Alva—Venus—and found them similar enough to doubt that the frame depicted an unknown object at all. The file preserved both the extraordinary estimate and the investigator’s own deflation of it.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryArquivo Nacional libera relatos de brasileiros sobre supostos Ovnis
What the field team believed it had seen
The full first-mission report circulated through a 1991 leak later investigated by I COMAR; portions correspond closely with records that entered the National Archives. In its commentary, the field team argued that bodies and lights had moved at changing altitudes and directions and performed complex maneuvers indicating they were “intelligently directed.” That was the assessment of observers in the field, not a public conclusion adopted by the Brazilian Air Force. Their conviction rested on repeated personal observation and witness consistency, while their photographs remained mostly ambiguous points of light.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryRegistros de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978
Two doctors, two patients, one placebo
A separate two-man Air Force medical-psychiatric team interviewed residents in Colares, Vigia, and Santo Antônio do Umbituba. The doctors examined two people immediately after supposed beam encounters: both displayed rapid pulse and breathing, tremors, crying, heat sensations, speech difficulty, and contracted postures. One received a tranquilizer; the other received ferrous sulphate as a placebo. By the next day both retained only fatigue. The report interpreted the acute symptoms as a normal adrenaline discharge spreading through close communities in a climate of collective hysteria.
Sources: Inside the Operação Prato medical-psychiatric reportOperação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summary
The order to stop
Hollanda later remembered that the mission was halted just as his team felt the sightings had become most revealing. In his 1997 interview, by then a retired colonel, he described lights at close range, larger structured objects, extensive photography, and film that has never appeared in the public archive. BBC reported his estimate of more than 500 photographs, sixteen hours of film, and roughly 2,000 pages. Those quantities came from Hollanda and later researchers, not a complete surviving inventory. The released collection verifies a substantial operation, but it does not verify every object or encounter in his late recollection.
Sources: Ademar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê HollandaÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicosOs OVNIs no Arquivo Nacional
The colonel breaks twenty years of silence
Hollanda spoke at length to ufologists Ademar José Gevaerd and Marco Antônio Petit in 1997. He presented himself as an initial skeptic who expected birds, reflections, or collective suggestion, then became convinced that the operation had confronted intelligently controlled technology. He died by suicide later that year. The timing fed stories of silencing and hidden evidence, but no demonstrated link connects his death to the interview. His testimony remains indispensable and difficult: the commander’s own voice, recorded two decades later, moving far beyond what the released photographs can establish.
Sources: Ademar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê HollandaÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicos
From classified dossier to national archive
Beginning in 2008, the Air Force transferred UFO records to Brazil’s National Archives after years of public pressure. The Colares material now sits inside the official OVNI fund alongside reports from across the country. The archive’s own guide identifies Operação Prato, the 130-entry register, military photographs, and the 1977–1978 geographic spread, while warning that an unidentified object is not automatically extraterrestrial. Colares endured because its folklore eventually acquired a filing code: BR DFANBSB ARX.0.0.184.
Sources: Os OVNIs no Arquivo NacionalAeronáutica libera documentos sobre aparição de óvnisRegistros de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978