The rumor moved west along the water
In the middle of 1977 a story began travelling down the coast of northern Brazil, from the fishing villages of Maranhão toward the mouth of the Amazon. A light came at night, low over the water or the rooftops, and picked people out with a narrow beam; whoever it touched was left weak, burned, marked, or paralyzed. The names changed with the town—aparelho, the apparatus; luz vampira, the vampire light; bicho, the beast—and settled at last on chupa-chupa, the sucker, because everyone agreed on what it wanted. By the second week of October the Belém papers were printing the accounts from Santo Antônio do Umbituba, and the panic crossed the bay to Colares, an island town of fishermen across the water from the city. Colares would give the phenomenon its name in the world outside.
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
The islanders stopped going out to fish after dark. Whole streets slept together in the open, lit bonfires, banged pans, said prayers in procession, and fired rockets at the sky. The intelligence report that eventually reached Brasília put it in a sentence: the population “held processions, lit bonfires and set off fireworks, with the aim of frightening away what they called the ‘bicho.’” The same report explained the panic to its readers in the capital in the voice of the regime: the coast was home to “an undernourished population, of low educational level, and above all mystical.” One of its own entries, from a village up the road, told a different story. A man named Manoel Matos de Souza had tried to shoot the thing, and had been struck, the Air Force logged, by a red beam of light that paralyzed him and put him in bed for two weeks.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryRegistro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Óvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicos
The patients at Wellaide Carvalho’s clinic
The island’s health post was run by a twenty-four-year-old general practitioner, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, and she is the reason the story has a medical record. In November 1977 she told Air Force interviewers about four patients: “all presented first-degree burns, as well as marks of small punctures… the men in the region of the neck, over the jugular, and the women on the breast (only one case).” They were frightened, dizzy, weak, and shaking. She did not believe anyone had been sucked of blood. She had not reported any of it to the state health secretary, she said, “to avoid falling into ridicule.” Over the years her account grew as the legend did. In a 2005 interview she described more than forty victims in little over a month, three of whom, all women, had died, and she added a detail that made her a heroine of the story—that the military had handed her boxes of tranquilizers and asked her to persuade the witnesses they were hallucinating, and had warned that if she went on believing the villagers she “would suffer severe punishments.”
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryEntrevista com Wellaide Cecim CarvalhoÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicos
Claudomira and the green light
The account that best captures what the islanders feared came from Claudomira Rodrigues da Paixão, thirty-five, who was interviewed by the head of the regional command’s intelligence section on November 1. At eleven on the night of October 18, she said, she woke to a green beam of light in her room. It fixed itself on her left breast, “sucking it,” then moved down to her right hand, where it felt “like the prick of a needle.” Her voice caught in her throat and her body would not move. What broke the spell was the ordinary world: the woman sharing the house scolding a child who had wet the hammock.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryRegistro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978
The doctor looked up
Carvalho saw it herself, twice. On October 16 at half past six in the evening and again on the 22nd, she told the interviewers, a silent object hung over the waterfront—metallic gray, “cylindrical, almost conical,” two or three meters long—and moved in a way she called almost comic. The Air Force logged her as a witness in its own register, entry 008, with two sketches. Nearly thirty years later she gave the interview that made her famous in Brazilian ufology, in which the object had become a thing “of supreme beauty,” four meters long, and a light “immensely bigger than my car” had come down on her Volkswagen on the road to Belém. Both accounts exist. The first was written down in 1977.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryRegistro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Entrevista com Wellaide Cecim Carvalho
Operation Saucer arrives
Local officials asked for help, and the First Regional Air Command in Belém sent its intelligence section. The field commander was Capt. Uyrangê Bolívar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima; his sergeant and rapporteur, who would write nearly every report, was João Flávio de Freitas Costa. They packed Minolta and Yashica cameras with long lenses, three Canon movie cameras, high-speed film, binoculars, and radios, and set up observation posts on the island and the mainland shore. Before they began they flew a helicopter over Colares at night to see whether the residents would mistake it for the bicho. The first mission ran from October 20 to November 11, a second from November 25 into December, and the register shows the team still keeping vigils on December 22.
Sources: Registro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryAdemar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê Hollanda
“I came in as the Devil’s Advocate”
Hollanda was, by his own later account, the wrong man to send if the Air Force wanted believers. “I came in as the Devil’s Advocate,” he said in 1997; his first explanations were “Birds. The plumage of an owl reflecting the moonlight,” and he spent two months telling his commander no. Then, at Baía do Sol on the night of October 22, he watched a blue light he compared to a welding torch; the register records it, entry 012, with a captain and two civilians as witnesses. There were nights when he stood under what he called a black disc hovering five hundred feet up, pulsing yellow. There was the night on the Guajará river, near a brickworks, when the team photographed an object “like an American football” with what looked like small windows, and then something else, enormous and blue, which he called “a Blue Sun.” A local man who was there told the Air Force a hatch had opened and a small figure in a tight suit had come out; the Air Force wrote that down too, at entry 017. “What if these guys come and abduct us?” Hollanda remembered asking his sergeant.
Sources: Ademar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê HollandaRegistro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978
The lights entered the military log
The register is not a narrative but a ledger: 130 numbered entries from fifteen localities, September 2, 1977, to November 28, 1978, each with a time, a bearing, a color, a shape, a movement, and a sketch. Entry 001 is a woman on the PA-17 highway who saw an inverted plate, yellow turning red, with a hiss “like a dynamo.” Roughly half the entries are the Air Force’s own team. Entry 058 is Captain Hollanda alone on November 28, watching something emit “a series of four beams of blue light.” Entry 076 is a farm where the team shot twenty-six photographs in one night. The last two entries are airline pilots. On February 14, 1979, the regional commander sent the whole folder—159 sheets, 130 records—to the Air Staff in Brasília, where it disappeared into the files for thirty years.
Sources: Registro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Ofício: Remessa de registro de observações de OVNIOs OVNIs no Arquivo Nacional
A photograph at impossible speed—and the morning star
The most spectacular claim in the file is also the one the file itself takes back. An early team estimated a light at about 3,000 meters altitude and calculated its speed, “empirically,” at 30,000 kilometers an hour. When the film came back, the intelligence summary records, the picture that had impressed everyone most “was identified, by the team chief, as the photograph he had taken of the Estrela d’Alva”—Venus. The summary notes the officers’ “fear of falling into ridicule before their colleagues.” Decades later the sergeant’s son added a coda from the family darkroom: as a young man helping print his father’s negatives, he said, he had amused himself by enlarging any bright speck until it looked like a flying saucer, and some of those prints had gone out into the world as genuine.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryOperação Prato: revelações de Fernando Costa
What the field team believed it had seen
The sergeant’s full report of the first mission has never been officially released, but it leaked. In 1991 a ufology magazine published it in facsimile, and an Air Force inquiry that September confirmed the document was the one written by “1S João Flávio de Freitas Costa,” now retired, a UFO enthusiast himself, and away prospecting for gold at Serra Pelada when they went looking for him. Its commentary is where the famous conclusion lives: the objects, the team wrote, moved at changing altitudes and directions in complex maneuvers that showed they were “intelligently directed.” That was the judgment of the men in the field. The Air Force never adopted it, and one of its officers had already told the Belém press that the whole affair was “nothing but a simple optical illusion on the part of the population, which is of low intellectual level.”
Sources: Informação on the 1991 publication of the Operação Prato mission reportDocumentos oficiais liberados e vazados sobre a Operação PratoOperação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summary
Two doctors, two patients, one placebo
Attached to that leaked report is a two-page annex by a separate Air Force medical-psychiatric team, which toured Colares, Vigia, and Santo Antônio do Umbituba and examined two people minutes after they said the light had touched them. Both had racing pulses, tremors, heat, tears, trouble speaking, and clenched postures. One was given a tranquilizer. The other was given ferrous sulphate—an iron tablet—as a placebo, and told it was the cure. By morning both had nothing left but fatigue. The doctors’ diagnosis was a normal discharge of adrenaline passing from neighbor to neighbor in a climate of collective hysteria. The annex records no examination of a burn.
Sources: Inside the Operação Prato medical-psychiatric reportDocumentos oficiais liberados e vazados sobre a Operação Prato
The order to stop
The register logs it at 6:30 p.m. on November 9: a sergeant arrived from Belém with the order to suspend the mission, and the team was stuck on the island for lack of a ferry. “‘The Operation is cancelled.’ Okay,” Hollanda recalled. “You saluted.” Twenty years on he had not made peace with it. He spoke of more than five hundred photographs and of films, dozens of them; the BBC would later put the haul at 500 pictures, sixteen hours of film, and two thousand pages, figures that come from later researchers rather than any surviving inventory. The National Archives holds photocopies of blurry lights, sketches, forms, and summaries. The films, its guide notes, have not so far been made available by the Air Force. “It was over for the Air Force,” Hollanda said, “but not for me.”
Sources: Registro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Ademar 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
In August 1997 the ufologists Ademar Gevaerd and Marco Antônio Petit sat down with Hollanda, by then a retired colonel, in Cabo Frio. What he told them went far beyond the file. The lights had known where his team was. After the operation, he said, two beings about a meter and a half tall, dressed in something like diving suits, had appeared in his bedroom and told him, “Calm down. We won’t do you any harm.” He had carried a red dot on his left arm since 1977; his sergeant, who had since died of a stroke, had one in his leg. He gave one public lecture, on September 7. On October 2, 1997, he hanged himself with the cord of a bathrobe. Gevaerd, who knew him, said afterward that he had attempted suicide before and suffered from depression. The timing fed every story of silencing, and nothing in the record connects his death to anything but his own illness. What the interview leaves is a commander’s voice, two decades on, describing things his photographs cannot show.
Sources: Ademar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê HollandaA verdade sobre a morte do coronel Uyrangê HollandaÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicos
From classified dossier to national archive
The Air Force began sending its UFO records to the National Archives in 2009 and made the transfer policy in 2010; that August the newspapers counted 1,562 pages. In 2024 the archive released the intelligence service’s own 86-page Operação Prato file. Jacques Vallée, who went to Pará in 1988 and was shown the file by Hollanda in Belém, came away with a line that still stands: “So far there is no proven instance of any death related to the objects.” The folklore has a filing code now, BR DFANBSB ARX.0.0.184, and nearly thirty years after the colonel’s death the same questions sit in the same folder. What were the men of the Second Section photographing when they were not photographing Venus? What made the marks on Claudomira’s breast? And why did the Air Force stop looking on the night its own captain thought it was finally seeing something?
Sources: Aeronáutica libera documentos sobre aparição de óvnisArquivo Nacional libera relatos de brasileiros sobre supostos OvnisOs OVNIs no Arquivo NacionalInvestigative adventures in Brazil: Jacques Vallée’s 1988 trip
What the archive establishes
Operação Prato was a real Air Force intelligence deployment. The National Archives holds the 130-entry register, the forwarding letter of February 1979, the 1977 intelligence summary, the 1991 inquiry into the leaked report, and photocopied images; researchers hold facsimiles of the leaked mission report and its medical annex. These show that military personnel interviewed residents, kept night vigils, made sketches, and photographed lights they could not identify. They do not establish the distance, size, or nature of any of those lights.
Sources: Os OVNIs no Arquivo NacionalRegistro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Ofício: Remessa de registro de observações de OVNIInformação on the 1991 publication of the Operação Prato mission report
The medical evidence has two incompatible layers
Carvalho’s 1977 testimony describes small burns and paired puncture marks on frightened patients; the military doctors, examining two acute cases, attributed the symptoms to adrenaline and contagion and examined no wounds. No clinical file, photograph of a lesion, or laboratory result is public. Carvalho’s later accounts—forty patients, then deaths that change in number and sex between tellings, a beam on her own car—cannot be reconciled with each other, let alone with the file.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryInside the Operação Prato medical-psychiatric reportEntrevista com Wellaide Cecim Carvalho
Deaths
The only death in the military papers is a clipping from Maranhão in May 1977, where a fisherman was killed among companions who blamed a light and the coroners blamed an electrical discharge. No death on Colares appears in the record. Bob Pratt, who visited three times from 1979, and Vallée, who went in 1988, both looked for the deaths the legend describes and found none they could confirm.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryInvestigative adventures in Brazil: Jacques Vallée’s 1988 trip
Venus, meteors, aircraft, and expectation
The investigators identified satellites and meteors, mistook Venus for their best target, and admitted a fear of looking foolish; their sergeant’s son has said that some published photographs were enlarged specks. Night estimates of range and speed without a known scale turn ordinary lights into impossible ones, and terror spreads. Those mechanisms account for a great deal of the wave. They do not obviously account for the register’s entries in which trained observers describe low, moving, repeatedly maneuvering lights over weeks.
Sources: Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryOperação Prato: revelações de Fernando CostaRegistro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978
Classification
This file is classified as a documented mass-reporting and panic episode with unresolved luminous observations, claimed physical effects, and an unusually extensive official response. The record supports neither blood-drinking lights nor a conclusion that nothing happened: an air force sent its intelligence officers into the field, they logged sightings of their own, and they left disagreeing about what they had seen.
Sources: Registro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 1978Operação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summaryAdemar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê HollandaInside the Operação Prato medical-psychiatric report
- MAY–SEP 1977
Reports of aggressive lights spread from Maranhão into coastal Pará; a fisherman’s death on Ilha dos Caranguejos is blamed on a light by his companions and on an electrical discharge by coroners.
- 2 SEP 1977
The first entry in the Air Force’s register: an inverted plate, yellow turning red, hissing like a dynamo, over the PA-17 highway.
- 8 OCT 1977
Belém newspapers publish frightening accounts from Santo Antônio do Umbituba, turning a regional rumor into a public alarm.
- 16 & 22 OCT 1977
Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho watches a silent gray cylinder over the Colares waterfront; the Air Force logs her sighting as entry 008.
- 18 OCT 1977 · 11 PM
Claudomira Rodrigues da Paixão wakes to a green beam on her breast and hand and cannot move or call out.
- 20 OCT–11 NOV 1977
Operação Prato’s first mission keeps watch, interviews residents, and photographs lights; on November 9 an order arrives from Belém to suspend it.
- 1 NOV 1977
A helicopter is flown over Colares at night to test whether residents mistake it for the bicho; the intelligence chief interviews Claudomira.
- 25 NOV–22 DEC 1977
A second phase returns military observers to the region; Hollanda later places the closest sightings, including the “Blue Sun,” in this period.
- 29 NOV 1977
The SNI’s Belém office summarizes the panic, the Venus photograph, Carvalho’s testimony, and plans for continued watching.
- 14 FEB 1979
Brig. Protásio Lopes de Oliveira forwards the 130-record folder to the Air Staff.
- 1991
UFO Documento publishes the leaked first-mission report; an Air Force inquiry traces it to the retired sergeant.
- AUG–OCT 1997
Hollanda gives his long interview, lectures once in public, and dies by suicide on October 2.
- 2009–2010
The Air Force transfers its UFO records, including Operação Prato, to the National Archives.
- AUG 2024
The National Archives releases the intelligence service’s 86-page file on the operation.
Sources & interviews
Registro de Observações de OVNI — Pará, September 1977 to November 19781º Comando Aéreo Regional, Brazilian Air Force · Arquivo Nacional file BR DFANBSB ARX.0.0.184 · 130 observation recordsOperação Prato mission material and SNI intelligence summary1º COMAR / Serviço Nacional de Informações · Informação nº 1802/320/ABE/77 and related papers, 1977–1991 · Arquivo Nacional microfilm ACE 3252/83Ofício: Remessa de registro de observações de OVNIMaj. Brig. Protásio Lopes de Oliveira, 1º COMAR, to the Chief of the Air Staff · February 14, 1979 · Arquivo Nacional file ARX.0.0.197Informação on the 1991 publication of the Operação Prato mission report1º COMAR · September 1991 · Arquivo Nacional file ARX.0.0.322Documentos oficiais liberados e vazados sobre a Operação Pratooperacaoprato.com · Facsimiles of the first-mission report published in UFO Documento nº 2 (1991), including the medical annexInside the Operação Prato medical-psychiatric reportWatch the Stars · August 19, 2026 · Analysis and scans of the two-page I COMAR medical annexAdemar José Gevaerd’s 1997 interview with Colonel Uyrangê HollandaAdemar José Gevaerd and Marco Antônio Petit · Cabo Frio, August 1997 · Published in Revista UFO nº 54–55 · English transcript preserved by the Internet ArchiveA verdade sobre a morte do coronel Uyrangê HollandaMarco Antônio Petit · Revista UFOEntrevista com Wellaide Cecim CarvalhoAdemar José Gevaerd · Revista UFO nº 116–117 · November–December 2005 · Interview of August 15, 2005 · ReprintOperação Prato: revelações de Fernando CostaCeticismo Aberto · October 2007 · Interview with the son of Sgt. João Flávio de Freitas CostaAeronáutica libera documentos sobre aparição de óvnisO Estado de S. Paulo · August 14, 2010 · Reporting on the Air Force document releaseÓvnis no Brasil: o que foi a Operação Prato, investigação da ditadura sobre fenômenos ufológicosAndré Bernardo · BBC News Brasil · August 5, 2017; updated July 7, 2021Os OVNIs no Arquivo NacionalRodolpho Gauthier Cardoso dos Santos · Arquivo Nacional · April 29, 2021 · Collection guide and historical overviewInvestigative adventures in Brazil: Jacques Vallée’s 1988 tripKeith Basterfield · UFOs – Scientific Research · July 2024 · On Vallée’s Pará and Maranhão inquiriesArquivo Nacional libera relatos de brasileiros sobre supostos OvnisPoder360 · August 27, 2024 · Includes the 86-page SNI Operação Prato fileSpotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
Connected files
The Varginha EncounterBrazil’s other great case, nineteen years later, where the military was again accused of knowing more than its files admit.The Levelland NightAnother night of lights and physical effects spreading from town to town, with an air force that reached for the weather.The Shag Harbour LightsFishermen, dark water, and a government that came to look and went home with nothing.Jacques ValléeHe went to Pará in 1988, saw the file in Belém, and found no death he could prove.The kinds of close encountersBurns and paralysis make Colares a second-kind case on Hynek’s scale, whatever caused them.Discuss this case
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