Operação Prato

Operação Prato (Operation Saucer) was the Brazilian Air Force's investigation of the nocturnal lights and beams that the inhabitants of the Pará coast, around Colares island, reported from September 1977, carried out by a small team under Captain Uyrangê Hollanda and lasting about four months. The Air Force's own record of the operation includes more than 500 photographs, about sixteen hours of Super-8 and Super-16 film and some 2,000 pages of reports, only a fraction of which has been made public through the Air Force's transfer of its UFO files to the Brazilian National Archives. Its commander told researchers that his team saw strange lights almost every night and took many photographs, none of which turned out well, so that he had "no proof of the flying saucers, only my visual information"; the portion of the operation's records released in 2004 offered no conclusions.

Background

Brazil had begun to experience a dramatic spate of sightings in August 1977, including many close encounters, which extended into 1978; reports came from at least thirty villages at the mouth of the Amazon. Residents named the phenomenon chupa-chupa and reported injuries from beams of light; the flap itself, and its medical profile, are treated under Colares UFO flap. The Air Force had run an earlier body for the subject, the System for the Investigation of Unidentified Aerial Objects (SIOANI), in 1969–1972 under Brigadier José Vaz da Silva.

The operation

The commanding officer on the ground was Captain Uyrangê Hollanda, assisted by Sergeant João Flávio Costa, under Colonel Camilo Ferraz de Barros, head of the second section of the First Aerial Region Command (I COMAR) at Belém. The team worked along the Pará coast, at Colares, Mosqueiro and Ananindeua, and in fifteen interior municipalities, and its last reports are dated 28 November 1978. It documented at least 130 cases of mysterious lights, collected witness reports, recorded observations from night vigils and took photographs, which the National Archives has digitised.

According to Hollanda, as the American researchers Bob Pratt and Cynthia Luce recorded his account, a large disc with a pulsating yellow glow appeared without warning about 150 feet above him and his men one evening in late 1977 and left toward the sea at great speed; his superior at Belém then gave him a team of technicians and photographers. He told them the team interviewed nearly three hundred people who reported close encounters, in dozens of cases people had been burned, at least two deaths were reported, and the objects he saw were domed discs with windows, triangular, rectangular, pyramid-like and jetliner-like craft and a huge mother-ship, some of them leaving the water; witnesses in some cases reported occupants usually four to five feet tall. Pratt spoke to a local doctor who confirmed deaths linked to the lights in 1977, although he and Luce could not confirm the whole of Hollanda's story.

The files and Hollanda's later account

Hollanda turned in his reports and never saw them again; he was told they would be kept indefinitely and was ordered to keep quiet, and he said that the United States Air Force was interested in the sightings and that he met American military attachés several times to discuss them. Documents of the Air Force's secret service revealed part of the records in 2004, and the portion released to the public offered no conclusions about the events of 1977. In August 1997 Hollanda gave a long interview to the Brazilian researcher Ademar José Gevaerd; he died by hanging two months later. Of the 753 reports then available at the National Archives, only six concern Prato. The Archives' collection of Air Force UFO files also holds the Air Force's report on the 1986 radar and interception episode.

References

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