Brazil.National Archives · FAB UFO collection (Brazil)

Brazil's National Archives maintains a public collection of UFO records spanning 1952 to 2023, organized chronologically and accessible via SIAN (the National Archive Information System). The set —known as the 'Óvnis Fund'— is produced by the Air Force Command (FAB), is held in custody by the National Archives, and includes reports, questionnaires, official correspondence, photographs, drawings, videos, audio and press clippings about objects seen in Brazilian skies. The exact figure varies by source and moment: the National Archives' official page cites around 743 records and the Ministry of Justice 'more than 700', while the 2026 press reported it as close to 900 (other notes say 'more than 800'); the discrepancy reflects successive transfers and different ways of counting files.

The institutional flow begins in 2008: after a freedom-of-information campaign driven largely by the Brazilian UFO Commission (CBU) —which for years pressed for the opening of the military archives— the FAB agreed to route to the National Archives the sighting material whose secrecy term expires or that it decides to make public. According to the FAB itself, documents from cases between 1952 and 2023 were transferred to the National Archives and are in the public domain. Access is real and operational: anyone can consult the fund through SIAN, and the public can even contribute material by sending it to the archive's relevant unit, which makes the collection a living resource rather than a closed deposit.

In 2026, amid the global disclosure push (with the U.S. releasing files via the PURSUE system), Brazilian and international press again highlighted the collection and presented it as one of the world's most open state UAP archives. The contrast is analytically relevant: while the U.S. model combines partial release with simultaneous non-confirmation (strategic ambiguity), Brazil maintains an open, chronological, searchable archive of hundreds of military and civilian reports. Honesty, however, requires not confusing quantity with quality: not all records are of high evidential value —the collection mixes mundane reports, press clippings and questionnaires with a handful of solid, well-investigated cases such as Colares (and the FAB's own Operação Prato, 1977-78), Trindade and the so-called Official Night of UFOs. Its open existence is itself an institutional datum, regardless of what any individual file proves.

Brazil is the corpus's transparency counterexample: where the U.S. released trickles with simultaneous non-confirmation, the Brazilian state has maintained since 2008 an open, chronological, searchable national archive of hundreds of reports dating back to 1952. That difference of regime is not minor. The U.S. model of 'strategic ambiguity' —releasing imagery while avoiding confirming what it shows— feeds suspicion of a cover-up precisely because it controls the tap. The Brazilian model does the opposite: it hands the whole fund to the citizen and lets each person assess it. That makes Brazil one of the best available laboratories to study the phenomenon's real distribution —what proportion of reports is mundane, how many resist analysis— without the classification filter.

For the corpus, the collection serves two functions. As an institutional datum, it reinforces the thesis that official military UAP documentation is not exclusive to the U.S.: a Southern Hemisphere regional power processed the phenomenon in a structured way for seventy years and ended up opening its archives. And as a source, it is the state primary base behind the corpus's Brazilian cases (Colares, Trindade, the Official Night), allowing those cases to be traced to consultable government documentation rather than secondary ufology literature. The honesty of the framing is part of its value: its very openness undercuts the idea of a universal, coordinated cover-up, and the archive pronounces on no case's origin —its contribution is methodological, offering open data, not settling the underlying question.