Brazil.Colares (Operação Prato)

From late August 1977 and throughout 1978, residents of Colares island and of coastal municipalities in the State of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, reported night-time incidents with luminous objects that emitted beams of light aimed at people. Locals called them 'chupa-chupa', because they believed the beam drew blood or energy from the victims. The Operação Prato mission report (ACE 3252/83) records the cases seen by Dr Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, aged 24, in charge of the Colares health unit: she told the team she had seen four patients with paresis, headache, asthenia, dizziness and tremors, all with first-degree burns and marks of small perforations, on the neck in men and on the breast in the single case of a woman; she added that she had observed no changes indicating anaemia and did not believe the victims had been 'sucked', though she accepted they might have been struck by a beam of light of unknown nature. She herself appears in the Air Force register as a witness to a metallic cylindrical object over the town on 16 October 1977.

Faced with the panic, the I Regional Air Command (I COMAR), based in Belém, sent its intelligence section under Captain Uyrangê Hollanda. The team interviewed witnesses, examined injuries and watched the sky at night. The report describes, among others, the case of Claudomira Rodrigues da Paixão, who on 18 October felt a light moving over her body and settling on her left breast, where the forensic institute's examination recorded a light burn, and that of Raimundo Galvão Trindade, with an oval mark of about 20 by 12 centimetres on his thigh that looked like a burn. The I COMAR 'Registro de Observações', held at the National Archives, numbers more than a hundred sightings between 2 September 1977 and November 1978, with sketches, maps and photographs annexed to several entries, captioned with place, date, time, altitude, distance, exposure, camera and, in some, film stock; its pages are stamped 'Confidencial': dozens were observed by the team itself, by Hollanda or by the unit's sergeants, mostly distant lights crossing the sky, some at low altitude. Two civilian witnesses in the register said they had been hit by a beam of light, with paralysis or numbness lasting days.

The command's public response was prosaic: on 5 November 1977 Lieutenant Colonel Camilo, an assistant officer on the investigation, told A Província do Pará that residents were mistaking artificial satellites and meteors for craft and that the physical reactions were due to fear. The closing comments of the mission report, dated November 1977, state that no satisfactory conclusion had been reached, blame the press for spreading panic and describe a climate of hysteria in a poor and isolated population. The documents stayed classified; in 2005 the Air Force showed part of them to ufologists and from 2007 it handed them to the National Archives. Captain Hollanda, by then a retired colonel, gave a long interview in 1997 in which he defended the reality of what had been observed and spoke of hundreds of photographs and filmed footage; he took his own life that same year, and there is no evidence of a causal link with his experience. Part of the material he described has not appeared in the public holdings.

Colares brings together three elements: a wave of reports with injuries described by a doctor and by a military team, an Air Force field investigation that left a day-by-day register of more than a hundred observations, many made by its own officers and sergeants, and the later release of those papers. Trained military personnel logged for months lights they could not identify; the register describes them with dates, times, headings and sketches.

The limits of what can be verified must be marked. First, the victim figures in circulation (hundreds, even deaths) are local and journalistic estimates; in the primary record the doctor speaks of four patients with mild burns, and the team describes a few more named cases. Second, the anaemia often cited as proof was denied by the doctor herself in 1977: she said explicitly that she had observed no anaemic changes. Third, the Air Force did not close the operation claiming to have found an unknown technology: its spokesman attributed the sightings to satellites and meteors and the reactions to fear, and the mission report ended without a conclusion and with a diagnosis of mass hysteria, fed by the press, in a poor and isolated community. That reading explains the wave of reports and some of the symptoms well, and most entries in the register are distant lights compatible with satellites, meteors, stars or aircraft; what it does not easily explain are the burn-like injuries documented by the team and the low-altitude lights observed by the soldiers themselves. There is no favourable official conclusion; what exists is that contemporaneous field documentation, now public. The ufologist Marco Antônio Petit, who interviewed Hollanda in 1997, was among those who pushed for the opening of Brazil's military archives.