Brazil.Conde, Bahia · radio reports a fallen sphere with a body inside

On the night of November 8, 1963, at 23:30, Radio Tupi in Rio de Janeiro aired a Portuguese-language news item that the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which monitored and translated foreign radio, picked up and translated immediately. Per the broadcast, reports from the municipality of Conde, in Bahia, said a large metal sphere had fallen in the center of town, gouging a hole four meters deep. The sphere had window-shaped openings covered with thick glass, and inside was a human body dressed in heavy clothing bearing indecipherable inscriptions. The people of Conde were intrigued, and the authorities had been informed. The same day, the Rio daily O Globo ran an item saying it had received news from Salvador of a large metallic globe that had fallen in Conde.

No one in Bahia confirmed the story. On November 9, Salvador's Diário de Notícias reported that the Ministry of Aeronautics categorically denied there had been any "strange object" in Conde. On November 11, the Jornal da Bahia ran the headline "A Nave que Não Estava Lá" ("The Airship That Wasn't There"). Its reporter wrote that the only newsworthy aspect of the episode was an "astounding by-product": he sent a telegram to his paper from the federal telegraph office in Conde, by an old Morse code transmitter, and five minutes later he had a reply from Salvador. The joke was the speed of a small-town telegraph; the airgram that quotes it does not say the reply refuted anything.

In Washington, the FBIS sheet was filed on November 13 as an inquiry of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, a body in the Executive Office of the President. The sheet does not say why the Council took an interest. In those weeks it was negotiating guidelines with the agencies on who should collect and identify fallen space vehicle debris, but none of its papers from that period mentions Conde.

On November 14, the U.S. embassy in Rio sent the consul in Salvador a cable (No. 94), drafted by Science Attaché André C. Simonpietri and signed by Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, asking him to confirm or correct its understanding from a radiotelephone conversation the night before: that the consul gave an unqualified negative on a newspaper report that a "large metal manned balloon" had been found near Salvador around November 8, with a dead crewman aboard wearing a uniform or spacesuit with strange markings, and a four-meter crater. The cable added that an object had been sighted aloft in that area around that date and tentatively identified as a weather-type balloon, but that no such object had been found aground. It went out unclassified, with copies for the Department of Defense and NASA.

The same day, the air attaché in Rio told the Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB (message C-113) that the first and only information available in Rio was the O Globo item; the consul said no object had been found and that his information pointed to a weather balloon, and the Rio press could not confirm anything either. The consul in Salvador, Harold Midkiff, also replied on the 14th, in telegram No. 157: "Story of strange object descending in region of Conde Bahia apparently fabricated in Rio no such objects seen by anyone in the area according to newspaper reporters and others who rushed there before investigation reports were received Secretary Public Security speculated object might be weather balloon but no such sighting verified." By pouch he sent the two Bahian clippings.

On November 20, the embassy sent Washington airgram A-628, "Negative Report on UFO," with the consul's reply and the content of the clippings; its subject line misdates the sighting to November 1964. On November 21, the air attaché relayed the consul's text to Wright-Patterson (message C-116) and added that there was no further mention in the Rio or other press. The record card of Project Blue Book, the Air Force program that logged sightings, dates the case November 8, 1963, with a civilian source, and classifies it as "Other: Hoax": investigation indicated it was just a story in the newspapers without fact, "apparently fabricated in Rio."

A radio report of a fallen sphere with a body inside was refuted within a week by the people closest to it. The consul in Salvador used the word "fabricated" without hedging, Brazil's Ministry of Aeronautics denied the object in the local press the day after the broadcast, and the reporters who reached Conde found no one who had seen anything. There is no second witness and no physical evidence either way: there is a story that never had substance and left no trace beyond the news item itself.

The story had the elements of a craft recovered with its crew (the body in a strange suit, the crater, the authorities alerted), and U.S. diplomacy handled it with the seriousness it would have given a real event: within a week, cables and messages passed between the consulate, the embassy and its science and air attachés, with copies to the Department of Defense and NASA, and the case reached the Air Force. The documents show a Cold War routine in which a report like this was enough to set off formal consultations.

One loose end remains. The embassy cable spoke of an object sighted aloft and tentatively identified as a weather balloon, but the consul specified that the balloon was a speculation by the Secretary of Public Security and that no sighting had been verified. Nor can anyone reconstruct, sixty years later, where the rumor began in Rio.