Ademar José Gevaerd

Ademar José Gevaerd (1962–2022), known as A.J. Gevaerd, was Brazil's most influential ufologist and one of the reference figures for UAP research in Latin America. A chemist by training, he left teaching in the mid-1980s to devote himself fully to the subject and, in 1985, founded «Revista UFO», the country's longest-running specialized magazine, which he directed for more than three decades. From that platform he organized much of the Brazilian research community and built a case archive that is, by volume and continuity, one of the richest in the southern hemisphere.

Gevaerd founded and directed the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas de Discos Voadores (CBPDV) and served as Brazil's director for the international MUFON network. Over his career he conducted or coordinated more than seven hundred field investigations within Brazil and lectured in nearly thirty countries, making him the main bridge between Brazilian ufology and the international conversation. His work stood out for insisting on documentation —photographs, military reports, corroborated testimony— over speculation, in a field especially prone to sensationalism.

His most significant institutional contribution was the campaign «UFOs: Liberdade de Informação Já» («UFOs: Freedom of Information Now»), which through the 2000s pressured the Brazilian state to declassify and transfer its military files on sightings to the National Archives. The campaign produced concrete results: Brazil became one of the countries with a relatively open policy of archiving and reporting UAP cases, and episodes such as the so-called «Operation Saucer» in the Amazon (1977) or the «Varginha case» (1996) became better documented thanks to that pressure. That declassified file in the Brazilian National Archives is a primary piece directly tied to his work.

For the UAP Codex map, Gevaerd represents the Latin American, archival dimension of the phenomenon: not a theorist of exotic hypotheses but an organizer who professionalized regional research and forced the opening of state archives. His critical flank is the usual one in media ufology: the closeness between the investigative and the editorial role —being at once archivist, director of a commercial magazine and spokesman— can create dissemination incentives that strain rigor. Even so, his documentary legacy and his push for institutional transparency place him among the indispensable actors of the South American record. He died in December 2022.