Marco Antônio Petit

Between 1977 and 1978, residents of Colares island (Pará) endured hundreds of nightly encounters with luminous objects projecting vertical beams, producing medically documented geometric burns and anemia. The Brazilian Air Force ran Operação Prato for fourteen months and officially acknowledged the case in 2010.

Brazilian Army operation in January 1996, one or more non-human creatures reported by civilians, soldier Marco Eli Cherese dead six weeks later from atypical bacterial infection. Thirty years later, the case remains politically alive: Brazilian witnesses testified behind closed doors in the U.S. Congress (Longworth, Jan 2026), a Brazilian neurosurgeon described a lilac-eyed entity, James Fox and Leslie Kean hosted the 30th-anniversary press conference at the National Press Club (Jan 2026), the Brazilian Superior Tribunal Militar dismissed the case as 'error and rumor' (Jan 2026), and the bipartisan Capitol press conference of Jun 9, 2026 specifically called to declassify Varginha records.

On the night of 19 May 1986, the radars of CINDACTA I (Brasília) detected some 21 unidentified objects over the airspace of São Paulo, Rio and Goiás. The FAB scrambled five supersonic fighters (F-5 and Mirage) from Santa Cruz (Rio) and Anápolis (Goiás); the pilots had radar and visual contacts with objects that evaded and accelerated to extreme speeds. Days later, the Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier Octávio Moreira Lima, confirmed the episode in a press conference alongside the pilots, admitting there was no conclusive technical explanation. It is one of the best-documented military UAP cases in the world.

Brazil's National Archives keeps public —via the SIAN platform— the 'Óvnis Fund': a collection of UFO records produced by the Air Force Command (FAB) spanning 1952 to 2023 (reports, official communications, images, audio and drawings). The institutional flow begins in 2008, when the FAB started routing declassified material to the archive. The National Archives' official figure is around 743 records; the 2026 press reported it as close to 900. In 2026, amid the global disclosure push, it was highlighted by the press as one of the world's most open state UAP archives — a contrast with U.S. strategic ambiguity.