Trindade Island UFO photographs

Trindade Island UFO photographs

Type	Case (photographs)
Date	About noon (12:20 p.m. by one account), 16 January 1958
Place	Off Trindade Island, South Atlantic, about 800 miles off Espírito Santo, Brazil
Photographer	Almiro Baraúna, 42, professional photographer from Niterói
Ship	Brazilian Navy training ship Almirante Saldanha (International Geophysical Year)
Camera	Rolleiflex 2.8 model E, 1/125 s at f/8
Witnesses claimed	From "about eight" to 48 or 50
Verdicts	Brazilian Navy: "indications of the existence" of the object; U.S. Navy and Project Blue Book: probable hoax
Later evidence	Second-hand accounts (2010–11) that Baraúna faked the images
Also known as	Trindade Island, Trindade photographs, Almiro Baraúna

The Trindade Island UFO photographs are a series of pictures taken on 16 January 1958 by the Brazilian photographer Almiro Baraúna from the deck of the Brazilian Navy ship Almirante Saldanha, off Trindade Island in the South Atlantic. They appear to show a ringed object, like the planet Saturn, flying past the island's peaks. Released by President Juscelino Kubitschek and published in February 1958, they became some of the most famous UFO photographs ever taken. The Brazilian Navy found no sign of tampering and concluded there were indications that the object existed. United States military reports called them a hoax. In 2010 and 2011 people close to Baraúna said he had told them he faked the images.^[1][2][3]

Background

Trindade is a remote island about 800 miles off the coast of Espírito Santo, where the Brazilian Navy kept an oceanographic station during the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Its commander was Corvette Captain Carlos Alberto Ferreira Bacellar. His report later described several UFO sightings by Navy crewmen and station workers between early December 1957 and mid-January 1958. They included a phenomenon Bacellar himself saw through a theodolite, and one sighting was thought likely to be a seagull. On board the Almirante Saldanha was a civilian group from the Icaraí underwater fishing club in Niterói, invited by the Navy to take underwater photographs. It was led by Amilar Vieira Filho, a banker and diver. His deputy was José Teobaldo Brandão Viegas, a retired Brazilian Air Force captain who instructed at the Niterói Aeroclub. The group included two divers and Baraúna, a 42-year-old photographer born in Bahia.^[2][3]

The sighting

On 16 January 1958 the ship was preparing to leave the island and hoist its launch. Baraúna was on deck at the stern, ready to photograph the operation. According to accounts, Viegas and others on deck suddenly saw a flying object with a ring around it, like Saturn. It came from the east towards the island, flew towards the peak called Pico Desejado, made a steep turn and left quickly to the northwest. Accounts give the time as about noon or 12:20 p.m.; Baraúna's 1967 letter says about 11 a.m. Viegas described a disc glowing with a phosphorescent light, brighter than the Moon even in daylight and about the size of the full Moon. As it tilted he saw it was a flattened sphere ringed at the equator by a large ring or platform, and he estimated its speed at about 700 mph as it vanished. He said the sighting caused tremendous confusion on board, with Baraúna pushed and pulled by excited onlookers as he tried to work his camera.^[1][2][3]

Baraúna used a Rolleiflex 2.8 model E set at 1/125 second and f/8. He said he took two photographs before the object disappeared behind Pico Desejado. It then reappeared bigger, flying the other way, lower, closer and faster, and he took a third. The fourth and fifth were lost when he was jostled, and a final shot caught it heading back out to sea. In a 1967 letter to the ICUFON group in New York, he said about fifty people on deck had watched a silent, luminous, silver plate-shaped object. It moved now fast and now slow, rising, falling and undulating, and left a phosphorescent white trail when it accelerated. He said it stopped for a few seconds beside the peak before shooting off over the horizon. Of six shots, he said, four were usable. He also passed on rumours that the ship's electrics had failed during the sighting, and said that after leaving, the ship stopped three times as the lights faded.^[2][3]

The negatives

According to the Navy report, Baraúna removed the film from the camera in front of Bacellar and others. He then went with the officer to the ship's darkroom, improvised in the infirmary, dressed as he was in shirt and shorts. He was there only ten minutes and at once showed the negative to Bacellar, who said he saw the object on it, though less clearly because the film was somewhat dark. Accounts of this key moment differ. Viegas said Baraúna locked himself in with Bacellar, but Bacellar wrote that Viegas held a torch during the developing while he waited outside. Baraúna said the film was developed about twenty minutes after the sighting, while Bacellar wrote it was an hour later because the photographer seemed very nervous. Navy documents found in its archives in April 2011 record that Bacellar saw only a "strange spot", on three frames rather than four, without mentioning a disc shape. Because the negatives were so small, the object appeared only as a dot. The ship docked early at Vitória, and Bacellar let Baraúna take the negatives home, free of any military supervision.^[2][3]

Analyses

Baraúna was questioned for four hours at the Navy Ministry and left the negatives for examination. A technician from the Navy's Hydrographic Department found no signs of tampering. A "more complete and thorough examination", including microscopic checks of the grain, marks, brightness and outline, was made by technicians of the Cruzeiro do Sul airline's aerial photography service. They found "no sign of montage", and ruled out any later montage. They added, though, that it would be impossible to prove or disprove a montage made beforehand, which would require "extreme technical skill and circumstances favorable to its execution". Baraúna said the Navy later timed him working his Rolleiflex and concluded he took six pictures in 14 seconds, with the object flying at 900 to 1,000 km/h. He said it estimated the object at 40 metres across and 8 metres thick. No known Navy document mentions these speed or size figures.^[2][3]

Publication and official response

The Navy at first kept the matter secret. According to Patrick Gross the photos were given to the press by President Kubitschek; Baraúna wrote that a Correio da Manhã reporter got hold of prints offered to the President. On 21 February 1958 the newspapers Correio da Manhã and O Jornal published the sequence. Baraúna said the Navy had sounded him out about what he would want to keep the photos unpublished, and that officers had suggested publicity might cause panic. The Navy Minister, Admiral Alves Câmara, was quoted as saying the Navy had "a great secret which it cannot divulge because it cannot be explained". On 27 February Deputy Sérgio Magalhães asked the Navy Ministry in Congress to answer questions about the photos and the earlier sightings.^[2][3]

The Navy then released Bacellar's report, "Clarification of the observation of unidentified flying objects sighted on the Island of Trindade, in the period of 12/5/57 to 1/16/58". It said there had been many witnesses on deck of "various qualifications – workmen, sailors, dentist, doctor, aviation officer and professional photographer", but gave no number. Its conclusions were cautious, given Baraúna's skill and earlier UFO montages. The photographer's testimony, it said, lost its "definitely convincing character" because a prior montage could not be ruled out. Even so, the personal testimonies and the photographs "permit the admission that there are indications of the existence of the UFO". Neither Bacellar nor the ship's captain, José Saldanha da Gama, saw the object, though they saw the commotion.^[2]

The American view

The U.S. naval attaché in Rio, Captain M. Sunderland, filed an Office of Naval Intelligence report on 11 March 1958. It described Baraúna as a man with "a long history of photographic trick shots" and suggested the affair was "a fake publicity stunt put on by a crooked photographer, and the Brazilian Navy fell for it". It ended with a joke that Martians were too fond of comfort to visit such a barren island. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book's consultant, said such bias and flippancy had no place in scientific investigation. Blue Book concluded that ATIC's analysis showed the picture was "probably a hoax", though its record card admitted it had been unable to obtain copies of the photos. Blue Book scientists who later examined copies found that the object had little contrast and no shadow in the noon sun, and seemed to be inverted in one picture compared with another.^[2][3]

Witnesses and contradictions

The number of witnesses is disputed. Dr. Willy Smith of the Center for UFO Studies later said 48 were on deck, though without giving a source. Baraúna said about fifty, but Commander Paulo de Castro Moreira da Silva, who was aboard, told O Globo that only "about eight" people saw anything. He said the only officer to confirm it was Lieutenant Homero Ribeiro. Of the diving group, the two divers were below in the mess and missed it. Professor Fernando Flávio Marques de Almeida, working on the island, said in March 1958 that neither he, his colleagues nor the island's garrison had seen any flying disc, and that they learned of it by radio. "We lived with our noses in the air," he said, since their main work was weather observation, so someone would have seen any strange object. The Brazilian ufologist Olavo Fontes compiled an extensive report for APRO in the U.S. It included further sightings off Trindade, from the Navy ships Tridente and Triunfo, and on Fernando de Noronha, none officially confirmed.^[2][3]

Accounts of a hoax

Baraúna had earlier made trick UFO photographs, once to show how the 1952 Barra da Tijuca UFO photos could have been faked. Viegas and Vieira Filho were his friends and fellow club members in Niterói. On 15 August 2010 the Globo television programme Fantástico interviewed Emília Bittencourt, a friend of Baraúna's. She said he had told her he joined two kitchen spoons into a spacecraft and photographed it against his refrigerator door with perfect lighting. "He laughed a lot about it," she said. In January 2011 a 69-year-old nephew of Baraúna, also a photographer, said his uncle had told him how he produced the montage in his home laboratory after returning from Trindade. One hypothesis is that the witnesses saw something ordinary, such as a seagull in flight. In this view Baraúna then created the image in his darkroom, a fraud made possible because no one on board could make out the dots on the negatives and the film was never confiscated or copied.^[2][3]

The case remains disputed. Supporters point to the number of witnesses and the Navy's analysis. Critics point to Baraúna's skill with trick photography, the contradictions in the accounts and the later reports of his admissions.^[1][2][3]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “UFO sightings in Brazil”, “Caso da Ilha da Trindade (in Portuguese)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.