1986 Brazilian UFO incident

1986 Brazilian UFO incident

Type	Case
Also known as	Official Night of the UFOs (Noite Oficial dos OVNIs), Night of the UFOs
Date	Monday 19 May 1986, from about 8 p.m.
Place	São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Goiás, Brazil
Radar contacts	21 (official count)
Aircraft sent	Two F-5E fighters and three Mirage IIIE (F-103) interceptors
Official report	Brazilian Air Force, dated 2 June 1986, released 25 September 2009

The 1986 Brazilian UFO incident, known in Brazil as the "Official Night of the UFOs" (Noite Oficial dos OVNIs), was a series of radar and visual sightings of unidentified lights over the Brazilian states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Goiás on the night of Monday 19 May 1986. Air traffic controllers, airline and private pilots and military personnel reported the lights, air defence radars recorded 21 unidentified contacts, and the Brazilian Air Force sent five fighter jets to intercept them without success.^[1][2]

Four days later the minister of the Air Force, Brigadier Octávio Júlio Moreira Lima, told a press conference that the Air Force technically had no explanation. Its official report, released only in 2009, concluded that the phenomena were solid and showed a kind of intelligence. Brazilian ufologists regard the night as one of the most important cases in the world.^[1][2]

The first sightings

At about 8:15 p.m. local time, Sergeant Sérgio Mota da Silva, an air traffic controller at São José dos Campos Airport in São Paulo state, was handling the departure of Rio Sul flight 703 to Rio de Janeiro when he noticed a strange light, like a beacon, standing still in the sky. He phoned the tower at Guarulhos International Airport to ask whether any aircraft was heading towards São José dos Campos; there was none, though Guarulhos did detect contacts near the city. While the two controllers were talking, the light vanished and then came back, brighter than before.^[1][2]

Through binoculars he could see three bright lights hovering over the airport. They shone mainly red but kept shifting into yellow, green and orange. When he dimmed the runway lights, the objects seemed to come closer; when he turned the lights back up, they moved away. He later said he did not know whether they were trying to interact with him, only that they behaved intelligently, and he came to believe that far more than 21 objects were seen that night.^[1][2]

Lights were reported across the region. In the interior of São Paulo state there were sightings at Caçapava, Taubaté and Mogi das Cruzes. According to the ufologist Edison Boaventura Júnior, at about 8 p.m. some two thousand cadets and officers at the Air Force's specialist school (EEAR) at Guaratinguetá watched the phenomenon with the naked eye or through binoculars. Ufologists have claimed that some of the objects were up to 100 metres across.^[2]

Reports from pilots

At least three aircraft reported sightings. The first was a TAM Bandeirante flying from Londrina to São Paulo, whose pilot told the Brasília area control centre that an object was approaching him on what looked like a collision course. The second, a Transbrasil flight from Guarulhos to Brasília, saw an object over the Araxá area of Minas Gerais.^[2]

The third was a twin-engine Embraer EMB 121 Xingu, registration PT-MBZ, on its way from Brasília to São José dos Campos. It was flown by Colonel Ozires Silva, founder of the aircraft maker Embraer, who was returning from a meeting with President José Sarney and was due to take office as head of the state oil company Petrobras the next day; his co-pilot was Alcir Pereira da Silva. At 9:04 p.m. the controller at São José dos Campos, who had three unknown objects on his radar over the city, called the aircraft to ask whether its crew had seen anything strange.^[1][2]

At 9:08 p.m. the Xingu reported bright red lights on the 150 radial of the São José dos Campos beacon, moving from east to west near the coast. Silva described them as looking like big red stars, a very large point of light. He decided on his own to try to get closer. His co-pilot, visibly frightened, reminded him that everyone who chased such a thing ended up disappearing; instead, the light vanished as soon as Silva began to manoeuvre. The next day, at his press conference as the new head of Petrobras, reporters asked him only about flying saucers. Asked in 2022, he declined to comment on the episode, but in a 2014 radio interview he said humans were very presumptuous to think they owned the universe.^[1][2]

The newspaper photographs

At about 9 p.m. the photographer Adenir Britto, on duty at the newspaper Vale Paraibano in São José dos Campos, took a call from a man who said there was a flying saucer over the paper. Thinking it might be a prank, he and the reporter Iara de Carvalho went out into the yard anyway and saw multicoloured lights moving in all directions. With a Nikon, a 500 mm telephoto lens and ASA 6400 film, Britto took several photographs. A month later two officers from the Aerospace Technical Centre (CTA), accompanied by the American ufologist James J. Hurtak, visited the newsroom and asked the editor for the negatives, which Hurtak said would be analysed by NASA. They were never returned. Hurtak later said he believed the objects came from outer space and were monitoring Brazilian military and industrial installations.^[2]

Radar contacts and alerts

The objects were tracked by the radars of the integrated air defence and air traffic control centre, CINDACTA. They flew over sites important to Brazil's air defence, including the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the Aerospace Technical Centre in São José dos Campos and the Air Force Academy at Pirassununga, and the minister of the Air Force was informed.^[2]

By 9:39 p.m. Santa Cruz Air Force Base, near Rio de Janeiro, had been put on alert because of several unidentified radar plots around São José dos Campos. About half an hour later Anápolis Air Force Base in Goiás reported radar echoes on the 270 radial of its beacon and was also put on alert. The contacts seen at Anápolis were not picked up by the Center of Military Operations (COpM) at CINDACTA I. The Air Defence Operations Centre ordered the interceptions, and the pilots were given a non-aggressive mission: although armed, they were to try a peaceful approach.^[1][2]

The intercepts

The first F-5

At 10:27 p.m. an F-5E of the 1st/1st Fighter Group "Jambock", callsign JB17 (FAB-4848), was scrambled from Santa Cruz and took off seven minutes later, at 10:34, flown by Lieutenant Kleber Caldas Marinho. Climbing through 17,000 feet, the pilot picked up a radar plot and saw a white light. It climbed steadily ahead of him, staying 10 to 12 miles away and 10 degrees above his aircraft, until it reached 33,000 feet, changing colour from white to red, to green and back to white. He followed it out over the sea until he was about 180 miles from Santa Cruz, when he reached his minimum fuel and had to turn back. One operator at the military operations centre wondered whether the objects might be spy aircraft, and the pilot asked in his report for a check on whether a foreign aircraft carrier was off the Brazilian coast; none was found.^[1][2]

The first Mirage

At 10:48 p.m. Anápolis launched its first Mirage IIIE (designated F-103 in Brazil) of the 1st Air Defence Group "Jaguar", callsign JG116 (FAB-4913), flown by Captain Armindo Sousa Viriato de Freitas. He obtained five radar contacts but never saw anything. At 11:09 p.m. an unidentified signal appeared on his onboard radar 22 kilometres away; he locked on to it and accelerated to Mach 1.3, about 1,600 km/h. When he was within about 2 miles (some 9 kilometres by another account) the contact, which seemed to be zigzagging and making 90-degree turns, suddenly accelerated away. In a 1993 interview on TV Globo's Globo Repórter, Viriato estimated its speed at Mach 15 — about 18,375 km/h — and said he knew of no aircraft that could fly that fast.^[1][2]

The second F-5

At 10:50 p.m. a second F-5E, callsign JB07 (FAB-4849), took off from Santa Cruz, flown by Captain Márcio Brisolla Jordão. He reported both seeing and tracking on radar an object giving off a bright red light. According to the Air Force report, after he failed to close the distance the light seemed to switch off, and the radar contact disappeared at the same moment. At 10:59 p.m., while he was searching visually around São José dos Campos, his controller, Sergeant Nelson, told him there were numerous contacts directly behind him. The radar showed 13 objects — seven on one side and six on the other — apparently escorting his aircraft. Jordão turned through 180 degrees but saw nothing and picked up nothing on his radar.^[1][2]

Two more Mirages

Two more Mirages were launched from Anápolis: FAB-4918, flown by Captain Rodolfo Silva e Souza, at 11:17 p.m., and FAB-4917, flown by Captain Júlio Cézar Rozemberg, at 11:46 p.m. Neither pilot made any visual or radar contact. In total, 21 radar plots were recorded during the night. According to Sérgio Mota da Silva, the Air Force counted only sightings that were confirmed on radar and visually at the same time: sometimes the pilots saw targets that the radars did not register, and sometimes the radars showed objects the pilots could not see.^[1][2]

The pilots described the lights as hovering motionless, zigzagging, turning at right angles, and changing colour, course and altitude. As the jets tried to close in, the objects would disappear from both sight and radar and then reappear somewhere else. The pilots were told to fly with their navigation lights off and weapons systems armed.^[2]

The press conference

At 4:30 p.m. on 23 May 1986 the minister of the Air Force, Brigadier Octávio Júlio Moreira Lima (1926–2011), held a press conference with the five fighter pilots and the controllers who had been on duty, confirming that five Air Force fighters had pursued 21 UFOs. He said it was not a question of believing or not believing in aliens; the Air Force could only give technical information, there were several hypotheses, and technically it had no explanation. He promised a full report within 30 days.^[1][2]

The official report

The report did not become public until 25 September 2009, 23 years later. Dated 2 June 1986, it was signed by José Pessoa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, acting head of the Air Defence Command. It concluded that the phenomena were solid and reflected a certain intelligence, in their ability to follow observers and keep their distance and to fly in formation, though they were not necessarily crewed. Among its final considerations, it said the phenomena could:^[1][2]

• vary their speed from subsonic to supersonic, and also hover;
• vary their altitude from below 5,000 feet to above 40,000 feet;
• give off white, green and red light, or no light at all;
• accelerate and decelerate suddenly;
• turn on a constant radius or make sharp 90-degree turns.

The report also noted how efficiently the bases had responded, with seven armed aircraft available within 30 minutes of the contacts being detected.^[1]

In a statement to BBC News Brasil in 2022, the Air Force said that all its material on UFOs had been passed to the National Archives, and that it had no specialists to carry out scientific investigations or give opinions on such phenomena. The UFO collection had become the second most consulted at the National Archives, after the records of the military dictatorship; it covers 64 years, from a 1952 sighting over Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro by two reporters from the magazine O Cruzeiro to a report by an Air Force pilot in 2016.^[2]

Interpretations

No firm explanation has been established, and accounts of the night are generally inconclusive. Brazilian ufologists treat it as a landmark case. Jackson Luiz Camargo, author of A Noite Oficial dos UFOs no Brasil (2021), called it one of the most important cases in world ufology and the one with the largest number of witnesses, but said it should not be called an invasion because the objects never behaved in a hostile way. The journalist and ufologist Ademar José Gevaerd, editor of UFO magazine, claimed that the largest object was a mothership 11 kilometres long and that the objects played "cat and mouse" with the jets. The ufologist Marco Antônio Petit said senior officers had told him that Brazil does not shoot at UFOs because they pose no threat, and Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, president of the Brazilian Commission of Ufologists, said the craft were real and intelligently controlled, though their origin remained unknown.^[2]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “1986 Brazilian UFO incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.