27 years later, the UFO phenomenon is still under taboo to the Brazilian military. A petition requires Brazilian president Lula da Silva the secret files' disclosure

Article by Carlos Mendes.
Translated by Paulo Santos, from the Brazilian UFO Magazine team.
Submitted to O Liberal newspaper.
Spread by the Brazilian UFO Magazine


In the months of October, November and December of 1977, and during the first half of 1978, the Brazilian state of Pará has been invaded by UFOs. And it wasn't simply sightings. Nothing to do with mysterious lights wandering at high altitudes. It was about bright objects, in several shapes and sizes, flying over the Marajó Bay region at low altitude, few meters above the trees and firing strong light beams at the people. The people harmed by the phenomenon - one of the most important ones of the world's ufology and still under research nowadays - gave several names to the silent and bright objects: “vampire light”, “bug”, “the thing” and mainly “chupa-chupa” (the sucker). They said the objects pilots were beings with the height of 1.20 or 1.30 meter.

The people called it chupa-chupa because of the weird scars the victims bore on their body. The light beam used to leave tiny holes on the skin. Among women, the scars were on their breasts. They seemed to loose blood during the attack. Men and women complained of giddiness, body numbing and headache after the attacks. The inhabitants of the cities of Colares, Santo Antonio do Tauá, Mosqueiro and Baía do Sol panicked on these days of bitter remembrance. The panic took over even the state's capital, Belém, with a sequence of strange lights reports and chupa-chupa attacks in several quarters of the city, astonishing the authorities.

High mystery

In the end of the 70s, scientists from all over the world came to Pará, Brazil, but they all failed to explain the phenomenon. Twenty-seven years later, documents from the Brazilian Air Force's secret service reveal that these lights from space were something much more unsettling than we can imagine. The explanation to the phenomenon is: there's no explanation. It is still a big mystery and a huge challenge to the science and to the Air Force's experts. Ufologists, scientists and researchers from Brazilian universities are collecting signatures to a petition that will be delivered to the Brazilian president Lula da Silva. It requires the Air Force to reveal the conclusions of the investigation on the chupa-chupa case. The petition already have thousands of signatures: physicists, biologists, journalists, officers and politicians among them. The campaign is called UFOs: Freedom of Information Now [www.ufo.com.br/secrecy.php].

The military report, called Operation Saucer, has 2,000 pages, 500 photographs and some 16 hours of films. It has been sent to the highest rank officers of the Air Force. At that time, the country had a dictatorship government and, because of this, these documents have been kept classified for more than 23 years. The report's conclusion wasn't revealed. The military were afraid of some relationship between the objects invasion and the communists, maybe a new weapon to destabilize the military regime. The national information service (note: SNI in Portuguese) and the Air Force's secret service decided to keep the results classified.

But through a brave Air Force's officer, captain Uyrangê Hollanda, part of this report came to the public, through an interview he gave to Brazilian UFO Magazine’s editor A. J. Gevaerd. He was the operation commander, sent by the government to this secret operation to investigate the facts and interview the chupa-chupa victims. Researchers got a copy of the report, and from all the victims told to the officer, the most interesting story was one from a farmer called Claudomira Paixão. She lived in Baía do Sol and told that, in the night of October 18th, 1977, she woke up when a strong light appeared through her house's window. “The air got warmer. At first, the light was green, touched my head and crossed my face. I woke up completely and the light became red. I could see a creature, like a man, wearing something like a diver's clothe. It had a device like a pistol. It aimed at me and the object blinked three times, as if shooting at my breast, almost always on the same place. It was hot and hurted me. I felt like there were needles piercing me. I think they collected my blood. I was terrified. I couldn't even move my legs. I was shocked.”

What she said to the military was very important because, for the first time, someone mentions a being leaving the flying object to extract blood. Almost all stories talk about lights causing giddiness, weakness and “body shivering”. The only exception is a case, also in Baía do Sol, talking about the appearance of a space couple that shot at a fisherman with a light-beam pistol, leaving him fainted for several minutes.

Uyrangê Hollanda
Uyrangê Hollanda – Brazilian UFO Magazine files

Carpenter shoot at flying saucer

The captain Uyrangê Hollanda told to on his Operation Saucer report the alien aircrafts flying over the region caused panic among the locals and drove some people to despair. They used to use fireworks to warn the neighborhood when chupa-chupa was coming. They often shot, with their hunting rifles, at the UFOs, said the captain to the Brazilian UFO Magazine [www.ufo.com.br]. “We always told them: don't shoot, don't shoot. Once, a strong light has been aimed at a carpenter. The man had 50 or 60 years old. He took his rifle and shot at the flying saucer. The light surrounded him and he fell to the ground, almost paralyzed. For 15 days the carpenter could hardly move. In the first day the man didn't move at all. He could see, hear and speak but it was very difficult for him to move.” Said the captain in an interview to the Brazilian UFO Magazine, the only magazine interested in hearing his impressive story.

A Colares fishermen also saw UFOs coming in and out from the waters of the Marajó bay. Sometimes, they could see their bluish light moving under the water. “Once, I was sleeping when the sergeants - members of the operation - told me they took a photograph of a flying saucer diving into the water close to a boat. I went to the beach and waited for the fisherman. When he came back he told me what happened. He was terrified. Several weeks later I saw a light close to a fishing-boat. It was blue and surrounded the boat once or twice, by 300 meters, then it dived into the water. There wasn't any sound. It was like a blade passing through the water.” said the captain.

No explanation to the injuries

The captain also heard from Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, the town doctor of Vigia in 1977. She said she took care of more than 40 victims and she saw burnings on their bodies. Because of her job, she asked him to keep her interview under secrecy. She was afraid of being considered ridiculous if people find out she had no explanation for the injuries. The locals, the vast majority fishermen and farmers, couldn't understand why they were chosen by the lights. They had just one certainty: they were terrified for being guinea-pigs to unknown beings from another planet. And they didn't know whether they would survive this weird experience.

The captain and his team were tired of seeing bright objects flying in front of them. The objects even stopped, waiting for them when they were taking photographs or filming. He couldn't disguise his astonishment. In the report he admits these are weird phenomenon. When he developed the crafts photographs, taken from a distance of 20 m, he had a surprise: the objects didn't appeared on some of them. They could only be seen on the negatives. “I think these objects were doing a show for us”, the captain said in the report. In fact, on a very good shot taken on the Mosqueiro island, one can see very well the shape of the UFO that came close to the team at very low altitude. Hollanda said he could see “low height humanoid beings” inside the craft. And this, if said overtly by him, the operation commander, could seriously affect the Operation Saucer credibility. Although Hollanda's superior, commander Protásio Lopes de Oliveira, already dead, believed in the existence of extraterrestrial beings, said the military to the Brazilian UFO Magazine [www.ufo.com.br].

Captain Hollanda also said commander Oliveira would have been “very happy” knowing that chupa-chupa was something so interesting and unexplained to the human science. And what the military saw wasn't unknown to the locals. A fisherman from Ponta do Cajueiro said one of the beings had 1.20 m height.

Priest witnessed object appearing

The priest Alfredo de La Ó, responsible for the Colares church at that time and already dead, was also heard by the military. One of his stories: one night when he was driving he saw a bright object cone-shaped far away. It was at 100 meters of altitude more or less and coming down. it seemed it was landing. “I stopped and came out of the car to see it better. It's lights were green, red and yellow and turned on and off clockwise. It was swaying but, suddenly, the lights became stronger and it went up. It disappeared and did not land”, said the priest.

At two o'clock in the morning of November 27th, 1977, the Air Force agents were paying attention to three bright objects, with different sizes, on a place called Ponta do Machadinho. Apparently they were landed at a distance of 3.000 meters from them. Suddenly, the smaller object came closer to the bigger one. Few seconds later, it flew northeast, towards Belém. The other two stayed for some seconds more and then rised up fast, disappearing while taking different ways.

Another five bright objects could be seen in November 28th at 5000 meters, over the city of Colares. After some time, they came closer to a bigger one. They had yellow, red and green lights. One object left the others and started to emit a strong blue light against a place called Ponta do Bacuri. Later, they came together again and left towards Baía do Sol, Mosqueiro, at high speed. A fisherman, terrified, reported to the military the sighting of a dark UFO reflecting a bluish light. He was then interviewed by a crew of the Brazilian UFO Magazine [www.ufo.com.br].

Object fires a light ray at the locals and fly away

One of the reports describes a yellow to red object flying at low altitude and without noise. Suddenly, it emitted a long bluish light beam hitting the victim on the lumbar region. This part of the body became numb. The victim also complained of paralyzing, muscular pain, and others for several days. Another story talks about a flying object of more or less 100 meters in size described by a Colares local. He said the object emitted strong light beams against the city. When it stopped the local aimed his rifle at the object and shot once. Then, he run away and hided in the bushes. Several locals spoke of a sighting over the Jejutauá estuary. A big, bright object at more or less 1.500 m and flying faster than a jet plane. The object turned suddenly and disappeared within the dark night of the Marajó bay.

On November 1st, 1977, the military set up an UFO observation post on the Colares water-tower, when a strange event caught their attention: at midnight, a blue light, already saw in previous sightings, was moving from south to north and stopped above the sand bank called Coroa Vermelha. Another bright object, yellow to red, came closer and became dark when it touched the light. Half an hour later, another object did the same, disappearing after “landing” on the blue light. Captain Hollanda said that a huge bright object, which seemed to be the 'mothership', has been a 100 meters from them. “I was terrified. At that moment I didn't know what could happen. They could have taken us. They could have done anything they want to us. Another time, they were at Baía do Sol and it was around 7:00 in the morning, Hollanda says, soon after the sun rising. “We didn't see anything when, suddenly, a huge disc-shaped object, with more or less 30 meters of diameter and 50 meters in height, hovered above us”.

Collecting materials

The Operation Saucer never came to an end. The Air Force canceled the work without explanation. Hollanda's conclusion (he has been found hanged with his own bathrobe belt by his daughters in 1997, on the second floor of his expensive house, a death officially called “suicide by asphyxia”): “the space beings called chupa-chupa by the locals were not attacking people but “collecting materials. Covering the Brazilian air space in bands, the same way aerial photography does. They started on Maranhão, then Colares, Marajó, Monte Alegre, Santarém, Manaus, covering all the region as if they had a schedule”. Why the Air Force canceled the operation ? Hollanda’s answer: “I don’t know why they took it for granted. The Air Force wasn't interested, but I was”.

The Brazilian UFO Magazine [www.ufo.com.br] carries in his site over 500 pages of official secret documents of the Brazilian Air Force, most of them never admitted by the military or the government. About 230 pages of that amount are docs from the Operation Saucer, that were obtained through several sources. All these files are free to download as an example that the Brazilian government, although still in denial, does have an strong interest by the UFO Phenomena and has conducted serious investigation about the matter.

A. J. Gevaerd, editor of the Brazilian UFO Magazine, can be contacted at: gevaerd@ufo.com.br.
Operation Saucer official secret documents can be downloaded at: www.ufo.com.br/documentop.php.
Other Brazilian Air Force official secret documents can be downloaded at: www.ufo.com.br/docPrincipal2.php.

[UFOINFO thanks A. J. Gevaerd and Brazilian UFO Magazine for sending this report]


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