Operação Prato

The Chupa-Chupa Panic at Colares

The reports started in the Baixada Maranhense in mid-1977 and spread west along the coast into Pará, settling hardest on Colares, an island fishing town near the mouth of the Amazon. The pattern repeated for months: a light would come in low — off the bay, over the rooftops — and people in its path described being struck by a beam. The marks were consistent enough that locals could describe them by heart: burn-like patches, paired puncture marks, mostly on the neck and upper chest, followed by weakness, numbness and headaches that lasted days.

A young doctor at the Colares health post, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, treated a stream of these patients during the wave and examined the marks herself — and, on two evenings in October, watched a silent cylindrical object from the waterfront. She appears in the Air Force's own files both as a treating physician and as a witness the team considered credible. The panic itself isn't in dispute, whatever caused it. The military's first mission report describes a town that had stopped functioning: nobody fishing, nobody sleeping, gangs of twenty and thirty people roaming the streets at night around fires.

It reached the point of paperwork. In November 1977 the municipal council of Maracanã passed a formal resolution — preserved in the intelligence files — appealing to the Air Force, the Navy and the Army to protect its population from objects that were "causing terror and panic". An elected body, formally requesting military protection from lights in the sky. By then, the Air Force was already there.

We've covered the victims' side of this story — the named witness statements, the doctor who treated them, and the deaths that were never investigated — in a dedicated page: The Chupa-Chupa Attacks: The People the Lights Came For.

Operation Saucer: The Air Force Moves In

Operação Prato was run by the intelligence section (A2) of the 1st Regional Air Command in Belém, with field operations led by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda and a ground team headed by Sergeant João Flávio de Freitas Costa. The first mission ran from 20 October to 11 November 1977; a second followed in late November and early December. The team set up numbered observation points around Colares and the surrounding municipalities, kept hour-by-hour logs, and photographed what it could — the reports record cameras, lenses, exposure settings and film stock for each attempt.

They also brought a doctor. The medical mission — Lieutenant Pedro Ernesto Póvoa and Aspirant Augusto Sérgio Santos de Almeida — interviewed residents in Colares, Vigia and Santo Antônio do Umbituba who described bites and stings to the neck, paralysis of the limbs, and loss of speech after contact with the lights, and examined two people immediately after claimed strikes. Their report records racing pulses, muscle tremors, rapid breathing, crying, heat sensation and stammering. Its conclusion is the sceptical anchor of the whole file: what people attributed to the rays of the OVNI was, in the doctors' view, a normal adrenaline response — fear of the unknown, spread "epidemically" through a close-knit community living in "a climate of collective hysteria".

The field team, who spent their nights outside staring at the sky rather than in the clinic, came to a different view. Their reports treat the victims' accounts as too consistent to dismiss — and they had sightings of their own to weigh.

What the Team Itself Logged

The value of Operação Prato isn't civilian testimony — it's that trained military observers wrote down what they saw, with instruments. On 1 November 1977, from the corner of the Colares cemetery, officers including the unit's lieutenant-colonel watched an object dive, recover and climb out in a 45-second pass; the report calculates it would have needed to reach supersonic speed, yet no sonic boom was heard. On 5 November, after a low pass, the team logged that their hand radio went dead across a bearing arc for twenty minutes and the compass used to align the theodolite stuck pointing south. On other nights they recorded objects making spiral descents and abrupt course reversals, photographed against the dark with whatever film they had.

The reports are strikingly candid about their own limitations. The team chief wrote that the photographic record "does not reflect our certainty" — they were issued slow film and inadequate equipment for most of the operation, and high-sensitivity stock only arrived near the end. It reads less like a cover-up than a unit doing extraordinary work on an ordinary budget.

In December came the closest thing to trace evidence. A farmer named Expedito reported marks on his land at Fazenda Jejú, off highway PA-47. Three agents drove out in an unmarked vehicle, confirmed two holes in the ground, measured and photographed them, and drew the cross-section above. Then they stayed for the night vigils — and logged an object descending over the farm's gravel pit at half past midnight, spinning on its vertical axis "like a top", shifting from amber-red to blue-white, before it climbed away without quite touching down.

How Operação Prato Unfolded

"Intelligently Directed"

The most quoted line in Brazilian UFO history sits at the end of the first mission report's commentary section, typed in Belém in November 1977 over the signature of the A2 team chief:

Two things keep this honest. First, it was the field team's assessment, not an Air Force institutional position — the same operation produced the medical report attributing the injuries to fear. Second, the certainty was explicitly personal: "our certainty is based on our personal observations and on the reliable testimony of people whom, by their actions and behaviour, we can trust." The team knew its photographs wouldn't carry the argument, and said so. What they put their names to was what they had watched, night after night, with their own eyes.

The Brigadier's Letter and the "Discoteca"

On 14 February 1979, Major-Brigadier Protásio Lopes de Oliveira — the commander of the entire 1st Regional Air Command — signed a confidential letter to the Chief of the Air Force General Staff in Brasília. Attached: one collection folder containing "130 (one hundred and thirty) records of observations of OVNI (Unidentified Flying Objects)" covering 2 September 1977 to 28 November 1978, catalogued by his command's intelligence section. Sighting records had kept accumulating for a full year after the operation officially ended — including two 1978 reports from professional pilots, one of whom described a double-oval object holding position a hundred metres in front of his Cessna after a near-collision pass.

The letter's routing slip carries a small detail that says a lot about institutional attitudes. A staff officer at headquarters, filing the folder a week later, wrote its destination by hand: Arquivo da "Discoteca" — the "disco" archive. A brigadier had sent Brazil's most extraordinary military file up the chain, and someone filed it with a joke. It stayed buried for thirty years.

The Leaks, and Colonel Uyrangê Hollanda

From the mid-1980s, pages of the mission reports and Air Force photographs began arriving anonymously at Brazil's UFO press, culminating in the magazine UFO Documento publishing them in 1991 under the headline "Official exclusive revelation: Air Force investigates flying saucers in Amazonia". The Air Force responded the way bureaucracies do: it opened a leak investigation. That file — ARX 322, also now public — reproduced the leaked material verbatim as evidence, page by page, photo by photo. In hunting its leaker, the Air Force formally confirmed that the leaked Operação Prato documents were real.

The final confirmation came from the man who ran it. In 1997, Uyrangê Hollanda — the captain who led the field operations, by then a retired colonel — gave a long on-the-record interview to Revista UFO. He confirmed the operation, described his own sightings at close range, including a small disc over Baía do Sol, and said he had come to believe the objects were not from here. About two months later he was found dead at home, and the death was ruled suicide. It has shadowed the story ever since, though no evidence of anything other than suicide has ever surfaced. What he left behind is the interview: the operation's commander, on tape, confirming everything the documents say.

The Evidence

The Bottom Line

Most UFO cases ask you to trust witnesses. Operação Prato asks you to read paperwork. A national air force deployed an intelligence team for months in response to civilian injuries; that team logged supersonic objects, instrument failures and ground traces; its chief signed his name under "intelligently directed"; his brigadier forwarded 130 records to headquarters; the institution filed it under a joke about disco and said nothing for three decades. Every link in that chain is a document you can download.

None of it proves what the lights were. The injuries have a plausible conventional reading — the Air Force's own doctor gave one — and the photographs that might have settled things were shot on the wrong film by an under-equipped unit. But as an official record of a military force taking the phenomenon seriously, watching it with trained observers, and admitting in writing that it could not explain what it saw, there is nothing else like it anywhere in the world.

Download the Original Documents

We host key Operação Prato records here so you can read them for yourself. All are scans of the original typewritten documents, in Portuguese. The full collection is at Brazil's National Archives and the researcher archive operacaoprato.com.

Official Archives