UFO sightings in Brazil

1947

• On 23 July 1947, topographer José Higgins was working with many laborers in Bauru, São Paulo. Suddenly, they heard an extremely sharp sound. Some moments later, they saw a lens-shaped object landing near them. The workmen run away leaving Higgins alone. The man reported that three humanoid figures emerged from the UFO and spoke to him in an unknown language; after about a half-hour, they returned to the UFO which then took them away.

  1952

• On 5 May 1952, the journalist Joao Martins and the photographer Eduardo Keffel claimed to have seen a flying disk in the vicinity of Barra da Tijuca. Keffel took some photographs of the UFO, which were published by the magazine O Cruzeiro.

  1957

• On 13 September 1957 The journalist Ibrahim Sued received an envelope containing a letter and three fragments of metal. The author of the letter wrote that he saw a UFO which exploded in the sky over the beach of Ubatuba; he collected some fragments and sent three of these to the journal together with the letter. Sued sent the fragments to a laboratory which analyzed them and discovered that they consisted of pure magnesium. James Harder and other ufologists came to the conclusion that the fragments of Ubatuba have an extraterrestrial origin, but other investigators think that this story is a hoax.
• Antonio Villas Boas claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials on 16 October 1957. Though similar stories had circulated for years beforehand, Boas's claims was among the first alien abduction stories to receive wide attention.
• On the evening of November 4, 1957, two sentinels at the Itaipu Fort, suffered moderate burns after being hit by a heat wave from an unidentified flying object, which allegedly came descending from the sky. The entire electricity of the fort, including the emergency circuits, went down during the incident. Afterwards, Brazilian Army and United States Air Force personnel, along with investigators of the Brazilian Air Force, flew to the fort to interview the soldiers. USAF's Donald Keyhoe expressed his opinions on the case:

  1958

• At 12:00 pm of 16 January 1958, the Brazilian ship Almirante Saldanha, taking part in projects of the Ano Geofísico Internacional, was preparing to sail away from Ilha de Trindade, off the coast of Espírito Santo. Captain Viegas was on the deck with several scientists and members of the crew when he suddenly noticed a flying object, which had a “ring” around it, just like Saturn. Everyone reportedly saw the UFO at the same time. It came to the island from the east, flew towards the Pico Desejado, made a step turn and went away very quickly to the northwest. As soon as the object was noticed Almiro Baraúna was requested for photographing. After getting the camera and going up the quarter-deck, he stated that he managed to take pictures of the object.

  1966

1977

• The Colares flap refers to an outbreak of UFO sightings that occurred in 1977 on the Brazilian island of Colares. During the outbreak, the UFOs allegedly attacked the citizens with intense beams of radiation that left burn marks and puncture wounds. These sightings led to the Brazilian government dispatching a team to investigate under the codename Operation Saucer, but the government later recalled the team and classified the files until the late 1990s.

1979

• On the evening of 28 July 1979, security guard Antonio Carlos Ferreira was allegedly abducted from his workplace - a furniture factory in Mirassol, São Paulo. According to his own accounts, he was approached by three humanoid figures who tranquilized and took him aboard a small ship which ferried him to a larger craft further away. There, he said he was positioned in front of a large television-like device and presented with a variety of images before being forced to mate with a female alien, after which he was tranquilized again and returned to the ground. Ferreira described the creatures as being approximately 1.2 meters tall with pointed ears, slanted eyes and human-like mouths. They lacked eyebrows or eyelashes and spoke in a language that superficially resembled Japanese. Some were said to have dark skin and red curly hair, while others had light skin and straight black hair. The ship was spherical with three undercarriage-like legs protruding from the bottom, with the interior lit by bright red and green lights. Ferreira states that he encountered the aliens again in 1982, with the craft supposedly landing close enough for him to see the female alien and a childlike alien observing him from a distance. He said he experienced a third encounter later in 1982 in which he was taken into the hangar of an alien craft via a green beam of light before being injected with a yellow substance. He said he was then taken to meet the two aliens once more, the younger of whom he was led to believe was his own child. Other encounters are said to have followed, to a total of 16 or 20 between 1979 and 1989.

  1980

• Elias Seixas de Mattos was a truck driver from Rio de Janeiro in 1980, when he had suffered an unexplainable experience. His story, along with the ones from his two friends, has earned an important page in the history of Brazilian Ufology because of the quantity of details he displayed to describe the situations.

  1986

1996

• The Varginha UFO incident was an incident in Varginha, Brazil, in 1996 involving reports of unidentified flying objects and strange creatures which were supposedly captured by Brazilian officials.
• In Saragonha Island, at Patos Lagoon, Haroldo Westendorff witnessed a cone-shaped UFO, 50 to 60 meters tall, with a base as big as a soccer stadium. He flew around the object for some 15 minutes, keeping 100 meters of distance. The object was spinning around itself and heading towards the sea and was spotted at the radar of Infraero's room at Pelotas' airport. It was not detected by Cindacta II in Curitiba, Paraná, which was responsible for watching the skies of southern Brazil. Westendorff also reported a smaller object coming out of the top of the big UFO, which climbed into the skies at a very fast speed, with the larger UFO following shortly afterwards. The Ministry of Aeronautics kept a secret investigation of the object seen by Westendorff.

  2008

• In 2014, a document called "Dossier Riolândia" was produced by the amateur organization Inape which allegedly shows the appearance of UFOs in the city of Riolândia on January 20, 2008.

  2013

• On 19 June, a light was visible in the sky over one of the protests in Brazil, and seen by thousands attending the event. It was reported to be an UFO, but it is currently believed to have been a drone used by local newspaper Folha de S. Paulo in order to shoot aerial images of the demonstrations.