BRAZIL 1986

Opening

On the night of 19 May 1986, Brazilian air traffic controllers and air defence radars picked up unidentified lights and radar contacts across the south-east of the country, from São José dos Campos near São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Goiás. Air Force fighters were scrambled from two bases. At least one pilot reported a radar contact he could not see, and at least one reported a light the radar did not show.

Four days later the head of the Brazilian Air Force held a press conference and said, in effect, that the force had no explanation. Brazilians call the night the Noite Oficial dos OVNIs, the official UFO night, because the military itself went on record. It is one of the few cases where an air force admitted a multi-station radar event it could not identify.

Timeline

About 8:15 p.mAir traffic controller Sérgio Mota da Silva sees three bright lights near São José dos Campos airport. Radar at Guarulhos detects contacts in the same area.

9:08 p.mAn Embraer EMB 121 Xingu reports red lights near the coast. Colonel Ozires Silva, the founder of Embraer, is flying it. He tries to approach the lights without success.

9:39 p.mSanta Cruz Air Force Base is put on alert.

About 10:10 p.mAnápolis Air Force Base reports radar echoes and goes on alert. The operations centre of CINDACTA I does not detect them.

10:27 p.mAn F-5E fighter from Santa Cruz sees a white light that climbs to 33,000 feet and changes colour. The pilot follows it out to sea until fuel runs low.

10:48 p.mA Mirage IIIE from Anápolis gets five radar contacts but sees nothing. It closes to about two miles from one of them.

About 10:50 p.mA second F-5E reports a bright red light on radar and by eye. The light goes out and the radar contact is lost.

23 May 1986The Air Force chief, Brigadier Octávio Júlio Moreira Lima, holds a press conference.

2 June 1986The Air Force report on the night is dated.

25 September 2009The report is declassified.

Key figures

Sérgio Mota da Silva, the controller at São José dos Campos, gave the first sighting.

Ozires Silva, the Embraer founder, was an unlikely civilian witness: an experienced aviation executive in his own aircraft.

The fighter pilots flew F-5E aircraft from Santa Cruz and Mirage IIIE interceptors from Anápolis. Sources spell some of their names differently, so I have not named them here.

Moreira Lima, the Air Force chief, put the official position on the record on 23 May.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the Air Force report dated 2 June 1986, declassified in 2009, and the radar plots and audio recordings that the Brazilian National Archives have since made available. The report describes contacts that changed speed from subsonic to supersonic or hovered, varied altitude, showed lights or none, and made sudden accelerations and sharp turns. It notes that seven armed aircraft were available within thirty minutes of detection.

The count of 21 objects comes from press reports and Brazilian Air Force retrospectives, and sources disagree on how many fighters took off and what types they were. One difference matters: the operations centre of CINDACTA I did not see the echoes that Anápolis and other radars did. I have not found an independent analysis of the raw radar tapes.

Things you might not know

• The runway lights seemed to matter. Mota da Silva reportedly dimmed the runway lights and said the lights seemed to approach, then withdraw when the lights were restored.
• The Embraer founder was flying. Ozires Silva was returning from a meeting in his own company's turboprop when he was drawn into the event.
• The chase went far. The F-5E pursuit reached about 180 miles from its base before fuel forced a turn back.
• A pilot's speed estimate. In a 1993 TV Globo interview a Mirage pilot estimated an object's speed at about Mach 15. That is a personal estimate, not a measurement.
• The government said so. Brazil's military did not deny the event. It declared it unexplained and later opened the papers.

Competing explanations

Radar anomalies and ordinary lights. The strongest sceptical reading starts with the mismatch: pilots saw lights the radar did not show, and the radar showed targets nobody could see. Anomalous radar returns, and aircraft lights or bright objects seen at night from a moving jet, can both produce such gaps. The weakness is that it needs several different effects to line up across several stations in one night.

Unidentified objects, as the report describes them. The Air Force's own report treats the contacts as real objects with unusual performance. It does not say what they were, and it does not claim they were crewed craft.

A mixed night. Some contacts may have been real and some spurious, which would explain why the accounts do not agree with each other.

Later life of the case

The 2009 declassification placed the case alongside Brazil's other opened Air Force records, including the 1977 investigation on the island of Colares (see the Colares report). The official UFO night has been revisited on anniversaries by Brazilian media ever since. No later document has explained what the radars tracked.

Finding

What is settled: something drew radar attention at several stations, fighters were launched, pilots made reports, and the Air Force chief said publicly that it had no explanation. What is not: whether the contacts were physical objects, atmospheric radar effects, or a mix.

The strongest reading is a real event with no public explanation. What still will not resolve: whether the radar recordings and the pilots' own reports have ever been analysed together by someone outside the Air Force.