Operação Prato 1977: 130 logged lights, inconclusive photos and a public 'optical illusion'

In late 1977 an Air Force intelligence team camped in Colares, Pará, where villagers said beams of light from the sky were attacking them. Its reports record sightings, symptoms and blurred photos, while an I COMAR officer told the press it was all an optical illusion.

0.9369° S · 48.2819° W · Colares, Pará · Oct–Nov 1977

Source: Brazil · Arquivo Nacional

Lights over the Pará coast

A Brazilian Navy intelligence report from the 4th Naval District, dated 23 November 1977, opens by noting that Belém newspapers had been publishing stories about unidentified flying objects over Pará and northern Maranhão since April 1977. Residents of those areas, it says, "falam em luzes misteriosas, causadoras de mortes ou alucinações" (translation: "speak of mysterious lights that cause deaths or hallucinations"). Among its annexes is a petition about the sightings from a town councillor of Maracanã, addressed to the armed forces ^[4].

A report by the Belém agency of the National Information Service (SNI), written in November 1977, traces the wave back about six months, to press stories that people in Viseu lived in fear of a silent object that hovered, landed and gave off an intense light. Later the object was said to have been seen in Bragança, Vigia, Colares and Mosqueiro. Because the press kept returning to the story, the Air Force, through the 1st Regional Air Command (I COMAR), put together a team of intelligence personnel ^[1]. In Colares, the report says, people held processions, lit bonfires and set off fireworks at night to drive away what they called the "bicho" (translation: "the beast") (p.4) ^[1].

What the team logged

The operational log begins on 20 October 1977, when the team drove from Belém to Santo Antônio do Tauá to meet people who said they had been struck by a beam of light "lançadas de um 'Objeto- engenho desconhecido'" (translation: "cast from an 'unknown object-device'") ^[3]. On 24 October the team went to Colares ^[2]. There José Jorge dos Santos, 48, told them that at 1 a.m. on 23 October a beam of light came through his roof, seeking his neck; he felt intense heat and numbness on the right side, and in the morning the family found specks of blood on his daughter's nightgown. The daughter reported no injury ^[2].

The three sergeants who signed the mission report, Flávio, Almeida and Pinto, also recorded their own sightings. At 6:26 p.m. on 5 November they tracked a light with a theodolite and a camera; afterwards, they wrote, a hand-held radio stopped picking up static or voices in one sector for 20 minutes and the small compass used to align the theodolite stopped working. They put the light about 1,200 m away at 1,500 to 1,800 m altitude (p.29) ^[2]. Before dawn on 8 November a light appeared 500 to 1,000 m in front of an observer and vanished as he raised the camera (p.30) ^[2]. The same log records satellites and a meteor that the team identified as such ^[3].

Symptoms, and no anaemia

The SNI report reproduces statements taken from Dr Wellaide Cecim de Carvalho, the physician at the Colares health unit. The people she saw said they had been struck by an intense light from an unknown object (translation of the quotation below), and she listed symptoms of unknown origin: generalised paresis, fever, headache, first-degree burns, nausea, tremors, dizziness, weakness and tiny holes in the skin. She had treated four patients, one woman and three men, and began a report to the health department but held back for fear of ridicule (p.5) ^[1].

The same report records that she "não observou fatores que a levem a concluir a presença de alterações anêmicas nas pessoas atingidas" (translation: "observed no factors leading her to conclude there were anaemic changes in the people affected"), although she thought they might have been hit by a ray of light of unknown characteristics (p.6) ^[1]. Popular accounts of the case describe victims drained of blood and left with acute anaemia; the doctor's statement in the intelligence file says she found no sign of anaemia. The operational log notes that doctors travelled with the team on 26 October and saw individual residents (p.44) ^[3].

As pessoas se referiam a ter sido atingidas por uma luz intensa, proveniente de um objeto desconhecido

— Dr Wellaide Cecim de Carvalho, as recorded by the SNI, Belém, 1977 (original Portuguese; translated above) [1]

Blurred photographs and a public denial

According to the SNI, two teams were posted where sightings were most frequent, and after some days of vigil one of them photographed what might have been the object. The photographer estimated it at about 3,000 m, moving at a roughly judged 30,000 km/h, but the developed film showed only a bright patch with no discernible shape (p.4) ^[1]. The report adds that the team chief identified the most impressive photo as one he had taken of the morning star (translation of the quotation below), which led him to doubt that the photos showed the object at all. Back in Belém the team kept quiet; there was no consensus among its members about what they had seen, an attitude the SNI linked to fear of ridicule (p.5) ^[1].

In public the Air Force played the sightings down. A clipping from A Província do Pará of 5 November 1977, filed with the Navy report, quotes Lieutenant-Colonel Camilo of I COMAR saying that "tudo não passou de uma mera ilusão de ótica por parte da população, que é de baixo nível intelectual" (translation: "it was all nothing more than an optical illusion on the part of the population, which is of low intellectual level"), that residents had mistaken satellites and meteors for spacecraft, and that their physical reactions were caused by fear ^[5]. The SNI report noted that I COMAR was organising a new mission (p.7) ^[1]. When a magazine journalist visited I COMAR's intelligence section on 25 January 1978 asking what had been established, the officer on duty gave him none of the data he requested ^[6].

Uma das fotos, justamente a que mais impressionou, foi identificada, pelo Chefe da equipe, como a foto que tirara da Estrela D'Alva.

— SNI Belém agency report, November 1977 (original Portuguese; translated above) [1]

A longer register, and film never released

The Arquivo Nacional holds I COMAR's "Registros de Observações de OVNI", numbered 001 to 130 ^[7]. The first entry is dated 2 September 1977, at kilometre 19 of highway PA-17 in Santo Antônio do Tauá: a luminous body shaped like a "Prato invertido" (translation: "upturned plate") (p.3). The last, number 130, is a private pilot's sighting near Tomé-Açu on 28 November 1978 (p.135) ^[7]. The register therefore runs well beyond the four months often given for the operation. The documents do not always agree: the SNI report has the parish priest of Colares waking at 3:25 a.m. on 26 October to see a bright object, while the register logs his sighting at 3:25 a.m. on 13 October (p.7) ^[1][7].

The Arquivo Nacional describes the operation as led by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda and covering at least 130 cases. It adds that, according to Hollanda, officers also shot film, but the Air Force has not made it available ^[8]. In the released log his name appears beside a 1 November contact with the priest (p.47) ^[3]. Hollanda died on 2 October 1997, days before Revista UFO published his interview in its October and November 1997 issues ^[10]. In May 2005 Brazilian ufologists were shown about 110 photos and 160 documents from the operation in Brasília (p.3), but an account written at the time said the files were still off limits to the public ^[9]. The papers reviewed here contain no final conclusion that the phenomena were real.

Last fact-checked: 2026-10-03. Every claim cites its source.