The Barra da Tijuca Flying Disc Photographs

Rio de Janeiro, 1952. João Martins was a reporter for O Cruzeiro, the Diários Associados weekly, and Ed Keffel was its press photographer. Brazilian sources say the two men were at Ilha dos Amores, an isolated spot at Barra da Tijuca, preparing a story about courting couples. Barra was then a remote beach district. They stood on a cliff overlooking the coast.

May 7, 1952, about 4:30 in the afternoon. Martins saw an object approaching at high speed and took it for an aircraft, then noticed something odd. "That 'plane' was flying sideways." He shouted to his colleague. "What the devil is that? Shoot, Keffel!"

Keffel took five photographs in about 60 seconds with a Rolleiflex. In the first frames the object looks like an aeroplane. As it tilts, a disc appears, with a slight dome on top and a raised ring on its underside. By the end it was almost vertical, then it vanished. The magazine described it this way: "The strange object came from the sea, with enormous speed, and was seen for one minute, of gray-blue color, absolutely silent, without leaving traces of smoke or flames."

O Cruzeiro presented the pictures as "the most sensational documentation ever obtained about the mystery of flying discs." Brazilian sources say they first ran in an Extra insert on 17 May 1952. US sources cite the issue of 24 May.

The Brazilian Air Force went to the site. Officers studied the sun's position, the distances, the trajectory and the shadows. They traced about 40 people whose stories reportedly matched, and they spent weeks trying to fake the pictures. They failed. The photos, they concluded, were genuine. The report stayed unpublished until 1959. Then Fernando Cleto, a Bank of Brazil official, made it public on the television programme O Enigma do Espaço, with help from the FAB's UFO commission under Col. João Adil de Oliveira.

Doubts came early. Carlos Éboli called the pictures "totally false" at the time. In 1963 Donald Menzel and Boyd wrote of the fourth photo that "shadows on the foliage indicate lighting from the right, while the light on the object seems to come from the left." APRO defended the series. Dr. Olavo Fontes argued that broken or dead palm branches created a false shadow angle.

In 1968 the Condon Committee examined the photographs as Case 48. William K. Hartmann wrote that in one frame "the disk is clearly illuminated from the left, while the hillside below appears to be illuminated from the right." He rejected the palm explanation because other foliage showed the same mismatch.

Later, Claudeir Covo of INFA went to the site on the same date, at the same time of day, with a scale model. For the shadow on the object in the fifth photo to be right, he argued, "the Sun would have to be inside the Atlantic Ocean." He noted that Keffel had exactly five negatives available. Nobody Covo found had seen anything, neither the fisherman Nonô nor the bar owner. Writing with Paola Lucherini in Revista UFO, he concluded that Brazilian ufology "was born from a great fraud."

Kevin Randle reached the same verdict: "Today, the best evidence seems to suggest the case is a hoax, perpetrated by two magazine writers who wanted an interesting story." Skeptics suggest a model disc and a double exposure. Neither Keffel nor Martins ever confessed, and some Brazilian ufologists still do not accept that the fraud was proven. Together with the Trindade Island photographs of 1958, Barra da Tijuca remains one of Brazil's most famous and most disputed photo series.