Caso Lemos Ferreira: Portuguese Air Force F-84G formation encounter

4 September 1957. Base Aérea n.º 2, Ota. At 19:21, four F-84G Thunderjets of the Força Aérea Portuguesa took off on a night navigation exercise, described as a joint Portugal and Spain training flight. One account has them flying out to Granada and back over Portalegre and Coruche at 25,000 ft. Another sends them over Córdoba and Cáceres.

The flight leader was Capt. José Lemos Ferreira. He was born in Portalegre and trained as a pilot in the USA. With him flew three sergeants: Alberto Gomes Covas, Salvador Alberto Oliveira and Manuel Neves Marcelino.

Around 22:00, something appeared just above the horizon. It was not a star, a heavenly body or a comet, Lemos Ferreira said later. It looked like a very bright star of unusual size. Its coloured core kept shifting, from dark green to blue and then through yellows and reds. It swelled to five or six times its first size. Then it shrank to a barely visible yellow point. Again and again. He compared it to a child's marble, but enormous. Later it looked like a sausage nibbled around the edges. It turned an intense red.

Then a small circle of yellow light came out of it. Three more followed. Four small yellowish spheres took up positions around the big object. They came at the jets at high speed. "Vem sobre nós!" the pilots called. It's coming at us. The formation broke apart to avoid a collision. In his own summary, the object "even passed below and behind the formation."

Near Coruche, as the jets began their descent, two or three officers out hunting reportedly saw "a dance of lights in the sky." The encounter lasted between 30 and 40 minutes, depending on the account.

After landing, Lemos Ferreira gave a signed statement to the Lisbon correspondent of Flying Saucer Review. He posed for photographs with the three sergeants. The four pilots wrote a joint report, which he believed the Air Force must have sent to NATO. No published conclusion, Portuguese or NATO, has surfaced.

In 1957, he recalled, UFOs "were not a subject of conversation in the Air Force." He met prejudice from his superiors. His career rose anyway. He served as Chief of Staff of the Air Force from 1977 to 1984, then as Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces until 1989.

An officer at Ota who had studied in Coimbra told him something striking. The Coimbra Geophysical Institute had recorded significant variations in Earth's magnetic field at the same time. The claim is second hand, and no magnetogram has been found. It is likely why NICAP files the case under electromagnetic effects.

Lemos Ferreira insisted he had not mistaken the object for Venus, which the pilots had identified separately. He was honest about his limits too. With an aircraft he could identify, he could work out its distance. With objects he did not know, he had no way of telling. No hoax allegation and no published sceptical analysis have been found.

In 2007, fifty years on, he told the story again to Lusa. RTP had already featured it in a 1995 programme, alongside cases from Lamego and Lajes. He died on 23 January 2020, aged 90. One obituary called him "the general who swore he saw a UFO."