The Colares Flap and Operação Prato

The Bay of Marajó opens onto the Amazon delta in north-eastern Pará. Colares sits on an island in that bay, a municipality of about 2,000 people. In 1977 a wave of lights moved along this coast. Jacques Vallée traced it from Cape Gurupi, north of Vizeu, toward São Luís and Belém. It culminated on Colares and at Baía do Sol. There was a precursor. 25 April 1977. Four fishermen on Ilha dos Caranguejos. One dead. Two with second-degree burns.

People called the lights chupa-chupa. Sucker-sucker. They came in from the bay. They glowed white, green, blue, orange and red. "No sound was detectable." Fisherman Manoel João de Oliveira Filho saw an object shaped "like an umbrella" stationary about 4m from the ground. Then it "moved away equally silently towards Machadinho." Barber Carlos Cardoso de Paula said a "ball of fire entered our house" and "ran up my right leg as far as the knee."

Vallée summed it up: "They came over the islands at low altitude and circled; they descended as if to land; they made loops and accelerated suddenly; they hovered over houses and probed the inside with beams." Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho ran the Colares health unit. By November 1977 she had 35 confirmed victims. She recorded burns, tremors, headaches and "very small orifices in the skin where they were hit by the rays." She later said every patient with earlier lab tests had developed a sudden anemia.

Colares mayor José Ildone Favacho Soeiro asked for help. The Air Force's regional command in Belém, I COMAR, sent a team. The first mission ran from 20 October to 11 November 1977. On 1 November, Captain Uyrangê Hollanda took over as operational chief. Sergeant João Flávio de Freitas Costa kept the records and drew sketches and maps. The team interviewed 39 civilians. Then it started logging sightings of its own.

27 November 1977. 19:10. Two light-yellow luminous bodies crossed the sky at 6,000 m, faster than 600 km/h. At the centre of the sky, one made a tight 360° turn. Sergeant Costa wrote that the objects showed "intelligent direction."

Officially, the operation closed after finding no unusual phenomena. Military doctors called the symptoms "normal reactions during fight-or-flight situations," passed person to person into "epidemic hysteria among residents." The intelligence service, the SNI, noted the team disagreed about its photographs and identified one light as the planet Venus. Dr. Carvalho said officers asked her to sedate patients and call it collective hysteria. Hollanda himself, she said, never pressured her.

1997. Hollanda went public. He described a vigil at Baía do Sol with SNI agents. A disc about thirty metres across, some two hundred metres up. It sent flashes of yellow light down onto the group. The light turned blue. Then it was gone at high speed. The objects, he said, came "from the sky and also sometimes from underwater." On 2 October 1997 he was found hanged at his home in Cabo Frio. The medical examiner confirmed asphyxia by hanging. Claims that he was silenced have no documented evidence behind them.

In 2007 Sergeant Costa's son, Fernando, said that as a teenager developing the team's film he had enlarged points of light to look like discs. He still insisted that something strange had happened. Sceptic João Lucas da Silva cannot say with certainty that the lights drew blood, yet concludes that "something happened." The FAB records now sit in the Arquivo Nacional. The chupa-chupa lives on in books, documentaries, a 2024 Globo podcast, Mestre Pacau's carimbó songs and the alien figures on display in Colares.