Fort Itaipu incident: the burned sentries

Fort Itaipu stands on Ponta de Itaipu in Praia Grande, São Paulo state, guarding the approach to Santos harbour. In the 1950s it was held by the 5th Coast Artillery Group and its 150 mm guns. The date is usually given as 4 November 1957. NICAP files it under 3 November, and Brazilian sources offer others. It was never settled. What is certain is the season. Sputnik 2 had just gone up, and sightings were being reported around the world.

About 2 a.m. Two sentries on duty see what looks like a new star over the Atlantic. Very bright. Orange. And moving toward them.

It comes in fast, then abruptly slows at about 1,000 feet. It sinks slowly, without a sound, until it hangs over the sentries, 50 to 100 metres away. It is round and enormous, perhaps 100 feet across, as wide as the wingspan of a DC-3. It bathes the ground and the guns in red light. Now there is a sound. A strong buzzing, like a generator.

Then the heat. No flame, no beam. Just a wave of it. One sentry falls unconscious. The other runs screaming for cover, tearing at his clothes. Neither fires his submachine gun. Their cries wake the garrison.

Every light in the fort fails. The emergency generator starts, then dies too. In one account the object heads out to sea, leaving a luminous trail across the Atlantic. In another it climbs away into the night sky. The whole event lasts about three minutes.

As the story was told, both men suffered burns over more than 10% of their bodies, mostly under their clothing. They were treated by a military doctor and taken to hospital. The fort was restricted. Brazilian and USAF officers investigated, and the results were classified. Later retellings added a twisted rifle barrel kept in an army museum in Rio.

None of it came from the sentries. It came from Olavo Fontes, a Rio physician and the Brazilian representative of APRO. Four Army officers told him the story. None were ever named, and Fontes says he was refused access to the patients. He published it in the APRO Bulletin in September 1959. From there the account passed to Coral Lorenzen, then to Jacques Vallée, Donald Keyhoe, Jerome Clark and dozens of books.

In 2008 Édison Boaventura Jr. of the Grupo Ufológico do Guarujá went looking. He wrote to 174 veterans. Former commander Osman Ribeiro de Moura remembered "a luminous object," but no injuries. The fort nurse, Darci Bento da Costa, was blunt: "Nothing happened!" The army museum found no trace of the rifle. The power records showed "absolutely nothing." Boaventura's verdict: a real close encounter of the first kind, with the burns invented.

Kevin Randle traced every version back to Fontes. He cited Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, who found "no one, even those on duty that day, confirm the case; only that they had a UFO event." By 2016 Randle was calling for the case to be dropped.

Not everyone agrees. David Rudiak argued that present-day witnesses recalled details Fontes never published, like the melted rifle and the power cut. Brad Sparks, writing on NICAP, treats Itaipu as a genuine electromagnetic effects case. On the same night, Varig captain Jean Vincent de Beyssac reported a red light as his equipment burned out. Something lit up the sky over Itaipu. On that much, even the veterans agree.