The Gravataí Air Force Base sighting and the Brazilian Air Force's statements

October 1954. A wave of saucer sightings was sweeping Rio Grande do Sul, from about 12 October to 3 November. The base at the heart of this story lies about 21 km north of Porto Alegre. Today it is Canoas Air Force Base. In 1954 it still went by Gravataí Air Force Base, the name used by the researcher Dr. Olavo T. Fontes.

Sunday, 24 October, early afternoon. Lt. H. Ferraz de Almeida, a jet pilot, was duty officer. Overhead hung something shaped like a five pointed star, tilted at 45 degrees. Then the five points faded away, and it moved in circles, sliding from side to side in an erratic "zig-zag" course. "Suddenly I saw another object approaching the Base area at a terrific speed," he said, and within seconds it stopped at the first one's side.

Major-Aviator João Magalhães Mota saw discs, domed on top with two or three swellings beneath, "silver-dull in color, like the aluminum-dull color of our jets." A halo wrapped them and vanished whenever an object stopped, and he put their diameter at 30 to 40 meters. With a chronometer he timed one on an east-west run: eight seconds out, ten seconds back. By his estimate it climbed from a standstill to between 40,000 and 50,000 feet in three seconds, with no smoke, no flames or engine noise.

At another hangar door, 60 meters away on the other side of the building, sergeants, soldiers and civilians were watching too. The two groups never met, so Mota discarded the hypothesis of a collective delusion. Ferraz watched until 4:30 p.m., when he left on a training mission. Three and a half hours. He also saw an object reverse course abruptly, draw an arc of 60 degrees in the sky and disappear at an angle of 30 degrees.

26 October 1954. The base command, under Col. Hardman, issued a press statement. The objects were circular and silvery-dull, their speed and altitude "far beyond anything known to the Base." Balloons and celestial bodies were ruled out. Fontes called it "the first Air Force admission that the saucers existed."

On 16 November, Brig. Gervásio Duncan of the Air Defence Command released summaries of 5 of 16 Air Force reports. In Fontes's English he said: "The objects are real, but we can't say positively what they are… We have no conclusion…" A Portuguese account citing Folha de São Paulo is more cautious: he did not doubt what was seen, but could not guarantee they were flying discs.

Col. João Adil de Oliveira, head of the Air Force General Staff's intelligence service, put Ferraz and Mota before an audience of officers. Fontes dates it 2 December 1954, at the Army Technical School. Brazilian sources name the Escola Superior de Guerra. His conclusions, as Fontes rendered them, were stark: "Evidence shows that the saucers are real." And: "We don't know where they come from, and we don't know the purpose of their survey."

No hoax allegation appears in the record. The witnesses themselves ruled out balloons, Venus, conventional aircraft and group hallucination. Mota's altitude and speed figures rest on an assumed distance. They are estimates, not measurements. And much of the record flows through Fontes's English articles, chiefly in Flying Saucer Review in May 1956, still unchecked against the original Brazilian press.

Brazilian popular sources still say Brazil was the first country whose military admitted flying saucers were real. Adil de Oliveira spoke for the Air Force again over the 1958 Trindade Island photographs. The case itself ended where Duncan left it. No conclusion.