Haroldo Westendorff and the Pyramid Over Lagoa dos Patos

Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. Spring 1996. A local group, the GPCU, was already logging a wave of sightings over the city. Its count would reach about thirty.

Haroldo Westendorff ran a rice mill, a transport company and an animal feed factory. He was 39. He had held a pilot's licence since he was 19 and had twice been Brazil's aerobatics champion.

Saturday, October 5, 1996. Westendorff took off at 09:00 in his own Embraer EMB-712 Tupi. Around 10:30, at about 5,500 feet over Lagoa dos Patos, near São José do Norte, he saw it.

A pyramid with eight sides and rounded corners. On top, an oval dome, dark brown. Three bulges on each face. It looked metallic, with a smooth base about 100 metres across, "as big as a soccer stadium", and it stood 50 to 60 metres tall. It was moving east toward the sea at a constant 100 km/h. No noise. No smoke.

He flew around its base three times. Some accounts say he came within 40 metres. His instruments never failed.

Then the rounded top seemed to disappear, leaving an open hole. A disc emerged, shaped like two plates one on top of the other, three times bigger than his plane. It rose, tilted and left at tremendous speed on a column of wavy reddish rays. Its departure was later calculated at about 12,000 km/h. Some versions say three discs came out. Finally the pyramid itself climbed straight up at high speed.

On his second lap, Westendorff radioed the Infraero control tower at Pelotas airport. Aírton Mendes da Silva raised binoculars and saw a triangular shape with a rounded top, grey with rounded edges. He called two others over. Gilberto Martins dos Santos told IstoÉ it was the size of a high voltage tower. Jorge Renato S. Dutra watched too.

CINDACTA II in Curitiba tracked Westendorff's plane but reported nothing unusual within 200 km. In late October a sergeant from Canoas Air Force Base came to Pelotas, asked not to be named, and spent an afternoon at the aero club taking statements. The Ministry of Aeronautics reportedly ran a confidential inquiry. No conclusion was ever made public. No documents have surfaced in Brazil's national archive, and the Air Force's statistics for 1954 to 2001 list no cases from southern Brazil that October.

Nobody has claimed a hoax, and no specific conventional explanation has been published. Doubters point to the empty radar and to versions that disagree on duration, distance, size and the number of discs. Gilberto Martins dos Santos later said on Programa do Ratinho that he was too far away to say he saw the same thing Haroldo saw.

An artist friend drew the object for Westendorff, and Prof. Sérgio Porres of the Catholic University of Pelotas made colour illustrations. Carlos Pereira, a MUFON member, wrote the case up for Revista UFO. RBS TV retold it in Histórias Extraordinárias, and in 2016 Revista UFO marked twenty years of the case.