VASP Flight 169: Captain Britto's Light over Brazil

Flight 169 was VASP's night economy run. On Monday, 8 February 1982, Boeing 727 PP-SNG left Fortaleza at 01:50 local time, bound for Rio de Janeiro's Galeão airport and then São Paulo. About 150 passengers were aboard. In the cockpit sat Captain Gerson Maciel de Britto, 45, a VASP pilot since 1960.

03:12. Near Bom Jesus da Lapa, in southern Bahia, Britto saw a light to his left. It was compact and very vivid. Red, orange, blue, white. He later described a disc-shaped structure the size of two jumbo aircraft together. Then it moved. It "came from one side of the plane to the other, over and below the plane, as if it was playing a game of hide and seek." Reports say it crossed tens of miles in fractions of a second, then returned to its place. Once, a bluish light filled the cabin.

The passengers watched. Silézia Barbosa Paes del Rosso said it shone "like a mercury street lamp". To Eliane Belashi it was "like an incandescent football". One woman remembered five sharp points. Lígia Auxiliadora Rodrigues took six photographs.

Britto flashed the aircraft lights to see a response. "The only response I could identify was the marked approach of the aircraft to the point where Brasília radar detected this object eight miles from our aircraft." At 04:19 the CINDACTA controller in Brasília reported it at eight miles, nine o'clock, following VASP 169 precisely. It grew harder to see as it entered cloud near the Serra do Mar. It was last seen over Guanabara Bay at 04:34. Three minutes later the jet landed at Galeão.

The story broke the next day when Jornal da Tarde ran Britto's drawing on its front page. Veja and Manchete followed, and Britto spoke on TV Globo's Jornal Nacional. VASP's own inquiry found no ground to dismiss the accounts as frauds or lies. CINDACTA played it down, with its Operations Division head calling the luminous radar point a device malfunction. Correio Braziliense headlined it "Para Cindacta, está tudo azul", meaning all clear.

Years later, the files surfaced. Reports from CINDACTA commander Col. Ronald Eduardo Jaeckel to the Air Force General Staff, along with the radio transcripts, were released to the Arquivo Nacional and to the Brazilian Commission of Ufologists. Marco Antonio Petit described them in Revista UFO in 2009. On a later flight to Belém, Britto was approached by a member of the Operação Prato team. A private meeting with Col. Uyrangê Hollanda followed. By Britto's account, Hollanda said a group in Brasília held the recordings.

Transbrasil pilots Milton Missaglia and Mário Pravato discussed Venus, while an Aerolíneas Argentinas crew asked, "Isn't it Venus?" Physicist Luiz Augusto L. da Silva of UNISINOS made the most detailed case: at 03:12, he calculated, Venus was at magnitude -4.55 but still 7.8° below the horizon. He proposed that a superior mirage lifted it into view 33 minutes before its normal rise. The radar return, he argued, was an artefact of the plane's own echo. The photographs, in his reading, showed navigation lights reflected on passing clouds.

Britto rejected Venus. The light, he wrote, contrasted sharply with the planet. It was the way it moved, he said, that ruled Venus out.

Around 150 witnesses, a radar return, photographs, drawings and official files made the VASP case one of Brazil's most debated sightings. Britto died in 2016. In 2023 da Silva titled his book Dossiê Voo Vasp-169: Caso Encerrado. He argues the case is closed. Not everyone agrees.