Colares and Operation Prato

In late 1977, the island community of Colares, in Brazil's Pará state at the mouth of the Amazon, reported weeks of nighttime attacks by flying lights that residents called "chupa-chupa," the sucker. Victims described beams that burned the skin, left puncture-like marks, and caused weakness. The Brazilian Air Force launched Operation Prato, a months-long field investigation that produced hundreds of photographs and reports. The files were classified for decades and are now partly public. It is Latin America's most extensively documented UFO wave.

Reports began along the Pará coast in mid-1977 and concentrated on Colares by October. Residents described luminous objects at rooftop height emitting thin beams. Dozens sought treatment for burns and small wounds. Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, the town's young physician, treated patients personally and has confirmed the injuries throughout her life, describing burned, hardened skin patches and puncture marks, along with anemia-like weakness.

The panic grew until the mayor formally requested military help. The Air Force's First Regional Air Command sent a team under Captain Uyrangê Hollanda. From roughly October 1977 to early 1978, the team camped in the region, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and reported photographing and filming unidentified lights. The operation ended abruptly without public explanation.

In 1997, Hollanda, by then a retired colonel, gave a long interview to Brazilian researchers describing the operation and his own sightings. He died by suicide months later, a fact that fuels the case's darker lore but has no established connection to the events.

Hollanda led the field team. Dr. Carvalho is the key medical witness. Brazilian researchers, and journalists at the Revista UFO magazine, drove the decades-long campaign that pried the files open.

Partially declassified Operation Prato files, including reports, sketches, and photographs, released in stages by Brazil's national archives from the 2000s onward. Medical testimony from Dr. Carvalho. Hundreds of witness accounts. Skeptics and proponents disagree about the quality of the photographic material, much of which is dark and ambiguous.

The operation itself was the official response, which makes the case unusual: a national air force formally investigated, documented, and then archived a UFO wave. Brazil has since released substantial portions of its military UFO files.

Skeptical readings note the region's poverty and isolation, the role of mass panic once the chupa-chupa story spread, and prosaic light sources (aircraft, meteors, ball lightning, and swamp-gas-type phenomena) available over an Amazonian estuary. The injuries have been attributed by some to insect bites, infected wounds, and coincidence amplified by fear. Proponents respond that a serving military team spent months on site and came away reporting unexplained phenomena, that the physician's medical testimony is specific and consistent, and that the classified-then-released paper trail shows the state took it seriously. No official explanation was ever issued.