By BOB PRATT and CYNTHIA LUCE
(This story is based on research carried out in Brazil between 1979 and 1997. To some extent, it overlaps material in UFOs Filmed Going Into and Coming Out of Bay, which was written in September 1999. A version of this story was published in the April 1999 issue of the MUFON UFO Journal. Cynthia Luice is an American researcher who has lived in Brazil since the 1970s.)
A
former intelligence officer who led an official investigation of UFOs said
he and his team photographed “many flying saucers” and admitted he was once
badly frightened when a huge UFO hovered just a hundred meters above him and
his men.
“I was terrified,” he said. “At that moment I didn’t know what
would happen. They could have abducted us. They could have done anything they
wanted to with us.”
We were talking to Uyrange Hollanda, a retired Brazilian
Air Force 
lieutenant colonel,
whom we interviewed for two days at his home in Cabo Frio, Brazil in August
1997.
“It was about seven o'clock, just after sunset,” Hollanda (right)
said. “We never saw anything approaching. Suddenly a big disc-shaped object
thirty meters in diameter and fifty meters high was hovering exactly above
us!
“It made a noise like an air conditioner, and in the midst
of that we could hear a sound like a bicycle sprocket when you pedal backwards.
“It was emitting a yellow glow that would grow and dim, grow
and dim, every two or three seconds for about five times. As we watched we
could see small yellow and orange lights in the middle of it. After the fifth
time, the lights turned light blue, dimmed and then it disappeared with incredible
speed toward the sea.”
The astonishing close encounter occurred near the village of
Baía do Sol, about twenty-five kilometers north of Belém, one night in November
1977during a long series of UFO sightings in thirty villages at the mouth
of the Amazon River.
FOUR-MONTH INVESTIGATION
The sightings began in August 1977 and continued for more than
a year. Hollanda said the chief of the Intelligence Service at the regional
Air Force command in Belém sent him and a half a dozen intelligence sergeants
to the region to investigate.
The team spent four months in Colares, Baía do Sol and other
villages just north of Belém, after which time the official investigation
was terminated. However, Hollanda said, he wanted to know more about what
was happening, so he and a colleague continued the investigation on their
own for several more months.
“I was interested because I saw a lot of things,” he explained.
“I continued searching for the reasons for what the UFOs were doing there,
what they wanted. The Air Force was no longer interested but I was.”
Hollanda said he and the six sergeants interviewed nearly three
hundred people who had had close encounters, including dozens of men and women
who had been burned by the UFOs.
At least two people died in Colares after being burned by rays
from UFOs, according to Dr. Wellaide Carvalho, who was then in charge of the
state-run hospital in Colares. Much of the UFO activity during the flap was
centered around Colares, a village on an island by the same name about eighty
kilometers north of Belém.
It is not known whether there were UFO-related deaths in any
of the other villages. Hollanda said he was not aware of the Colares deaths
at that time but heard about them later.
In a 1993 interview in Belém, Dr. Carvalho also said she treated
about forty people who had been burned by rays from UFOs. Hollanda told us
his team had seen almost 
the
same number of injuries in Colares, but added that people had been similarly
burned in many other villages as well, including some on Marajó Island, sixty
kilometers west of Colares across Marajó Bay at the mouth of the Amazon (Marajó
Island is larger than the country of Switzerland.).
Villagers in Colares reported that sometimes UFOs would sit
in the dark sky at night and beam down rays of red light at the roofs of houses,
passing through the tile roofs as if they didn’t exist.
The UFO beings used two different rays of light, Hollanda said.
“First came a green light that would hit the person and paralyze them, then
the green light would turn off and a red ray of light would hit, burning them.
A lot of people were burned.”
One
of the victims in Colares was Claudomira Paixão, then thirty-five.
On the night of October 18, 1977, she was asleep in a hammock at the home
of a cousin with five children. About eleven that night a light coming through
a window awakened her.
“The
air became warmer and warmer,” she said. “The first time the light was green.
It touched my head and passed across my face. I woke up and the color changed
to red.”
She
could see a person, like a man in a diving suit, but only from the chest up.
“It
was very hot. I got very thirsty. It hurt, like being stuck with a needle.
I bled at all three points. I think each time he took blood. I was terrified
but I couldn't move my legs. I was paralyzed. I was very frightened.”
UFO
BURNS LEAVE SCARS
The
man and the light disappeared when she began screaming, awakening her cousin,
who took her to the hospital. Dr. Carvalho
treated her and Claudomira returned home about four in the morning.
The
burns left three tiny scars in a triangular pattern on the upper right side
of Claudomira’s chest. "For many weeks I had headaches and fever."
After
serving for one year in Colares, Dr. Carvalho
returned to Belém, where she went to work in the state Department of Public
Health. In the 1993 interview, she said most of the burns she treated in Colares
were like sunburns, on the chest and throat.
“I
she could see two small puncture wounds in the center of the burns,"
she said. "All had irritation, swelling, redness. Very red. The burns
usually covered an area of ten to twenty centimeters and the skin peeled
off.
“These
burns healed quickly. Usually it takes about seventy-two hours for burned
skin to peel. UFO burns begin to peel almost immediately.”
In each case, she said, the victims told her a ray of light
had hit them.
Most of the villagers in Colares were terrified because they
thought they were under attack by the UFOs and they had no way to defend themselves.
Many fled from the area.
Dr. Carvalho said that for three months all the professionals
left Colares except her and two other residents, the sheriff and the priest,
Father Alfredo de La Ó (who had many UFO sightings, according to Hollanda).
They had little to eat except for eggs and farinha because fishermen were
too frightened to fish. Farinha is a meal or flour made from manioc roots.
PARALYZED BY
LIGHT
Hollanda said the villagers were very afraid. “They used weapons,"
he said. "They shot at the discs very often, threw rocks. We told them:
‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’
“Once a strong light was focused on a man’s home in Colares,
a carpenter about fifty or sixty years old. He got a rifle and aimed at the
disc. The light turned on him and he fell to the ground, almost paralyzed.
“He could barely move for fifteen days. The first day he was
dizzy. He could hear, see and speak but he stayed in his hammock for days,
hardly able to move. After fifteen days he was normal again.”
Fishermen
from Colares also saw UFOs going into and out of the water of the bay and
sometimes they saw blue lights moving around underwater.
“They
told me about these sightings, but I did not believe them,” said Hollanda,
who was a captain at the time of the sightings. “Once I was sleeping and the
sergeants came and told me they had photographed a flying saucer diving into
the water near a boat. I waited for the fisherman to come to shore and he
told me that happened. He said he was afraid.
“Several
weeks later I saw a light near a fishing boat. The light was blue. It circled
the boat once or twice about three hundred meters away and then it dived into
the water.
“The
boat was about eight hundred meters off shore. I could see the sail of the
boat in the light from the UFO. I saw
it. It really happened. I started to believe the fishermen were telling the
truth. I asked the fishermen 'Did it make a splash, a sound?' 'No, nothing.'”
Hollanda
held his hand horizontally flat, then moved it down and said: “When you hit
the water that way, SPLAT! But when you do like this,” and he turned hand
vertically sideways, “no sound, like a blade going in water.
VILLAGES
ACROSS BAY ATTACKED
“I
talked with another crew of fishermen who said they saw a blue light under
water circle the boat and then come out of the water about a hundred meters
away. We got a lot of reports from fishermen.
“I
went over to Marajó Island three or four times to see what was happening there,
and the people there were getting attacked too. Some of them said they also
saw flying saucers floating on the water, blue lights, and they could hear
sounds like fishing nets being launched and then pulled in. This was maybe
eight hundred to a thousand meters off shore.”
Marajó Island is on the opposite side of Marajó Bay from Colares.
Hollanda said the people called the UFOs chupa-chupas (from
the verb chupar, meaning "to suck") because they believed
the UFOs suck blood from the victims. He was convinced that actually did happen
but he also believed the UFO crews were simply taking blood samples, somehow
withdrawing small amounts when they burned someone with a ray of red light.
“They were not attacking people,” he said. “They were collecting
material.”
Hollanda, who died unexpectedly on October 2, 1997 at the age
of fifty-seven, spent thirty-six years in the Air Force. He enlisted at the
age of seventeen and spent the next seven years undergoing academic and military
training at Brazil's Air Force academy.
He was a pilot, a parachutist, a jungle expert, and for many
years was the finance officer of the Belém Air Force Base. He was fluent in
English and French, and for twenty-four years was an officer in the secret
Intelligence Service, a fact that few people were aware of.
Hollanda said he had Indian, Portuguese, Jewish, French and
Dutch blood in him and was proud of the fact that one of his great-great-grandmothers
was indian and a member of a cannibal tribe called Porintintin.
AT INTELLIGENCE
SCHOOL
He knew some indian dialects (“They would greet me saying,
‘Capitão! Capitão!’” he said in Cabo Frio), and almost every month for six
years he spent long periods of time living in the jungle and working with
tribal indians. He retired from the Air Force on March 10, 1992.
Flying
saucers were seen nearly every night from April through July in 1977 throughout
the neighboring state of Maranhão just before they began showing up farther
west at the mouth of the Amazon. They first were seen in the Colares area
in July and August but Hollanda was not aware of the sightings until the following
month.
“I was in Brasília at the national Intelligence School and
when I returned to Belém, my section chief (a lieutenant colonel named Camilo,
the head of the Belém base’s Intelligence Service) asked me whether I believed
in UFOs. Until then, I didn’t know about the operation (in Colares). When
he asked me that, I said ‘Yes.' And he said, ‘Well, you are responsible for
the operation now.’”
Colonel Camilo and several sergeants from the air base had
already spent two to three weeks in Colares. They had interviewed some of
the people who had been burned by UFOs and had seen flying saucers themselves.
Asked why Camilo chose him, Hollanda replied: “I don’t know.
I was the chief of the Operation Section. I was responsible for the operations
of the Intelligence Service.
“I went to the commander of the base, the brigadier, to find
out what he wanted done,” Hollanda said. “I asked him what the command wanted
to know about the cases in Colares, what was the line of the investigation.
He said he was interested in what was happening and wanted to know everything
we could find out. He wanted us to get the details and make a report.”
The commander did not set any specific length of time for the
investigation. Hollanda selected as his staff a number of sergeants who worked
in Intelligence and had been trained in different specialties, photography,
meteorology, first aid and so on.
PROBLEMS PHOTOGRAPHING
UFOS
To Hollanda, this was just another intelligence operation.
He called it Operação Prato because, he said, he had to give the operation
a name.
“Brazil is the only nation that calls UFOs discos voadores,
or flying saucers,” he explained. “In Portugal, they speak Portuguese too
and they call it ‘flying plate.’ The Spanish call them platillos volantes
and the French call it ‘flying saucer’.
“I could not call it Operation Flying Saucer. I could not call
it Operation Flying Disc. I chose a cousin of the saucer, a plate. That’s
why I called it Operação Prato.”
Hollanda soon made his first trip to Colares to see what was
going on.
Generally, the team members would spend a week in one village
or another – moving from Colares to Mosqueiro to Baía do Sol to Benevides,
Santo Antônio do Tauá, Vigia and many other villages, as well as farm areas,
and return to Belém on weekends.
They often saw flying saucers themselves and photographed many
of them, then kept detailed notes and sketches on altitude, movement, direction,
color, shape and anything else they believed important. In the daytime they
would type up their reports.
They interviewed people who had seen UFOs and had been burned
by them, again making written records of what people told them.
“I was there with orders from my commander to see and try to
understand what was happening there,” Hollanda said. “We were to photograph
everything we could. But I spent two months without any (photographic) results.
SPECIAL FILMS
AND FILTERS
“I saw the balls of light, I saw the people who had been burned,
but I could not make any conclusions. Many times during the two months, I
saw very bright lights, blue lights, yellow lights, but I didn’t see one object.
I saw lights but no shape. I was worried because my work was showing no results.
“When we saw a big ball of light we photographed it, but they
did not register on the film. I was sure when I came back to headquarters
that we had a picture of a big light, but nothing showed on the negatives.
“Then I asked for filters and special film, infrared and ultraviolet.
The results were much better, and then we identified many other forms, many
other shapes.”
Once
they started getting results, they were able to get good photos of UFOs, he
said.
“The first was a disc with windows. The second was rectangular,
like a barrel on its side. The third was a trapezoid, or like a pyramid with
its top cut off. The fourth was like a Boeing (737). The fifth was triangular
or like an arrowhead. They flew very high in the sky and very fast. They were
also seen leaving the water. The sixth was domed. The seventh was pointed
on the top and bottom and was black on top and white on the bottom. The eighth
was like a ball with three sticks coming out the back, with lights on the
sticks.”
“It was maybe a hundred meters long with windows in
it. This was near Baía do Sol. And little ones (flying saucers) would come
out of it and later go back in, three, four, five, six sometimes. We photographed
this several nights.”
Hollanda
said some people in Colares reported seeing occupants in the flying saucers.
Most were short, about one meter fifty centimeters. However, in two cases
the beings were taller and looked more or less like normal people.
“One
man in Baía do Sol said he was sleeping after lunch when he awoke to see a
red light blinking outside his house. He thought that was strange and went
to the window, and what he saw was much stranger.
“It
was a huge shape like a helicopter but without rotors. A red light was blinking
on top. There were three men inside. They were tall, about one meter eighty,
with blond hair and blue eyes and were wearing white suits with blue capes.
They looked like they were working with instruments, like a computer.
“When
he appeared at the window, he heard one say to the others: ‘Look at that.’
And immediately the UFO took off, disappearing beyond the trees.”
In another case, a pilot friend of Hollanda’s was driving near
Colares one night when he saw a light in the sky coming toward him.
“He stopped the car and he saw this disc land behind the trees.
He was alone on the road, it was completely dark and he became frightened.
Then he saw a man walking toward him.
“The stranger was tall and had blond hair. He walked close
to the car, looked at the driver, and looked into his eyes. The driver started
to cry and the tall man shook his head, glanced at the license plate, turned
and walked back into the forest. The disc took off into the sky.”
Hollanda also related a story about a young man named Luís
who was hunting in the forest. Luís climbed a tree and sat a hammock to wait
and watch for small animals. A bright light approached and stopped above him.
HUMANOID
FLOATS DOWN FROM UFO
Luís was frightened. He jumped to the ground and tried to hide.
He saw a door open on the bottom of the UFO and a little humanoid floated
down to the tree on a beam of light with his arms and legs spread out. He
shined a red light over the hammock and then floated back up into the UFO.
"Luis began to run but the forest was muddy,” Hollanda
said. “He ran and ran and the disc chased him with the beam of light. It took
him an hour to get to the place where two friends were waiting for him in
a boat.
“They saw a big ball of light searching for them, and all three
jumped into the water to hide in the weeds. Then the UFO stopped over the
boat and again the little man came floating down like before and passed a
red light over their boat, searching for something. Then the man went back
to the flying saucer and it went away.”
(In Hollanda’s official report that was sent to Air Force headquarters
in Brasília, he stated that the incident occurred on the evening of November
11, 1997, and the humanoid was described as short but muscular and wearing
a dark, seamless uniform, and that as Luis fled from the first encounter,
he looked back and saw the humanoid examining his fishing net.)
Hollanda said he persuaded a reluctant Luis to take him and
four sergeants back to where this happened.
“We took some photographs of it. Then, about eleven forty-five,
we saw the same ball of fire again, but this time it was smaller and going
at a slower speed. Now it was only a thousand meters from us over on the right
side of the river and maybe two hundred meters high.
PHOTO SHOWS VERTICAL
DISC
"At midnight, a big ball of fire passed directly over
us, going across the river. When it got to the other side, it turned its light
out and we saw a disc-shaped object about twice as big as a Boeing 737, very,
very big. It was amber colored with many bright white windows.
“When it passed over us, we heard a small noise like a turbine,
but low. It crossed the river and disappeared. We photographed this object
also.
“Then,
about two in the morning, we saw it again. This time it was coming down the
right side of the river. It looped out and swung back toward us and stopped
for a minute above the opposite shore. It looked like the sun had stopped
about seventy meters away and six to eight meters high. It was a very, very
big ball of bluish light.
“We
were taking pictures all the time. Then the object went into the sky very
fast and shut its light off. When it did that, we couldn't see the shape but
there was one green light on top and a red light on the bottom.
“We
couldn't see the shape but when the pictures were developed, we could see
a large disc-shaped object standing vertically, rather than horizontally.”
Whenever
possible, usually at the end of each week or two in the field, Hollanda turned
in reports of the team’s findings. These reports gave details of each sighting
of their own and those they learned about, the testimony of witnesses, and
photos they took of UFOs. Included would be sketches of the UFOs, as well
as maps showing where sightings occurred and paths of the UFOs as they moved
about.
Hollanda
no longer remembered how many individual cases he and his team reported to
Brasília. Somehow, Brazilian UFO researchers obtained copies of many of the
reports, and we have seen at least three different sets, no two of which are
identical.
DIFFERENT SUMMARIES
Some
are bare summaries of incidents with dates and times but no names, while others
name the witness and give date, time, location and other details of the encounters.
Some examples of the first type are:
1.
“A reddish-yellow light moving at low altitude
moving east to west descended rapidly toward the witness, obliging him to
hide in the bushes from where he saw the object shine a blue light in his
direction. He could not determine its size or shape. He heard a hissing sound
like a dynamo when the object climbed toward the city.”
2.
“A bright light hovering about twenty meters above the trees, bluish
color with three black stripes, with a round shape like a farinha oven, lit
up everything around it. The witness aimed a gun to shoot the object when
he was hit by a reddish light that felt like an electrical charge, paralyzing
him. Thereupon the object moved off, gaining altitude in a wavy motion and
spinning like a wheel while making a slight hissing sound.”
3.
“A ball of light, yellow-reddish, moved down to a low height, ten meters,
east to west, circular shape with a multi-colored tail, making no sound, emitted
a long ray of bluish light that hit the witness in the back, causing numbness
in the area hit and paralysis, muscle pain and other effects for several days.”
4.
“A reddish-yellow light descended to one hundred meters, moving north-south…
At a distance its light was very bright and when it came close it reduced
the intensity of the light, like a lighted cigarette in the dark. After coming
to a swift stop, the object fired three quick rays of bluish light toward
the city (Colares), 1,500 meters away. Witness raised his gun and fired two
shots at the UFO.”
And
from the more detailed documents, a copy of which we showed to Hollanda in
1997 (“These are my reports,” he said), these examples:
1.
“About 11:30 on the night of October 12, 1977 in the village of Santo Antônio
de Tauá, a twenty-year-old man named Manoel was standing outside his house
with four friends. They saw a yellow light moving east to west, then slow
down and stop about twenty meters from them. Inside the object they could
see a man on the left and a woman on the right who appeared to be working
controls of some kind. Then a beam of red light was directed toward the group,
hitting Manoel. It was like an electrical shock that traveled all over his
body from the head to his toes. He felt weak and paralyzed, and thought that
for some minutes he was going to faint."
2.
“Late on the same night in the same village, a forty-year-old man also named
Manoel was asleep in his house with his children when a bright light came
through the roof, awakening him. He started to get up but felt paralyzed.
He tried to scream for help but couldn’t. After about two minutes he was able
to get up and cry out. His neighbors came to his rescue. In telling the investigators
his story, Manoel said his left side was numb for eight days. He said he had
seen a ball of light several times passing near his home at low level without
making any noise, at times slowing down and nearly stopping before disappearing
at great speed.”
3.
“At four o'clock in the morning on October 26, 1977, in the same
village, a thirty-six-year old man named Raimundo was awakened by a bright
greenish glow in his room. Then he felt as if he had been stuck by a needle
on the inside of his right thigh. He felt dizzy and soon had a headache. His
thigh was reddish and hot. Several other people had told him the same thing
had happened to them but he didn’t believe them. Ten days later, his thigh
looked like it had been sunburned. The whole area was twenty-five centimeters
long and fourteen wide, oval shaped. In the center was a small red point and
around that was a two-centimeter area that was clearer where the skin was
starting to peel.”
COLLEAGUES MADE
JOKES
Hollanda
turned all of his reports in to his superiors and the command sent them to
Brasília. “I never saw them again,” he said.
Q.
“Did anybody from Brasília ever ask you any questions about these reports?”
we asked.
A.
“No, I asked them and they said ‘We are keeping them indefinitely.’”
Q.
“But nobody asked questions about what you found up there?
A.
“No, they joked about it,” Hollanda replied.
Not
all of his colleagues took his investigation seriously. “Some of my fellow
officers used to joke with me and asked if I had seen any flying saucers.
But later some of them saw the same things.”
Hollanda’s
investigation was not a secret mission but it was “classified,” he said.
“The
Brazilian government and the Air Force were not interested in publicizing
UFOs because three questions were often asked of the government and the Air
Force: Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they want? And the Air
Force did not have answers to the three questions.”
Asked
if his commander had specifically told him he could not speak publicly about
the sightings, Hollanda replied: “Yes.”
We
asked if the Air Force ever had any similar UFO investigations in other parts
of the country. “No,” Hollanda answered, and then said his investigation was
unique for three reasons.
“We
(referring to himself) were lucky we had a very long exposure to the UFO phenomenon.
We were lucky because we were chosen to be commander of the operation. And
we were lucky because my commander, the brigadier, was interested and believed
in UFOs. Three conditions. It would be very difficult to have all three again.”
U.S. OFFICERS
‘INTERESTED’
We
asked if he had ever worked with the U.S. Air Force, and again he said “No”
but added: “They were interested but we never worked together. They asked
about the UFO operation but we never worked together. They wanted to know
what we saw, the facts.”
He explained that two or three times military attaches from the American embassy in Brasília would pass through Belém, they would have lunch or drinks together, and the subject would come up.
“It was very discreet,” Hollanda said. “I suppose it was just curiosity, or they dissimulated very good.”
We
asked if at any time did his commander ever consider sending planes after
the UFOs, and he said: “No.”
Nor
did he and his sergeants ever think of shooting at the UFOs. “We never, in
the entire time of the mission, used a single weapon, never even thought of
doing it,” he said.
Hollanda
was convinced that the UFOs “surveyed” much of northern Brazil in 1977-78.
(For a guide to pronouncing unfamiliar Brazilian names, click here.)
Copyright 1999 by
Bob Pratt and Cynthia Luce
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