The Colares UFO wave (Operação Prato)

In 1977 residents of Colares, in the Brazilian state of Pará, reported lights in the sky said to suck people's blood. The Brazilian Air Force sent a team to investigate in what became known as Operação Prato.

In 1977 people in the Colares area, in the interior of Pará, said they were seeing strange lights in the sky that could suck blood from people, g1 reported in 2024. The accounts added to rumours that had been coming out of Maranhão for months. The Brazilian Air Force took notice and began Operação Prato to look into the statements of people who said they were victims of the objects.

Superinteressante describes a 160-page report from the Air Force's First Regional Air Command, titled Registros de Observações de OVNI. A group of officers led by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda wrote it after being sent to investigate what the people of Colares, on Marajó bay, were reporting. Folha de S.Paulo (2009) quotes a detailed account in the files of a luminous object moving at high speed over the front part of Colares, seen at least twice, on 16 and 22 October 1977. The report called its shape cylindrical, almost conical, and a rough drawing was attached. Folha's headline says the SNI investigated UFOs during the dictatorship.

According to English Wikipedia, several photographs of lights were taken in late 1977, but the military stayed sceptical, and the operation ended after roughly four months without turning up anything unusual. Portuguese Wikipedia traces how the papers became public. On 5 May 2008 the presidency's Casa Civil asked the Ministry of Defence to open UFO records that could be declassified, following a request from the CBU, and to send them to the Arquivo Nacional. On 23 April 2009 the Air Force's documentation centre, CENDOC, sent the first documents there.

g1 calls it one of Brazil's biggest UFO cases. In 2024 Globo released a podcast on Operação Prato that g1 says includes accounts never published before.