Colares 1977 to 1978: From UAP flap to military investigation and filled hospital beds

Between late 1977 and early 1978, a chain of small fishing communities in North of the State of Pará, Brazil, reported waves of low altitude luminous objects that locals nicknamed chupa chupa (the bloodsucker lights). The fear was not only the sky shows. Residents described narrow beams that struck people at close range, leaving tiny puncture marks and first degree burns, followed by weakness and dizziness. The reaction was immediate. Villagers kept night watches, lit bonfires, and fired fireworks to ward the lights away. The mayor of Colares asked the Air Force for help. Belém’s 1º Comando Aéreo Regional (Air Force Regional Command) formed a field team and gave the mission a name that is now a landmark in UAP history, Operação Prato (Operation Saucer).

Forty years later the case remains one of the most document rich UAP episodes in Latin America. It combines official field reports, photography and film that the Brazilian National Archives now preserve, medical testimony from the only physician on Colares during the peak weeks, and an extended on camera interview given in 1997 by the mission’s field commander, by then retired as Colonel Uyrangê Hollanda. The interview was filmed shortly before his death. (YouTube)

This is a synthesis that brings those strands together. It weighs the released files, the press record, the medical reports, and the commander’s words. It also marks clearly where the sources converge and where they diverge.

Setting and trigger events

Colares sits on the mouth of the Amazon, a place of river islands, mangroves, and open water horizons. By mid 1977, reports of luminous objects and beams spread through Pará’s Salgado microregion. Newspapers used the local name chupa chupa and carried descriptions of fear in nearby towns like Vigia and Mosqueiro. Press clipping collections attached to the official mission files show how fast the panic moved from rumor to front page. (ufology.patrickgross.org)

The mayor of Colares and city officials requested military support. Belém’s 1º COMAR organized a response that blended intelligence officers, photographers, and a medical detachment. The internal mission reports speak of “corpos luminosos” seen by both civilians and military observers and record interviews and watch logs collected by the team. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

What Operação Prato actually did

Teams, dates, and methods

According to the archival record and the consolidated summaries, the first mission ran from 20 October to 11 November 1977; a shorter second mission followed from 25 November to 5 December 1977. Additional investigative activity continued into 1978 and was folded into the region’s intelligence reporting. The combined “Registro de Observações de OVNI” compiled by 1º COMAR lists roughly one hundred and thirty entries across 1977 and 1978, and the mission reports include sketches, photographs, and a press reader. (Wikipedia)

Field methods, as described in the reports and later on camera by the commander, included stationary night watches at known vantage points, photography with telephoto lenses, and attempts to time and triangulate the motion of lights against horizon features. The team also visited households to document alleged close encounters and to examine marks on clothing and vegetation. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

What the military logged

The “Registros” summarize multiple observations of yellow or amber lights, sometimes with blue flashes, moving at speeds estimated from several hundred kilometers per hour to supersonic. Some entries note abrupt course changes, brief hovers, and vertical climbs, and classify the observation types using an internal scheme and, in places, with cross references to the Vallée close encounter scale. Several entries are clearly labeled as direct military observations during the official watch windows. (Wikipedia)

The mission narrative also recorded interviews with thirty nine residents in Colares, Tauá, and towns in the municipality of Vigia. These interviews captured recurring details that matter for medical assessment. People described tingling and partial paralysis, headaches, tremors, and a distinct type of superficial burn sometimes paired with micro perforations. One of the named interviewees is the island’s young physician, Dra. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, who described four patients she had treated with first degree burns and tiny punctures. (Wikipedia)

What the official conclusion said

One of the mission texts states that, despite the involvement of a medical team, meteorologists, and aerospace technicians attached to 1º COMAR, nothing conclusive was obtained about the supposed phenomena. That is the formal note inside an otherwise detailed body of logs that does not deny contact events or the luminous bodies themselves, it simply says the cause remained unresolved. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

The medical dimension

The Colares physician’s interviews across the years are crucial because she documented patients as events unfolded. In later, more expansive interviews, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho said she treated dozens of victims with identical superficial burns, immediate skin peeling rather than delayed blistering, and puncture marks clustered on the upper chest or near the carotid area. She repeatedly described associated symptoms of lethargy, dizziness, and anxiety. She also recalled pressure from visiting officials to reassure the community that the events were mass delusion, a request she declined. (ufo.com.br)

The official mission interview with her in 1977 is more conservative but consistent in clinical features. It records four cases she personally attended, describes first degree burns and micro perforations, and notes neuromuscular symptoms such as paresis. This is a unique point of contact between field medicine and an official record. (Wikipedia)

Subsequent academic and ethnographic work in Pará collected community memory of the injuries and of how people adapted. Those records emphasize that the physical wounds and the social wounds were inseparable. Families organized collective night watches, and some residents left their homes for weeks. (encontro2024.sp.anpuh.org)

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What the commander said on camera

In 1997, two decades after the field work, Uyrangê Hollanda gave a long, filmed interview about Operação Prato to Brazilian ufologists. Weeks later he was found dead at home, a case recorded at the time as suicide. The Imprensa Nacional’s magazine notes the date as 2 October 1997. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)

The interview matters because it adds operational color and many specific claims. In the session, the retired officer recalls being asked by his superior in Belém whether he “believed in flying saucers,” then being assigned to lead the new mission that came to be called Operação Prato. He describes his first interviews on the island, including a woman with a brownish burn mark and two small punctures on the left breast, and narrates the first nights of stationary watches with cameras ready. He also describes an optical trick his team used when reviewing negatives under a red gelled flashlight, a method he says helped reveal structure within the luminous glows on film.

He recalls a watch with agents of the Brazilian CIA (Serviço Nacional de Informações) at the Baía do Sol, when a disc appeared almost overhead, pulsing yellow light as if gathering itself, and producing a clicking sound like a bicycle freewheel. He claims the team later filmed and photographed a structured object with something like portholes that shifted color from yellow to blue. He further states that the command viewed the film in Belém and that, in total, the team captured hundreds of photographs and many hours of film.

Hollanda goes further, stepping outside the official reports. He tells of a humanoid figure near a craft, describes a later bedroom encounter in which a being touched his leg and spoke in Portuguese, and, most controversially, advances a hypothesis about the purpose of the beams. In his words, the lights seemed to take blood and tissue in small amounts to study the human immune response and prevent disease transmission before a larger contact attempt. These are personal claims, not reflected in the formal mission conclusions, and must be labeled as witness interpretation.

For the historical record, the specific video the user flagged is a full length posting of the 1997 interview. It is widely mirrored online and is now part of the case literature. (YouTube)

What was released and when

Brazil’s National Archives now hold an organized fund for aeronautical records on unidentified phenomena. The fund includes the declassified Operação Prato mission texts, sketches, and a selection of photographs, along with later material from the intelligence service. The Archives describe a corpus of hundreds of items, including reports, correspondence, questionnaires, photographs, drawings, videos, audio, and press clippings. Several mission documents and image sets can be accessed through the archive’s digital interface. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)

The mission reports preserved through the Archives include pages labeled “Continuação do Relatório de Missão” for Colares, with detailed interview notes, including the interview with the physician. They also include the workmanlike watch logs that list time, location, estimated distances, apparent sizes, colors, and behavior of luminous bodies, and press readers that track local coverage in papers such as O Liberal and A Província do Pará. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

Civilian investigators and international collectors helped mirror material as it emerged. The Black Vault and Brazilian researcher sites maintain useful consolidated sets for study, though the National Archives should be considered the authoritative repository. (The Black Vault Documents)

The press record

Contemporary clippings show how rapidly the narrative and the new vocabulary spread. On 16 October 1977, O Liberal used the term chupa chupa while describing panicked residents and reported beams. The clipping sets that circulate in the digital archive and in collectors’ bundles show similar coverage through October and November across Pará’s papers. These articles are useful for sequence and public mood. They are less useful for technical detail, which is better sought in the mission records and medical notes. (ufology.patrickgross.org)

Television returned to the story years later. Rede Globo’s Linha Direta aired a 2005 episode that interviewed the island physician and noted the role of the Air Force detachment. That program helped introduce a new generation to the case and accelerated later declassification and organizing of the files. (Rede Globo)

AAWSAP investigation

AAWSAP, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, singled out the 1977 to 1978 Colares events as a core historical dataset because they combined mass sightings with repeat reports of close range physiological effects. Through its contractor BAASS, AAWSAP stood up a dedicated “Project Colares/Brazil” workstream documented in the program’s July 2009 Ten Month Report, then folded Brazilian Air Force Operação Prato materials and veteran reporter Bob Pratt’s field files into its CAPELLA data warehouse for pattern analysis. Program leads later described “deployment to Brazil” and a sustained South America outreach effort during late May and early June 2009 to secure primary source material and working relationships, with Colares prioritized as a medically relevant, multi witness case. (New Insights)

AAWSAP’s emphasis at Colares was biomedical and forensic. The DIA released under FOIA a commissioned medical survey on “anomalous acute and subacute field effects on human tissue,” which explicitly cites Colares as an exemplar of clustered injuries following exposure to UAP related energy, aligning with Brazilian military records that logged “micro perforations,” transient paralysis and exhaustion in patients seen by physician Wellaide Cecim during the flap. In AAWSAP reporting, Colares served as a natural laboratory for hazard modeling, allowing investigators to correlate witness timelines, photographs and symptom clusters with candidate physical mechanisms for UAP emissions and to assess implications for human safety. (Defense Intelligence Agency)

Weighing the evidence

Convergences

Multiple data types. The Colares file includes military logs, sketches, and photographs taken under mission orders; interviews with named civilian witnesses, including a physician; and a consistent press chronology. These elements, viewed together, present a coherent time and place frame that is rare in community scale UAP events. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

Medical features that repeat. The physician’s 1977 interview embedded in the mission files records burns and micro perforations in four patients. Her later interviews describe dozens more with matching features. The overlap supports the claim that a cluster of unusual minor injuries occurred during the flap.

Direct military observations. The watch logs include entries where the observers are mission personnel, not only civilian informants. Those entries report unusual maneuvering, abrupt course changes, and speed estimates that are difficult to square with known civil traffic in that airspace at that time.

Divergences and open questions

Casualty claims. Some authors have asserted multiple deaths. The official documents released to date do not list fatalities. The local physician did not document death certificates tied to the beams. Researchers should differentiate between community rumors recorded in newspapers and medical or forensic records. (ia801509.us.archive.org)

Numbers and custody. Hollanda’s recollection speaks of roughly five hundred photographs and many hours of film. The Archives hold selected images and documents; not every roll or reel the public has heard about is visible. Without a full chain of custody for the imagery, quantitative claims about the total volume should be treated as provisional. (YouTube)

Official language. The mission text that says nothing conclusive was obtained is important. It should not be read as denial of the events themselves. It is an admission that the team could not identify cause. That framing mirrors many official programs worldwide that have documented real effects and still closed files without explanation. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

Prosaic possibilities that fail to fit

Atmospheric optics, ball lightning, and meteors cannot account for puncture marks, localized first degree burns, and the pattern of close range sensations described by multiple patients in a short span of time. Nor do they match the watch logs that describe silent low altitude passes and abrupt braking and course changes. No human aircraft known to be operating in that area at the time can replicate the light behavior and apparent instant acceleration recorded in the logs. The burden of proof remains on any prosaic proposal to match both the medical pattern and the military watch data. (Wikipedia)

Cross cultural and historical context

Brazil’s aeronautics community already had a documented interest in unidentified phenomena. The National Archives’ OVNI fund shows systematic capture of reports and imagery across decades, not just in 1977. Within that long record, the Colares flap sits with an unusual density of medical claims, making it a key case for the category of UAP witness injuries. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)

Comparisons are instructive. The later 1986 Brazilian night of the UAPs is a radar visual and interceptor scramble case with strong sensor confirmation but no injuries. Colares is almost the inverse, with close range human effects as the leading edge and sensor capture as a secondary strand. Together they form a complementary dossier for Brazilian UAP history. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)

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A careful read of Hollanda

The 1997 interview is not a simple retelling. It layers field memories, speculative conclusions, and deeply personal experiences. Where it aligns with the files, it enhances our understanding of the mission’s tempo. His recollections of watch sites and the presence of SNI personnel dovetail with later document releases. Where he offers hypotheses about biological sampling or recounts intimate indoor encounters, we must label them clearly as witness interpretation and reserve judgment.

It is also important to state what can now be documented about his death, since later writers have wrapped it in suggestion. The Imprensa Nacional’s periodical notes his death as a suicide on 2 October 1997. That is a sober fact, not evidence of any hidden hand, and it should not be used to inflate the case. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)

What still needs doing

Digitize and index all remaining imagery with provenance. The Archives should be supported in scanning remaining negatives and reels where they exist, and in linking each image to a watch log entry.

Reconstruct the medical cohort. Even a limited anonymized reexamination of surviving patients’ records and scars could help classify injury mechanisms. The 1977 interview captured clinical features that point to directed energy of some kind; a modern dermatologic study could test that inference.

Map the watch geometry. The watch logs include times, locations, and apparent sizes that lend themselves to reconstruction. An open data replot could help separate near horizon illusions from close range events.

Conclusion

Colares is a pivot case. It forced a real military mission with doctors in the field. It left patients that a named physician treated and described in the language of medicine. It left watch logs that are exact in time and location and plain in their surprise at observed maneuvers. It also left an officer who chose to speak late in life, giving context and interpretation that is both valuable and, in places, controversial.

This is not a tale that ends with a label. It is a body of evidence that asks for continued work. The fact that the official language stopped at unidentified is not a weakness, it is an honest admission. The fact that a community still remembers the nights of the lights is not a weakness either, it is part of the record of how people react to contact with the unknown.

Colares deserves its place in any serious historical record of UAP. It is not only a Brazilian story. It is a case study in how state institutions handle reports that are both social and physical, how medicine documents what it sees, and how an investigator balances duty, silence, and testimony.

References

Primary and official repositories

• Brazilian National Archives, news note and fund description for OVNI holdings, including Operação Prato materials. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)
• Brazilian National Archives, Operação Prato mission report pages “Continuação do Relatório de Missão” with interview excerpts and watch logs. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)
• Brazilian National Archives, consolidated reproduction of the mission activity report by 1º COMAR. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)
• I COMAR summary and “Registros de Observações de OVNI” overview cited in consolidated histories. (Wikipedia)

Medical testimony

• Interview and later profile of Dra. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho in Revista UFO. (ufo.com.br)
• Mission interview excerpt naming the physician and describing first degree burns and micro perforations. (Wikipedia)
• Academic work on community memory of the chupa chupa phenomenon. (encontro2024.sp.anpuh.org)

Commander’s testimony

• Full length posting of the 1997 Uyrangê Hollanda interview. (YouTube)
• Transcript in Brazilian Portuguese used for detailed quotations and timing.
• Imprensa Nacional magazine note on the date and nature of his death. (Serviços e Informações do Brasil)

Press record and later media

• Newspaper clippings index and reproductions referencing O Liberal and A Província do Pará coverage in October 1977. (ufology.patrickgross.org)
• Rede Globo Linha Direta program page and episode on Operação Prato. (Rede Globo)
• Investigation Alien with George Knapp on Netflix has interviews with some of the victims. (Netflix)

Collections and mirrors

• The Black Vault compilation of Operação Prato documents. (The Black Vault Documents)
• Brazilian researcher site cataloging official and leaked documents. (operacaoprato.com)

AAWSAP citations

• Lacatski, J. T., Kelleher, C. A., Knapp, G., Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: New Insights, chapters outlining “Project Colares/Brazil,” the Ten Month Report and “deployment to Brazil.” (PDF Host)
• BAASS, Ten Month Report, 30 July 2009, table of contents listing “Project Colares/Brazil” and related sections. (Scribd)
• Basterfield, K., “BAASS’ Project Colares/Brazil investigations,” summary of the Ten Month Report’s Colares section, 2009 Brazil travel, and stated aim to examine links between advanced aerospace technology and physiological effects. (ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com)
• DIA FOIA, “Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Tissue,” March 2010, with explicit Colares citation. (Defense Intelligence Agency)
• Arquivo Nacional do Brasil, Operação Prato mission records noting interviews and physical effects observed in patients treated in Colares, 1977 to 1978. (imagem.sian.an.gov.br)

Claims Taxonomy

Speculation Labels

Hypothesis.
The pattern of superficial thermal injury plus micro puncture suggests a narrow beam with both photothermal and mechanical components, possibly a coherent microwave or millimeter energy source coupled with a localized biopsy action. That model would fit the immediate peeling described and the tiny paired wounds, but it remains a conjecture that requires laboratory reproduction and dermatologic study.
AAWSAP used Colares as a template to model human hazard zones and technical signatures from close range UAP encounters.

Witness interpretation.
Hollanda’s suggestion that the beams were part of a biological sampling regime to map human immune response is an attempt to infer motive from pattern. It is an internally consistent reading of the injuries and the repeated focus on upper chest and neck, but it is not demonstrated by the documents.
Beams were perceived as targeted and incapacitating during the “Chupa Chupa” period recorded by Brazilian authorities.

Researcher opinion.
From an evidentiary standpoint, Colares is a signal rich cluster. The density of similar minor injuries in a small geography over a few months, coupled with official watch logs that speak of low altitude structured lights, pushes the case out of the usual misidentification bin. The lack of a fully digitized photo and film archive keeps it from crossing the final threshold into instrument dominated validation. That is a solvable archival problem.
Injury patterns in Colares are consistent with exposure to directed energy or radiative fields, but definitive source characterization is pending.

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