Case · C-052

The “Official UFO Night” in Brazil: radar and FAB fighters

São José dos Campos and the skies over São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Goiás · Brazil · May 19, 1986 – May 20, 1986

In flight Mixed witness types Radar

What happened

On the evening of May 19, 1986, the São José dos Campos tower controller saw moving lights over the city while the São Paulo approach radar recorded contacts; the crew of the twin-engine PT-MBZ, with Colonel Ozires Silva on board, unsuccessfully tried to approach them. The Air Defense Command scrambled five interceptors between 22:34 and 23:36, F-5Es from Santa Cruz and Mirage IIIs from Anápolis: some pilots had visual or onboard-radar contacts, at one point the ground radar recorded thirteen tracks behind one of the fighters, which turned without seeing them or detecting them on board, and on May 23 Minister Octávio Moreira Lima declared that he had no technical explanations for the 21 objects reported. The report of June 2, 1986, declassified in 2009, describes targets capable of passing from subsonic to supersonic speeds and of hovering, and concludes that the phenomena were solid and showed a form of intelligence, without indicating their origin.

Proposed explanation

No official explanation. At the time astronomers and commentators proposed meteors, the reentry of space debris (Geoffrey Perry pointed to the Soviet station Salyut 7), ball lightning or radar anomalies; Brigadier José Cavalcanti, of the air defense command, told the magazine Veja that space debris could explain only part of the facts, because the speeds of the targets recorded by radar ranged from very low to very high.

Official investigation

Ministério da Aeronáutica – Air Defense Command (COMDA); documents at the Arquivo Nacional

Words of the document

os fenômenos são sólidos e refletem de certa forma inteligência

Official documents

1. Relatório de Ocorrência – noite de 19 de maio de 1986 · Ministério da Aeronáutica – Comando de Defesa Aérea (COMDA) · Jun 2, 1986

Sources

1. Government of Brazil (gov.br), May 20, 2022: “Official UFO Night in Brazil” (primary source)
2. Correio Braziliense, January 2022: the night when 21 UFOs were chased by FAB fighters (press)
3. Patrick Gross, “UFOs at close sight”: Brazil 1986, chronology and proposed explanations (analysis, pro-disclosure)
4. Wikipedia (English): 1986 Brazilian UFO incident (other)

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