Operação Prato (Colares, 1977)

Background

Colares is a small municipality on an island in the Amazon estuary near Belém, in the state of Pará. In 1977 residents began reporting lights in the sky that, they said, struck people and left marks on their bodies. The local press called the phenomenon Chupa-Chupa (roughly 'sucker'), and villagers responded with night vigils, bonfires and fireworks, believing these would keep the lights away. Mayor José Ildone Favacho Soeiro asked the Brazilian Air Force for help, and the military opened an investigation under the name Operação Prato, or 'Operation Saucer' in English-language accounts.

The investigation

The operation ran in two phases, from 20 October to 11 November 1977 and from 25 November to 5 December 1977, according to the Wikipedia article. Its infobox names Brigadier Protásio Lopes de Oliveira as strategic chief, Colonel Camillo Ferraz as tactical chief and Captain Uyrangê Hollanda Lima as operational chief, and says the Air Force worked with the National Information Service (SNI). Regional Air Command (COMAR) in Belém coordinated the work, and the field teams conducted interviews, took photographs and filmed night observations. Popular accounts put the total at more than 500 photographs, about 16 hours of film and some 2,000 pages of reports, figures repeated in a 2026 O Antagonista feature that gives no document citation.

The official outcome is contested. Wikipedia reports that the military remained skeptical of the photographs and that the operation closed with no unusual phenomena found. The O Antagonista article instead presents the Air Force documentation as acknowledging that the phenomena could not be explained by known technology or natural causes, but it does not quote the documents and offers no skeptical explanation. The two accounts cannot both be right, and neither is based on a full reading of the report.

One well-documented sighting illustrates the reports. On 12 October 1977 at Campo Serrado, a farm worker named Manoel Matos de Souza, known as 'Coronha', said that around 2 a.m. he saw a bluish light about 20 metres up and was struck by a reddish beam that left him paralysed. The military testimony describes an electric shock running up from his feet and a 'tremor of the flesh'. Patrick Gross's archive reproduces this testimony and notes that the page itself reaches no official conclusion.

Injuries, photographs and the archive

The injury claims are the case's most dramatic element and its weakest-documented one. Jacques Vallée, in Confrontations (1990), reportedly said several people were killed by the lights and that the injuries resembled microwave effects. The Wikipedia article attributes this to Vallée and gives no independent evidence. A 1993 remark by physician Dr. Carvalho, who said she had treated around forty burn victims, two of whom died, is cited on the Metabunk forum thread, where posters call the death claim unsupported. Forum readers who reviewed the archival report say it lists about 130 sightings and mentions no injuries, though this is a secondhand reading.

Skeptical explanations focus on the wounds and the photographs. Dr. Zoghbi reportedly described the injuries as self-inflicted scratching during a hysterical episode, while forensic doctor Wilton Reis described 'saca-bocado' wounds; others called them snare injuries, consistent with skin caught on a fingernail or branch. Fireworks used by residents to ward off the lights are a plausible source of some burns, and the injury reports appear to have grown after the 'Chupa-Chupa' name spread. On the photographs, Fernando Costa, son of a sergeant involved in the operation, said in an interview that he had enlarged light spots on film as pranks.

Official records also have problems. Metabunk posters report that papers from 1989 and 1991 declared the stamps on some sighting pages to be fake, and that several cited sightings cannot be matched to the official listing.

Declassification and current status

Part of the report was released in 1997, when Captain Hollanda gave an interview to ufologists Ademar Gevaerd and Marco Antônio Petit about his time with the team. Three months later he was found dead at home; Wikipedia reports an apparent suicide and notes that the article does not connect his death to the operation, although conspiracy claims circulate. In May 2005 ufologists were allowed to examine Air Force UFO files, and Operação Prato material was among the most significant. The official papers are held by the Arquivo Nacional in Brasília, and the SNI's UFO work during the dictatorship was reported in 2009.

Colares is best understood as a documented military investigation whose photographs and injury accounts are unverified, and whose official conclusion is reported differently by different sources. The residents' fear and the fireworks, the late growth of the injury stories, and the admitted fakes in the archive all support caution. The case nonetheless remains one of the most-cited UFO investigations in Brazilian history, and a useful example of how a government inquiry can become a source of mystery when its outcome is disputed and its records are only partly public.