Uyrangê Bolivar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima

Overview

Uyrangê Bolivar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima was a captain in the Brazilian Air Force (Força Aérea Brasileira, FAB) who, in late 1977, was handed one of the strangest assignments in the history of any air force: investigate why hundreds of residents of a remote stretch of the Amazonian coast were reporting attacks by luminous objects that allegedly burned and pierced their skin. His resulting field investigation, codenamed Operação Prato ("Operation Saucer" or "Operation Plate"), remains one of the only known instances of a national air force running a sustained, on-the-ground UFO investigation with a dedicated team, standing equipment, and hundreds of witness interviews. Twenty years later, a rare interview in which Hollanda finally discussed what he had seen and concluded ended, less than two months later, with his death by hanging — an event that has since become almost as debated within Brazilian ufology as the phenomenon he was sent to investigate.

Background: the Chupa-Chupa panic

In 1977, communities along the coast of Pará state — centered on Colares Island and extending into the municipalities of Vigia and Santo Antônio do Tauá — began reporting nighttime encounters with silent, glowing objects, variously described as saucer- or barrel-shaped, that fishermen and villagers said swept low over rooftops and river water. Locals dubbed the phenomenon Chupa-Chupa ("Sucker-Sucker") or Luz Vampira ("Vampire Light"), after the injuries that reportedly followed: small puncture-like wounds, burns, dizziness, nausea, and in the most dramatic accounts, anemia consistent with blood loss. Rumors of similar attacks had already circulated in neighboring Maranhão state months earlier, and by mid-1977 panic in the fishing villages north of Belém was severe enough that several mayors formally petitioned the Brazilian Air Force for help — an unusual step for a civilian population to take with a military branch rather than local police or health authorities.

The 1st Regional Air Command (I COMAR), headquartered in Belém, authorized a field investigation and placed Captain Hollanda in operational command. It was an unusually thin mandate for what was being asked: a UFO investigation run not by scientists or intelligence specialists but by a single line officer and a small detachment.

Operação Prato (October 1977 – January 1978)

Hollanda's team consisted of himself and six sergeants, equipped with a theodolite for triangulating aerial objects, still cameras, movie cameras, and tape recorders — modest tools for the scale of the task. From late October through early December 1977, the team worked door to door across more than thirty villages, interviewing over 400 residents who claimed direct encounters, and cross-referencing accounts for consistency. According to accounts later given by Hollanda and by researchers who reviewed the operation, the team amassed:

• More than 500 photographs of aerial phenomena, some showing distant lights over water or treetops
• Roughly 16 hours of Super-8 and Super-16 motion-picture film
• A final report running to roughly 2,000 pages, combining witness testimony, medical notes, and observational logs

The stated objective was never to prove or disprove extraterrestrial visitation, but to determine whether a real physical threat to the population existed and, if so, its nature. The operation's formal conclusion — as it eventually filtered into the public record — was that the phenomena were "unidentified," without evidence of hostile or clearly artificial technology, effectively closing the file without resolving the underlying mystery. The report and much of the photographic and film archive were not released to the public; the film footage in particular is widely reported to have never surfaced for independent examination, a gap that later became a central point of skeptical criticism.

Operação Prato's obscurity for nearly two decades — despite its scale — is itself notable. Unlike the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, which ran for decades under continual public and congressional scrutiny, Prato was a comparatively brief, low-visibility operation whose existence only became widely known in Brazilian ufology circles well after the fact, largely because Hollanda himself said almost nothing publicly until 1997.

Skeptical counter-evidence

As later researchers dug into Operação Prato, significant cracks appeared in the case for a genuine anomalous phenomenon. Investigators and forum researchers, notably contributors on the skeptic site Metabunk, compiled several counterpoints:

• Admitted photo manipulation. The son of one of Hollanda's own sergeants, Flávio Costa, later stated that his father deliberately enlarged and altered light-dot artifacts during darkroom processing specifically to make them resemble flying saucers — meaning at least some of the operation's most-circulated photographic "evidence" was knowingly doctored by a member of the investigating team itself.
• Injury explanations. A physician who reviewed reported wound patterns attributed them to self-inflicted scratching during episodes of hysteria, or to mundane "snare" abrasions, rather than any energy weapon or medical extraction.
• Sociogenic contagion. Commentators note that the severity and specificity of reported symptoms escalated once the phenomenon acquired the sensational "Chupa-Chupa" (blood-sucking) label — a pattern consistent with mass psychogenic illness, in which anxiety and suggestion, rather than any external agent, drive symptom clusters through a community.
• Documentation gaps. Original Air Force paperwork from the operation reportedly makes no mention of the injuries that later became central to the legend; the claim that villagers died from these encounters traces to a single account given by a Dr. Wellaide Carvalho in 1993 — sixteen years after the fact — with no contemporaneous corroboration.
• Unreleased primary evidence. The 16 hours of film shot by Hollanda's team have never been made public, meaning the operation's best physical evidence has never been available for outside review, forensic dating, or comparison against known aerial phenomena.

Taken together, these points do not prove the Chupa-Chupa reports were entirely fabricated — hundreds of witnesses across dozens of villages independently describing similar phenomena is not nothing — but they substantially undercut the strongest claims of physical, technological attack, and place Operação Prato closer to a well-documented social and military episode than to confirmed non-human evidence.

The 1997 interview and disclosure

For nearly twenty years after the operation closed, Hollanda — by then retired with the rank of colonel — gave almost no public account of what he had seen or concluded. That changed in June 1997, when Ademar José Gevaerd, editor of Brazil's Revista UFO, and co-editor Marco Antonio Petit spent two days at Hollanda's home on the Rio de Janeiro coast recording an extensive, wide-ranging interview. In it, Hollanda reportedly discussed the scale of the photographic and testimonial evidence his team had gathered, described his own private assessment that the phenomena reflected genuinely unconventional technology rather than mundane causes, and explained why the operation's official language had remained so cautious. The interview, later archived in English translation on the Internet Archive, is regarded by Brazilian ufologists as the single most important primary account of Operação Prato, since so little of the original written report ever circulated.

Colleagues who spoke with Hollanda around the time of the interview described him as energized rather than anxious — pleased, by most accounts, to finally have his story on the record after two decades of institutional silence.

Death, October 1997

On October 2, 1997 — about fifty-four days after the interview's publication — Hollanda was found dead at his residence in Iguaba Grande, a small town on the Rio de Janeiro coast. His daughter, Daniela, discovered him hanged with the belt of his bathrobe. Local police at São Pedro da Aldeia registered the death, and the medical examiner's office in Araruama ruled it an asphyxial suicide; military police who responded to the scene filed corroborating statements. Reporting compiled afterward by Revista UFO noted that Hollanda had reportedly attempted suicide once before, years earlier, unconnected to the UFO material.

The timing — a public disclosure followed within weeks by death — inevitably fed speculation. Writer Alberto Romero alleged that "mysterious people" had visited Hollanda in the days before his death, implying a deliberate silencing. This account has circulated widely in UFO media as evidence of a cover-up. But the two people closest to the case at the time pushed back directly. Marco Antonio Petit, who had co-conducted the original interview and later investigated the death himself, concluded it stemmed from years of depression and unrelated family strain, and dismissed the silencing narrative as baseless — arguing publicly that such theories damage ufology's credibility more than they illuminate the case. Gevaerd, for his part, offered a more melancholy explanation of his own possible role: he suggested that if Hollanda had actually read his own interview once it was published, "perhaps he would not have reached the extreme of taking his own life" — a remark that reads less as an accusation of government murder than as private regret, and arguably the most direct testimony available from someone who knew Hollanda personally in his final months.

No independent investigation beyond the routine police and medical examiner processes was ever opened, and no physical evidence of foul play has been produced. The official record remains suicide; the surrounding folklore of silencing remains just that — folklore, propagated mostly at second and third hand by writers with no direct access to the case file.

Legacy and significance

Hollanda occupies an unusual place in UFO history: a mid-ranking, non-superpower military officer who was formally tasked, equipped, and deployed to investigate a UFO flap using conventional field-investigation methods — door-to-door interviews, systematic photography, instrumented observation — rather than the classified intelligence or radar-tracking apparatus more familiar from U.S. or Soviet cases. That institutional fact, the existence and scale of Operação Prato itself, is not seriously disputed; Brazilian Air Force records and multiple independent journalistic accounts confirm the operation happened roughly as described.

What remains genuinely contested is everything downstream of that fact: whether the Chupa-Chupa injuries reflect an unexplained physical phenomenon, mass psychogenic illness, folklore embellishment, or some mixture of all three; whether the surviving photographic evidence — partly admitted to have been doctored by Hollanda's own team — can be trusted at all; and whether his death was, as the official record states, a personal tragedy unrelated to his UFO work, or something more sinister, as a persistent strand of ufological writing continues to insist despite the lack of corroborating evidence.

Operação Prato has since become a touchstone case in Brazilian ufology, referenced in books, documentaries, and retrospectives as the clearest example of a Latin American government directly engaging — however briefly and inconclusively — with a mass UFO phenomenon. Hollanda himself, largely silent for most of his life and then gone within two months of finally speaking, has become almost as central to the case's mythology as the lights over Colares that he was sent to explain.