Twilight glowing over still water at the edge of the Amazon rainforest

UFOs & UAPs

The Colares UFO Flap: Brazil's Air Force and the Vampire Lights

In 1977 glowing objects fired beams at villagers on a Brazilian island, and the Air Force launched Operation Saucer. The files still don't explain it.

15 min readPublished 2026-09-05

On the island of Colares, at the point where the Amazon spills into the Atlantic, the trouble came from the sky and it came for people. Through the second half of 1977, fishermen paddling home in the dark, families asleep in stilt houses over the tidal flats, and old women sitting on their porches all told the same story to anyone who would listen. A light would appear over the water, hang there, and then send down a beam that found a human body and held it. Where the beam touched, it left small burns, or two neat puncture marks, and it left the person dizzy, weak, and drained of something they could not name. The townspeople had a word for it before the outsiders arrived with theirs. They called it the chupa-chupa, the thing that sucks.

What makes Colares different from almost every other case in the UFO record is what happened next. This was not a story that lived only in rumor and a few blurry photographs. The Brazilian Air Force sent a team. Officers moved into the region, interviewed the wounded, sat out on the beaches at night with cameras, and photographed the lights themselves. They filed reports, sketched what they saw, and locked the whole thing in a cabinet for the better part of thirty years. When the files finally came out, they did not close the case. They deepened it.

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A Town at the Mouth of the Amazon

Colares sits on a small island in the bay of Marajó, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará, a short boat ride from the port city of Belém. In 1977 it was a fishing town of a few thousand people, built where the great brown river finally loses itself in salt water. Life ran on the tide. Men went out at night in wooden canoes, families lived in houses raised on posts above the mud, and the electricity, where it existed at all, went dark early. It was the kind of place where the night sky still meant something, because there was nothing else competing with it.

That geography matters, because it shaped who the witnesses were. These were not thrill seekers or hoaxers chasing a headline. They were river people who knew the difference between the moon on the water, a boat lantern, a plane bound for Belém, and a storm coming in off the Atlantic. They had spent their whole lives reading that sky for weather and for navigation. And in the last months of 1977, according to their own consistent testimony, the sky started reading them back.

The Lights That Fed on People

The objects came in several forms. Witnesses described glowing spheres, cylinders that hung in the air like refrigerators standing on end, and hat-shaped craft ringed with light. Some moved with a slow deliberateness; others darted and stopped in ways no aircraft they knew could manage. What united the reports was the beam. Again and again, people said a shaft of light would come down from the object, sweep across the ground or the water, and settle on a person as if it were looking for one.

The effects that followed were physical and specific. Witnesses reported a burning heat where the light touched, a feeling of weakness spreading through the body, numbness, dizziness, and in the most talked-about cases, small marks left on the skin: reddened burns, or a pair of tiny holes close together, sometimes with a bruise around them. People described feeling as though the blood or the strength were being pulled out of them, which is exactly how the local name for the phenomenon translated. The chupa-chupa did not just appear. It reached down and took.

Fear moved through the town the way it moves through any community that feels hunted. Men organized night watches on the beach, banging drums, setting off fireworks, firing shotguns into the air toward the lights. Families crowded together after dark rather than sleep alone in exposed houses. Some people left the island entirely. What is striking in the accounts is not panic for its own sake but a grim, practical response: a whole community rearranging its nights around the belief that something in the sky was coming for the people below.

The Doctor Who Kept the Records

The person who turned frightened testimony into something closer to a medical record was Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira, who ran the small health post in Colares. She was a physician in her twenties, posted to a remote town, and she found herself examining a steady stream of patients with wounds she could not comfortably file under anything ordinary.

By her own later accounts she treated dozens of people, a figure often cited at around thirty five, who came in with the same pattern: two small puncture-like marks on the skin, localized burns that looked as if the tissue had been affected by radiation or intense heat rather than flame, headaches, low blood pressure, trembling, and a lingering weakness. She noted that the burns did not behave like the sunburns or cooking-fire injuries she saw every week. She examined the marks, dressed the wounds, and, crucially, she believed her patients. Dr. Wellaide went on record saying she had no conventional diagnosis that accounted for the whole cluster, and she never publicly walked that back.

Her role is one of the load-bearing beams of the entire case. A UFO story built on lights alone can be set aside as misperception. A UFO story in which a trained doctor logs a repeating pattern of injuries in real time, on patients she treated personally, is a harder thing to file away. Whatever the beams were, the marks they left were examined by someone whose job was to look at bodies and tell the truth about them.

Operation Saucer

As reports piled up and the local press in Belém ran the story, the Brazilian Air Force did something that almost no air force has done before or since with a UFO flap: it opened a formal field investigation on the ground. The effort was run out of the First Regional Air Command in Belém and given the name Operação Prato, which translates as Operation Saucer or Operation Dish. Placed in charge was a young officer, Captain Uyrangê Hollanda.

Hollanda and his team set up in the affected area in the closing months of 1977. Their brief was not to reassure the public or to explain the lights away, but to gather evidence. They interviewed witnesses across the region, collected accounts of the beams and the injuries, took statements, and, most remarkably, went out night after night to try to see the objects for themselves. They brought cameras and film. They kept logs. For weeks, uniformed members of the Brazilian military sat on the same dark beaches as the fishermen, waiting for the same lights, and when the lights came, they aimed their lenses at them.

That is the detail worth sitting with. The official machinery of a national government did not treat Colares as a punchline. It treated the phenomenon as a real thing that could be observed and recorded, and it committed men and equipment to the task for months. The reports that came out of Operation Saucer run to hundreds of pages, filled with witness drawings, technical notes, and the airmen's own observations of things they could not identify.

What the Airmen Photographed

The physical output of Operation Saucer is what keeps researchers coming back. The team produced a body of material that reportedly includes hundreds of photographs, a stretch of cine film, and dozens of hand drawings, both from witnesses and from the officers themselves. The images show luminous shapes over the water and in the night sky: glowing ovals, points of light with structure around them, forms that the report's authors classified into categories by shape and behavior rather than dismissing as a single stray light.

For decades this archive sat sealed. It began to surface in the 2000s, after a long push by Brazilian researchers campaigning for the release of the country's military UFO files, an effort that eventually pried loose hundreds of pages of the Prato documentation. When the material came out, it did not arrive stamped with an official verdict of swamp gas or hysteria. It arrived as what it was: the field notes of a military unit that had gone looking for the chupa-chupa and had come back with photographs, drawings, and a great many pages of testimony, and no tidy explanation attached.

That absence of a conclusion is itself telling. An investigation designed to calm the public could have ended with a reassuring official cause. This one ended with an archive that the Air Force apparently preferred to keep quiet, and that the officers involved described, years later, in terms far stranger than any press release ever used.

A Wave Across the Amazon

Colares was the most concentrated outbreak, but it was not alone. The chupa-chupa reports of the late 1970s were part of a broader pattern that ran across the Amazon basin and the northeast of Brazil, in Pará, Maranhão, and neighboring areas, where communities in different towns described beams of light from aerial objects and, in a number of cases, injuries and even deaths attributed to them. American journalist Bob Pratt, who spent years traveling rural Brazil chasing these accounts, documented case after case in which villagers reported being struck by light and falling ill, sometimes fatally, always in places far from any UFO subculture that could have coached them.

This is where Colares stops looking like an isolated fright and starts looking like the visible peak of something wider. The same core details, a light that descends, a beam that seeks a person, burns and puncture marks and draining weakness, recur in the testimony of people who had never met, spread across a region the size of a country, in an era before any of them could have read one another's stories online. The consistency across witnesses who had no way to compare notes is the hardest part of the whole affair to wave away.

The Explanations and Their Holes

Every conventional reading of Colares explains part of the case and then stalls on the rest.

The most common is mass hysteria: a frightened, isolated population, primed by rumor and by lurid newspaper coverage, seeing threats in ordinary lights and talking one another into shared symptoms. There is no doubt that fear spread through Colares, and fear can shape what people report. But hysteria does not press two small holes into a person's skin, and it does not produce the localized burns that a physician examined and dressed and described as unlike anything in her ordinary caseload. Panic can explain a crowd's mood. It cannot explain a wound.

Then there is ball lightning and related atmospheric plasma, invoked to account for glowing spheres that move, hover, and vanish. The Amazon basin is electrically active, and luminous atmospheric phenomena are real. Yet ball lightning is famously brief, lasting seconds, and it does not conduct a weeks-long campaign against a specific town, returning night after night, aiming beams at chosen individuals. Stretching a rare, short-lived spark to cover months of directed encounters asks more of the theory than the theory can carry.

Others have reached for aircraft, helicopters, or the lights of smugglers and prospectors working the rivers by night, mistaken by unsophisticated locals. This runs straight into who the witnesses were. River people know boat lights and aircraft. It also runs into the officers of Operation Saucer, trained observers with cameras, who sat in the same darkness and reported the same objects rather than identifying passing planes.

And there is the flat suggestion that the whole thing was invented or exaggerated for attention. It founders on the sheer scale and cost of the response. Governments do not deploy a months-long military field investigation, complete with cameras and classified reporting, to chase a rumor they believe is nothing. Something convinced the Brazilian Air Force that Colares was worth watching in person.

The Outsiders Who Came to Look

Colares drew serious investigators from outside Brazil, and their conclusions were notably cautious rather than dismissive. The French-American scientist Jacques Vallée, one of the most rigorous figures in the study of unidentified phenomena, examined the Brazilian cases and wrote about them in his book Confrontations, treating the reported injuries as a genuine and troubling data set rather than as folklore. Vallée, a computer scientist by training and a man temperamentally allergic to easy belief, did not come away with a neat answer. He came away convinced the medical dimension deserved to be taken seriously.

Bob Pratt, the American reporter, spent years on the ground assembling first-hand accounts, and the picture he built was of a phenomenon that was regional, consistent, and physically harmful, documented in the words of people who had nothing to gain from telling it. Brazilian researchers, meanwhile, kept the pressure on for the release of the official files, and their persistence is the reason the Prato archive is public at all. What none of these investigators produced, across decades of effort, was the sentence that would let the rest of us stop thinking about it. No one has written the paragraph that makes Colares ordinary.

The Captain's Last Word

The strangest coda belongs to the officer who led the investigation. Captain Hollanda kept largely silent about Operation Saucer for twenty years. Then, in 1997, near the end of his life, he agreed to speak with Brazilian UFO researchers and described what the mission had been like from the inside. By the accounts of that interview, he spoke of witnessing the objects at close range, of the effect the experience had on him, and of an investigation that shook the men who carried it out far more than the official record ever admitted. He came across not as a showman but as a man finally unburdening himself of something he had carried a long time.

Within months of giving that account, Hollanda was found dead in his home. The death was recorded as a suicide. For those who follow the case, the timing sits uneasily: the one senior officer who broke his silence about Operation Saucer, gone so soon after he spoke. There is no proof of anything sinister in it, and it would be irresponsible to claim otherwise. But it is one more thing about Colares that refuses to resolve into something simple, one more door that closes just as you reach for the handle.

Why Colares Still Matters

Most UFO cases ask you to weigh a witness against your doubt and leave it there. Colares hands you more, and asks you to make all of it agree. It gives you a whole town describing the same beams, a physician logging the same wounds on patient after patient, a national air force so convinced that it ran a months-long field investigation, hundreds of pages of once-secret reports, photographs and drawings of luminous objects, and an investigating officer who broke thirty years of silence and then was gone. None of these pieces cancels the others. They stack.

The conventional explanations each pick up a corner of the case and set the rest down. Hysteria touches the fear and drops the wounds. Ball lightning touches the spheres and drops the weeks of targeting. Misidentification touches the untrained villager and drops the trained officer with a camera. What survives every one of them is the same stubborn core that survived the Air Force's own investigation: over the island of Colares, in the last months of 1977, something came out of the sky, reached down, and marked the people below, and to this day no explanation satisfies everyone who has looked hard at the files. The lights went away. The question they left behind never did.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the chupa-chupa?

Chupa-chupa is the name the people of Colares and other Amazon communities gave to the phenomenon, roughly meaning the thing that sucks. It referred to luminous objects that appeared over the water and villages and sent down beams of light that seemed to seek out individual people, leaving burns, puncture-like marks, and a draining weakness. The name came from witnesses' sense that the light was pulling something out of them, and it was in use locally before any outside researchers arrived to study the case.

Did the Brazilian government really investigate?

Yes, and that is what sets Colares apart. The Brazilian Air Force, through its regional command in Belém, ran a formal field operation called Operação Prato, or Operation Saucer, in the final months of 1977, led by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda. The team interviewed witnesses, gathered testimony, and photographed the objects themselves over weeks of nighttime watches. Much of the resulting archive, hundreds of pages plus photographs and drawings, was eventually declassified and released to researchers.

Were people actually injured?

According to the physician who ran the local health post, Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira, yes. She reported treating dozens of patients with a consistent pattern of small burns, paired puncture marks, low blood pressure, and weakness that she said did not match ordinary injuries she saw in the area. Her clinical observations, made in real time on patients she examined herself, are among the most difficult parts of the case to dismiss.

What explanations have been offered?

Researchers and officials have proposed mass hysteria, ball lightning and atmospheric plasma, and misidentified aircraft or the lights of night boats. Each accounts for some slice of the reports and struggles with the rest. None has managed to explain, all at once, the physical wounds a doctor documented, the months of directed encounters, and the fact that trained military observers watched and photographed the same objects the villagers described.

What happened to Captain Hollanda?

Hollanda stayed quiet about Operation Saucer for about twenty years, then gave an interview in 1997 in which he spoke openly about witnessing the objects and about how deeply the mission had affected him and his men. He was found dead at home not long afterward, in a death recorded as a suicide. There is no evidence of foul play, but the closeness of his death to the moment he finally spoke has kept the coda to Colares as unsettled as everything that came before it.