Colares: When UFOs Attacked in Brazil

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In Lue Elizondo’s book, he dedicates a chapter to a bizarre historical case that informed his UFO threat narrative: In 1977, in Colares, Brazil, UFOs attacked and terrorized thousands of people. The attacks were investigated, witnessed, and documented by the Brazilian Air Force. The resulting report, including photos of videos of UFOs, was covered up, until it leaked in the 90s, culminating with the death of a whistleblower.

Lue Elizondo

• In Elizondo’s book, he describes attending a dinner shortly after joining AAWSAP with a Brazilian general, who was setting up an arrangement to share Brazilian UAP data with the program. During dinner, the general shared details about a series of UFO encounters studied by the Brazilian Air Force:
• Elizondo: “I learned that in the mid-1970s, for several years running, people living along the coast of northeastern Brazil noticed strange lights and aircraft that buzzed their small towns and villages at night. The objects ranged in size from baseball-sized orbs to huge aircraft that looked as if they could transport the occupants of an entire city. Flying discs, spheres, triangles, cylinders—the variety of the objects ran the gamut… For centuries, humans all over the planet have reported such things. But in Brazil, these flying phenomena seemed to be targeting human beings.”
• “People reported being chased by a yellow orb. After several yards of pursuit, the light turned blue before delivering a nasty laserlike blast that burned victims or left them unconscious. Other people claimed that hovering aircraft attempted to lift them off the ground—with nets and hooks—and drag them up into the ships. Were these hooks and nets a metaphor for some advanced technology like a tractor beam, or were primitive tools like hooks and nets actually being used? It all seemed so strange to me.”
• “As attacks increased, people quashed their natural curiosity and switched to outright terror. If a ship or orb or light appeared, they ran for their life… It didn’t matter where you sought shelter. The lights pursued people to their homes and farms. Beams shot through tiled roofs as if the roofs were made of gauze, and roved intelligently through interior rooms as if searching for something… People lived in fear. They knew from experience or hearsay that if the ‘laser’ touched their skin, they’d be burned. Reports described blood being sucked from their bodies. Everyone called the lights chupa-chupa, which means suck-suck in Portuguese… I found myself moved by the photos of victims displaying their wounds and looks of resigned horror on their faces.”
• “In 1977, the intelligence branch of the Brazilian Air Force descended on the region with twenty investigators and physicians led by Lieutenant Colonel Hollanda. Initially, they planned to interview victims, catalog eyewitness accounts, and treat the wounded. The longer Hollanda’s team remained in the area, the more they witnessed these horrors for themselves. They captured footage and hundreds of photographs of mysterious objects and aircraft, one approximately three hundred feet long.”
• “Brazilian officials shut down Hollanda’s investigation and circulated a story that no unusual phenomena were found. They locked down the files until the 1990s. The long-retired Hollanda died of apparent suicide shortly after their release. The general casually admitted that the Brazilian government had covered up what happened in Colares. His comment surprised no one at our dinner. Of course Brazil buried the truth. That’s what every government has done, and always will do.”

Lights

• Rósio Oliveira, local fisherman: “It began with lights all over Colares… sometimes in the shape of a hat, round, discs, like an umbrella… They seemed to come from way high up, from many places, one from the sky, one from the bay… They put out a strong light, too bright to see a shape. The light was blinding. One time we saw three or four objects come together into one big one. They seemed to come from different directions and then joined together. Many times we could see them going across the island toward Belém. They didn’t make any noise. Very silent. One time we saw many UFOs coming out of the water at the same time, one, two, three, four… Many lights came out of the water. Huge objects went into the water, came down and went into the water.”
• Col. Hollanda: “That thing was happening a lot in the Colares Region… The [mayors in the region] sent a [letter to the military] because these things were bothering the fishermen a lot. It is a fishing island there and… they couldn't fish anymore because it flew around the boats. Sometimes some even dived near the side of the boat.”
• Cinaldo Oliveira, reporter: “About 90 percent of the people we talked to had seen UFOs. And a lot of fishermen got burned…They were not serious burns, but the men were so afraid they did not want to go out to work!”
• Bob Pratt, UFO researcher: “These events were part of the ‘Colares flap,’ which was… part of a much larger UFO wave that took place over a vast stretch of northern Brazil for more than twenty months in 1977 and 1978… [It began] in April 1977, several hundred miles to the east in the neighboring state of Maranhão. It then swept west over the Colares-Belém area and continued far to the west toward Manaus in the Amazon region for months after.”
• Col. Hollanda: “[The UFOs] were moving from Maranhão to Colares, Belém, Monte Alegre, Santarém and Manaus. They were covering the Brazilian air space and the Amazon region in strips, like we do in aerial photography.”
• Bob Pratt: “The Air Force investigation was centered on hundreds of sightings around Colares and more than two dozen other villages less than sixty miles from the major seaport city of Belém on Marajó Bay. Belém is the capital of the state of Pará and the home of about two million people.”

Attacks

• Col. Hollanda: “there were a number of Reports from people who were hit by a Light, and who believed that their blood had been sucked. So, we went to check, and they were mainly women—For every 10 people, 8 were women—who had a mark on the left breast that looked like two needle holes. They also had a brown stain around it that looked like an iodine burn. People said that some of their blood had been sucked. A small portion of the blood had been drawn. They started calling it ‘Chupa-Chupa’ because of that fact. A light came and fell on the person, usually on the left breast of women. In men it was on the arm or on the leg.”
• According to Brazilian UFO researcher Thiago Ticchetti, the victims were anemic, showing low blood and iron levels.
• Col. Hollanda: ​​“First came a green light that would hit the person and paralyze them. Then the green light would turn off and a red ray of light would hit, burning them. A lot of people were burned.”
• Sgt. Flávio Costa, second in command of the Air Force team: “People struck by a beam of light suffer what we can call a ‘nervous breakdown’ (for lack of a better explanation) whose symptoms are nearly always the same: partial or total paralysis, loss of speech, chills, dizziness, hot flashes, hoarseness, tachycardia, tremors, migraine-type headaches, and progressive numbness of the area hit by the beam of light.”
• Bob Pratt: “Wellaide Carvalho, the doctor in Colares at the time, told… [Bob Pratt] in 1993 that she had treated about forty people who had been burned and that two of them died. She said members of the Air Force team knew people had been burned… [She] said the burns did not form blisters or resemble burns caused by fire or hot water but were similar to burns caused by Cobalt. Also, there was no pain in the affected areas, only itching, and after two days the skin began to peel. She said that when treating victims she often found two small punctures, very close together, more or less in the center of most of the burns.”
• Col. Hollanda: “The first lady I interviewed in Colares… had been burned by the so-called ‘Chupa-Chupa’. I saw the mark. She showed me her left breast. There was a brown stain, as if it were a burn and two perforation dots. Sometimes it's just one. When we were talking to her, she described that she was sitting on a hammock putting a child to sleep and the environment suddenly started to change temperature… She saw that the roof started to turn reddish, as if you had gotten a cigar close to a sheet of paper. It was getting reddish and then she could see the sky. The roof had disappeared. It was like glass. She could see the sky so she could see what was on the other side. She was able to see the stars… From that hole first came a green light and she went a little numb. Then a red beam, a red beam of light that came down and hit her on the breast.”
• Col. Hollanda: “They were very terrified. Some said they were sick and numb for some days. A citizen [told me] a light had appeared near his house and it focused in his direction… He ran into his house… He got a rifle and aimed it at the light, the light turned red and he fell to the ground. He was barely able to move for fifteen days. The first day he was dizzy. He could hear, see and speak normally but could barely move. He was in a hammock all that time… But there was nothing serious. He was not hit by anything. A projectile or anything of that nature. Just a light that cut off his energy and left him without the ability to move.”

Terror

• Rósio Oliveira, the fisherman: “The Air Force people told us the UFOs were not dangerous, don’t be afraid. Everybody was upset and they were trying to calm the people down. They were saying it was just a little flying apparatus and a little laser light and people were being paralyzed but they were not taking blood…”
• Sgt. Costa: “[The people of Colares live] in a state of ‘collective hysteria,’ its inhabitants terrified by the appearance of mysterious lights of unknown origin. They don’t sleep, nor fish… The population lives in a state of terror. At times a scream of fear and then the news is spread that the ‘apparatus’ attacked so and so…”
• Bob Pratt: “I’ll never forget it,” said Ana Célia Oliveira, a schoolteacher who was six years old at the time. “People and animals were attacked. There was no food. Terrible lack of food. No one was fishing. People would not go out to their vegetable gardens for crops. Everybody tried to go around in large groups. Nobody wanted to be left alone. All of Colares stopped.”
  • “At six o'clock it got dark and we would go to sleep. Groups of as many as fifty to sixty women and children would get together in one house… The men would stay awake all night. They lit bonfires and banged on pots and pans to make noise to scare the UFOs away. People began to shoot into the sky to scare them away… One time I heard men shouting and I ran to the door and opened it and saw many UFOs in formation, and suddenly they went in all directions. The objects moved very quickly.”
• Sgt. Álvaro Pinto Santos: “People were really afraid. Really scared. They didn’t know what to do. They were so terrified they didn’t fish. They wanted guns to shoot… We had to explain to them that they couldn’t shoot at the UFOs or things could get worse.”
• Col. Hollanda: “The people shot at the discs very often but we told them, ‘Don't DO that!’”

Operation Prato

• Brigadier Oliveira, the Air Force base commander in Belen: “If it’s something in the air, it’s for us to help. The people in Colares were really upset and they believed something very strange was happening, and I wanted proof. So I sent a team there. I wanted real proof of what was going on there.”
  • It was called “Operação Prato” which translates to “Operation Plate”
• Bob Pratt: “It was a small team from the Intelligence Service consisting only of Captain Hollanda and six sergeants, who were armed only with a theodolite, cameras and tape recorders… The intelligence agents spent [four months, from October 1977 to January 1978,] in Colares and other villages interviewing people who had encounters or sightings.”
• Bob Pratt: “[Hollanda] and his team carried out their investigation dressed in civilian clothing and took no weapons with them. They lived in a borrowed beach house at Colares, slept in hammocks they took with them, cooked their own food, washed their own clothes in a stream and dried them on bushes, and drove their own cars.”
• Bob Pratt: “The UFOs were never tracked on radar because no radar existed in the Belém area at that time. Nor were any fighter planes sent up to try to intercept them because the nearest jet base was at Brasília, a thousand miles to the south… They learned about sightings in other localities only by word of mouth from the inhabitants and the police.”
• Bob Pratt: “For the most part, they slept during the daytime and stayed up all night watching the skies, taking photographs when UFOs were seen and recording the information. They interviewed hundreds of witnesses, taking testimony on tape recorders and later typing up reports.”
• Col. Hollanda: “I'm going to tell you that, honestly, I came in as the Devil's Advocate. I went in to demystify it all and to say that this thing did not exist. Let's say it was like a collective hallucination. That something was really being seen, but it was nothing Extra-Terrestrial. I don’t know. Birds. The plumage of an owl reflecting the moonlight. Something of that nature.”
• Bob Pratt: “During the investigation, the agents had more than two hundred sightings of their own… Hollanda said his team took more than five hundred photos and more than three hours of motion picture films of UFOs… [He said] that he believed more than a thousand photos existed.”
• Sgt. Santos: “One night in Colares we saw something like a great big tub about one and a half meters in diameter about eighty meters from us. Sgt Nascimento took photos. The light was so intense it hurt the eyes.”
• Sgt. Santos: “We saw a strange light… It came down very low. It was pulsing red on the bottom, almost violet, and on top white. We thought it was going to land but it swooped back up. It was kind of heart-shaped with a little dome on top. There was no sound. It just took off with a speed that was absolutely incredible. It just zoomed off into space. I thought it was very beautiful.”
• Sgt. Santos: “[We saw a reddish-yellow object, like an] intense rotating beacon… (He then describes the flight path across the sky) This sequence took 45 seconds. Considering the short time for these maneuvers… it would have had to pass from a subsonic velocity to supersonic velocity and then normally there would have been a sonic boom, which did not occur during this sighting… This and other cases were unexplainable.”
• Bob Pratt: “The final report on the operation… was over five hundred pages long.”

Case Closed

• Brigadier Oliveira, the base commander: “They brought a film for me to see… I thought it was very interesting. I saw something flashing, and another one coming towards… but what is true is that there is a lighthouse there… So I called the Navy commandant and asked, ‘Do you have a lighthouse in that area?’ ‘Yes, we have.’ And I asked, ‘Was there a problem there?’ ‘Yes, sometimes the lighthouse was blinking, sometimes it wasn't.' So, that’s no proof because it was a malfunctioning lighthouse… I think it was mass hysteria that produced the whole thing. I took an impartial position. I just wanted proof… but the ‘proof’ was destroyed when I discovered the whole business of the malfunctioning lighthouse.”
• Bob Pratt: “[The team] would probably disagree, pointing out that, among other things, one of the films showing UFOs going into and out of the water was shot on the far side of another island well out of sight of the Colares lighthouse.”
• Bob Pratt: “The brigadier’s theory also does not explain something that was happening elsewhere in the region. An almost identical flap of the same magnitude had just taken place in the neighboring state of Maranhão to the east, or it may have been just an earlier part of the same flap. From April to July of 1977, UFOs were seen almost every night in a wide area around Pinheiro, a small city about five hundred miles southeast of Colares.”
• Manoel Paiva, the mayor of Pinheiro: “Two-thirds of the people of this city saw a big ball of fire the size of a long-playing record. It came at high speed and then it would stop. Suddenly it would go up or down with the same velocity. Lots of people who were fishing here in canoes and boats were chased by this ball of fire… Many people complained that their eyes hurt after they'd stared at it. The object seemed to be a living thing, with colors swirling around in it like molten steel and an occasional flash of light as if explosions were occurring inside it… It made many people sick. Everybody was afraid. Many people were afraid to go out at night because of what might happen to them if 'the fire' caught them… Fishermen and farmers reported they'd been burned when UFOs suddenly and silently appeared in a great blast of light in the night sky just over their heads… The fishermen were so afraid that they wouldn't go fishing for three or four months. Many people wouldn't even go into their backyards to relieve themselves at night.”

Leaked Documents

• Bob Pratt: “Over the years I was given three batches of documents (in 1991, 1997 and 1999). Altogether I have about 400 pages, including the eighteen photos of UFOs with identifying information and sketches on the backs of the photos. Of this 400 or so, about half were duplicates. Some of the photocopies are a bit faded and hard to read, and no doubt are copies of copies of copies, etc… Exactly how many sightings were investigated is not known, but the pages that were leaked give details of three hundred and twenty-five incidents.”
• Bob Pratt: “In 1997, long after he had retired as a lieutenant colonel, Hollanda decided he was no longer obligated to remain silent… and publicly discussed Operação Prato.”
• Bob Pratt: “Operation Prato was once again in the news on May 20, 2005 as a result of a year-long campaign by Brazilian ufologists [who gathered 36,000 signatures] to get the Air Force to open its UFO files. In meetings on May 20 with ufologists at military headquarters in Brasília, three top generals acknowledged that the Air Force had long been concerned about UFOs and had systematically tracked them… since 1954… Brazilian ufology leader A. J. Gevaerd and half a dozen other ufologists were allowed to examine a number of UFO files from the Air Force archives [including] about 110 photos and 160 documents from Operation Prato.”
  • “Furthermore, according to Gevaerd… the Air Force leaders said they (1) recognized the importance of ufology, (2) pledged to help get classified files opened to the public, and (3) guaranteed that steps would be taken to form a joint committee of military and civilian UFO researchers to study the phenomenon.”
• Thiago Ticchetti: “Captain Hollanda told [researchers] they recorded more than 22 hours of film. The footage shows UAPs coming in, coming out of rivers, of lagoons, UAPs coming from the wood, from the forest, or passing by, or just hovering, or shooting beams of light to the ground searching for something, perhaps. But, we don't know where the footage is. We have heard some rumors that this footage is now in the United States. We have suspicions that the American agencies, probably some with three letters, came to Brazil and confiscated, or got, or borrowed the many documents, photos, and those films.”
  • George Knapp: “The first time I met Thiago in person, he told me what his suspicion was, is that it came here to Las Vegas. That it went to BAASS, to AAWSAP, the DIA program, and I could just confirm this, that I have seen files from the Brazilian Air Force that did go to BAASS. I have not seen the video. So if AAWSAP had it, they didn't let me see it.”

Were These Attacks?

• Col. Hollanda, asked about the purpose of the UFOs: “I'll answer you with a personal conclusion of mine… As I told you, I was a Jungle Operations Officer… I had a lot of contact with Indigenous Tribes and we were very careful, very concerned about not transmitting any disease that was contained in ourselves to them. The disease in our bodies is controlled by antibodies of ours that they didn't have and you could pass them some flu, measles, tuberculosis, because we have that. That would be a tragedy…”
  • “If I were them [the UFOs] and I put myself in their shoes, I needed an open, frank appearance, a direct appearance, what would I have to do? I would have to protect myself… Knowing that you… carry in your bodies something that can damage mine, you see? The only way to defend myself is if I had a sample of your blood, a sample of your tissue. It was not difficult to imagine that this is what they were doing. These things even became a joke to some people, the ‘Chupa-Chupa’ they called it. But they were collecting material. They were collecting blood. In order to see what was contained in the blood that could damage them in a necessary future contact. But not only blood, also material, cells. I don't know what this high energy beam could do, if it could carry that material too. Particles of the body, pieces of the body. That could be later analysed by them…”
  • “Because I heard from people that it was an act of aggression, and to me it doesn't seem to be aggression. I thought that they were collecting material in order to defend themselves in a contact event that needed to be close and that this could damage them because of some disease of ours.”

References

• Luis Elizondo: Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs
• Bob Pratt: Operação Prato
• Bob Pratt: UFOs Filmed Entering and Leaving Bay
• UFO Magazine: Colonel Hollanda Interview (print)
• UFO Magazine: Colonel Hollanda Interview (video)
• UFO Magazine: The truth about the death of Colonel Hollanda
• Weaponized: That Time UFOs Attacked 2000 Humans
• Red Panda Koala: Colares Part 1: They Came From the Sea and Sky
• Red Panda Koala: Colares Part 2: Operação Prato
• Red Panda Koala: Colares Part 3: A Story Not Forgotten By All

Episode 54, posted on September 22, 2024

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