Colares, 1977: The Island Brazil's Air Force Was Sent to Watch

Three hours of light over the water

On the night of December 9, 1977, sometime after 11pm, Captain Uyrangê Hollanda stood at an observation post on an Amazon river island and watched a cylindrical object roughly 100 meters long move low over the water. Amber at first, then bluish. It maneuvered, by his account, for close to three hours.

Before we go further, one ground rule, because the entire case depends on it. Hollanda told that story in 1997, twenty years after the fact, and nothing in the file his own operation left behind corroborates it. Everything the colonel says in this article comes with that same asterisk: his word, two decades later, and the paperwork never backs him up. I am going to say that once and trust you to remember it, because the reason Colares matters has never been any single story. It is that a national air force sent an intelligence officer and some twenty men to a river island to investigate the lights, logged what it saw for months, photographed some of it, and then sat on the records for 27 years.

The records are out now. You can read them. That is what this article is actually about.

What happened, in order

The lights did not start on the island. Through July and August 1977, people around Belém, in Mosqueiro, Ananindeua, and other settlements, described the same visitor: a silent glow, sometimes disc-shaped, sometimes like a giant flashlight, hovering over rooftops and riverbanks at night. Locals named it the chupa-chupa, roughly sucker-sucker, for what many said it did. It would drop low, fire a beam, and leave burns, puncture marks, and a lasting weakness behind.

The reports concentrated on Colares. As they mounted, the town's mayor asked the Air Force for help, and in September 1977 the First Regional Air Command opened Operação Prato, Operation Saucer, under Hollanda's command.

The tidy version of this story says the operation ran four months and closed. The real record is messier, and worth being precise about: some sources say the field operation officially ended in December 1977, others say January 1978, and the documented file actually spans September 2, 1977 to November 28, 1978, across 15 municipalities in the Pará interior. Whatever the official end date, the Air Force's attention to these lights lasted over a year.

The file, item by item

Most retellings skip the file. It is the best part.

Going in, I expected the declassified material to be underwhelming, and in one sense it is: no smoking gun, no alien, no answer. What it is instead is a bureaucracy taking the problem seriously, and somehow that lands harder. Here is what Brazil actually released, starting in 2005 after the ufologist A. J. Gevaerd's freedom-of-information campaign:

• About 170 pages of mission reports
• 126 photographs taken by the operation itself
• Maps, diagrams, and witness sketches of the objects
• Logged trajectories, coordinates, view angles, and times
• Notes on physical effects on soil and on people
• Film footage: none
• Conclusions: none

Officers logged their own observations of unexplained lights and treated them as data. The scanned documents are public, in Portuguese, sketches and photographs included. The file does not say what the lights were. It says the Air Force looked.

That absence of film is the itch that never quite goes away. Hollanda later claimed the complete record ran to more than 2,000 pages, over 500 photographs, and 16 hours of film, and that "everything that occurred during Operation Prato was properly photographed and filmed." Remember the asterisk. But the public archive holding 126 photos and zero film is a fact, and it keeps the question of what else exists permanently open.

The doctor who refused

Two people carry this story, and English-language coverage almost always picks the wrong one to lead with.

Wellaide Cecim Carvalho finished her medical degree at 21 and was running the Colares health unit when the flap began. By her own long-form account, she treated around 80 chupa-chupa patients, more than 40 in the first month alone, the pace climbing from one case every three days to three or four a day at the peak.

Her descriptions are the most clinical evidence the case has. Two puncture marks, often on the neck. Burns that necrosed tissue and looked immediately scarred rather than like ordinary thermal or chemical burns, healing over 15 to 30 days and leaving permanent depigmentation. And the detail that a physician could actually measure: sudden severe anemia, hemoglobin roughly halved in the patients she tested, along with muscle weakness, dilated pupils, and reduced reflexes.

She also says Air Force officers pressured her to sedate her patients with Diazepam and tell them they were hallucinating, and threatened her medical license when she pushed back.

"How could I drug an entire population?"

She refused, kept treating, and kept talking about it for the next four decades. Carvalho reported sightings of her own, including a small cylindrical craft with humanoid figures, and locals attributed several deaths in late 1977 to the phenomenon. No autopsy or official record ever connected any death to the lights.

The colonel, and how his story ends

Hollanda broke twenty years of silence in 1997. First on Rede Globo's Fantástico that July, then in August in a long sit-down with Gevaerd and Marco Antônio Petit, published across two issues of Revista UFO. If you watch one thing about this case, make it the full interview with English subtitles, 109 minutes of the commander describing craft at under 100 meters from his posts, the December cylinder, and an incident where a small door opened and a being floated out near his men.

On October 2, 1997, two months after that interview, Hollanda died by suicide at his home in Cabo Frio.

Because a talkative officer died soon after talking, the silencing theory has never gone away, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a raised eyebrow. Gevaerd, who interviewed him and considered him a friend, has said publicly that Hollanda had suffered a years-long depressive illness with a prior attempt, and rejected the assassination reading outright: nobody, in his words, "suicided" him for talking too much. The timing is real. So is the documented illness. That is where the record ends, and this article ends there with it.

What holds up

The skeptical case is stronger than the mystery-friendly version wants it to be, and the sharpest skepticism comes from inside the operation itself. The military's own reports refer to "the monster created by the press" and describe the region's population, in the blunt language of a 1970s intelligence document, as poor, under-schooled, and easily influenced by media. Injury reports grew after the press coined the chupa-chupa name, which is the shape a feedback loop takes. A contemporary physician, Dr. Zoghbi, argued some wounds were self-inflicted scratching during episodes of hysteria, though Carvalho's clinical record points the other way. The fullest skeptical walkthrough is the Metabunk thread on the case.

While researching this, I went looking for anything that would independently tie one injury to one light, and hit the same wall every researcher hits: there is nothing. No injury conclusively traced, no death medically attributed.

And yet. A national air force ran a months-long field operation and came away with 126 photographs of lights it could not identify, rather than a memo dismissing the whole affair. Panic has ordinary explanations. Sustained, documented state attention does not, and that residue is what survives every debunking. As far as anyone can show, Operação Prato remains the only investigation a national air force ever built entirely around UFO reports and documented thoroughly enough to be worth fighting to declassify.

Colares, for its part, made peace with the fear. The town now calls itself the Cidade dos ET's, the City of ETs, with alien statues on the corners, an ET-themed Carnival bloco, and a restaurant named Operação Prato serving Amazon dishes under ET-themed names.

Before you go

Colares sits on a river island north of Belém, and getting there is part of the point. There is no airport and no bridge.

• By bus: direct from the Belém rodoviária, about R$14 to 16, roughly 1h35m to 2h, departures around 06:45 and 15:45 daily, including a short free vehicle ferry onto the island.
• By car: BR-316 then PA-140, about two hours, same ferry.
• By boat: a slower water route runs about 3h40m.

Good to Know

• Stays are simple, budget pousadas: Pousada Mirante do Sol (beachfront), Pousada e Peixaria Guarujá, Pousada Rio Novo in Beira Mar, Pousada Opção da Ilha in Bacuri, Pousada Espaço in the center, Dadinda Pousada Familiar on Rua do Rosário. Book directly by phone or WhatsApp.
• Praia do Humaitá, a quiet beach a few hundred meters from the center, is where locals place the early sightings.
• This is a working Amazon estuary town: hot, humid, mosquito-heavy. Repellent and sun protection are not optional.
• English is very limited and the economy runs on cash. There is no formal UFO museum, though writer Agildo Monteiro Cavalcante keeps an informal ufology study space.
• Best window: the Amazon dry season, roughly July through November.

Don't expect a museum with the answers. Colares is a lived-in river town that leaned into its legend, not a curated exhibit. The pleasure is the ferry, the beach, the ET statues, and the strange fact that all of this really did summon a real Air Force operation.

Worth the trip?

If you want a polished attraction with a gift shop and a documentary loop, this is not it. If you want to stand where a documented military UFO investigation actually happened, eat lunch at a restaurant named after it, and get there by ferry across the Amazon delta, Colares delivers something almost no UFO site can: a place that is ordinary, warm, and lived-in rather than staged. Pair it with a couple of days in Belém and treat the crossing as half the experience.

Four sources worth your time

• The English-subtitled Hollanda interview: the colonel's claims in his own words, and the single most important document of the case that isn't paper. A free English transcript exists if you prefer reading.
• The declassified scans: the actual file, not the retelling.
• Dr. Wellaide's interview: the medical spine of the case, in Portuguese and worth machine-translating.
• OperaçãoPrato.com: a Brazilian archive of every TV special on the case, from the 1997 Fantástico segment onward, all in Portuguese.

Go for the ferry, the beach, and the town's easy embrace of its own strangeness. Read the file on the bus ride there, and decide for yourself what the Air Force was photographing.