UFOs - Leslie Kean [106]
It was only recently, in 2008 and 2009, that the Brazilian government began its release of numerous previously secret UFO files and stated that it would gradually release them all in groups by decade, one decade at a time. As of this writing, documents, photos, and drawings from the 1950s through the 1980s have been made public—more than 4,000 pages—many of them concerning the Air Force’s “Operation Saucer,”3 involving extensive military investigations of UFOs in the Amazon region in 1977.
A. J. Gevaerd, coordinator of the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers, a prominent civilian group, and his colleagues have been instrumental in bringing about the release of these government files. Gevaerd was also the first to interview four-star Brigadier General José Carlos Pereira (Ret.), the highest-ranked Brazilian official ever to speak out about UFOs. Brigadier General Pereira has contributed an original piece on the handling of UFO events in Brazil at the highest levels, including his personal thoughts about the phenomenon, for this book. At his request, some of the material included in his piece was excerpted from a transcribed interview with Gevaerd, while some of it was written specifically for this piece. All was translated from Portuguese.4
The general begins his essay with a description of a spectacular series of sightings involving military pilots and radar on May 19, 1986, which has come to be known as “official UFO night in Brazil.” It was not until late in 2009—after Brigadier General Pereira completed his piece “UFOs in Brazil”—that any documentation was made public about this case. The newly released five-page “Occurrence Report” about the 1986 incident was written by the acting commander of the Brazilian air defense command to provide the Minister of Aeronautics with “information provided by the air traffic control and air defense, as well as the interceptor pilots involved in this event.” The once-classified report states that radar readings on both the air defense system and intercepting jets were recorded simultaneously, while, also simultaneously, the pilots observed the objects through the cockpit window. Such an “achievement” is quite rare: to capture a UFO on ground radar and airborne radar while pilots observe it, all at the same time. This is what the Belgian Air Force hoped to accomplish through its launch of F-16s a few years later, as described by General De Brouwer.
The document lists numerous common characteristics of the phenomena recorded that night, such as sudden accelerations and decelerations, an ability to hover, and supersonic speeds. The objects were observed as white, green, and yellow lights, and sometimes without any lights at all. The official conclusion reads as follows: “It is the opinion of this Command that the phenomenon is solid and reflects intelligence by its capacity to follow and sustain distance from the observers, and also to fly in formation, not necessarily manned.”5
Brigadier José Carlos Pereira was a commander of the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command6 from 1999 to 2001, and he then became General Commander of Air Force Operations until 2005. In that position, he supervised thirteen generals and 27,000 subordinates. Prior to these positions, he had been a commander of several air bases in Brazil and commander of the Brazilian Air Force Academy.
On the night of May 19, 1986, an array of UFOs were spotted over southeastern Brazil, and the entire defense system was put on alert. The Air Force scrambled its most experienced pilots in F-5 and F-103 jets to intercept these objects. Colonel Ozires Silva, president of a Brazilian oil company, and his pilot, Commander Alcir Pereira de Silva, were flying an executive Xingu jet near Poços de Caldas heading to São José dos Campos, when radars in different locations showed twenty-one UFOs in the sky from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro. Silva and his pilot saw one of them and chased it for thirty minutes—a fast-moving, bright red-orange light that appeared to jump from point to point. They were not able to gain on it