What happened
In January 1958 the Brazilian Navy training ship Almirante Saldanha was at remote Trindade Island, some 1,100 km off Brazil, supporting International Geophysical Year research. Around noon on 16 January, as a launch was being hoisted, shouts went up on deck. Civilian photographer Almiro Baraúna, aboard with a diving club, grabbed his Rolleiflex and took a series of pictures of what witnesses described as a flattened, Saturn-like disc with a ring around it, crossing the sky, disappearing behind a peak and returning. Retired Air Force Capt. J. T. Viegas said it glowed brighter than the moon. The film was developed aboard within minutes in front of an officer. When Brazilian papers published the photos in February, the Navy minister was quoted saying the Navy had a secret it could not explain, and President Juscelino Kubitschek was reported to have released the pictures. A Navy report found no sign of tampering on the negatives but could not exclude prior trick photography.
The official explanation
Skeptics point out that Baraúna was a skilled trick photographer who in 1954 had published a magazine piece showing how to fake a flying saucer picture; that the Navy captain and commanding officer did not themselves see the object; and that the film was developed by Baraúna alone in an improvised darkroom. The US naval attaché in Rio called it a probable publicity stunt, and Blue Book recorded it as probably fabricated. Later skeptical analyses argue a double exposure of a model.
The anomalous case
Several people on deck, including a retired Brazilian Air Force captain, said they saw the object with their own eyes, and the negatives were developed aboard within about ten minutes, with the officer in charge of the station saying he saw the object on the wet negative. Brazilian Navy technicians and photo experts from the Cruzeiro do Sul aerial survey service examined the negatives, including microscopically, and found no sign of montage. The Navy's own report concluded there were indications the object existed. Several other unexplained sightings by Navy crew and station workers had been logged at Trindade in the weeks before. Blue Book's verdict was issued without ever seeing the photographs, and J. Allen Hynek criticised the US attaché's flippant report as having no place in a scientific investigation.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- The Trindade Island photographic case of 1958 (with translations of the Brazilian Navy report and US attaché report) Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
- The Trindade Island Case: Zaluar interview with Almiro Baraúna, OVNI Documento (1979), translation Ceticismo Aberto (Kentaro Mori)
Witness reports elsewhere
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