What happened
At dusk on 19 May 1986, the lone controller in the tower at São José dos Campos airport saw three bright lights over the field that kept changing colour, red to yellow to green, and seemed to approach when he dimmed the runway lights. Over the next hours radar stations around São Paulo and Brasília picked up unidentified returns. A small executive plane carrying Colonel Ozires Silva, the founder of Embraer and the incoming head of Petrobras, reported big red 'stars' and chased them for nearly half an hour without closing. The Brazilian Air Force scrambled F-5E fighters from Santa Cruz and Mirage IIIs from Anápolis. Pilots reported lights that climbed away, radar contacts that pulled back as they approached and, in one case, thirteen radar plots appearing behind a fighter. In all, 21 radar plots were logged. Four days later the Air Force minister faced the press with the pilots and said that technically he had no explanation. The military report, released in 2009, described objects that changed speed, altitude and direction at will.
The official explanation
No official conventional explanation was ever issued. Proposed natural explanations include bright stars and planets distorted by atmospheric conditions, anomalous radar propagation producing false targets during temperature inversions, and the tendency of intercept pilots to chase bright celestial lights at night. Critics also note that radar and visual contacts were often not simultaneous, which weakens the case that a single object was seen both ways.
The anomalous case
This is one of very few cases in which a national air force publicly confirmed that its jets chased unidentified objects, with the service chief sitting beside the pilots to say so. The declassified report states that the targets varied speed from subsonic to supersonic and could hover, ranged from below 5,000 to above 40,000 feet, made sharp 90-degree turns, emitted white, green and red light or no light at all, and showed intelligence in keeping their distance and flying in formation. A Mirage pilot reported closing to about two miles on a radar target that zigzagged and then pulled away despite his supersonic speed, and later estimated its velocity at many times the speed of sound. The witnesses included the Embraer founder, controllers and fighter pilots, and cassette recordings of their radio traffic are now in Brazil's National Archives.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- 1986 Brazilian UFO incident Wikipedia
- 40 anos da noite em que caças da Força Aérea perseguiram 21 óvnis TNH1 (via Folhapress)
Witness reports elsewhere
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