The Colares wave (Operação Prato)

Through the last months of 1977, the island town of Colares in Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon, reported nightly visitations: fast, low, luminous objects — locals called the phenomenon the chupa-chupa, the sucker — whose narrow beams left residents with burn marks and puncture-like lesions. The town's physician, Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, treated dozens of the injured and documented burns she could not attribute to any ordinary cause, while part of the population fled the island at night.

In response the Brazilian Air Force's I COMAR launched Operação Prato — Operation Saucer — under Captain Uyrangê Hollanda: a uniformed field team that spent roughly four months in the region taking witness statements, keeping night watches, and producing hundreds of photographs and pages of reports of luminous objects. The operation was closed abruptly in December 1977 with nothing published. Hollanda, interviewed in 1997 shortly before his death, said his team had seen the phenomena themselves and had filed everything upward without receiving an explanation back.

Under Brazil's access-to-information law the Prato files — reports, negatives, sketches — were transferred in stages to the Arquivo Nacional, where they can now be read: a military record of a civilian injury wave, documented in the field by the investigating force itself, with no conclusion on any page. The wave is carried here as contested — not for want of paper, but because the paper declines to say what it saw.