CENDOC Envelope 09 — 1978 FAB UFO Records
A Brazilian Air Force CENDOC archive envelope collecting 1978 OANI sighting reports, internal correspondence, and analysis from across Brazil — the peak year of the Colares chupa-chupa wave and Operação Prato.
Brief
CENDOC Envelope 09 is among the largest single-year FAB UAP document collections in the Arquivo Nacional series, spanning reports and internal correspondence from 1978 — the year the Força Aérea Brasileira formally investigated the Colares incident cluster under Operação Prato. The envelope covers a period of above-average incident density across Brazil, with the northern Pará state region as the epicenter of a sustained wave of low-altitude UAP encounters carrying reported physical effects on witnesses. The PDF is scanned with no OCR text available; all summary content derives from the Arquivo Nacional description blurb.
Metadata
- Agency
- Força Aérea Brasileira / Arquivo Nacional
- Release
- 1978-12-31
- Type
- PDF • .pdf
- Length
- 85 pages
- Programs
- Operação Prato, CENDOC
- Tags
- OANI, chupa-chupa, Colares, Operação Prato, Brazil, Pará state, 1978, physical effects, FAB archive
Key points
- The envelope covers 1978 — the year of Operação Prato, the FAB's formal military field investigation of the Colares/Pará UAP wave.
- The Colares chupa-chupa incident cluster, named by local residents for reported light-beam encounters that left physical marks on witnesses, peaked during this envelope's coverage year.
- Contents span sighting reports, internal correspondence, and analysis material drawn from across Brazil, not solely from the Colares or Pará region.
- Described as one of the largest single-year FAB OANI envelopes in the Arquivo Nacional series, indicating an exceptional volume of recorded incidents for 1978.
- OANI (Objeto Aéreo Não Identificado) is the FAB's formal designation throughout this series — the Brazilian Portuguese equivalent of UAP.
Most interesting
- Operação Prato ('Operation Plate') was a covert FAB field mission run from September to December 1977 and extended into 1978, tasked with documenting the Colares incidents on the ground; its existence was not publicly confirmed until mission commander Captain Uyrangê Hollanda gave on-camera interviews to researcher A.J. Gevaerd in the 1990s.
- The chupa-chupa label came from Colares and surrounding Pará communities whose residents described craft projecting focused beams that appeared to burn skin and produce puncture marks — injuries documented in contemporaneous medical records and later in the FAB's own Operação Prato files.
- 1978 is widely cited as the single most document-dense year in the FAB Arquivo Nacional OANI series, which spans the 1950s through the 1980s.
- Brazil's military government of the late 1970s treated UAP reporting as a legitimate national-security matter, generating systematic documentation at a time when the US Air Force had formally closed Project Blue Book and adopted a posture of public disengagement.
- Captain Hollanda died in 1997, shortly after his extended on-camera account of the Operação Prato investigation — timing that has since made his case a recurring reference point in disclosure-era discussions of witness attrition.