Brazil and UFOs: a hotbed for the unexplained

Around the world, 2023 has been the year of the extraterrestrials. After some mysterious objects were seen (and some shot down) in North American skied in February, alleged “alien skeletons” were displayed during a public hearing in Mexico’s Congress. What’s more, a recent NASA probe into UFO sightings came out as inconclusive: the space agency stated there is no proof to suggest aliens were behind the slew of unexplained phenomena it analyzed, but that it also couldn’t rule out the possibility.

But in Brazil, 2023 is just business as usual — with a typically long list of “unexplained” sightings this year already.

In recent months alone, there have been reports of UFOs over the Congress building in Brasília; a mysterious ball of green light spotted in cities in three states, and a red-colored orb spooked residents in the interior of Piauí state. At the end of 2022, airline pilots saw strange lights for six consecutive days in the sky over Rio Grande do Sul.

But those hoping for a close encounter of the third kind were left frustrated, as the unexplained phenomena were routinely explained as drones, planes, burning objects, and in the case of the latter, Starlink satellites. 

In 2018, the Brazilian Justice Ministry released a report detailing 743 occurrences of objects whose natural origins could not be immediately determined. The reports, audio, video, and photos were cataloged by the Brazilian Air Force and sent to the National Archives.

The first record in the report consisted of nine photographs of a plate-shaped flying object, taken in Rio de Janeiro in 1952. The photographer wrote on one of the images that it resembled a DC-5 airplane, “but it was flying sideways.”

The most famous such case in Brazil occurred on May 19, 1986, and became known as the “Night of the UFOs.” That night, an air traffic controller at an airport in São José dos Campos, in…