Vitória

Trindade and the Photograph from the Deck

On 16 January 1958 the vessel Almirante Saldanha lay off this Brazilian island in the South Atlantic with an International Geophysical Year expedition aboard. A photographer, Almiro Baraúna, shot an object shaped like a disc with a ring around it from the deck — four of six frames caught it. The film was developed on board there and then, with officers present; the Brazilian Navy analysed the images, accepted them as genuine, and the country's president confirmed them publicly. It later emerged that Baraúna had once made staged photographs for a magazine as a joke, and that became the sceptics' main argument. In sixty years the frames themselves have never been shown to be faked.