Mystical places in Brazil
3 legends · 2 cities
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Ubatuba and the Magnesium Fragments
In September 1957 a Brazilian newspaper received a letter from a fisherman claiming that a disc-shaped object had exploded in the air over the beach at this town in front of him, enclosing several light metal fragments. The samples reached a Brazilian agricultural laboratory, which identified almost pure magnesium. The argument starts there: some analyses showed a purity above what industry could achieve at the time, others found it ordinary. The fragments were passed from hand to hand and laboratory to laboratory, some were lost, and some were studied in the United States in the 1980s. Sixty years on the result is inconclusive, and the Ubatuba fragments remain the best-known example of how physical evidence in this subject dissolves along a chain of custody.
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.
Colares and Operation Saucer
From late 1977 people on this island in the mouth of the Amazon began complaining of glowing objects that hung over houses at night and put a narrow beam down on them. They came to the clinic with burns, dizziness and anaemia; the local doctor, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, kept the records. The Brazilian Air Force sent a team — Operação Prato, Operation Saucer, which worked for several months. The military collected hundreds of pages of reports, photographs and cine film. The material was declassified in the 2000s and passed to the Brazilian National Archives. It names no cause; some doctors put the symptoms down to panic and poor diet, and some did not. Many families left the island at the time.