UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (33 page)

The document lists numerous common characteristics of the phenomena recorded that night, such as sudden accelerations and decelerations, an ability to hover, and supersonic speeds. The objects were observed as white, green, and yellow lights, and sometimes without any lights at all. The official conclusion reads as follows: “It is the opinion of this Command that the phenomenon is solid and reflects intelligence by its capacity to follow and sustain distance from the observers, and also to fly in formation, not necessarily manned.”
⁵

Brigadier José Carlos Pereira was a commander of the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command
⁶
from 1999 to 2001, and he then became General Commander of Air Force Operations until 2005. In that position, he supervised thirteen generals and 27,000 subordinates. Prior to these positions, he had been a commander of several air bases in Brazil and commander of the Brazilian Air Force Academy
.

O
n the night of May 19, 1986, an array of UFOs were spotted over southeastern Brazil, and the entire defense system was put on alert. The Air Force scrambled its most experienced pilots in F-5 and F-103 jets to intercept these objects. Colonel Ozires Silva, president of a Brazilian oil company, and his pilot, Commander Alcir Pereira de Silva, were flying an executive Xingu jet near Poços de Caldas heading to São José dos Campos, when radars in different locations showed twenty-one UFOs in the sky from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro. Silva and his pilot saw one of them and chased it for thirty minutes—a fast-moving, bright red-orange light that appeared to jump from point to point. They were not able to gain on it and eventually had to give up their pursuit.

This was a situation in which numerous expert witnesses saw something and radar detected the same thing. Radar equipment can be affected by many different factors, and can present a false echo, but a false target appears very briefly and is easy to recognize because it disappears quickly. It’s a different story when we have a regular trajectory to follow. Also, when we have more than one radar spotting the same target, we know it’s serious. This equipment operates in different frequencies, so we have the correlation of independent readings from different sources. These data have nothing to do with human eyes. When, along with the radar, a pilot’s pair of eyes sees that same thing, and then another pilot’s, and so on, the incident has real credibility and stands on a solid foundation.

A few days after these sightings, Brazil’s Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier Octavio Moreira Lima, called a press conference to explain what happened. He revealed that six jets had been scrambled from Santa Cruz AFB and Anapolis AFB, and some of the pilots had made visual contact, while all objects were registered on radar. The minister promised an official report within the next thirty days, but for some reason he changed his mind about releasing it. This was probably for some political reason, or maybe fear of panic because at that time the thinking was that the population might panic, if they knew. But in the meantime, the pilots and controllers were not prohibited from speaking about it.

The events of that night were really amazing, and some of our simple questions have simple answers: Did the pilots see the phenomena? Yes. Did the radars spot them? Yes. Did Ozires and other military pilots see them? Yes. Did pilots in commercial aircraft see them? Yes. Do the times of the sightings correlate? Yes. Do the trajectories of the objects correlate? Yes; all of this was technically analyzed. So, did it happen?

Yes, it did happen.

Everything was spotted by
both
aircraft radars and the radars on the ground. On-board radars operate in a microwave band, which is very narrow, while ground radars operate in a much broader band, so there’s no risk of confusion or mistaken correlation.

During this event, the military was not fearful of any sort of invasion. Jets armed with missiles took off and reached the objects in less than two minutes. These jets are always armed, but with peacetime armaments, consisting of two small missiles. If those objects were from an enemy country, they’d have been crushed that night. These pilots were highly trained and their radar capacities were increased to the maximum, which normally isn’t required. Radars never operate at full capacity, in order to save energy and to prevent wear-and-tear on the equipment. But after the jets took off, the capacity was increased to a broader range. Communications never failed, and the country was suffering no threat whatsoever. The jets landed safely and the pilots returned unharmed. Mission accomplished!

I don’t think that UFOs have made any real threat to national security, but we have to recognize that the current lack of knowledge about the subject is enough to raise suspicions, as it would about anything as seemingly advanced. So we then come to the very biggest of questions: What were those objects? No one knows. They were not foreign jets attacking. They were
unidentified flying objects
. And where are these objects now? Who knows? Were they captured? Not that we know. So here is where the problem of material evidence comes in, and we don’t have it.

When I was a commander, these unusual sightings occurred about once a month and usually were of very short duration. I remember there were about two to three incidents per year of military pilots being sent up to intercept something unknown that appeared on radar. Our civilian pilots are not afraid to speak up, and they always do, because they don’t want to lose their jobs for
not
reporting unusual events. The first thing they do when they see something strange is to call the controllers, because they have a huge personal responsibility.

A civilian aircraft is always in contact with air traffic control, and all of these operations in Brazil are linked to the Air Force and are of a military nature. When a commercial pilot says, “There’s something going on here,” the control center will immediately report it to the military operations center in that area, in case it is something serious. They will take some action regarding that fact and report to the air defense operations center,
⁷
which is the superior body and the only one to oversee the whole country. Then the pilot or the air traffic controller will fill out a report; they know where to get the form—from any Air Force base or any traffic controlling office throughout the country—and they deliver the completed papers to any Air Force base.

Next, there’s always an investigation after the pilot registers what he saw. As requested on the reporting form, he must report the direction, altitude, and speed of the object. We also need other details, such as the position of the sun compared to the aircraft at that time. The brightness of the object is also important, as well as the kind of clouds in the sky at the time. All these data are precious. The controllers are then able to check if some other aircraft crossed the path of this pilot, which could explain the event. An investigation will follow, and if they discover that no other aircraft was there and the weather was not a factor, we have a special situation. And all these things are easy to check when everything is spelled out in the initial report. We go on eliminating all possibilities until we are sure that there is no conventional explanation for the data, and then the report is securely filed.

Pilot reports that turn out to have a conventional explanation are eventually deleted, and someone from the Air Defense will inform the pilot that they found out what happened. If no explanation is found, the case is transferred to another folder, called the “Book of Flight Occurrences.” All of these unsolved cases are kept there in those books, and one hopes that researchers will eventually be allowed to see them. They include serious reports from pilots and air traffic controllers—everything we cannot explain, everything that is held as secret, goes to those books. It’s important to emphasize that this “Book of Flight Occurrences” contains cases that couldn’t be explained even after analysis by experts especially assigned to this task.

When I was a commander at COMDABRA, the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command, from 1999 to 2001, all cases involving UFOs spotted by military pilots and by radars would came to my attention. I directly participated in an investigation of a UFO incident only once, although I had access to secret files and both official and unofficial reports. After leaving the military, I still had access to nearly all the information I desired on this subject.

I haven’t followed what happened at the Air Defense over the last four years, but I know that we continue to receive reports. Even so, I want to mention something important. I believe that up to 90 percent of all sightings are never reported. Brazil is a huge country, and these reports are filed only where there is an airport or an Air Force base, and only by people who know how the process works. Civilians don’t even know that these forms exist and are available throughout the country. I don’t know the actual percentage of sightings that result in reports, but I think it must be tiny. So the number of reports that come to the knowledge of the military is almost insignificant.

It is a big step for a country to officially acknowledge the existence of UFOs, as France has done. But releasing information has not caused people to panic, and I don’t think it would if more files were to be opened. No one fears transparency; instead people fear the lack of it. I think that from the moment the government opens the subject for debate, all the fear people have toward this subject will disappear. And if there’s one country that never panics, it’s Brazil. Quite the opposite; maybe we would even create a new samba theme in celebration.

How do we handle the existence of UFOs? The evidence shows that unexplained phenomena are occurring, and this leads many of us to believe in the presence of alien spacecraft visiting planet Earth. However, drawing conclusions about what these things are is dangerous, since we do not have enough knowledge to do that. I believe science has much more work to do in order to identify and explain the phenomenon. We need astronomers, meteorologists, aviation experts, astrophysicists, and many other scientists, because such an investigation must be jointly addressed by many specialists. In fact, this effort must engage the whole nation. The synergistic effect of knowledge is undeniable.

I’m a man devoted to science, a man with a scientific mind. If you present the hypothesis that extraterrestrials may be here and may be doing things that we can’t understand, your idea runs contrary to conventional scientific reasoning. As far as we know, our own solar system does not contain life on any planet except Earth.

I’m basing my ideas on the knowledge we have
today
, achieved by science as it currently understands the universe. This is the caveat to be considered. If we assume only current knowledge, I am forced to reject every possibility of anyone coming from outer space to Earth. And it gets more complex if we go further, because Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, does not seem to have a planetary system. We move then to the portion of the universe astronomers call the “inhabitable zone,” which is many light-years from Earth.

However, I would never assert that no other civilization could have advanced a million years ahead of us somewhere else. I humbly insist, therefore, that our current knowledge must be inherently insufficient for comprehending everything. After learning about UFOs while in the military, I became clear—in fact, certain—about the high level of ignorance we have regarding the universe, given the current stage of human scientific development. The UFO phenomenon has demonstrated that we have a lot more to learn about physics and other scientific areas. We don’t yet have the final word within science, and, eventually, we will be able to understand what is now unknown.

Look at what happened over the mere last hundred years, with discoveries ranging from penicillin to the airplane. We humans left the ground for the first time in an airplane nearly 100 years ago and within only one century were able to reach the moon. In astronomic terms a hundred years is nothing, not even dust. Obviously, an advanced people would not use rocket engines like our spacecraft sent into space. If in one century and with our limited capacity we could achieve this, think about it: Where will we be a hundred or a thousand years from now?

I don’t have a problem with philosophy entering into this discussion in attempting to address the issues we haven’t been able to solve: who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Since Aristotle, human beings have been asking these same questions and we still don’t know the answers. The scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon in combination with other subjects within science and philosophy might be a way to move toward those answers.

No institution has the right to close the door on the discussion of any matters, be they scientific, political, social, or religious—and that includes the study of unidentified flying objects, which I consider to be within the realm of science. I believe that not only Brazil, but also all socially and technologically developed countries, should set up governmental agencies to address this matter. The United States should certainly lead the way, since that country is and will remain the planet’s greatest technological power, with a great ability to aggregate knowledge from other countries. And if it should be accepted that something is coming here from space, I think the United Nations should be responsible rather than leaving that task in the hands of individual countries.

PART 3

A CALL TO ACTION