The record
In 1977, people in and around Colares, a fishing town on an island near the mouth of the Amazon in the state of Pará, began reporting lights that came down at night and shone beams on them. Some said the beams left burns and small puncture marks on their skin and made them weak. Residents called the lights chupa-chupa, roughly "sucker," because they said the lights drained them. Many families stayed up at night with fires and fireworks to keep the lights away.
The town's mayor asked the Brazilian Air Force for help. The Air Force sent a team led by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda in two phases, from October 20 to November 11 and from November 25 to December 5, 1977. The operation was named Operação Prato, Operation Saucer. Its members interviewed witnesses, kept watch at night and took hundreds of photographs and some film of lights over the area.
The town's doctor, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, later told researchers, including the French-American scientist Jacques Vallée, that she treated dozens of people for burn-like injuries during the scare. Vallée, who visited the region in the 1980s, wrote that some injuries looked like the effects of microwave radiation. These are accounts given years later; the medical records themselves have not been published.
The Air Force said its investigation found no unusual phenomenon and closed it. Parts of its files, with reports, sketches and photographs, were later released to Brazil's National Archives. In 1997, Hollanda, by then retired as a colonel, gave a long interview to Brazilian UFO researchers in which he described seeing large craft himself. He died at his home a few months later; reports describe the death as a suicide.