Case files / colares-1977
Colares: the lights that hurt people
- When
- Mid to late 1977 · 1977 on the timeline
- Where
- Colares and the Amazon delta, Pará, Brazil
- Reported by
- Villagers, a town doctor and a Brazilian Air Force team
- Released
- Brazilian Air Force files, shown to researchers in 2005
- Status
- Investigated by the Brazilian Air Force; never explained officially
Through mid 1977, newspapers in the states of Pará and Maranhão reported people saying "luminous rays" from strange lights had hit them at night. Locals called the lights chupa-chupa, roughly "suck-suck," because people said the beams drained them. The town doctor in Colares, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, later said she treated a number of people with burn-like marks and weakness. Mayors asked the government for help, and some families left their villages or kept fires burning all night.
The Brazilian Air Force regional command in Belém sent a team led by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda from about September to December 1977. It took witness statements, drawings and photographs and kept watch at night. Researchers who have seen the files describe hundreds of pages of reports and photos of lights. The files were not made public at the time; Brazilian researchers were shown them in 2005, and they are held by Brazil's National Archives.
In 1997, by then a retired colonel, Hollanda told Revista UFO that his team set out to explain the lights away and that he came to believe the objects were not from Earth. He died later that year. Jacques Vallée visited the area in the 1980s and interviewed witnesses. No Brazilian agency has said what the lights were; skeptics have pointed to fear spreading between villages, which the witnesses reject.