Brazilian "night of the UFOs" (19 May 1986)
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The visual record
Illustrations, recordings and archival references — each with its own provenance. A documented source is a starting point for investigation, not a verdict on its explanation.
Brazilian Air Force Mirage III
A Mirage III of the Brazilian Air Force, the type scrambled from Anápolis alongside F-5s on 19 May 1986 to intercept objects tracked on radar over São Paulo state. Aircraft type photograph · context, not from the night itself.
André Gustavo Stumpf from Brasília, Brasil · 2010 ↗CC BY 2.0Licence terms ↗American Alchemy · 0:30:54
Open the source at the cited time. The episode thumbnail is video packaging, not a photograph of the reported subject.
American Alchemy / Jesse Michels ↗YouTube-hosted preview and player; not relicensedOn the night of 19 May 1986 Brazilian air traffic control and Air Force radar tracked about twenty unidentified objects over São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Goiás; Mirage and F-5 fighters were scrambled and pilots reported lights they could not close on. The Air Minister confirmed the events publicly. A former defence minister recounts them in the corpus.
The event
| Date | |
|---|---|
| Place | -23.4300, -46.4700 approximate · Brazil |
| Official response | Brazilian Air Minister Brig Octávio Moreira Lima held a press conference on 23 May 1986 confirming that fighters had been scrambled against radar-tracked objects; a later Air Force report called the objects solid radar and visual contacts with no conclusion. |
Reported by
- brazilian air force pilots military Mirage III and F-5 pilots
- sao paulo cindacta controllers aviation CINDACTA I radar controllers
Investigated by
- brazilian air force military
Who spoke about it later
- Aldo Rebelo 0:30:54 Brazil's Most Famous UFO Cases Confirmed Real By Defense Minister ▶ 2026
Mentioned in the corpus
Passages this record cites, with the stamp of the block each quote sits in.
On the map
Brazilian "night of the UFOs" (19 May 1986), Colares wave and Operação Prato, Varginha incident. Open the full map filtered to this record.
Sources on this record
- 0:30:54 Brazil's Most Famous UFO Cases Confirmed Real By Defense Minister ▶
1986 in May, you had 21 unidentified objects uh spotted in four different Brazilian states. You had six fighter jets that were
- 0:01:40 Brazil's Most Famous UFO Cases Confirmed Real By Defense Minister · Jesse Michels ▶
Operation incursions of 1986, an unforgettable night for
- 1986 São Paulo UFO sighting