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The date May 19, 1986 has been dubbed “Night of the UFOs” in Brazil and the reason for that is startling.
On that night, 2,000 cadets and officers at an air force training school witnessed several UFOs that night. Five air force pilots testified that they witnessed 21 UFOs appear and disappear the same night.
It all began that night when Brazilian air force air traffic controller Sergeant Sergio Mota da Silva reported seeing a strange light in the sky from his control tower near Sao Paulo.
“It doesn’t go up or down, it doesn’t go to the left or to the right, it’s just standing there,” the New York Post reports he said upon seeing the light.
Mota, believing that perhaps the light was a plane, asked his fellow air traffic controllers if one was scheduled to be in the area and was told no.
He also reported that when he dimmed the lights on the airport’s runway the UFO moved towards the tower and when he increased the brightness it moved away.
“Whether they were trying to interact with me, I don’t know. What I do know is that they behaved intelligently,” he said.
That same night around 8 p.m. a couple of thousand cadets and officers from an air force training school reported seeing the same light.
Shortly after that the pilot of a private plane reported encountering several objects in the sky as it landed at the airport.
Two passenger planes also reported seeing these lights.
With these reports causing some concern, the Brazilian air force scrambled several jets to investigate. What they encountered was confusing and hard to understand.
“Sometimes, the pilots had visual contact with the targets, but the radars did not register anything,” said Mota. “Other times, the radars even picked up the presence of objects, but the pilots could not see them.”
A Brazilian fighter pilot going 1,000 mph couldn’t even get close to the UFOs
One of the fighter pilots, Captain Armindo Sousa Viriato, attempted to close in on one of the lights at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour.
He says when he did that the UFO accelerated to a speed he estimates was around 11,500 mph, or 15 times the speed of sound.
“If there is a plane that can develop that speed, I don’t know of it,” he said in an interview discussing the night.
Almost 30 years later, no explanation for the UFOs in the sky that night has ever been discovered.
“How often to you get a situation where you put jets effectively in dog fights with objects they can’t even get near?” Gary Heseltine, Vice President of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research, said about the incident, adding, “When you have the testimony of multiple pilots, backed by audio, visual, radar you have to take it seriously.”
This event and other UFO encounters will be discussed by experts from across the world this week as a part of a hearing taking place in the Brazilian Senate into UFOs.
One of those experts, Luis Elizondo, former head of a secret Pentagon UFO program, said about the hearing, “Brazil has historically been one of the most open nations involving UAPs and has been considered a hot spot for many years,” adding that Brazil’s investigations into these UFO reports “is an indicator to the serious nature of this topic.”