4 case files, newest first.
Radar and pilots across four Brazilian states tracked lights for hours, and the Air Force sent five fighters after them. Four days later the Air Minister told the press: 'Technically, we have no explanation.' The Air Force's own report, released in 2009, called the phenomena solid.
In the Brazilian Amazon, rubber tappers and riverside communities tell of the mapinguari, a huge, foul-smelling, shaggy creature. Ornithologist David Oren proposed it might be a surviving giant ground sloth. Expeditions found no animal, and most scholars treat it as folklore that may carry a memory of extinct megafauna.
In 1977 residents along the Pará coast reported beams of light that they said drained blood and burned skin. The Brazilian Air Force sent a team to investigate. Its records, released by Brazil's National Archives, document sightings but no explanation.
Three young women in a southern Minas Gerais town said they saw a crouching creature with red eyes on 20 January 1996. Rumours of military captures followed. A Brazilian Army inquiry, now public at the Superior Military Court, concluded the figure was a local man known as 'Mudinho'.
