Chasing A UFO! Fighter Jets Scrambled To Hunt A Mysterious ‘Alien Aircraft’ In One Of World’s Most Intriguing Events From The Past

Brazil has become the latest country to take action on unidentified flying objects (UFOs), with the Brazilian Senate holding its first-ever public hearing on June 24.

The historic US Congressional hearing on UFOs held in May for the first time in over 50 years revived global interest in the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), with the governments of Russia and China also announcing their actions to investigate the subject.

In this hearing, senior US Naval Intelligence officials testified that the database of UFO sightings includes 400 incidents, up from 143 recorded in the previous year. While no evidence of aliens was discovered, some events couldn’t be explained.

An example of such events is the declassified footage taken from US Navy’s fighter jets showing mysterious, unexplained objects flashing in the sky, famously dubbed the ‘Tic Tac’ video.

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Incidentally, the US Congressional hearing coincided with the anniversary of the so-called ‘Night of the UFOs’ in Brazil, an event that unfolded on May 19, 1986, and lasted for over several hours in which a whopping 21 UFOs were sighted by multiple witnesses, both civilian and military, in four states: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Goiás.

The Brazilian Senate held a special session on June 24 for the 75th anniversary of the World Day of Ufology which UFO experts and enthusiasts celebrate, to commemorate the first widely reported UFO sighting in 1947 by Kenneth Arnold, an American aviator who claimed to have seen what he referred to as ‘flying saucer’ over Mount Rainier in Washington.

The event was requested by Senator Luís Eduardo Grangeiro Girão and some other Senators and was approved on March 16.

Senator Girão has long been associated with the subject of extraterrestrial beings. He was one of the producers of the 2012 film ‘Area Q,’ which features American actor Isaiah Washington, from Grey’s Anatomy, in the cast.

The film shows a story of an American man who, in search of his missing son, goes to Ceará, the home state of Senator Girão, where there is a place called Area Q known for strange UFO incidents.

While not much has been reported about the June 24 hearing yet, according to previous reports about the event, various UFO experts from around the world were invited to brief the Brazilian lawmakers.

These experts included Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and British UFO expert Gary Heseltine, Vice President of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research.

According to various reports and experts, the hearing was expected to discuss the famous Night of the UFOs.

“Undoubtedly, the inquiry will cover the Night of the UFOs,” said Heseltine, a former police detective. “What’s impressive is that the incident lasted several hours from the first sightings, and fighter jets scrambled from several airports.”

Night Of The UFOs

The Night of the UFOs officially began around 8:00 pm Brazilian time when Sergeant Sergio Mota da Silva, the air traffic controller at the Sao Jose dos Campos airport in Sao Paulo, spotted a light in the sky from the control tower of an airport near the city of Sao Paulo.

Intrigued by this, Mota asked controllers at Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport tower to check if any plane was heading to his airfield. The answer was negative, and while he was talking, the object vanished.

After a while, the object reappeared, this time shining even more brightly. Mota fetched some binoculars to observe better and found that the object was light and multicolored.

At one point, the sergeant dimmed the airport runway lights, and the object moved closer, and when he increased the brightness, the object moved away.

“Whether they were trying to interact with me, I don’t know. What I do know is that they behaved intelligently,” the sergeant told the BBC.

Around the same timeframe, about 200 soldiers, including cadets and officers from the School of Aeronautical Specialists (EEAR), also spotted these lights, either with naked eyes or with binoculars, according to the ufologist Edison Boaventura Júnior, president of the Guarujá Ufological Group (GUG).

In addition, at least three planes reported similar sightings that night, one of which was piloted by the famous Brazilian entrepreneur and the founder of Embraer, Ozires Silva.

Brazilian Air Force Dispatched Fighter Jets

The objects were also picked up by radars from the Brazilian Air Force’s (FAB’s) Integrated Center for Air Defense and Air Traffic Control (CINDACTA), meaning they were solid objects.

The FAB scrambled its combat aircraft to intercept the objects. However, the pilots were disoriented by what they encountered.

According to them, these multicolored dots could hover statically in the sky, fly in a zigzag, turn at right angles, change color, trajectory, and altitude, and reach up to 15 times the speed of sound.

“The number of objects seen that night was much higher than 21,” air traffic controller Mota said

“Sometimes, the pilots had visual contact with the objects, but the radars did not register anything. Other times, the radars even detected the presence of objects, but the pilots could not see them.

The Air Force considered only the sightings in which there was simultaneous confirmation. The rest were discarded,” he continued.

Initially, three planes were dispatched, the first of which an F-5E piloted by Lieutenant Kleber Caldas Marinho left the Santa Cruz Air Base in Rio de Janeiro at 10:34 pm.

He described closing in on the target, “which stopped moving towards me and started to climb.”

“I kept following the contact until about 30,000 feet when I lost radar contact and was left with just visual contact,” he said.

The second fighter, a Mirage F-103 piloted by Captain Armindo Sousa Viriato de Freitas, took off at 10:48 pm from Anápolis Air Base in the state of Goiás.

At 11:09 pm, Captain Viriato, an unidentified signal, appeared 22 kilometers away on his radar. He immediately framed his target and prepared to fire at the suspected enemy.

His Mirage soon hit the speed of Mach 1.3 – 1.3 times the speed of sound (approximately 1,600 km/h), and much to the amazement of Captain Viriato, when he was nine kilometers from the target, the object accelerated sharply and reached the speed of Mach 15.

To put this in perspective, the fastest aircraft in history is the North American X-15 which reached its maximum speed of 7,274 km/h (approximately Mach 5.89) in October 1967.

The third fighter, also an F-5 piloted by Captain Márcio Brisolla Jordão, left the Santa Cruz Air Base at 10:50 pm, and nine minutes later, while conducting searches in the Sao José dos Campos region, he was informed by his flight controller, Sergeant Nelson that numerous objects are flying behind him.

Based on this, Captain Jordão performed a 180° maneuver to see his pursuers but to no avail. According to radar images, there were a total of 13 UFOs, seven on one side and six on the other, that “escorted” Captain Jordão’s F-5

Brazilian UFO researcher Ademar José Gevaerd believes alien technology “immensely superior to ours” was on display that night.

“At no time did they try to attack us. They played cat and mouse with us,” he said.

Photographic Evidence From The Ground

The Photojournalist Adenir Britto was also working that night in his newspaper office when he received a tip-off that there was a flying saucer overhead the newspaper office.

He initially assumed it to be a joke but did go outside with a reporter to check and, much to his surprise, saw multicolored lights moving in all directions. He also took some pictures.

A month later, two officers from the Aerospace Technical Center (CTA) of the FAB, accompanied by the American UFO researcher James J. Hurtak, turned up at the newsroom and demanded that the editor hand them over the negatives of the photos taken by Britto on the pretext that they needed to be analyzed by NASA.

The negatives were never returned.

The Phenomena Are Solid And Reflect Intelligence – Brazilian Air Force

Four days later, then Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier Octávio Júlio Moreira Lima, held a press conference in which he told the reporters that five FAB fighter jets chased 21 UFOs.

“It’s not about whether or not you believe [in extraterrestrial beings or flying saucers]. We can only give technical information. There are several assumptions. Technically, I would tell you that we have no explanation,” Lima said at the time.

He also announced that the episode would be investigated, and within 30 days, a report would be released, but it was not until 23 years later, on September 25, 2009, that a report on the case was finally released.

The report concluded that “the phenomena are solid and reflect, in a certain way, intelligence, due to the ability to follow and maintain a distance from observers, as well as to fly in formation, not necessarily manned.”