Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean smith. For the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the show. In last week's episode, Shores of the Unknown, we ventured to the west coast of Wales, where in nineteen seventy seven, fourteen school children claimed to have seen a UFO lingering in a field behind the far end of their playground.
The bizarre episode at Broadhaven School seemed to set off an extraordinary series of events that remain unparalleled in the history of the British UFO experience. Incredibly, this wasn't by any means the most peculiar UFO event to her in nineteen seventy seven. For that, we need to travel four and a half thousand miles away southwest across the open waters of the North Atlantic Ocean to a remote fishing
village on the north coast of Brazil. It was a balmy night when forty eight year old a Medio Oliviera returned home from work, exhausted and crawled into the hammock strung up in his living room. At some time around eleven pm, he sensed a sudden brightness in the room. When he opened his eyes, he found the place lit up by a single beam of light that seemed to
be coming through the roof a medio. Watched with alarm as the beam tracked across the room before finally stopping to rest on the outside of his thigh, just above the knee. He cried out in pain his leg was burning when the light disappeared. Moments later, he rubbed at the spot where now there was a perfectly round red mark exactly where the light had been. Twenty five year old dentist Luccia Marquess was buying food at the local market when she heard a loud commotion coming from the beach.
Walking towards the shoreline, she found a large group of people, excitedly huddled together and pointing wildly into the air. She looked up to find two lights, one red and one green, circling each other in the sky above. As she continued to watch, she noticed the lights seemed to be taking it in turns to switch on and off, almost as if they were signaling to each other. Both incidences took place in Kolares, a village in northern Brazil on the banks of the vast Rio Para, a large channel at
the southern edge of the Amazon Delta. Cholaris Is itself located on the island of Calaris, which sometime at the end of the last ice age, found itself severed from the mainland when ice melt caused the surrounding waters of
the Furo de Laura to rise. Just over sixty miles to the south lies the city of blem where Carlos Mendez, a junior journalist at the State of Para newspaper, receives the first of many calls one afternoon from a number of Cholaris's two thousand residents, all claiming to have witnessed the bizarre lights in the sky. Around the same time, twenty four year old doctor Valai di Carvalio, director of health at the local care unit, notices a sudden increase
in the number of people attending her clinic. Before long, ten to twenty people are turning up each day, all displaying similarly strange injuries, and all with a peculiar story to tell. The symptoms were all the same, with patients displaying clear radiation burns, but also more strangely small punctu wounds that they claimed only appeared after they had been
supposedly attacked by the lights. The wounds, which seemed to turn black within hours of occurring, as if they were weeks old, were nothing like doctor Carvallio had ever seen before. Back in blem Carlos Mendez pulls in a photographer and together the pair make the two hour journey to Calaries to investigate the apparent sightings for themselves. Within minutes of arriving, they are swamped by terrified residents desperate to share their stories.
One woman described being struck by the light while inside her home and how at the moment she saw it, her arms and legs became instantly paralyzed. It was only the next morning when she found the small puncture wounds on her thorax. It was, she said, as if something had been sucking on her blood. As more and more residents came forward to tell their stories, it became clear to the young journalist that the town was in a dangerous grip of panic. So neither Mendes nor his photographer
would see anything untoward themselves. They were left in little doubt that the fear they had registered on the faces of the townsfolk had been very real. Indeed, are you always taking care of your family. Do you often take care of others and not yourself. Now it's time to take care of yourself, to make time for you. You deserve it. Teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best to feeling like yourself again. With teledoc, you can speak to
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with her body spasming violently. Carvalio did her best to stabilize the patient, but due to the limitations of the clinic, was eventually left with no choice but to drive the woman herself for immediate treatment in the far better equipped Valm City Hospital. It was five days later when another woman was rushed to the clinic in a severe state of shock, her body so rigid that her relatives had
barely been able to maneuver her into the car. Carvalio listened with incredulity as they described how the woman had merely been standing in her back garden when she was enveloped in a beam of light, which had left her in a complete trance. Again, Carvalio had little choice but to drive the woman to Belem Hospital for emergency treatment.
A few days later, Carvalio received the devastating news that both her patients had died, and when she asked to see their death certificates, the cause of death had been listed merely as unknown. Troubled by what they had seen, Carvalio and her colleagues, although skeptical of the reports of strange lights in the sky, were none the less concerned, and being especially eager to prevent a mass hysterical episode,
pleaded with local officials to mount a thorough investigation. As it happened, the authorities had ample reason to take reports of weaponized flying objects very seriously. Indeed, only two years previously, the Brazilian military dictatorship led by Ernesto Gissell, had finally ended a brutal and bitter guerrilla war with the militant
faction of the Communist Party of Brazil. With much of the fighting happening in the local state of Para, it led some to wonder whether the strange flying objects might in fact be some sort of weapon given to a surviving band of militants by a more advanced communist regime. Soon after, a team of air force officers from the Regional Command of the Brazilian Air Force were duly dispatched
to the region. The team, led by experienced operations Captain Urungue Hollander, began by ordering his men to collect as many eye witness accounts of the phenomena as possible before trying to record it for themselves. As such, a series of observation posts were set up across the island, each team being equipped with multiple cameras and telescopes to aid
their investigation. Over the next few months, Horlander and his team collected testimony from over three thousand local residents who claimed to have seen or at least heard about the apparent U foes. More than eighty claimed also to have been directly targeted, injured, and even chased by them. One evening in October, doctor Carvallio, who had remained unconvinced by the more fanciful reports, was returning home from work when
she saw a woman fainting suddenly in the street. Rushing to help her, she was amazed to find a cylindrical object floating in the sky no more than a hundred feet above them. Feeling threatened, she tried to move away, only to find that she was frozen to the spot. She could only watch in terror for the few moments it took until the object circled once above them, before making its way toward the coast and disappearing out to sea with no sign of an end to the extraordinary reports.
The people of Corrals were dismayed when, without warning one morning in December, Captain Hollander ordered his men to pack up their equipment and immediately vacate the area. Despite their best efforts, neither doctor Carvallio or Carlos Mendez were able to find any official word from the Brazilian military or government as to what they had or hadn't discovered during
the four month operation. Within a few more months, the reported sightings of weird objects and lights in the sky, named chupa chupa by the locals meaning succor succor, became fewer and further between. By March nineteen seventy eight, they had all but stopped, as the local community was left alone to try and come to terms with what had been experienced. Over the many years that followed, the stories soon dissolved into local legend, and so it would remain
for the next two decades. It was sometime in June nineteen ninety seven when Adela mar javert Co, editor of zis Ufo magazine, received a surprise phone call from Captain Hollander of the Brazilian Air Force. Hollander, who had become an avid reader of Gavard's magazine, congratulated the stunned ufologist on his diligent work and reassured him that he was on the right path. But what Hollanda said next sent
a genuine chill down his spine. For twenty years, he said, he had been forced to keep a secret, but now he was retired, he didn't want to keep it anymore. He asked finally if adelmar wanted to know what really happened on that top secret excursion to Corrales Island in nineteen seventy seven. Days later, a nervous and excited Chavert, along with his co editor Marco Petit, traveled to Hollander's home in a wealthy suburb of Cabo Freyo in the
state of Rio de Janeiro. Prior to arriving, the pair had not quite been sure what to expect of the mythical captain, whose top secret mission had taken on a heart of darkness level of mystique. They were soon relieved, however, to find him, although a little shorter than they had expected, in complete possession of all the mental faculties one might expect of a man with such significant military experience, and what he told them in the course of two extraordinary
hours would change their lives forever. It was true that the Brazilian government had indeed sent him and his men to Kraals to investigate the apparent UFO's sightings, and that they had abruptly ended the investigation after four seemingly fruitless months of research. It had even been given a formal name, operasone Prato, meaning Operation Saucer. What wasn't true was that
they hadn't found anything. Not only had they recorded over fifteen hours of film footage as well as five hundred photographs of UFOs, Hollander had seen them himself, a variety of objects in the sky, some as much as one hundred meters in diameter, one coming clearly into view above his team before flying out eastwards over the Atlantic. He even claimed to have one night been visited by a pilot of one of the crafts. A powerful flash of light had lit up his bunk, revealing a creature about
one and a half meter's tour standing behind him. It was dressed in what looked like a diving suit with a gray mask, and it spoke only to reassure him that they meant no harm. Next, Hollander offered his arm to Petit's video camera. See here, he said, as he poked and prodded at the skin. They put this inside me. Petite and Gavard looked on in shock, seeing clearly that
there was indeed something buried in the captain's forearm. The researchers turned to each other in stunned disbelief as the aging captain sat back, exhaling a long, deep breath, as if, like the ancient mariner, he had suddenly been released from a huge and intense burden. Shavert and Petite thanked Hollander for his time, and Julie made their way back home, barely able to fathom what they had just heard. The pair published Herlande's story in July nineteen ninety seven, to
little fanfare outside of the wider eufology community. It was immediately denied by the Brazilian government and military. It was three months later when Captain Herlande's daughter, who had not heard from her father in a few days, arrived at his home to check up on him. After repeatedly shouting for him and receiving no reply, she opened the bedroom door to find the veteran's lifeless body slumped down against the back wall. His bath robe belt used as a
makeshift noose, was wrapped around his neck. Despite an official verdict of suicide, many were quick to suggest that there may have been more to Herlander's death than seemed coming, as it did so soon after he had spoken out about Operation Saucer. Ufologist adel Mar Javert dismissed the accusation, however, believing instead that Horlander's actions were in keeping with a man who had struggled with depression for much of his life.
It was testament to what Chavert and Petite saw as Horlander's bravery in coming forward that they doubled down on their search for the truth about what exactly occurred in that remote fishing community in nineteen seventy seven after launching a request of information. In March two thousand and four, after years of denials, the Brazilian government reluctantly admitted that
a UFO investigation had indeed taken place after all. In May two thousand and five, Chevert and Petite traveled to the headquarters of the Brazilian military in Brazilia, where they were granted the opportunity to view a number of documents pertaining to the investigation, including diagrams drawn by Captain Hollander himself detailing his own personal sightings, as well as a
selection of photographs taken during the investigation. Although there remains no clear evidence to reveal exactly what had taken place. What is true is that the majority of the operation source of file remains to this day classified. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now go to Unexplained podcast dot com, Forward slash support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me,
Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes. Feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter at Unexplained Pod. Now it's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you, Tell a doc gives you access to a licensed therapist to
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