Date:
January 16, 1958
Location: Trindade Island, Brazil
Trindade,
a small rocky island in the middle of the South Atlantic
Ocean 600 miles off the coast of Bahia, Brazil, was the
site of one of the most impressive photographic cases
in UFO history.
Source:
STUDIOVNI/Jerome Clark (CUFOS)
By
Jerry Clark (Center for UFO Studies)
Trindade,
a small rocky island in the middle of the South Atlantic
Ocean 600 miles off the coast of Bahia, Brazil, was the
site of one of the most impressive photographic cases
in UFO history.
In
October 1957 the Brazilian Navy set up a small scientific
base on the unoccupied island, where oceanographic and
meteorological research would be conducted in connection
with the International Geophysical Year. Starting early
the next month, instrument-bearing weather balloons were
launched daily. They were designed to explode in the upper
atmosphere, releasing the instrument packages which would
parachute to earth to be retrieved by the researchers.
By the end of the month base personnel were reporting
silvery UFOs which seemed to be monitoring the balloons
movements.
On
January 1,1958, at 7:50 A.M., the passage of a bright
point of light, like a mirror reflecting sunlight, was
observed by the entire garrison. The next evening a round
object with an orange glow circled the Navy tow ship Triunfo
traveling off the Bahian coast 400 miles from Trindade.
As the crew watched, the UFO executed sudden right-angle
turns and at other times hovered near the ship. The sighting
lasted for 10 minutes.
The
most fantastic event occurred on the sixth. The bases
chief officer, Cmdr. Carlos A. Bacellar, had just overseen
the launching of a weather balloon into a morning sky
clear of everything but a single large cumulus cloud at
14,000 feet. Inside the radio cabin Bacellar listened
to the signals the balloon emitted as it ascended. Suddenly
those signals inexplicably diminished, then went dead.
When
Bacellar went outside to investigate, he saw nothing out
of the ordinary, at least at first. The balloon was ascending
normallyuntil it came directly below the cloud,
at which point it seemed to be sucked abruptly upward.
For the next 10 minutes it remained out of sight and inside
the cloud. Finally, when it reappeared, it was above the
cloud and devoid of the instrument package.
Soon
a silvery object emerged from behind the cloud. As it
moved slowly from the southwest to the east, a technician
gazing through a theodolite spotted it and alerted the
commander, who viewed it briefly through binoculars, then
through a sextant. Crescent-shaped and bright white in
color, the object reversed course at one point and remained
in sight for some time before it entered a cloud bank
(Fontes, 1960).
The
photographs
Later
[16JAN58], at 12:15 P.M., as the Almirante Saldanha sat
anchored off the south coast of Trindade and prepared
for a return trip to Rio de Janeiro, 48 crew members and
passengers spotted an object approaching the island. Among
the witnesses was Almiro Barauna, a civilian who had been
brought along because of his skill in underwater photography.
Barauna gave this account to João Martins of the
magazine 0 Cruzeiro:
I
had my Rolleiflex 2.8-model E, which was kept inside an
aluminum box for protection against the corrosive effects
of water and salt. I had left my Leica with a telephoto
lens in my cabin a few minutes before. The deck was full
of sailors and officers. Suddenly Mr. Amilar Vieira and
[retired Air Force] Capt. [José Teobaldo] Viegas
called to me, pointing to a certain spot in the sky and
yelling about a bright object which was approaching the
island.
At
this same moment, when I was still trying to see what
it was, Lt. Homero [Ribeiro] the ships dentistcame
from the bow toward us, running, pointing to the sky and
also yelling about an object he was sighting. He was so
disturbed and excited that he almost fell down after colliding
with a cable. Then I was finally able to locate the object,
by the flash it emitted. It was already close to the island.
It
glittered at certain moments, perhaps reflecting the sunlight,
perhaps changing its own light I dont know.
It was coming over the sea, moving toward the point called
the Galo Crest. I had lost 30 seconds looking for the
object, but the camera was already in my hands, ready,
when I sighted it clearly silhouetted against the clouds.
I shot two photos before it disappeared behind Desejado
Peak. My camera was set at speed 125, with the aperture
at f/8, and this was the cause of an overexposure error,
as I discovered later.
The
object remained out of sight for a few seconds behind
the peak reappearing bigger in size and flying in
the opposite direction, but lower and closer than before,
and moving at a higher speed. I shot the third photo.
The fourth and fifth ones were lost, not only because
of the speed the saucer was moving, but also for another
reason: in the confusion produced as a result of the sighting,
I was being pulled and pushed by other persons also trying
to spot the object and, as a consequence, photographed
the sea and the island onlynot the object. It was
moving again toward the sea, in the direction from which
it had come, and it appeared to stop in mid-air for a
brief time. At that moment I shot my last photo (the last
on the film). After about 10 seconds, the object continued
to increase its distance from the ship, gradually diminishing
in size and finally disappearing into the horizon [ibid.].
The
object was gray, metallic, and solid-looking, though surrounded
by a greenish haze or mist. With a ring running through
its midsection, it resembled a flattened version of the
planet Saturn.
Badly
shaken by the experience, Barauna removed the film from
the camera almost immediately but delayed processing it
for an hour. Finally he and Capt. Viegas entered the ships
darkroom together, while Cmdr. Bacellar (who had not been
on deck when the sighting occurred) waited outside the
door. Ten minutes later Barauna showed the wet negatives
to Bacellar (there was no photographic paper available)
and said that it looked as if the UFOs image had
not been picked up. The commander examined the negatives
carefully and spotted the image. Subsequently, the other
witnesses stated that the object in the photographs was
the one they observed ("New Evidence," 1965).
Aftermath
Barauna
took the negatives with him to Rio and processed them
in his own laboratory. Shortly afterwards Bacellar showed
up at Baraunas home to look at the developed photographs,
which he then took to the Navy Ministry. Two days later
he returned them, and shortly thereafter Barauna was summoned
to naval headquarters, where high-ranking officers grilled
him. The Ministry sent his negatives to the Cruzeiro do
Sul Aerophotogrammetric Service for analysis. They were
declared genuine. In short order Brazils President,
Juscelino Kubitschek, ordered them released to the press.
In
the days ahead some of the witnesses gave interviews to
newspapers. On the twenty-second Cmdr. Paulo Moreira da
Silva of the Brazilian Navys Hydrography and Navigation
Service stated that the "object was not a meteorological
balloon, for the one we had launched that day was released
at 9 A.M., two [sic] hours before the appearance of the
object in the sky... . Also it was not a guided missile
from the United States because the island of Trindade
is off the route of those rockets."
Olavo
T. Fontes, a well-connected Rio physician who represented
the Tucson-based Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(A.P.R.O.), learned of the incident from naval informants
on February 4. On the evening of the fourteenth, at the
Navy Ministry, he was shown five photographs. He did not
know then that the fifth had been taken earlier than the
first four (Baraunas photographs), and to this day
little is known about this picture. Fontes believed it
was taken by a Navy sergeant in late December at Desejado
Peak on the island (Lorenzen, 1962).
A
naval source later told Fontes that the day before Barauna
took his pictures, the Almirante Saldanhas radar
had tracked an unknown object. At 2:30 A.M. on the sixteenth,
less than 10 hours before the Barauna sighting, Ezio Azevedo
Fundao, chief of surgery at a Rio hospital, and members
of his family saw a Saturn-shaped UFO off the coast of
Brazil, in the direction of Trindade. At approximately
the same time the same or an identical object was observed
from the deck of the Tridente, a Navy tow ship.
On
February 23 Paulo M. Campos, a reporter for Diario Carioca,
citing an unnamed but "best possible" source,
wrote that "more than the sighting of the flying
saucer itself, what really made a deep impression on the
Navy was the report that instruments like radio transmitters,
and apparatus with magnetic needles, ceased operating
while the flying object remained in the islands
proximity. The Navy decided to
consider
this a top-secret fact." When he checked with his
own sources, Fontes could get neither confirmation nor
denial of this alleged aspect of the event. (In a 1983
interview Barauna recalled that just prior to the UFOs
appearance all of the electrical power on the ship had
failed [Smith, 1983].)
After
Brazils House of Representatives demanded further
information from the Navy, it was given a secret report
on the official investigation. The document was leaked
in October 1964 to Coral Lorenzen, director of APRO. After
reviewing the various sightings and the January 16 photographs,
its author, Corvette-Capt. Jose Geraldo Brandao, concluded
that the "existence of personal reports and of photographic
evidence, of certain value considering the circumstance
involved [absence of evidence of tampering, the presence
of other witnesses], permit the admission that there are
indications of the existence of unidentified aerial objects."
He also noted the "strong emotional upset . . . in
all persons who sighted the object, including the photographer,
civilians, and members of the ships crew" ("New
Evidence," op. cit.).
A
hoax?
On
November 27, 1959, Donald H. Menzel, a Harvard University
astronomer and UFO debunker, wrote Richard Hall of the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
to report his "tentative conclusion" concerning
the object in the Trindade photograph:
I
have in my possession one well-authenticated case of a
saturn-like object, whose nature is known and clearly
distinguishable in this particular instance. A plane,
flying in a humid but apparently super-cooled atmosphere,
became completely enveloped in fog, so about all one could
see was a division where the stream lines were flowing
up and down respectively over and under the wings. The
cabin made a saturn-like spot in the center, and the wings
closely resembled the appearance of the Brazilian photographs.
The
Trindade objects speed and sprightly maneuvers were
explainable, Menzel claimed, as an illusion created by
the reflection of sunlight on the plane.
But
four years later, in The World of Flying Saucers, Menzel
publicly declared the case a hoax, charging that Barauna
had faked the photographs via double exposure in collusion
with an associate (Menzel and Boyd, 1963). He wrote, without
mentioning newspaper articles and official reports to
the contrary, that when reporters had a "chance to
interview the officers and crewmen who allegedly had observed
the Trindade saucer and could support Baraunas story...
[n]one of them had actually seen the object." In
fact, in 1959 Hall had provided Menzel with a translation
of a March 8, 1958, O Cruzeiro article which names several
of the witnesses (Hall, 1959).
Menzel
reprints a Brazilian Navy press release, but when the
original and Menzels version are compared, some
significant discrepancies become apparent. In the latter
three words are added and six left out.
The
original reads: "Evidently, this Ministry cannot
make any statement about the object sighted over the island
of Trindade, for the photographs do not constitute enough
evidence for such a purpose." Menzel renders it thus:
"Clearly, this Ministry cannot make any statement
about the reality of the object, for the photos do not
constitute enough evidence for such a purpose." Whereas
the first statement acknowledges an object and a sighting,
the second implies that their reality is open to question
hardly the Brazilian Navys intention.
Menzels
attack continues in his next book, The UFO Emgma, wherein
though citing no source he outlines the
"extremely simple" method that he claimed was
used to fake the photographs. "In the privacy of
his home," Menzel writes, "the photographer
had snapped a series of pictures of a model UFO against
a black background. He then reloaded the camera with the
same film and took pictures of the scenery in the ordinary
fashion. When the film was developed, there was the saucer
hanging in the sky." Menzel seems to have woven this
story out of whole cloth. He also repeats the unfounded
allegation that "no one else, except a friend (and
presumed accomplice), had seen the disk flying overhead"
(Menzel and Taves, 1977).
Though
the U.S. Navy, which had expressed interest in the case
at the time of its occurrence (Fontes, op. cit.), refused
public comment, in a 1963 letter Maj. Carl R. Hart of
the U.S. Air Forces Project Blue Book quoted from
an Office of Naval Intelligence report: "This gentleman
[Barauna] has a long history of photographic trick shots.
. . . [He prepared a purposely humorous article, published
in a magazine, entitled A Flying Saucer Hunted Me
at Home, using trick photography" (Hart, 1963).
It should be noted that the article was a debunking piece
intended to show how a much-publicized 1952 Brazilian
flying-saucer photograph was created (Smith, op. cit.).
In
1978 an Arizona-based group, Ground Saucer Watch (GSW),
which specialized in analysis of purported UFO photographs
(and which had rejected most as phony), subjected good-quality
prints to a computer-processing technique, focusing on
edge enhancement, color-contouring, picture-cell distortion,
and digitizing. GSWs specialists came to these conclusions:
The
UFO image is over 50 feet in diameter. The UFO image in
each case reveals a vast distance from the photographer/camera.
The photographs show no signs of hoax (i.e., a hand-thrown
or suspended model). The UFO image is reflecting light
and passed all computer tests for an image with substance.
The image represents no known type of aircraft or experimental
balloon. Digital densitometry reveals a metallic reflection.
We are of the unanimous opinion that the Brazilian photos
are authentic and represent an extraordinary flying object
of unknown origin [Hewes, 1979].
Given
the number of witnesses, the results of photoanalyses
both military and civilian (Hopf, 1960), and the need
for debunkers to reinvent the incident to "explain"
it, it seems most unlikely that the Trindade photographs
were hoaxed.
Sources:
Fontes,
Olavo T. "The UAO Sightings at the Island of Trindade."
The A.P.R.O. Bulletin Pt. I (January 1960): 5-9; Pt. II
(March 1960): 5-8; Pt. III (May 1960): 4-8.
Hall,
Richard H. Letter to Donald H. Menzel (November 2,1959).
Hall, Richard H., ed. The UFO Evidence. Washington, DC:
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena,
1964.
Hart,
Carl R. Letter to Richard H. Hall (January 24, 1963).
Hewes,
Hayden. "The Mystery Disk over Trindade Island."
UFO Report 7,1 (February 1979): 18-19,58.
Hopf,
John T. "Exclusive IGY Photo Analysis." The
A.P.R.0. Bulletin (May 1960): 1,4.
"IGY
Team Snaps UFO." The A.P.R.O. Bulletin (March 1958):
1,6.
Lorenzen,
Coral E. The Great Flying Saucer Hoax: The UFO Facts and
Their Interpretation. New York: William-Frederick Press,
1962. Revised edition as Flying Saucers: The Startling
Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space. New York: New
American Library, 1966.
"Brazilian
Official Report on the Trindade UFO." Fate 18,3 (March
1965): 38-48.
Menzel,
Donald H. Letter to Richard H. Hall (November 27, 1959).
Menzel, Donald H., and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying
Saucers:A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the
Space Age.Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1963.
Menzel,
Donald H., and Ernest H. Taves. The UFO Enigma: The Definitive
Explanation of the UFO Phenomenon. Garden City, NY: Doubleday
and Company, 1977.
"New
Evidence on IGY Photos." The A.P.R..0. Bulletin (January
1965): 1,3-8.
Smith,
Willy. "Trindade Revisited." International UFO
Reporter 8,4 (July/August 1983): 3-5,14.
"UFOs
in Latin America." In Hilary Evans with John Spencer,
eds. UFOs 1947-1987: The 40-Year Search for an Explanation,
97-113. London: Fortean Times, 1987.
"UFO
Photo Certified by Brazilian Navy Labeled a Hoax by USAF."
The UF0 Investigator 1,10 (July/August 1960): 3.
*
By permission of the author. Clark, J. "Trindade
Island Photographs." The UFO Encyclopedia: The phenomenon
from the beginning (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 898-903). Detroit,
MI: Omnigraphics, Inc. 1998
Source:
http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case254.htm