Flying to Colares, Pará | Chinook Coastal Transit | Operação Prato Context

Описание: This is a coastal flight north to Colares, Pará, Brazil, in a CH-47 Chinook.

The departure point for this run is SJNA (Clube de Esportes Aéreos e Náuticos do Pará Airport) near Belém. From there I take the long way, tracking the coastline north until Colares comes into view. I prefer flights that earn the destination. No instant spawn, no jump cuts pretending distance does not exist. Just a real route, a steady pace, and time for the mind to settle.

Colares is best known for a wave of incidents in 1977 and 1978 that went far beyond the usual “light in the sky” report. Residents across parts of Pará, including Colares Island and nearby areas, described repeated night-time encounters with strange aerial lights that appeared to move with intent. Locals gave the phenomenon a name: “Chupa-Chupa.” In witness accounts, the lights were not distant stars. They were low, close, persistent, and sometimes described as projecting beams. Some people reported physical symptoms afterward such as weakness, dizziness, nausea, and small marks. Whether every detail was accurate in every case is impossible to prove decades later, but the collective effect was real: fear spread, routines changed, and people began to organise their nights around avoiding whatever was out there.

It escalated to the point that the Brazilian Air Force launched an investigation known as Operação Prato (Operation Saucer). The operation began in September 1977 and is widely described as continuing into 1978, gathering witness statements and reportedly documenting unusual aerial lights. This is one of the reasons Colares remains so discussed. It is not only a folk story. It became a matter of official attention.

I’m not including that context to claim a conclusion. I’m including it because the atmosphere of the time still makes sense to me. In the late 1970s I lived in Guyana, and even though it is a different country, it is the same broad region. Stories like this do not respect borders. They move through people, through workers, through military channels, through rumour networks, and through the quiet ways fear travels when something feels abnormal and unresolved.

I also witnessed incidents in Guyana that people around me attributed to the same “Chupa-Chupa” phenomenon, including livestock losses. In my case, that meant pigs found dead in circumstances locals took seriously and spoke about in the same tone as the Colares reports. Again, I’m not presenting that as laboratory-grade proof of any one explanation. I’m telling you the personal context: why this subject never felt like a distant internet mystery to me.

And one memory, in particular, has never faded. In 1978, I watched a UFO above the treeline, moving with purpose toward a pig farm, while I stood at the officers’ quarters on the Pioneer military base called Pupaya. It was one of those moments where your body understands something before your mind finds the words. The treeline gives you scale. The direction of travel gives you intent. The stillness of the air makes the object feel louder than it should. Even now I can picture it cleanly, because the brain does not blur the edges of the things it decides are important.

That is why I am flying to Colares. Not to preach certainty, not to farm outrage, not to cosplay as an investigator. I’m flying there because it is a real location with a real history attached, and because the only honest way to approach a charged place is slowly. Along the coast. With time to think. With the world visible on both sides of the aircraft.

https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwik...