The Fort Itaipu Incident
The account
A glowing object hovered over the fort before dawn and burned two sentries with a wave of heat.
What investigators found
No public military document confirms the episode, which is known mainly through Olavo Fontes's account published in the United States.
The story
In the early hours of November 4, 1957, at around two in the morning, two soldiers on guard duty at the Itaipu Fortress in Praia Grande supposedly saw orange lights approaching at high speed. One of them descended and hovered over the fort. Then the sentries felt intense heat, their clothes were damaged and they suffered burns. One of them reportedly fainted, and the base's lights went out.
The story reached the public through ufologist Olavo Fontes, who published it in 1959 in the bulletin of APRO, an American civilian research group. Fontes said he had heard it from military men who asked for secrecy. The Army never released any record of the case, and the soldiers' names are unconfirmed. Without documents, the episode remains one of the most cited and least verifiable in Brazilian ufology.