Revista UFO (Brazil)

History

Revista UFO is the principal Brazilian civilian UFO periodical, published since 1985 under the editorial direction of Ademar José Gevaerd. The magazine is produced by Editora UFO from offices in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, the geographic centre of Brazil and the historic operational base of Gevaerd's broader Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas de Discos Voadores (CBPDV). Across forty years of continuous publication, Revista UFO has functioned as the documentary record of South American UFO research, the principal vehicle for the public release of Brazilian Air Force investigation findings, and the Portuguese-language counterpart to the major Anglophone civilian-research traditions.

The magazine's editorial position has consistently combined three commitments. First, primary-source documentation of Brazilian field cases, with emphasis on government-record release and military-witness testimony. Second, sustained press engagement with the Brazilian Air Force (Força Aérea Brasileira), the source from which most major Brazilian disclosures of the 1990s and 2000s eventually emerged. Third, full coverage of the global UFO discourse in Portuguese translation, including the post-2017 American disclosure cycle and the Italian, French, and British civilian-research traditions.

1985 to 1996: The Foundational Period

The magazine's founding period overlapped with the Brazilian military's gradual movement from absolute secrecy to qualified engagement with the civilian-research community. Brazil's principal historical cases entered the international record largely through Revista UFO's documentation work: the Antonio Villas-Boas abduction of 15 October 1957, originally investigated by Dr. Olavo T. Fontes and brought into English-language coverage through APRO and Flying Saucer Review; the Trindade Island photographs of 16 January 1958, photographed by Almiro Baraúna aboard the Brazilian Navy training vessel Almirante Saldanha; the Operação Prato investigation conducted by the Brazilian Air Force in the Pará state archipelago between September 1977 and December 1977, which the FAB declassified through Gevaerd's CBPDV in 2005; and the multi-witness 1986 night flight over Brazilian airspace involving Embraer trainers and Mirage interceptors.

The 1996 Varginha incident of 20 January 1996 brought Revista UFO into the international mainstream press for the first time. The magazine's investigation, conducted by Gevaerd and team alongside the local Minas Gerais state police, produced the multi-witness documentary record that subsequent investigators (including American-side coverage by Stan Friedman) drew on extensively. The Varginha case was the most significant Brazilian civilian-witness incident of the post-Cold-War era and the most documented Latin American UFO incident in any English-language secondary literature.

1996 to 2010: The Government Engagement Period

Through the late 1990s and 2000s, Revista UFO developed a sustained working relationship with the Brazilian Air Force on the question of progressive declassification. The magazine's reporting documented the FAB's internal debates, the 2005 Operação Prato release, the 2008 acknowledgment by Brigadeiro José Carlos Pereira (the Air Force's then-public spokesman) that the FAB had been investigating UFOs continuously since the 1950s, and the December 2010 formal directive by Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim establishing the requirement that all military UFO reports be archived at the National Archive (Arquivo Nacional) within thirty days.

The Brazilian disclosure framework that emerged from these years is structurally distinct from both the American and the European models. Where the United States Air Force formally ended its UFO investigation programme in 1969 (Blue Book closure) and only re-engaged through AATIP from 2007 onwards, the Brazilian Air Force never formally closed its investigation function and instead progressively opened access to its accumulated holdings. The Revista UFO archive of the 1996 to 2010 period is the principal civilian-side documentary record of that distinctive Brazilian institutional engagement.

2017 onwards: The Disclosure Era

The post-2017 cycle, opened by the 16 December 2017 New York Times article and the subsequent US congressional hearings of 2022 to 2025, found Revista UFO already positioned as the established Brazilian translator and contextualiser of the broader disclosure-era discourse. The magazine's coverage from 2017 onwards has carried Portuguese translations of the David Grusch sworn testimony, the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act legislative history, the AARO Historical Record Report Volume I findings, and the Italian CISU and French SOS-OVNI civilian-research material.

The magazine's Brazilian-specific coverage in this period has documented the formal Senate hearings convened by Senator Eduardo Suplicy on the question of military UFO records in the early 2010s, the ongoing declassification programme through the National Archive, and the continued reporting of Brazilian Air Force pilot encounters along the Amazon basin and the northeastern coast.