Brazil’s National Archive has quietly opened one of the largest public UFO paper trails in the world, with material on 893 sightings dating back to 1952, and the archive itself says most of them probably have ordinary explanations.
The Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro put the collection online in late May 2025, reportedly ahead of a planned June 13 release date, which surprised even insiders. It includes photos, audio recordings, drawings, and written reports, arranged by the date of the incident from 1952 through 2023. For anyone who follows UFO disclosure, it adds to the 700-plus Brazilian UFO files released in 2018 and sits alongside the US government’s own recent release of 162 declassified files.
How to Get Into the Files
The cases live in the archive’s SIAN system. Researchers register for an account, choose the category for unidentified flying objects, and browse case by case. An English version of the site exists, though most of the documents are in Portuguese. The archive also invites the public to contribute their own material.
The Archive’s Own Caveat
The archive describes the collection as an unevaluated set of sighting reports. Including a case says nothing about the nature of what was seen, and it expects that most of the cases could be explained by conventional causes. That is refreshingly honest, and it is also a reminder that a big archive is only as valuable as the pattern work done on it.
Analysis of all 893 cases will take time, so for now the collection is raw material. Anyone patient enough to read Portuguese case files has a rare chance to compare decades of sightings from a single country, in the original paperwork, without waiting for a documentary to summarize it.
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