UFO Over the Water, Palmas, Brazil (2001)
In 22 March 2001, near Palmas, Tocantins (Tocantins River / Lajeado reservoir), two people, named in the report as Vinicius da Silva and Marta Rosenthal, were driving home from a day of fishing on the Tocantins River near Palmas, in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins, on 22 March 2001 at about 18:00. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at Palmas?
Two people, named in the report as Vinicius da Silva and Marta Rosenthal, were driving home from a day of fishing on the Tocantins River near Palmas, in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins, on 22 March 2001 at about 18:00. They felt a bump in one of the car tires. Thinking he had a flat, da Silva stopped the vehicle and got out to check it. He found nothing wrong with the tire. Then he heard Rosenthal screaming. She was pointing to the right side of the road.
A few meters away, hovering low over the water, was a metallic object with small windows along its edge. Standing outside the object, on a ledge, was a humanoid figure about 1.30 meters tall. In the original wording logged by the researcher, the figure "was holding something resembling a hose and was apparently sucking water from the river and into the craft." After roughly two minutes the humanoid pulled the hose back up out of the river and re-entered the object. The craft then "became very bright and shot away horizontally into the sky."
That is the entire reported event. It is a roadside close encounter of the third kind: a craft, an occupant, and an action (drawing up water) observed at close range for about two minutes. There is no reported missing time, no physical trace recovered, no landing, and crucially no photograph or video. The flat-tire-that-was-not-flat detail is the only odd physical element, and the witnesses themselves did not tie it causally to the object. Note one wrinkle in the chain of custody: the source record lists "Number of Witnesses: 1" even though it names two people present, which is the kind of small inconsistency that survives when a case passes through a compiler rather than a first-hand interview transcript.
A word on the location, because the working title of this file calls it a UFO "over the ocean." It was not over the ocean. Palmas is the capital of Tocantins, in the geographic heart of Brazil, hundreds of kilometers from any coast. The water in question is the Tocantins River, which around Palmas was in the process of becoming a very large artificial lake: the Lajeado hydroelectric dam (Usina Hidreletrica Luis Eduardo Magalhaes) was impounding its reservoir in exactly this 2001 to 2002 window, widening the river into a body of open water broad enough to be mistaken in a caption for a sea. The "ocean" label is a downstream repost error, not part of the primary account, and the file is filed under its true setting: an inland river encounter.
What is the official explanation?
There is no official narrative for this case, and that absence is the single most important fact about its evidentiary weight. No air force unit logged it, no police report is referenced, no civil aviation body, and no Brazilian government UFO file (the kind later released through the "UFOs: Freedom of Information Now" campaign that Revista UFO and the Brazilian Commission of Ufologists ran from 2005 onward) names Palmas on this date. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969 and never had jurisdiction in Brazil regardless. There is, in short, no official apparatus to quote here, neither one that investigated nor one that debunked.
What exists instead is a civilian catalogue trail, and it is short and traceable. The earliest and only origin record is the entry in Albert S. Rosales's Humanoid Contact Database, hosted for years at iraap.org. The entry reads, field for field: "Location: Palmas, Tocantis, Brazil. Date: March 22 2001. Time: 1800," followed by the narrative, and then "HC addendum. Source: Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, Brazil. Type: B." Type B in Rosales's typology denotes an occupant seen entering or leaving a craft, which fits the hose-and-ledge action exactly. Rosales later folded the case into his published volume "Humanoid Encounters 2000-2009: The Others Amongst Us" (CreateSpace, 2015, 306 pages), so the record exists both online and in print under his name.
The named source, Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, is not anonymous and is worth identifying precisely, because in a single-source case the credibility of the case is largely the credibility of the man who logged it. Ticchetti, born 5 February 1975, joined the Entidade Brasileira de Estudos Extraterrestres (EBE-ET) in 1997 and has been on the staff of Revista UFO, Brazil's main ufology magazine, since that year as co-editor, translator and columnist. He went on to become president of the Brazilian Commission of Ufologists (CBU), national director of MUFON in Brazil, and after Ademar Gevaerd's death in 2022, editor of Revista UFO itself. The "EBE-ET" tag on the original entry dates the report to his EBE-ET period. So the provenance is a named, active, institutionally embedded Brazilian researcher feeding a case to a named American cataloguer. That is a real chain. It is also a thin one: it is a logged report, not a documented investigation, and nothing in the public record shows that the witnesses were interviewed on the record, that the site was visited, or that any independent party confirmed the account.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Witnesses named only as Vinicius da Silva and Marta Rosenthal; no biographical detail, no follow-up testimony, and no corroborating witnesses are recoverable from the record.
Is the UFO Over the Water, Palmas, Brazil (2001) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the ordinary readings, and there are several that fit comfortably. The most economical is simple misperception at dusk over new water. This was 18:00 in late March near the equator, so the light was going. The Tocantins at Palmas was at that very moment swelling into the Lajeado reservoir, a wide, glassy, recently flooded expanse that reflects sky, vehicle lights, and riverbank activity in ways an unfamiliar shoreline does not. A boat, a dredge, a pumping rig, or fishing equipment working that new water at distance, seen for the first time across an unfamiliar reflective surface, can read as a hovering metallic object with a figure and a hose, particularly to two tired people who have just had a startling tire bump. A second ordinary reading is that the report is embellished or invented at some point in the chain, witnesses, local correspondent, or in translation, which a single-source testimonial case can never fully exclude. Against an outright hoax, though, is the account's flatness: a fabricator usually reaches for drama, and "it sucked up some water and left" is about as undramatic as a saucer story gets. There is no physical evidence to test either way, no photo to analyze, no trace, no instrument record, so no ordinary explanation can be confirmed and none can be ruled out. The honest summary of pass one is that the event is fully consistent with a misidentification at the waterline that grew slightly in the retelling, and that this is unprovable.
Pass two, taking it at face value. If real, this is a low, close, brief CE-III in which a small crewed craft drew water from a river and departed at speed, the occupant standing about 1.30 meters tall. It would belong to the well-attested South American sub-genre of "water-collection" UFO reports and would be modest as such cases go: short duration, no interaction with the witnesses, no aftereffects. Nothing in the account is internally impossible, and the witnesses asked for nothing, claimed nothing grand, and disappeared without building a career on it, which is the behavior pattern of people who saw something rather than people selling something.
The deciding factor for the tier is not which story is true but how much can be verified, and the answer is almost nothing. Two sources carry the case to the required standard: Albert Rosales's IRAAP Humanoid Contact Database entry and his published 2015 volume, both crediting Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, a real and identifiable Brazilian researcher. That clears the two-source floor for traceability. But it is one report from one originating source, with no photograph, no document, no official file, no physical trace, and no corroborating witness. There is no counter-explanation strong enough to dispute (so this is not Disputed) and no authentication strong enough to call it Verified Unexplained. It is an uncorroborated, well-attributed, image-less close encounter that stands entirely on two named witnesses and the researcher who logged them. That is the definition of Unknown: no official narrative exists, and the case rests on testimony alone. Tier: Unknown.
Sources
- www.ufocasebook.com/2001brazil.html
- web.archive.org/web/20081121094009/http://iraap.org/rosales/2001.htm
- web.archive.org/web/20090305095036/http://iraap.org/rosales/
- thinkaboutitdocs.com/palmas-tocantis-brazil-03-22-2001/
- books.google.com/books/about/Humanoid_Encounters_2000_2009.html?id=nPCQjgEACAAJ
- www.calameo.com/books/005239657809d30f334c6
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Brazil
