The Alagamar Photograph, Natal
On the morning of 26 November 2006, former Brazilian military man Roberto Di Sena snapped casual digital photos of the sky over Alagamar on the edge of Natal and noticed nothing unusual. When he downloaded the frames, one of them held a small white domed disc hanging over the rooftops, an image that A. J. Gevaerd's Brazilian UFO Magazine took seriously enough to put through formal analysis.
What did witnesses see at Alagamar?
The photograph shows a bright blue late-morning sky with scattered cumulus over a working-class Natal neighborhood: a long perimeter wall, tiled rooftops, and palms framing the lower edge of the frame. Above the cloud line sits a compact white disc with a visible dome, apparently metallic, captured in sharp focus. Di Sena took the picture with a Pentax Optio 60, a 6 megapixel compact camera, sometime between 8:30 and 10:00 AM local time. He saw nothing in the sky while shooting, took several pictures at random, deleted a few, and found the object only on the computer afterward. The circulating version carries his copyright watermark, Roberto Di Sena, Brazil, November 2006.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
No government body is known to have examined this photograph. The investigation that exists is civilian: A. J. Gevaerd, editor of Brazilian UFO Magazine and head of the Brazilian Center for Flying Saucer Research (CBPDV), collected the case and commissioned analysis. That a national ufology organization with decades of standing logged, analyzed, and published the image is the extent of the official-adjacent record.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Roberto Di Sena, a former member of the Brazilian military living in the Alagamar area on the periphery of Natal. He presented the image openly under his own name, cooperated with Gevaerd's investigation, and made no claim to have seen the object with his own eyes, which cuts both ways: it removes any sighting testimony but also removes any motive-laden story built around the frame. No hostile testimony against him is on record.
Is the Alagamar Photograph, Natal real? The two-pass assessment
First pass, the case at face value: a named, traceable witness with a military background, a dated original file from a known camera, prompt submission to Brazil's main ufology organization, and a formal analysis. Engineer Claudeir Covo, one of Brazil's most experienced photo analysts, examined the primary image and concluded the object was genuinely in the air and not a small nearby object like a hubcap. Gevaerd himself first suspected a copy and paste composite from an older UFO photo and reports that he ruled that out. Second pass, the limits: this is a single anomalous frame that nobody saw with the naked eye, which leaves the field of mundane candidates wide open, a bird, a balloon, a thrown or wind-carried object frozen by a fast shutter, or an insect, none of which can be excluded from one frame with no witness observation. No named analyst has published a method-based debunk of this specific image, so there is nothing on the counter-evidence side of the ledger either, but Gevaerd's own investigation was reported as ongoing and no final published resolution has surfaced in the years since. Verdict: an intriguing, well-provenanced orphan frame that was never resolved in either direction. Unknown.
Sources
- www.ufocasebook.com/photosbrazil.html
- www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/ufo-over-alagamar-brazil-2006/
- www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1042.htm
- futurescience.org/natal-brazil-most-recent-ufo-sighting/
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Brazil
