UFO? Satellite? Bat-signal? What are the strange lights in the sky of Porto Alegre

For five consecutive days, the skies of Porto Alegre have intrigued pilots, specialists and the curious in general. Since the 4th, a Friday night, reports and footage of lights over the city have been circulating, including pilots of different aircraft who witnessed the phenomenon at the same time.

On Twitter, the search for the term UFO (an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO) has already resulted in a feast of images from Rio Grande do Sul in recent days.

The hypotheses pointed out by experts consulted by the Sheet go far from claiming that extraterrestrials are hovering over gaucho lands. For physicists and engineers, the most likely diagnosis is too many people paying attention to everyday celestial phenomena at the same time.

So far, the most controversial episode is that of the 4th, when at around 11:30 pm Commander Daniel Medina Guimarães landed in Porto Alegre on a Gol flight from Brasília. When talking to the tower, Guimarães learned that the previous pilot, on a TAM flight, had reported the same phenomenon.

In an interview with the GZH website, Guimarães reported having witnessed intense lights with colors “at certain times, a very vivid white, and at certain times, lights in a mixed color between red and green”, appearing at intervals of a few minutes. .

At first, the commander himself thought it was a satellite, but the circular movements would be different from the trajectory of this type of equipment. By flying at 11,000 meters and perceiving the light a little above, he calculated that the beam was about 13 or 14,000 meters above the ground.

Fraport, the concessionaire responsible for Salgado Filho Airport, and the Brazilian Air Force do not report anything unusual in the city’s sky, either on the date or later.

Responsible for a space observatory in Taquara (RS), 80 km from Porto Alegre, engineer Carlos Fernando Jung has records of light circulating in the sky near that time.

He cannot say whether what the pilots witnessed is the same phenomenon, but he is convinced that his record is that of an effect caused by a light cannon pointed at the sky – event producers call these luminous equipment sky light, that emit beams up to 7 km high. They are a kind of “bat-signal” in motion.

According to Jung, the light from one of these devices can “bounce” on the clouds, rise and cause the optical illusion of a point of light moving above the pilots. The hypothesis would explain the circular movements and the color variation, which occurs in contact with different points in the atmosphere.

The source of the cannon could be some event that occurred on the shores of Lake Guaíba. The following day, for example, the opening show of a real estate development in the region used several of them.

From the report of the 4th, others came and many videos emerged. However, none particularly intriguing to scientists. Invited to analyze some of them, Luiz Fernando Macedo Morescki Junior, physicist and professor of astronomy at the IFSC (Federal Institute of Santa Catarina), in Jaraguá do Sul (SC), did not rule out the possibility of a satellite in orbit for any of them.

“Satellites are not sources of light, they are illuminated by the sun. Depending on the position in which one of them is, it gets stronger or weaker, giving the impression that it is a light that goes off and on”, explains the professor.

Willing to put order in what is happening in the sky of Porto Alegre, Jung created a timeline with reports, videos and other images of the phenomena. What has surfaced so far are images of people impressed by what he observes on a daily basis — and a few pitfalls.

On a Tuesday night footage of pilots, for example, of an illuminated sphere, the engineer claims with almost 100% certainty that it is Mars. A video from Torres (RS), on the north coast, on the same night, appears to be someone trying to play a prank with a drone.

For Marcelo Girardi Schappo, physicist, author of the book “Camoufladas de Ciência” and pilot, it is difficult for the Gol commander’s report to allow a safe conclusion because the references when flying are unreliable.

Thus, something that appears to be above may actually be below, something that disappears may have just been covered up, and something that changes color may be an effect of the interaction of light with the chemical elements that are in the atmosphere at that moment, as in an aurora. boreal.

“I see a lot in the ufological argument: ‘if nobody can explain it, then it’s aliens.’ All the other conventional possibilities are much more likely, like meteors, bright planets with clouds moving in front of them, electrical discharges, reflections from searchlights, drones etc.”, emphasizes Schappo.

“All are well known and documented, and that’s why we talk about them, even if the images don’t allow us to conclude with precision in favor of any of them”, says the professor.