UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 05 · AUGUST 7, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · EOP-UAP-D001NASC Inquiry into Bahia, Brazil Incident, November 13, 1963
This one-page item shows how a sensational foreign news story reached the White House in 1963. It is a Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) transcript — the CIA’s service for monitoring and translating foreign radio and press — of a Rio de Janeiro radio broadcast about a supposed crash in Brazil, kept among the papers of Edward C. Welsh, who ran the National Aeronautics and Space Council as its executive secretary.
What the broadcast claimed
According to the transcript, Radio Tupi reported on the night of 8 November 1963 that a large metal sphere had fallen in the middle of the town of Conde, in Bahia state, gouging a hole four meters deep. The sphere was said to have window-like openings covered with thick glass and, inside, a human body in heavy clothing marked with inscriptions nobody could read. The item adds only that local people were intrigued and the authorities informed. It records the broadcast, not any check of it.
What happened next
Handwritten notes dated 13 November record the council asking a State Department official to have the U.S. Embassy in Rio confirm the story locally. The embassy’s reply, sent the next day, is DOS-UAP-D001: it reported that an object assessed as a weather balloon had been seen in the area but that no such object had been found to have crashed.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released August 7, 2026, quoted in full
This document is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) wire report dated November 9, 1963, tracking a local Portuguese-language radio broadcast from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, regarding an alleged crash of a “large metal sphere” containing a deceased occupant in Conde, Bahia, Brazil. This FBIS report is excerpted from the files of Edward C. Welsh, Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC). NASC was a cabinet-level advisory body within the Executive Office of the President responsible for coordinating U.S. space policy from 1958 to 1973.
Handwritten annotations dated November 13, 1963, document a communication between officials at NASC and the U.S. Department of State. The note records a NASC request to a State Department official to query the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro for local verification of the reporting. This inter-agency request precedes a subsequent diplomatic cable sent by the Embassy the following day, cataloged in this collection under the title “DOS-UAP-D001.”