The Zigzag Object: Gol Flight 9109 and Two Other Crews near Quixadá

Ceará, northeastern Brazil. The town of Quixadá sits about 170 km from Fortaleza, beneath the airliners descending into the state capital. For a decade, nobody outside the Brazilian Air Force knew what three crews had reported there one January day.

Then came August 2024. The Air Force's yearly transfer of pilot reports to the Arquivo Nacional brought roughly 30 of them to light, most from 2023. One was from 2014.

January 24, 2014. About 12:10. Gol flight 9109, from Brasília to Fortaleza, was flying between 33,000 and 35,000 feet near Quixadá. The crew reported a large, white object. It moved from east to west in a zigzag. The document describes its speed as supersonic. It left no trail. According to Diário do Nordeste, the whole encounter lasted 3 seconds.

The record is blunt about what happened next. "O GL09109 fez manobra evasiva para evitar colisão com o OVNI." GL09109 made an evasive manoeuvre to avoid a collision with the UFO.

About 12:15, Avianca Brasil flight ONE6372, from Guarulhos to Fortaleza, was in the same altitude range. The document says "both" saw the object only on TCAS, the cockpit collision-avoidance display, and that it was flying very fast in zigzag movements. It never says who "both" were.

About 12:53, a third aircraft, flying from Alagoas to Piauí, had visual contact. Its pilot described a white object, quite fast, that passed about 300 feet from the aircraft. In O Globo's version, this pilot also caught it on traffic-detection systems, called it medium to large, able to zigzag at supersonic speed, and made defensive manoeuvres.

The report came from Comdabra, the Brazilian Aerospace Defence Command, and was received by CINDACTA III, the regional air defence and air traffic control centre. It now sits in the Arquivo Nacional's "Objeto Voador Não Identificado" collection, stamped as declassified information. No pilot has ever been named or interviewed.

CNN Brasil, in a report by Fábio Munhoz, checked the database of CENIPA, the Air Force accident and incident investigation centre. It found no record of any Gol aircraft on that date. The Air Force said it does not carry out studies or analyses on the subject. No conclusion was ever drawn.

No one has alleged a hoax. The questions are about what was seen, and how. Some outlets place the evasive action with the third pilot rather than the Gol crew. An object seen only on a collision-avoidance display raises its own doubts, since that system shows nearby aircraft. A speed judged from a moving airliner is an impression, not a measurement. The Arquivo Nacional itself stresses that the label OVNI does not mean flying saucers or extraterrestrials exist, and astronomer Ednardo Rodrigues prefers the term UAP.

Quixadá has been here before. On May 14, 1960, an orange light was seen by about 20 people at a farm there, a case remembered as Rachel de Queiroz's sighting, and coverage of the Gol report also recalled the Barroso case. The 2014 encounter now lives in the August 2024 news coverage and in CNN Brasil's review of the year's UFO cases, beside other Ceará pilot reports from the same release.