São Paulo Protest Light

June 2013. Brazil was in revolt. What began as protests over a rise in public-transport fares grew into a national movement against World Cup spending. Ghost Theory put the number of participants nationwide at up to 200,000. In São Paulo, one march after another filled the streets.

Somewhere above one of those marches, a light appeared. A single bright point. No wings, no structure, no other lights. In a close-up still, it "appears to be a simple ball of light." Then it started to move. HuffPost described a mysterious bright light that would "dart and zig-zag across the sky." Ghost Theory said it began "buzzing the crowd" and "zigged and zagged for at least two full minutes" over the streets.

Thousands of people saw it. Onlookers pointed and shouted. Several stopped to gaze upwards, and for a moment the march lost its hold on their attention. Some thought they were watching a police surveillance drone. Others believed it was an alien craft.

The next day, a clip of the light appeared on YouTube. It spread quickly. Ghost Theory, writing on 20 June, embedded a copy credited to the channel UniversExplorersTV and noted that an earlier upload had been "forced down" by its owner. The story of a UFO over the Brazilian protests was on its way around the world.

It did not last long. A second video surfaced, filmed from the object's own point of view. It showed the crowd from above. The light was a camera drone flying for TV Folha, the video arm of the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. HuffPost put it plainly: "the mysterious thing in the sky was a drone with a camera attached, piloted remotely by Sao Paulo news station Folha TV."

According to Tecnoblog, the aircraft was a DJI Phantom flown by Luis Neto of the aerial-imaging company GoCam. Neto chose a small, light model to reduce the risk of injury if it fell. It carried press markings so that protesters would not suspect its purpose. Its route took in Largo da Batata, the Marginal Pinheiros and the Ponte Estaiada. João Wainer, editor of TV Folha, said the released clip was only a preview. On 24 June, Folha reported that its drone use had echoed in the Wall Street Journal, and that a website had suspected a UFO.

Nobody claimed the clip was faked. The only question was what the light was. Joe Nickell of Skeptical Inquirer summed it up: "If you put anything up in the sky it will end up a UFO to many people." Marc D'Antonio of MUFON looked ahead: "As drones become more prevelent, we're gonna see a massive surge of UFO sightings."

Some threads remain loose. No source matches the ground clip to the drone flight by timestamp. Even the date is uncertain. Wikipedia gives 19 June 2013. HuffPost says it was a Tuesday, which would be 18 June. The protest details point to the evening of 17 June.

The São Paulo light is listed among Brazil's UFO sightings, and it is often cited as one of the earliest cases of a news drone mistaken for a UFO. Reason ran the story beside news of Turkish police shooting down a protest drone in Istanbul. HuffPost recalled a drone flight over about 25,000 protesters in Moscow in 2011. A new kind of light had joined the sky above the crowd.