“Story of strange object descending in region of Conde Bahia apparently fabricated in Rio.” That was the verdict Harold Midkiff, the U.S. consul in Salvador, sent to the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro on November 14, in telegram No. 157. The embassy passed his findings to Washington in a cable dated November 20, 1963, which the State Department made public on August 7, 2026, in the fifth release of its PURSUE initiative.
Midkiff’s message was short on drama. No one in the area had seen such an object, he wrote, according to newspaper reporters and others who rushed to the scene before any investigation reports came in. The state’s public security secretary guessed it might have been a weather balloon, but the consul added that no such sighting had been verified.
The Brazilian Ministry of Aeronautics went further. It categorically denied there had been any “strange object” in Conde, a town in Bahia.
That same day, November 14, Midkiff sent two newspaper clippings by pouch. Diario de Noticias of November 9 carried the ministry’s denial. The Jornal da Bahia of November 11 ran a piece titled “The Airship that wasn’t there”. Its reporter found one thing worth writing about: he had filed his own telegram to the paper from the federal telegraph office in Conde, using an old Morse code transmitter.
The cable, labelled DOS-UAP-D002 in the archive, follows an earlier exchange between the embassy and the department. Its subject line, “Negative Report on UFO,” says what it concludes. The consulate cited the lack of local reporting at the time and the contradictory newspaper coverage afterward as evidence that the published claims could not be backed up.
Embassy copies also went to the department with a request that they be passed to Defense. The released file points to no physical evidence and no eyewitness account.
Sources
- DOS-UAP-D002, Diplomatic Cable, Brazil, November 20, 1963 — WARUFO — Declassified UAP Document Archive
- DOS-UAP-D002, Diplomatic Cable, Brazil, November 20, 1963 | UFO Declassified
- DOS-UAP-D002, Diplomatic Cable, Brazil, November 20, 1963
