The Capão Redondo Sphere

Capão Redondo is a working district on the southern edge of São Paulo. On the evening of 2 January 1998, according to the account the archive holds, a family at dinner saw a sphere about twenty centimetres across moving over the houses. It was silent and it manoeuvred in a way the account calls intelligent, and it stayed in view for about thirty minutes. A boy and his cousin filmed it. The account records that it was seen from as close as ten metres, and that investigators later located sixty-two eyewitnesses.

What is on the record

Two claimants are resolved: the ten-year-old who held the camera, who is not named here, and a witness recorded as Tadeuszka. The account's sixty-two witnesses and the archive's two are different measures. Sixty-two is the investigators' count as the source reports it; two is how many the archive resolves.

The film is what makes this case unusual, and it exists: several minutes of home video, examined at the time by a Brazilian civilian group and by a researcher from the national space institute. The archive does not hold it. Nor does it hold the investigators' witness list, which is the other thing that would let a reader test the sixty-two.

An ordinary explanation has been put forward and should be recorded as live rather than settled. A recent reanalysis proposed a kite carrying a lamp in a plastic bottle, a common thing over São Paulo rooftops, and that reading is contested. A small object at close range in the dark is exactly the situation in which size and distance are hardest to judge by eye, and a camera does not fix that.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3, the archive's tier for multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. A filmed object and a street of reported witnesses carry it there, and the film's absence from our holdings keeps it there. What the boy filmed is not resolved here.