At dusk on Sunday, May 31, 2026, Mayk Leão was on the veranda of his small farm in rural Campo Largo, just outside Curitiba in southern Brazil. He pointed his iPhone at a forested ridge roughly three kilometers away. What he filmed was a cluster of colored lights hovering above the trees. He said it was round and huge, and that it went dark all at once. "I think I just saw a gigantic alien ship," he told his followers. Within days it had become Brazil's biggest UFO story of the year.
Video: 98 Live on YouTube (in Portuguese). The footage shows lights filmed at maximum phone zoom. What they are has not been verified.
Leão, 31, is a nursing technician who posts about animal rescue and farm life. That day, he said, began with something strange. While looking for a wild cat on the property, he found an electric fence knocked down. He also heard metallic noises that sounded like someone "choking" or a rope snapping, and he said something hovered over his house in the afternoon. That night came the lights. According to g1, his first Instagram video reached millions of views, and one report put it at 12.9 million. He went from about 46,000 followers to more than 1.4 million in three days.
The Brazilian Air Force (FAB) responded through DECEA, its airspace control department. On May 31, it said, "no object was identified by air defense radars or reported by local airports with information about unknown objects," and airspace control "occurred within normal parameters." Hernan Mostajo, an astronomer at the Observatório Cosmos, told SBT News he saw no early signs of editing, fraud, or AI in the footage. He also noted that atmospheric effects, the distance, and the shaking phone camera could explain how the lights appear to behave. His analysis was not conclusive.
Then came the most down-to-earth explanation. Wanderlei Zandona, a drone pilot and influencer, flew a drone from Leão's farm toward the lights, first at night and then again by day. His footage suggested the glow on the ridge came from a guesthouse called Chácara Paraíso, whose owners said the lights had always been there. Leão rejects that. He says those are not the lights he recorded, and he accuses others of trying to profit from his story. The two sides still disagree, and nobody has proven what was on that ridge.
The video set off a nationwide wave of copycat sightings. Within a week, new clips came from Bento Gonçalves in Rio Grande do Sul, the Chapada dos Veadeiros in Goiás, and a beach camera in Pontal do Paraná. The FAB again said its radars detected nothing unusual on the Bento Gonçalves date. The reports haven't stopped. This month alone, Brazilian outlets covered a bright light over João Pessoa on Nov. 2, which lined up with a visible International Space Station pass. On Nov. 9, a fiery streak crossed the sky over São Bernardo do Campo, and astronomers there split between space debris and a sunlit airplane contrail. Campo Largo remains the case that started the frenzy. It is also a good example of how a pixelated zoom shot, a remote ridge, and a huge audience can turn a few lights into a national mystery.
Sources: g1 Paraná · SBT News (FAB statement) · PEGN · Clube FM / Correio Braziliense (drone pilot) · CNN Brasil · g1 RS · Portal Correio · Hub News · Rede 98
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