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aircraft was there and the weather was not a factor, we have a special situation. And all these things are easy to check when everything is spelled out in the initial report. We go on eliminating all possibilities until we are sure that there is no conventional explanation for the data, and then the + m4 report is securely filed. Pilot reports that turn out to have a conventional explanation are eventually deleted, and someone from the Air Defense will inform the pilot that they found out what happened. If no explanation is found, the case is transferred to another folder, called the "Book of Flight Occurrences." All of these unsolved cases are kept there in those books, and one hopes that researchers will eventually be allowed to see them. They include serious reports from pilots and air traffic controllers— everything we cannot explain, everything that is held as secret, goes to those books. It's important to emphasize that this "Book of Flight Occurrences" contains cases that couldn't be explained even after analysis by experts especially assigned to this task. When I was a commander at COMDABRA, the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command, from 1999 to 2001, all cases involving UFOs spotted by military pilots and by radars would came to my attention. I directly participated in an investigation of a UFO incident only once, although I had access to secret files and both official and unofficial reports. After leaving the military, I still had access to nearly all the information I desired on this subject. v4 wow 1 toad +o.a ar omien a 1 I haven't followed what happened at the Air Defense over the last four years, but I know that we continue to receive reports. Even so, I want to mention something important. I believe that up to 90 percent of all sightings are never reported. Brazil is a huge country, and these reports are filed only where there is an airport or an Air Force base, and only by people who know how the process works. Civilians don't even know that these forms exist and are available throughout the country. I don't know the actual percentage of sightings that result in reports, but I think it must be tiny. So the number of reports that come to the knowledge of the military is almost insignificant. It is a big step for a country to officially acknowledge the existence of UFOs, as France has done. But releasing information has not caused people to panic, and I don't think it would if more files were to be opened. No one fears transparency; instead people fear the lack of it. I think that from the moment the government opens the subject for debate, all the fear people have toward this subject will disappear. And if there's one country that never panics, it's Brazil. Quite the opposite; maybe we would even create a new samba theme in celebration. unexplained phenomena are occurring, and this leads many of us to believe in the presence of alien spacecraft visiting planet Earth. However, drawing conclusions about what these things are is dangerous, since we do not have How do we handle the existence of UFOs? The evidence shows that