Diplomatic Cable, Brazil, November 14, 1963 — Department of State File
This document is a U.S. Department of State diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the Office of the Secretary of State in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 1963. This cable documents an effort by the Embassy to verify that the Department had assessed certain content…
Incident Overview
On November 14, 1963, in Bahia, Brazil, the Department of State preserved a documentary record that was declassified and published on August 7, 2026 as part of the fifth tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
What the government released
This document is a U.S. Department of State diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the Office of the Secretary of State in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 1963. This cable documents an effort by the Embassy to verify that the Department had assessed certain content published in a local newspaper as inauthentic, following a discussion on a poor-quality telephone connection the previous night.
To ensure both offices were referencing the same reporting, the cable cites descriptive language paraphrased from the press, namely a “large metal manned balloon” and a “dead crewman aboard wearing [a] uniform or spacesuit with strange markings.” The cable concludes with the embassy’s understanding that an object assessed to be a weather balloon had been reported in the vicinity, but that no such object had been found to have crashed. A follow-on correspondence regarding the alleged incident is included in this collection under the title “DOS-UAP-D002.”
Related records
The release files this document with NASC Inquiry into Bahia, Brazil Incident and Diplomatic Cable, Brazil, which concern the same matter. They were written by different offices and are best read in sequence.
The case in this archive
This document is a primary source for the Conde sphere story, written up here at length from the contemporary record. The file and the case history are worth reading against each other: the document is narrower and more cautious than the account that grew up around it, which is usually the point.
Status of the case
This is an archival document, and it should be read as one. It records what a particular office believed, or was willing to commit to paper, on the day it was written — not a present-day finding. The mid-century investigations worked from witness testimony, sparse instrumentation, and the strategic anxieties of the early Cold War, and the great majority of the sightings they catalogued were eventually attributed to aircraft, balloons, astronomical objects, and misidentification. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no modern determination about the incidents described here, and the document’s release is not an endorsement of the conclusions inside it. Its value is as evidence of how the United States government investigated the question, and of what it chose to keep.