NASC Inquiry into Bahia, Brazil Incident, November 13, 1963 — Executive Office of the President File
This document is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) wire report dated November 9, 1963, tracking a local Portuguese-language radio broadcast from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, regarding an alleged crash of a “large metal sphere” containing a deceased…
Incident Overview
On November 13, 1963, in Bahia, Brazil, Executive Office of the President 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 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) wire report dated November 9, 1963, tracking a local Portuguese-language radio broadcast from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, regarding an alleged crash of a “large metal sphere” containing a deceased occupant in Conde, Bahia, Brazil. This FBIS report is excerpted from the files of Edward C. Welsh, Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC). NASC was a cabinet-level advisory body within the Executive Office of the President responsible for coordinating U.S. space policy from 1958 to 1973.
Handwritten annotations dated November 13, 1963, document a communication between officials at NASC and the U.S. Department of State. The note records a NASC request to a State Department official to query the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro for local verification of the reporting. This inter-agency request precedes a subsequent diplomatic cable sent by the Embassy the following day, cataloged in this collection under the title “DOS-UAP-D001.”
Related records
The release files this document with Diplomatic Cable, Brazil (DOS-UAP-D001) and Diplomatic Cable, Brazil (DOS-UAP-D002), 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.