I am amazed that nobody has mentioned the 4 photos taken by the Brazilian Navy off Trindade Island in the South Atlantic (16/1/58) :
http://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/trindade58.htm#pics
There were no less than fifty eyewitnesses on the deck of the ship from which these pictures were taken.
The weirdest thing is that none of these witnesses have ever come forward. Captains, explorers, scientists, spear-fishermen - nobody. The Blue Book investigators looked for them but failed to find any.
The commanding officer, Capitao-de-Mar-e-Guerra (CAPT) Jose Santos Saldanha de Gama, had not seen the object and was noncommittal. The executive officer also had not seen it but, arriving shortly thereafter, had formed the opinion that those on deck had seen it. The captain had reported that his secretary, a LCDR, had seen it but this officer when personally questioned avoided discussing the matter. Later, it was learned that the photographer was accompanied to the darkroom by an officer who waited outside the door while Baruna developed the negative alone.
Only one person has ever come forward to say that he saw the saucer, and that it looked like the photos; Amilcar Vieira, a personal friend of Baruna's. So maybe there
was something there? Or were they in league?
Perhaps neither of these alternatives is correct.
https://ufo.com.br/noticias/trindad...ephew-claims-that-the-photos-are-fake-part-1/
Baruna's nephew says yes, it
was a fake, because Baruna had already run out of film by that time. Some of the people on the ship had noticed a strange cloud formation, and he snapped his empty camera at it, then faked the images in the dark room later. Vieira and other witnesses (if any) may have seen a strange cloud formation, but the faked photos have become 'conflated' with what they saw in their memory, and now they only remember the faked saucer.
Note that this is the theory put forward by Baruna's nephew,
not by me. I do generally agree with the theory of conflation, as it explains many features of various cases; but I wonder why Baruna's nephew has chosen this explanation rather than a straightforward collusion between Baruna and Vieira. Perhaps this is the explanation that Baruna himself came up with - he
knew that the photos were fakes, and yet there was at least one person who claimed to have seen the 'saucer'. Only conflation could explain this.