This story was communicated by the well-known Brazilian ufologist A.J. Gevaerd in the beginning of December 2006:
On Saturday, November 25th, Brazilian UFO Magazine's editor A. J. Gevaerd received a call from Bahia with an intriguing story. The caller was Francisco Baqueiro, a psychologist and therapist, magazine's consultant in abductions, who said to have photographed with his cell phone a strange and perfectly disk-shaped flying object being carried by a non-identified truck in a road in the Brazilian state of Bahia. The picture was taken on Tuesday, November 21st, at 07:16 AM.
Baqueiro said he heard of the transportation one day before when an informer from an intelligence service called him telling an unknown artifact crashed and was recovered in an area in Bahia known as Recôncavo Baiano, south of the capital Salvador. The informer also told the object was to be carried from that place to the city of Feira de Santana, nearly 110km from Salvador, through the BR-324, a two-lane road with heavy traffic linking Salvador to that municipality. Despite the fact that Baqueiro was severely ill with kidney disease, he decided to check what happened.
That Tuesday 21st, shortly after 06:30 AM, the consultant and his wife spotted the truck carrying the object and followed after them. The vehicle stopped at Posto Phoenix, a gas station along that road, 60km far from Salvador and near the entrance to municipalities of Maracangalha and São Félix. Baqueiro pursued the truck for 15 minutes and reported that it was escorted by four Federal Police cars - two ahead and two behind - which delayed the traffic in the road.
"I tried to enter the gas station in order to better check what was going on, but was prevented by the federal agents", states the therapist. He also says the truck was very slow in the way and the object on it was so large that the vehicle had to go on at the center of the road. Even though, parts of that fuselage exceeded the truck and touched the trees at the side of the road. "That was certainly too heavy to make a truck to go so slow".
Despite the strangeness of that scene, the object was uncovered and totally exposed. "Even with so many cars coming on the opposite way (going to Salvador) and the other ones behind the truck, very few people seemed to care about that scene", Baqueiro says. After the Federal Police prevented him from entering, he stopped for a few moments near Posto Phoenix and, pretending to be talking on the phone, he took a single shot of the object. "I didn't try others because I didn't want to catch their attention".
Baqueiro sent the picture to the Brazilian UFO Magazine via cell phone, where it was uploaded into a computer and enlarged. Editor Gevaerd and co-editors Marco Petit, Rafael Cury and Claudeir Covo, along with the magazine consultants Fernando Ramalho, Wallacy Albino and Wendell Stein have preliminarily examined the photo. All were surprised by the image. One of magazine's co-editors and one of its consultants were skeptical and related that image to a similar one found on the Internet some months before. But a careful comparison showed that the object photographed in Bahia is a totally different thing (below). As for the previous picture, nothing came out and there is no information concerning verification of its authenticity.
Francisco Baqueiro - a consultant for the Brazilian UFO magazine for three years - is specialized in alien abductions and continues his search for more information on the fact. Following his editor's advice, he returned to that gas station two more times, but employees seemed to be afraid of talking about the issue. Now Baqueiro tries to find out exactly where the supposed crash might have happened and where the object was taken to. "All I know is the crash was in a sugar cane plantation, but the object was nearly intact".
The region is home to oil refineries, but Baqueiro denies the possibility of confusing a lid for water or fuel tanks with a possible UFO. After having worked for Petrobras, the main oil company in Brazil, he is sure to know such parts very well and they never reach the size of the object seen on the truck. He also rejects the possibility of the object being an attraction from a theme park, since he also knows much of the engineering of one of the largest parks in Bahia.
Right after the controversy reached the Internet, several UFO researchers suggested that the disk-shaped object could be a cover for some liquid container that couldn't be transported assembled, and had to be taken in parts. That, according to a few investigators, would explain why the object was being transported in broad day light with no camouflage or at least some cover on top of it. Nuclear engineer Luiz Carlos C. Pires sent an e-mail positively identifying the disk-shaped object as a cover for a factionary distillation machine, but the discussion is still open. And information is giving to overseas colleagues as to obtain further info that could explain the case.
The story was accompanied with the following image; which may show anything from an industrial part to an alien spaceship:
The story was soon published on a number of websites, and, surprisingly, different pictures showing an object with a different shape than the one above were attached:
It must be noted that A.J. Gevaerd indicated that the correct image is the first of these three and the two others are unverified pictures.