A shortcut across the lot
At about half past three on Saturday afternoon, January 20, 1996, three young women were walking home through the Jardim Andere district of Varginha, a coffee town in the south of Minas Gerais. Liliane da Silva was sixteen, her sister Valquíria fourteen, and their friend Kátia de Andrade Xavier twenty-two. They had been helping with a house move, and had changed their route, by one account, after being warned about a man pestering women along the usual one. The new way led across a vacant lot beside a workshop wall on Rua Benevenuto Braz Vieira. Liliane saw it first: something crouched against the wall, as if, she told the Folha de S.Paulo that year, it were sheltering from the strong sun. It had dark brown skin that looked smeared with oil, and three raised bumps on a large head. Kátia screamed and froze. It turned its face to them. The eyes were red, Liliane said, with no pupils, and she could see no mouth or nose. They ran all the way home, where Liliane told her mother she had seen “o capeta”—the devil.
Sources: Conheça a história da aparição do ser do espaçoFantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaAs pegadas do ET de Varginha em 20 anosET de Varginha, 30 anos: o que se sabe e o que nunca foi explicado
What the mother found
Luiza Helena da Silva went back to the lot. The thing was gone. She reported footprints in the dirt and a smell she called sulphur, which later retellings turned to ammonia and the footprints to three-toed ones. Around six that evening a violent storm broke over Varginha, with hail, fallen trees, and a blackout, and kept the fire brigade busy. None of the three women called what they had seen an extraterrestrial. That idea was supplied soon afterward by a local lawyer and UFO investigator named Ubirajara Rodrigues, who heard the story, interviewed them, and told them what he thought it might have been. The town never let them forget it. Kátia was two weeks pregnant and was taunted that the baby was the ET’s. Liliane left school.
Sources: Conheça a história da aparição do ser do espaçoFantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaET de Varginha foi revelado em inquérito de militares; veja as alegaçõesDe ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETThe ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after the sighting
From frightened witnesses to an alien story
On February 4 Fantástico, the Sunday-night institution of Brazilian television, put the three women in front of the country. By June The Wall Street Journal had a correspondent in town under the headline “Tale of Stinky Extraterrestrials Stirs Up UFO Crowd in Brazil.” In August the Folha found Varginha turned into a “mecca” for what it called ETmaniacs, with visitors still stopping to stare at the wall. By then Rodrigues and a second ufologist, Vitório Pacaccini, were no longer investigating a sighting. They were investigating a capture.
Sources: Tale of Stinky Extraterrestrials Stirs Up UFO Crowd in BrazilVarginha vira meca ‘ETmaníacos’The ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after the sighting
A second story grows around the first
It came together from pieces. Eurico and Oralina de Freitas, caretakers on a farm outside town, said that in the small hours they had watched a whitish object the size of a minibus drift low over the pasture trailing smoke. Pacaccini recorded a cassette with a firefighter, Robson Oliveira, who said the brigade had been called before eight that morning about a “bicho no mato”—a critter in the brush—and that by half past ten something was in a net, inside a wooden box, on the back of an Army truck. Soldiers, speaking anonymously, described a second creature caught that night, kept at the Hospital Regional, moved to the Hospital Humanitas, and collected on January 22 by a convoy from the Army’s Sergeants’ School (EsSA) at nearby Três Corações. Rodrigues told a press conference that two bodies had reached a secret basement laboratory at the University of Campinas, the domain of the prominent forensic pathologist Fortunato Badan Palhares. A reserve officer offered the press the Army’s alternative: the commotion at the hospital had been a pregnant couple with dwarfism. A regional TV crew filmed the Campinas basement and found a machine room and hot-water pipes. Badan Palhares says he did get an odd phone call telling him the Army was bringing material from Varginha. Nothing came.
Sources: Fantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaAs pegadas do ET de Varginha em 20 anosDe ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETThe ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after the sighting
The death folded into the mystery
Marco Eli Chereze was twenty-three, a soldier in the intelligence section of the Minas Gerais military police. On February 7 a small pustule was removed from under his arm at the barracks clinic. On the 11th he was admitted to hospital. On the 15th he died in intensive care of what the state’s examiners recorded as acute respiratory failure, septicemia, and bacterial shock from a staphylococcus infection. He was buried, his family says, in a closed coffin without a wake; his widow said pages were missing from his chart. The ufologists’ explanation was that Chereze had been in the car that cornered the second creature on the night of January 20 and had grabbed it with his bare hands. The Army’s inquiry answered in one sentence: “There is no connection whatever between the death of the said soldier and the supposed capture operations.”
Sources: Fantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaET de Varginha: morte de militar tem alguma ligação com o caso?Amid UFO Hearings in Congress, ‘Moment of Contact’ Offers History Lesson
The Army investigates the accusations
In 1996 Pacaccini and a co-author, Maxs Portes, published Incidente em Varginha, which named the officers and sergeants said to have carried out the capture. The Sergeants’ School responded with Military Police Inquiry no. 18/1997, run by Lt. Col. Lúcio Carlos Pereira from February to June 1997: 357 folios of testimony, duty rosters, and vehicle logs, now digitized by the Superior Military Court. It was an investigation of the book’s accusations, not of the vacant lot. The trucks seen leaving the base had gone, it found, to a dealership called Automáco, and the file includes the invoice: January 29, 1996, 492 reais, wheel balancing and alignment. It found fire crews mobilized by the storm that day and no call to capture any animal. A military prosecutor called the movements mere work routine, and the file was archived that August. Almost nobody saw it until the magazine IstoÉ obtained the conclusions in October 2010.
Sources: Inquérito Policial Militar n. 18/1997A história oficial do ET de VarginhaET de Varginha foi revelado em inquérito de militares; veja as alegaçõesET de Varginha: relato foi apurado pelo Exército e virou caso judicial
The man called Mudinho
For the figure by the wall, Pereira had a candidate: Luís Antônio de Paula, a local man known in the neighborhood as Mudinho, “the little mute,” who was often seen crouching. Page 334 of the inquiry reads: “More probable is the hypothesis that this citizen, probably dirty owing to the rains, seen crouching by a wall, was mistaken by three terrified girls for a ‘space creature.’” A photographic study was attached; Pacaccini says its pictures were darkened to help the resemblance. The sisters have never accepted it. They had known Mudinho since they were children, they told a Globo documentary in 2026—he used to come into their father’s bar. Skeptic Brian Dunning notes that in 1996 they were reported as saying they did not know him. And the inquiry’s picture of a rain-soaked afternoon sits awkwardly beside Liliane’s own first description of a thing hiding from the sun.
Sources: A história oficial do ET de VarginhaDe ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETBrazil’s Roswell: The Varginha UFOConheça a história da aparição do ser do espaço
Moment of Contact
The American filmmaker James Fox says he worked the case on and off for sixteen years, shot a Varginha sequence for his 2020 documentary The Phenomenon, and then “cut it all out” to give it a film of its own. Moment of Contact, narrated by Peter Coyote, was released on demand on October 18, 2022. The three women and their mother tell their story again, now with details that are not in the 1996 reports: a sense that the creature was silently asking for help, and men in dark suits who came offering cash. A witness named Carlos de Sousa says that a week before the sighting he watched a damaged, cigar-shaped craft the size of a school minibus come down trailing white smoke, reached the wreck, smelled ammonia, and picked up a scrap of foil that uncrumpled itself before soldiers ran him off; one, he says, threatened to crack his skull. A man filmed from behind, identified only as a former soldier, says he saw an oily-skinned creature on a steel table at the Humanitas, drove it to Três Corações and on to Campinas, and noticed a comrade carrying a video camera. The film’s claim that a U.S. military transport came for the remains rests on air-traffic controllers’ recollections; one, Marcos Feres, had said publicly in 2021 that an American military aircraft entered Brazilian airspace that week without the required clearance and diverted to Campinas. The cardiologist who treated Chereze says his patient died of an undetermined cause. At one door Fox is warned off by an armed man. Critic Roger Moore pointed out that in 107 minutes nobody produces a fragment, a photograph, or a document, and Dunning that the filmmakers must have known of the military inquiry and what it found.
Sources: The Why Files with James Fox on UFO disclosure, Varginha, and more (transcript)Trailer for UFO doc ‘Moment of Contact’ about the Roswell of BrazilAmid UFO Hearings in Congress, ‘Moment of Contact’ Offers History LessonAvião dos EUA entrou sem autorização no Brasil e americanos estiveram em VarginhaDocumentary Review: “Moment of Contact”Brazil’s Roswell: The Varginha UFO
The video and the neurologist
What Fox wants most is a piece of film. Since at least 2022 he has said that he has spoken to three people in Brazil who claim to have seen video of the captive creature, and in May 2023 he offered $200,000 for it; his source, he wrote, said the being was alive but very feeble. Then a Varginha neurologist, Ítalo Venturelli, came forward. In a 2022 interview Venturelli said plainly that he had not seen the being, only a colleague’s account and a video. In the expanded cut of the film released in December 2025, he says that a neurosurgeon friend, the late Marcos Vinício Neves, took him into the intensive care unit of the Hospital Regional and let him stand at the bedside for three or four minutes. What he describes is nothing like the thing by the wall: white skin, a teardrop-shaped head, lilac eyes, three fingers and a thumb, the size of a seven-year-old child, “like an angel.” He had never told anyone, he said, not even his children; a heart attack changed his mind. “Eu sei o que eu vi”—I know what I saw. Brazilian researchers at Portal Vigília laid his two statements side by side, and noted that in 2023 he had published a short story, labelled fiction, about a Varginha being. Fox now says Neves shot the video, that it is brief and black-and-white, and that he has the dead man’s computer. In 2022 Fox also filed a freedom-of-information request for U.S. military flights into Brazil that week. In 2025 the CIA declined to answer, citing the National Security Act.
Sources: Announcement of a $200,000 reward for footage of the Varginha beingCaso Varginha: médico muda testemunho e confessa contato direto com alienígena“Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters” releasing digitally December 2025Landmark Brazilian UFO Case Reaches Capitol Hill as Varginha Incident Turns 30The Why Files with James Fox on UFO disclosure, Varginha, and more (transcript)Avião dos EUA entrou sem autorização no Brasil e americanos estiveram em Varginha
Two anniversaries in one month
The thirtieth anniversary arrived as two rival events. From January 6 to 8, 2026, TV Globo aired a three-part documentary, O Mistério de Varginha, in which the capture story came apart on camera. One of the anonymous soldiers from 1996 said he had invented his account after a ufologist offered him 5,000 reais: nothing had happened; it was all manipulation. The firefighter Oliveira said he had made up the cassette under pressure, and two of the men he named turn out not to have been on the duty roster. Gen. Sérgio Coelho Lima, who commanded the Sergeants’ School in 1996, spoke publicly for the first time to say that hiding an alien would have been impossible. And Ubirajara Rodrigues, the man who first said “extraterrestrial,” said, “Eu não acredito em mais nada disso”—I don’t believe in any of this anymore. Telling the girls what they might have seen, he said, was a crass error. Liliane and Kátia said they felt abandoned by him. Twelve days later Fox took a room at the National Press Club in Washington. Six of his Brazilian witnesses had been refused U.S. visas despite help from a congressman’s office, so the women appeared on tape; de Sousa and Venturelli came in person, along with Armando Fortunato, a medical examiner who had signed Chereze’s necropsy and now spoke of an unusually virulent bacterium, though one found on Earth. Rep. Eric Burlison addressed the room. Five days earlier, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal reported, Fox’s party had met privately with Burlison, Tim Burchett, and Anna Paulina Luna in Burchett’s office. The Pentagon repeated its denial. An exhumation of Chereze has been requested.
Sources: De ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETET de Varginha: ufólogo arrependidoFantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaUAP (UFO) Press ConferenceVarginha UFO crash: Witnesses share testimonyLandmark Brazilian UFO Case Reaches Capitol Hill as Varginha Incident Turns 30
A city adopts the visitor
Whatever crouched by the wall, Varginha kept it. The state water company built a sixty-five-foot water tower downtown in the shape of a flying saucer. The bus shelters are saucers too. The city threw itself a party for the fifteenth anniversary, and in 2023 registered the ET as municipal intangible heritage. A Memorial do ET, funded with 1.5 million reais from the federal tourism ministry and promised for 2016, finally opened in November 2022, and closed for corrosion repairs within about a year; a thirteen-foot sculpture of the creature went up in 2025. The mayor told El País one more piece of local lore: that on the day in question, the hospital turned away the bakery’s bread delivery.
Sources: Varginha vira meca ‘ETmaníacos’Prefeitura comemora 15 anos do ET de VarginhaAs pegadas do ET de Varginha em 20 anosThe ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after the sightingIncidente de Varginha
What remains beside the wall
Thirty years on, nearly everything built on top of the vacant lot has cracked: the firefighter’s tape, the soldier’s confession, the basement in Campinas, the man who first said “ET.” What has not moved is the bottom layer. Three women who gained nothing from it, and lost a good deal, still say that on a bright afternoon something with red eyes turned to look at them, and that it was not the neighbor they had known all their lives. If it was Mudinho, why did girls who knew him run home screaming about the devil? If it was not, what was it sheltering from? And somewhere in Brazil, is there really a few seconds of black-and-white film?
Sources: Conheça a história da aparição do ser do espaçoDe ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETLandmark Brazilian UFO Case Reaches Capitol Hill as Varginha Incident Turns 30
The strongest evidence is early testimony
Liliane, Valquíria, and Kátia described the encounter to family within minutes and to national newspapers within months, and have not changed the core of it. Those 1996 reports fix what they said: the posture, the oily brown skin, the red eyes, the bumps, the sun. Details that appear only later, including the telepathic plea and the visitors offering money, carry less weight, and the two sides dispute whether the women knew Mudinho at the time.
Sources: Conheça a história da aparição do ser do espaçoTale of Stinky Extraterrestrials Stirs Up UFO Crowd in BrazilBrazil’s Roswell: The Varginha UFOAmid UFO Hearings in Congress, ‘Moment of Contact’ Offers History Lesson
The official file has a narrower scope than the legend
IPM 18/1997 is a substantial primary record of the Army’s response to accusations against named personnel, with testimony, rosters, invoices, and a conclusion. It was opened a year after the event by the institution accused, it never examined the lot, and its Mudinho hypothesis rests on rain that the first witness account does not mention at the time of the sighting. Sources disagree even on its length: the court catalog says 357 folios, several 2026 reports about 600 pages.
Sources: Inquérito Policial Militar n. 18/1997A história oficial do ET de VarginhaET de Varginha: relato foi apurado pelo Exército e virou caso judicialThe ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after the sighting
The recovery chain has no chain of custody
The capture narrative was assembled from one second-hand cassette, anonymous soldiers, and ufologists’ press conferences. The cassette’s author and at least one soldier have recanted, saying they were pressured or paid; one soldier stands by his account. No fragment, body, sample, chart, photograph, or transport order has been produced in thirty years. The farm couple connected their smoking object to the case only after the women’s story was in circulation.
Sources: Fantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaDe ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETET de Varginha: ufólogo arrependidoInquérito Policial Militar n. 18/1997
What the film adds, and what it cannot
Moment of Contact and its 2025 expansion put new first-person claims on the record: de Sousa’s crash, the anonymous driver, the air-traffic controllers, Venturelli’s bedside visit. All are testimony given twenty-five to thirty years after the fact, several from people who had earlier said something different or nothing. Venturelli’s white, lilac-eyed being does not match the women’s brown, red-eyed one, which Fox explains by proposing more than one creature. The American transport rests on recollection, and so do the helicopters that some tellings add to it: from the Brazilian Air Force in one version, out of the aircraft itself in another. The video remains a claim about a claim: people who say they saw footage that has never surfaced.
Sources: Amid UFO Hearings in Congress, ‘Moment of Contact’ Offers History LessonCaso Varginha: médico muda testemunho e confessa contato direto com alienígenaAvião dos EUA entrou sem autorização no Brasil e americanos estiveram em VarginhaThe Why Files with James Fox on UFO disclosure, Varginha, and more (transcript)Landmark Brazilian UFO Case Reaches Capitol Hill as Varginha Incident Turns 30
Classification
This file is classified as an unresolved humanoid witness encounter surrounded by an unverified, and now partly retracted, recovery narrative. The official inquiry rejected military capture and proposed a human misidentification that the witnesses reject. “Unresolved” applies to what the three women saw in the lot.
Sources: Inquérito Policial Militar n. 18/1997De ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETET de Varginha, 30 anos: o que se sabe e o que nunca foi explicado
- 13 JAN 1996
Date on which Carlos de Sousa later says he saw a cigar-shaped craft crash outside Varginha.
- 20 JAN 1996 · ABOUT 3:30 PM
Liliane and Valquíria da Silva and Kátia de Andrade Xavier see a crouched, oily-skinned, red-eyed figure beside a wall in a Jardim Andere lot and run home in fear.
- 20 JAN · ABOUT 6:00 PM
A violent hailstorm strikes Varginha, bringing down trees and power lines.
- 4 FEB 1996
Fantástico broadcasts the witnesses’ story nationally.
- 15 FEB 1996
Military police soldier Marco Eli Chereze, 23, dies of septicemia eight days after minor surgery; ufologists later link his death to a captured creature.
- JUN–AUG 1996
The Wall Street Journal and Folha de S.Paulo report from a town filling with UFO pilgrims.
- 13 FEB–19 JUN 1997
The Army’s Sergeants’ School conducts Military Police Inquiry no. 18/1997 into the book Incidente em Varginha; it rejects military involvement and proposes “Mudinho.”
- OCT 2010
IstoÉ publishes the inquiry’s conclusions for the first time; Ubirajara Rodrigues says there is no proof an ET was captured.
- 18 OCT 2022
James Fox’s documentary Moment of Contact is released; the Memorial do ET opens in Varginha three weeks later.
- 2 MAY 2023
Fox offers a $200,000 reward for alleged video of the creature.
- DEC 2025
An expanded edition of the film adds Dr. Ítalo Venturelli’s claim to have stood at the creature’s hospital bedside.
- 6–8 JAN 2026
Globo’s O Mistério de Varginha airs recantations by a soldier and a firefighter, and Rodrigues’s statement that he no longer believes any of it.
- 20 JAN 2026
Fox presents witnesses at the National Press Club in Washington, with Rep. Eric Burlison attending; the Pentagon repeats its denial.
Sources & interviews
Tale of Stinky Extraterrestrials Stirs Up UFO Crowd in BrazilThe Wall Street Journal · Matt Moffett · June 28, 1996 · Contemporary reportingConheça a história da aparição do ser do espaçoFolha de S.Paulo · Rodrigo Vergara · August 18, 1996 · Contemporary reportingVarginha vira meca ‘ETmaníacos’Folha de S.Paulo · Rodrigo Vergara · August 18, 1996 · Contemporary reportingInquérito Policial Militar n. 18/1997Superior Tribunal Militar · Arquimedes catalog · 357 folios in two volumes · 1997A história oficial do ET de VarginhaIstoÉ · Rodrigo Cardoso · October 2010 · First publication of the military inquiry’s conclusionsPrefeitura comemora 15 anos do ET de VarginhaPrefeitura de Varginha · January 12, 2011 · Municipal celebration recordAs pegadas do ET de Varginha em 20 anosO Globo · Élcio Braga · January 18, 2016Requerimento de Informação n. 3.515/2018Câmara dos Deputados · Dep. Chico Alencar · Request to the Defense Ministry concerning Army records and the Varginha caseAvião dos EUA entrou sem autorização no Brasil e americanos estiveram em VarginhaPortal Vigília · 2021 · Report on air-traffic controller Marcos Feres’s accountTrailer for UFO doc ‘Moment of Contact’ about the Roswell of BrazilFirstShowing · 2022 · Release details for the James Fox documentaryBrazil’s Roswell: The Varginha UFOBrian Dunning · Skeptoid #853 · October 11, 2022 · Skeptical analysisDocumentary Review: “Moment of Contact”Roger Moore · Movie Nation · October 15, 2022 · Critical reviewAnnouncement of a $200,000 reward for footage of the Varginha beingJames Fox · Post on X · May 2, 2023Amid UFO Hearings in Congress, ‘Moment of Contact’ Offers History LessonAdam Stone · The Examiner News · July 31, 2023 · Detailed summary of the film“Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters” releasing digitally December 2025Horror Society · November 7, 2025 · Distributor press release for the expanded editionCaso Varginha: médico muda testemunho e confessa contato direto com alienígenaPortal Vigília · Comparison of Dr. Ítalo Venturelli’s 2022 and 2025 statementsDe ‘casal de anões’ a ‘Mudinho’: como autoridades contestaram o suposto ETg1 / EPTV · January 8, 2026 · Interviews with witnesses, researchers, and former EsSA commanderET de Varginha: ufólogo arrependidoRevista UFO · January 2026 · Response to Ubirajara Rodrigues’s reversal and the recanting witnessesET de Varginha foi revelado em inquérito de militares; veja as alegaçõesCNN Brasil · January 7, 2026 · Summary of the military inquiryET de Varginha: relato foi apurado pelo Exército e virou caso judicialMigalhas · January 2026 · Legal summary linking both digitized volumes of the inquiryFantasias e contradições do Caso VarginhaRevista Questão de Ciência · January 15, 2026 · Skeptical reconstruction from primary recordsET de Varginha: morte de militar tem alguma ligação com o caso?Estado de Minas · January 2026 · Medical and inquiry records on Marco Eli CherezeET de Varginha, 30 anos: o que se sabe e o que nunca foi explicadog1 / EPTV · January 20, 2026 · Retrospective with records and witness updatesThe ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after the sightingEl País · Naiara Galarraga Gortázar · January 20, 2026UAP (UFO) Press ConferenceNational Press Club · Event listing for January 20, 2026 · Not sponsored or endorsed by the clubVarginha UFO crash: Witnesses share testimonyNewsNation · January 20, 2026 · Coverage of the Washington press event and Pentagon responseLandmark Brazilian UFO Case Reaches Capitol Hill as Varginha Incident Turns 30Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal · The Debrief · January 31, 2026The Why Files with James Fox on UFO disclosure, Varginha, and more (transcript)The Singju Post · February 27, 2026 · Interview transcriptVarginha UFO incidentWikipedia · English-language orientation and reference trail · Consulted September 17, 2026Incidente de VarginhaWikipédia · Portuguese-language orientation and reference trail · Consulted September 17, 2026Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
Connected files
James FoxThe filmmaker who spent sixteen years on Varginha and is still chasing a video of the creature.The Roswell IncidentVarginha is called Brazil’s Roswell for a reason: bodies, an Army convoy, a pathologist, and witnesses who surfaced decades later.The Socorro ArroyoAnother daylight encounter with small figures, reported within minutes by someone with nothing to gain.The Shag Harbour LightsA fishing village that, like Varginha, turned its strangest night into a museum and an identity.Leslie KeanShe and Ralph Blumenthal reported the 2026 Capitol Hill meeting on the case from inside the room.The kinds of close encountersWhy a figure by a wall makes this a third-kind report, whatever happened afterward.Discuss this case
Compare notes with other readers: witness details, sources, and the parts that still do not add up.
Open the discussion