The Varginha Incident

What Happened in Varginha on 20 January 1996

The day didn't start with the girls. In the early hours of 20 January, a farming couple — Oralina and Eurico Rodrigues — were woken by their cattle panicking in a pasture on the road between Varginha and Três Corações. They told the magazine ISTO É they looked out and saw a grey object the size of a minibus, shaped like a submarine, drifting slowly over the field about five metres up. No lights, no sound, trailing whitish smoke.

At around 3:30 that afternoon, Liliane Fátima Silva, her sister Valquíria and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier were walking through a vacant lot in Jardim Andere, a district two kilometres from the city centre. Liliane saw it first and screamed. The creature was crouched near the wall dividing the lot from a mechanic's workshop, arms down between its legs.

The girls ran home. Forty minutes later, Liliane and Valquíria's mother, Luiza Helena Silva, walked back to the lot to see what had frightened them. She found nothing. The girls' description never wavered, though — not that week, not when Harvard psychiatrist John Mack flew down to interview them that year, and not in the decades since.

The Capture Claims

What turned a strange sighting into "Brazil's Roswell" was what local researchers said happened around it. Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, a Varginha lawyer and long-time UFO researcher, began investigating the next day, later joined by Vitório Pacaccini from Belo Horizonte. By May 1996 they claimed to have interviewed 14 witnesses, four of them military.

Their reconstruction went like this. At around 10:30 on the morning of the 20th — five hours before the girls' sighting — four members of the Varginha fire brigade captured a creature near a wooded area three blocks from the lot, boxed it up under a white cloth, and handed it over to soldiers, who drove it to the Sergeants' School (EsSA) in Três Corações, 25 kilometres away. A second creature was reportedly seen at the Hospital Regional the following day, transferred at night to the better-equipped Hospital Humanitas, and died there. Pacaccini said a 42-minute taped statement from a soldier at EsSA described a pre-dawn convoy on 23 January carrying the body to Campinas, and both researchers named the officer they said commanded the operation: Lieutenant-Colonel Olímpio Wanderley Santos.

The army's response at the time was blunt. The commander of EsSA, General Sérgio Pedro Coelho Lima, called the researchers' claims "so absurd they become ridiculous". An army spokesman joked that his only concern was with "national and foreign aliens — but terrestrial ones". The named lieutenant-colonel said he first heard of his starring role through phone calls and assumed it was a prank.

Two odd details made the denials sit less comfortably. ISTO É reported in May 1996 that Luiza Helena Silva said four men in suits had come to the family home and offered cash for her daughters to publicly retract their story; they never identified themselves and never came back. And the administrator of both hospitals confirmed there really had been unusual activity at each one that week — but said one was an exhumed body brought in for an X-ray, and the other was equipment arriving for the city's first heart transplant.

The Death of Marco Eli Chereze

Marco Eli Chereze was a 23-year-old military policeman in Varginha. According to the capture account, he was one of the men who handled a creature with his bare hands. In the weeks after the incident he fell ill, was operated on for a cyst in his armpit, and died on 15 February 1996 from a generalised infection.

The official explanation, given later by a former commander of his battalion, was a hospital infection following the surgery. That does happen, and nothing in his medical record has ever been shown to be unexplainable. But his family said they were never given a proper account of why a healthy 23-year-old died within a month of a routine procedure, and his death has stayed at the centre of the case ever since. It is the one detail that even sceptical accounts of Varginha tend to handle carefully.

How the Varginha Case Unfolded

The Army's Answer: A Man Called Mudinho

The army's investigation settled on a simple explanation. Luís Antônio de Paula, a local man known in Varginha as "Mudinho", lived rough in the area and had both mental and physical disabilities. He was often seen crouching close to the ground. The inquiry concluded that the girls, already frightened, had seen Mudinho — probably dirty from heavy rain — huddled against the wall, and their minds filled in the rest.

It's not an absurd theory, and cases like this do sometimes resolve into exactly this kind of mistaken identity. But it has problems that have never gone away. The witnesses were shown photographs of Mudinho and rejected the identification flatly — they knew him, as most of the neighbourhood did, and they have spent thirty years saying that what they saw was not a man. And there's a smaller, stranger problem: the explanation leans on Mudinho being soaked and muddy from the rain, while ISTO É's contemporary report — published four months after the event — described the sighting as happening on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

IPM 18/97: What the Military Police Inquiry Actually Says

The most important document in the Varginha case is the one almost nobody had read until recently. In August 1996, the book Incidente em Varginha, by Pacaccini and Maxs Portes, named serving soldiers as participants in the alleged capture. For the army this was no longer a UFO story — it was an accusation against its own officers. In early 1997 it opened Military Police Inquiry number 18 at the Sergeants' School in Três Corações.

The inquiry ran from February to June 1997 and produced 357 pages across two volumes. It took statements from the named officers — including Lieutenant-Colonel Olímpio Wanderley Santos — and from the researchers themselves. Its conclusion: there was no creature, no capture and no operation, and the military vehicles seen in Varginha that weekend were on routine business. The case was archived at the Superior Military Court in August 1997 as closed records number 908/1997.

For decades the file was something you had to request. Now it isn't. The Superior Military Court has digitised both volumes and published them in its ARQUIMEDES archive, where anyone can download the complete scanned originals. Whatever you make of its conclusions, that matters: Varginha is one of the few cases anywhere in the world where the state's full internal investigation — witness statements, conclusions, signatures — is sitting on a public server.

The Declassified Varginha Files

The IPM isn't the only paperwork. Brazil's National Archives holds an entire fund of Air Force UFO records — 743 dossiers spanning 1952 to 2016, transferred from the Air Force's documentation centre after a campaign by Brazilian researchers. Buried in it are at least two items that bear directly on Varginha.

The first is a 1971 Air Force intelligence report — Informe 018/COMZAE-2, stamped RESERVADO — describing an oval, predominantly silver object seen by much of Varginha's population at around 7pm one evening. According to the report, it paused over a house in the Vila Mendes district, circled the city in front of what the Air Force called credible witnesses including doctors and business owners, gave off flashes of light at low altitude, and then headed for Três Corações, where it was last seen hovering over the army's Sergeants' School — the same EsSA the 1996 creature was allegedly taken to — with soldiers reportedly among the witnesses. Nobody suggests the two events are connected. But it means UFO reports tying Varginha to the EsSA were in Brazilian military files a full 25 years before the famous incident.

The second is a dossier of 1996 press coverage the Air Force kept on the case itself — including the ISTO É investigation quoted throughout this page, which preserved the witnesses' earliest recorded descriptions, the army's contemporaneous denials, and the bribery claim, all written down within four months of the event. As primary sources go, a military-archived copy of what everyone said at the time is hard to beat.

Moment of Contact and the 30th Anniversary

The case found its second life in 2022, when American filmmaker James Fox released Moment of Contact, a documentary built on the Varginha witnesses — including the women from the original sighting and new figures like Carlos de Sousa, who claims he saw a damaged craft come down near the city a week before the main events. A follow-up, Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters, arrived in December 2025.

Then came the anniversary. On 20 January 2026 — thirty years to the day after the girls ran from the lot in Jardim Andere — Fox hosted a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Among the Brazilian witnesses was Dr. Ítalo Venturelli, a Varginha physician who described four minutes he says he spent beside a captured being in a hospital in 1996 — a being that, in his account, communicated with him without speaking. Six other witnesses never made it: their US visa applications were denied despite months of effort, and Fox travelled to Brazil to record their statements on video instead.

Days earlier, on 15 January, Fox and three of the witnesses had given the same accounts in a closed-door meeting with members of the US Congress. None of this constitutes evidence in itself — testimony is testimony, whether it's given in a vacant lot in 1996 or a press club in 2026. But it's a measure of how stubbornly this case refuses to close.

The Evidence

The Bottom Line

Strip away thirty years of retellings and Varginha comes down to a small number of solid facts. Three young women saw something in broad daylight that terrified them, described it identically, and never changed their story. A young policeman connected to the wider claims died weeks later, at 23, with an explanation his family never accepted. The army denied everything, then a year on investigated its own men, and wrote its conclusions down. And a city that supposedly had no UFO history turns out to have been in Air Force files since 1971.

The official explanation — a frightened misidentification of a disabled local man — might even be right. It would not be the first time a strange afternoon hardened into a legend. But it asks you to accept that three witnesses who knew Mudinho failed to recognise him from seven metres in daylight, on an afternoon a contemporary report describes as sunny rather than rainy, and that all of the surrounding noise — the convoy claims, the taped soldier, the men in suits, Chereze — is coincidence and invention layered on top.

What makes Varginha worth your attention now isn't the legend. It's that this is one of the rare cases where you no longer have to take anyone's word for what the government did. The inquiry is online. The archive files are online. You can read them yourself — and decide whether 357 pages closes the case, or just documents how it was closed.

Download the Original Documents

We host copies of the key Varginha records here so you can read them for yourself. All are scans of the originals, in Portuguese. The two IPM volumes are compressed for the web — the full-resolution originals are on the Superior Military Court's archive, linked below.

Official Archives

The original full-resolution files are held by Brazil's Superior Military Court and National Archives, free to access.