VARGINHA

Opening

Late on the afternoon of 20 January 1996, three young women took a shortcut across a patch of waste ground in the Jardim Andere neighbourhood of Varginha, a coffee town in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Crouched against a wall, they said, was a creature unlike anything they had ever seen: brown, oily skin, a large head with bumps on top, big red eyes, and a smell so strong it followed them all the way home.

Within days the town was full of stories of firefighters, Army trucks, a creature at the hospital and bodies being flown out of the country. The Army says none of it happened. Thirty years later, Varginha is still Brazil's most famous UFO case, and the town has made the creature its mascot.

Timeline

13 to 20 January 1996Later accounts describe an object coming down near Varginha in the days before the sighting. These dates come from later testimony, not from any official log.

20 January, late afternoonSisters Liliane and Valquíria Silva and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier see the figure on the vacant lot and run. Their families hear the story that evening.

The days afterRumours spread of firefighters and soldiers capturing a creature, of Army vehicles in Jardim Andere, and of unusual activity at the town's Regional Hospital. Local lawyer and investigator Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues tracks down a nurse who describes outside doctors, Military Police and Army vehicles at the hospital.

4 February 1996TV Globo's Sunday programme Fantástico airs interviews with the three women and Rodrigues. The case goes national.

1996Researcher Vitório Pacaccini publishes Incidente em Varginha, naming soldiers he says took part in a recovery.

13 February to 19 June 1997Because soldiers have been named in print, the Army's sergeants' school, the Escola de Sargentos das Armas, holds a formal military police inquiry, IPM No. 18/1997. It runs to 357 pages in two volumes. Named soldiers deny transporting anything unusual, and the vehicle movements are explained as routine maintenance.

August 1997The inquiry is closed. It concludes there was no crash and no capture, and that the women probably saw a local man known as Mudinho, crouched and dirty in the rain.

2022 and 2025Filmmaker James Fox investigates the case in Moment of Contact, and returns with new witnesses in Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters, released in December 2025.

Key figures

Liliane Silva, Valquíria Silva and Kátia Andrade Xavier are the first and most important witnesses. They were not ufologists or soldiers, and they have kept to their account for three decades. Their sighting is the one part of the case that does not depend on second-hand stories.

Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, a local lawyer, reached the women early and has stood by them ever since. Vitório Pacaccini's book, by putting soldiers' names in print, is what forced the Army to investigate at all.

Luís Antônio de Paula, known locally as Mudinho, is the Army's explanation: a local man with mental health problems who the inquiry said could have looked like the creature in poor light. The women have always rejected this.

Lieutenant Colonel Lúcio Carlos Finholdt Pereira signed the inquiry's conclusion.

James Fox, the American documentary filmmaker behind Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and The Phenomenon (2020), did more than anyone to bring Varginha to the world. For Moment of Contact (2022) he spent years in the town, tracking down witnesses who had never spoken on camera, and he returned for Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters in December 2025. His films treat the three women and the town with a seriousness the case rarely got from outside Brazil.

Physical and documentary trail

The official record is the Army's 357-page inquiry, later made public through Brazil's Superior Military Court. Its conclusion is that no crash or capture of extraterrestrial beings was proven, and that the soldiers named in the book had been on ordinary duties.

The civilian record is the women's statements, given within hours and repeated on national television within two weeks, plus the dossiers built by Rodrigues and Pacaccini. What neither side has is the thing that would settle it: a photograph of the creature, a medical record, or any physical trace.

Things you might not know

• It happened in broad daylight. Most close encounters happen at night. The women saw the creature in the late afternoon, at close range, which is why their description is so detailed.
• The smell is in every account. All three described a strong, strange smell, often compared to ammonia, that seemed to cling to them after they ran.
• It had bumps on its head. The women described three raised lumps or ridges across the top of its large head, a detail that turns up in almost every drawing of the "Varginha ET".
• The Army only investigated because of a book. The 1997 inquiry was opened because Pacaccini printed soldiers' names, not because of the sighting itself.
• A policeman's death became part of the story. A young Military Police officer, Marco Eli Chereze, died weeks later of an infection. Some researchers claim he had handled the creature; his death has never been officially linked to the case.
• The town embraced it. Varginha now calls itself the "land of the ET". It has a water tower and bus shelters shaped like flying saucers, and an ET statue.

Competing explanations

A real creature and a military recovery. The women's detailed daylight sighting, the rumours of soldiers and a hospital, and later testimony gathered by researchers including James Fox all point to something the authorities captured and removed. Against this: no body, no photograph and no documents.

Mudinho in the rain. The Army's explanation for the sighting. It is possible for a frightened glimpse, though the women knew the town and say what they saw was not a man.

Real events, joined by rumour. Ordinary fire engines, Army vehicles and hospital traffic in a busy week may have been stitched into a capture story after the sighting became famous, even if the women did see something they could not explain.

Later life of the case

Varginha has been the subject of documentaries, books and countless anniversary features, and is often called "Brazil's Roswell". Some military witnesses gave interviews years later that went further than their 1997 statements, and some of those were later disputed or withdrawn. James Fox's two films brought the case to a new international audience and put new witnesses on camera.

Finding

Three young women saw something on a waste lot in Varginha on 20 January 1996 that frightened them so badly they ran home, and they have described it the same way ever since. Nobody has shown they were wrong. The larger story of a capture and a cover-up rests on testimony that came later and has no physical evidence behind it, and the Army's inquiry denied it.

What still will not resolve: what was crouching by that wall. The women's account has never changed. The thing they saw has never been found.