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The Varginha ET: how a rainy afternoon became Brazil’s Roswell

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In January 1996, three young women in a small Brazilian town saw a red-eyed figure crouching by a wall. Over thirty years, the story grew into a legend of captured creatures, a secret autopsy and American cargo planes. Meanwhile, the Army’s inquiry, and eventually the case’s first investigator, reached a very different conclusion.

When: January 20, 1996
Where: Brazil
Witnesses: Three young women: sisters Liliane and Valquíria Silva, and Kátia Andrade Xavier
Official position: A Brazilian Army military police inquiry (IPM 18/97, 1997) found no military operation and no captured creature. Its “most likely hypothesis” was that the women saw a local man crouching by a wall in the rain. A military court closed the case on July 4, 1997.

A rainy Saturday afternoon

Varginha is a small coffee-growing town in southern Minas Gerais, Brazil. At around 3 p.m. on Saturday, January 20, 1996, three young women took a shortcut across a vacant lot in the Jardim Andere neighborhood: sisters Liliane and Valquíria Silva and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier.

Something was crouching at the foot of a wall. According to their account, it was small, with brown, oily-looking skin, red eyes and three bumps on its head. The women ran. Liliane and Valquíria's mother, Luiza Helena da Silva, later noticed a strong, unpleasant smell at the spot. Their description has barely changed in thirty years, and the three women still insist that what they saw was not a person.

That is the core of the story. Everything that later turned the case into "Brazil's Roswell" was built on top of it.

How the story spread

The next morning, a local shopkeeper told Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues about it. The lawyer had been investigating UFOs for years and lived a few blocks from the lot. He interviewed the women that same day. He later stressed that at that point he spoke only of an "unknown and strange" being, not an extraterrestrial one.

It took two weeks for the story to reach the media. The first TV report aired on TV Alterosa on February 1, 1996, the Estado de Minas newspaper covered it the next day, and a few days later Globo's Sunday magazine show Fantástico took it nationwide. The paper also published six very similar composite sketches based on the women's descriptions.

The timing helped. A few months earlier, the widely publicized "alien autopsy" film had been shown around the world, including in Brazil, and in the summer of 1996 Independence Day became a blockbuster. The ufologists made deliberate use of the attention. "We have to admit that the media is the ufologists' main weapon," Rodrigues told Revista UFO.

Captures, hospitals, convoys

A new thread appeared at the end of February. On February 28, 1996, Estado de Minas published the taped testimony of an anonymous soldier, supplied by Rodrigues and fellow researcher Vitório Pacaccini. According to it, firefighters had captured a creature on the day of the sighting and taken it to the Army sergeants' school in the nearby town of Três Corações.

Denials followed immediately. The fire department's commander, Captain Pedro Alvarenga, said the same day that his unit had been out cutting down a tree that morning. The city hospital's director called the whole thing "a fantasy." The commander of the sergeants' school, General Sérgio Pedro Coelho Lima, denied it at a press conference in May 1996 and told IstoÉ magazine that the ufologists' claims were "absurd" and "ridiculous." According to the Army, the trucks seen in town were taking vehicles for maintenance, and a private hospital had been installing new cardiac surgery equipment.

Liliane and Valquíria's mother said that on the evening of April 29, 1996, four men in suits visited the family and offered money if the women would retract their story. There is no record of the visit beyond the family's account.

From one creature to eight

The story grew month by month. In July 1996, The Christian Science Monitor, citing ufologists, reported two creatures. In September 1996, Claudeir Covo, a leading Brazilian ufologist, laid out a detailed scenario in Planeta magazine: rifle shots, a nighttime convoy to Campinas, an underground laboratory beneath the University of Campinas (Unicamp), and a visit by NASA staff. Almost all of it was attributed to anonymous military sources. In June, Covo spent forty minutes searching for the site of a presumed crash from a light aircraft and found nothing.

Later ufologist compilations speak of eight creatures, an alert from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and an American cargo plane flying to Panama. These claims come from anonymous "leakers"; no documents have ever surfaced. According to Gazeta SP, the forensic pathologist at the center of the Unicamp story, Fortunato Badan Palhares, denied in a 2016 TV interview that he had ever performed an autopsy on any creature.

The most tragic layer involves a young military police officer. Marco Eli Chereze died on February 15, 1996, at the age of 23; the forensic report gave the cause as sepsis, a blood infection. The claim that he had been infected by touching the creature first appeared almost a year later, in February 1997. Yet according to military police records he was not even on duty on January 20, and his treating physician believed a urinary infection was the likely cause.

The Army's inquiry

Pacaccini and Maxs Portes's book Incidente em Varginha named individual soldiers. In March 1997, the sergeants' school command ordered a military police inquiry. Its two volumes, about 300 pages each, contain testimony from soldiers, police officers, firefighters, drivers, the book's authors and Rodrigues himself. Every soldier named in the book denied taking part in any operation, and the departure and arrival times of Army vehicles did not match the alleged transport of a creature.

The inquiry also offered an explanation for the sighting. There had been heavy rain and hail that day. Across from the lot lived a local man with an intellectual disability, known in the neighborhood as Luizinho or Mudinho, who habitually sat crouching in the street. In the words of the officer leading the inquiry, Lieutenant Colonel Lúcio Carlos Finholdt Pereira, the "most likely hypothesis" was that the man, probably muddy from the downpour, was seen crouching by a wall and mistaken by three frightened girls for a "creature from space."

On June 18, 1997, the military prosecutor asked for the case to be closed. He wrote that no government body had been involved and that the authors' conduct was unethical but not criminal. The military judge closed the case on July 4, noting that the story was so implausible it had become material for a TV comedy show.

The explanation faces a serious objection: the women knew Luizinho. According to Rodrigues's 2001 book, when they returned to the lot, the man walked over and crouched down, and Kátia laughed: "I've even given him cigarettes. Who doesn't know Luizinho? Imagine us confusing him with that thing." Yet as Brazilian skeptic Kentaro Mori points out, it would be a remarkable coincidence for an unknown creature to crouch down right across from the house of a man who habitually did exactly that.

The inquiry's findings were never secret. IstoÉ published them in 2010, and anyone could request copies of the file. In January 2026, Brazil's Superior Military Court drew public attention to them again.

Thirty years on

By the anniversary, the story had split in two directions.

One direction was set by Rodrigues himself. At the end of his nearly 400-page book in 2001, he acknowledged that five years of research had produced no conclusive evidence, and around 2010 he published a critical book titled A Desconstrução de um Mito ("The Deconstruction of a Myth"). In Globo's January 2026 documentary series, he went further, saying he had made a serious mistake by suggesting to the witnesses that the being might be extraterrestrial, which may have shaped their memories.

The 1996 military witnesses also appeared in the same series. Back then, three of them had given accounts to the ufologists: a firefighter described the capture, a corporal said he saw the creature at the hospital, and a private described its transport to Campinas. Today the firefighter and the private say their accounts were invented. The private says a ufologist offered him 5,000 reais for his testimony, while the corporal, speaking anonymously, stands by his original story. Pacaccini denies paying anyone. He has acknowledged, however, that at the time he told the soldiers they could deny everything if they felt afraid.

The other direction is represented by American filmmaker James Fox. His documentary Moment of Contact came out in 2022, and on January 20, 2026, he held a press conference in Washington with new witnesses. One of them, physician Ítalo Venturelli, says he saw a calm, white-skinned being at the city hospital in 1996. That contradicts not only the skeptics but also the brown, red-eyed creature described by the three women. The Debrief, which covered the event, itself noted that no hard evidence was presented.

Meanwhile, Varginha lives off its own legend. As early as 1996, the mayor wanted to make the town the "UFO center of the Americas." An ET memorial opened in November 2022, and in 2023 a municipal decree declared the "Varginha ET case" part of the town's cultural heritage.

What remains for certain after thirty years is a rainy afternoon, three frightened young women and a figure crouching by a wall. Who or what it was, we still do not know for sure. Everything claimed beyond that remains unproven.

The sober take

What is proven: In February 1996, the three young women described their sighting in both local and national media, and their description has remained essentially unchanged since. The fire department, the hospitals, the military police and the Army all denied in 1996 that any creature was captured or transported. The Army's 1997 inquiry found no military operation. The forensic report attributed Marco Eli Chereze's death to sepsis.

What is not proven: The claims about a capture, hospital treatment, Unicamp, NASA and a NORAD alert rest on anonymous sources. In thirty years, not a single photo, video, document or piece of physical evidence has surfaced. Two of the 1996 military witnesses retracted their accounts in 2026, and the case's first investigator acknowledged that he may have influenced the witnesses.

The most likely explanation: According to the Army, the women saw a local man with an intellectual disability who lived across from the lot, habitually crouched, and was muddy from the heavy rain. This is plausible but not proven. Against it: the women knew the man, and they still deny it was him.

What amplified the story:

ufologists who, in their own words, deliberately used the media to push the case;
anonymous "leakers" whose claims grew year after year;
the mood of the time: the "alien autopsy" film and Independence Day;
the town's economic interest, already visible in 1996.

What remains open: What exactly the women saw that afternoon. Based on the available sources, all that can be said for certain is that they saw a crouching figure, and every claim beyond that is unproven.