0312 - CE3
People claim they saw aliens after UFO crash-landed in Brazil in 1996, documentary reveals
It sounds like science-fiction. On Jan. 13, 1996, the United States Air Force shoots down a UFO, which crashes six miles from a medium-sized town in southeastern Brazil. Seven days later, two sisters aged 14 and 16, and a 21-year-old friend spot a tiny, frightened alien with big red eyes, crouching by a wall. They run screaming back to their mother.
The Brazilian police and military capture at least two aliens, one of which scratches an officer, infecting and ultimately killing him, before dying along with its extraterrestrial comrades. The US Air Force confiscates the alien bodies and takes them to an unknown location. A vast cover-up by the Brazilian military, enforced with death threats, lasts for 26 years. But if it’s all made up, it is one of the greatest works of science fiction in history. Most everyone who hears the witnesses tell their story a quarter century later is convinced they are telling the truth.
When witnesses came in contact with the alien, they said it looked scared appeared to be suffering from the heat
Filmmakers recreated the UFO crash site based on accounts that described the object like a submarine made of aluminum foil.
In the film, Carlos De Sousa describes seeing the UFO rocking and jerking around in the sky before crashing to the ground
Now, a new documentary, “Moment of Contact” (currently streaming on Amazon and Apple TV+) lays out the most convincing case yet that extraterrestrials not only exist, but have visited, and died on earth. A college professor and amateur ultralight pilot named Carlos de Sousa said he witnessed the crash in Varginha, Brazil on Jan. 13, 1996. In the film, De Sousa describes the spacecraft as the size of a school bus but shaped like a submarine with white smoke leaking out of a gash in its back. He compares the UFO to a malfunctioning washing machine, rocking and jerking around in the sky.
De Souza says he ran to the site of the crash where he saw pieces of metal, like a thin aluminum foil, spread across the field. He said he picked up a piece of the metal, crumpled it in his hand, and then let it go, at which point it returned to its original shape. Immediately afterward, he says the military showed up and soldiers started screaming at him to go away. “Go away! Go away! I’m ordering you,” they yelled, as one officer held a rifle to his face.
Kátia Xavier (from left), Valquíria Silva and Liliane Silva return to the scene where they claimed to see a “sad, shrunken” creature in Brazil in 1996
Valquíria was 14 when she told the world of their findings, which were met with ridicule at the time
Valquíria and her friends say what they saw was neither human nor animal
Seven days later, sisters Liliane and Valquíria Silva and their friend Kátia Xavier were walking through an empty lot in between two houses when they spotted the creature just eight feet away. “I was in the front and they were a little farther back,” Liliane, who was 16 in 1996, explains in “Moment of Contact” directed by James Fox. “Passing by here the graffiti caught my attention. I looked and I saw the creature. It appeared to be suffering from the heat.” “When Liliane screamed, I looked and felt fear,” said Valquíria, who was 14 at the time. “I looked into its eyes and saw that it was frightened. Just as I was frightened, the creature was also frightened. I saw that it was afraid of us. It was an exchange of fears. It for ours. Afraid of us in the same way we were afraid of it. A being we weren’t familiar with.” “What I saw stopped me in my tracks,” says Katia, who was 21 at the time. “It glued me to that spot. It had red eyes, oily skin. I couldn’t see an open mouth. Not smiling… Sad expression. Shrunken back. It didn’t have hair. Eyes three times bigger than ours.”
After Liliane screamed she started running away and the two girls joined her. “What we saw wasn’t human and wasn’t an animal either. Nowadays I do think it was a being from another planet,” says Liliana. “It wasn’t a man, it wasn’t an animal. What it was, I can’t say,” says Valquíria. “After we ran for a while we stopped and asked what we saw and then we ran to our mothers. “I came out to meet the girls,” their mother, Luiza, says in the film. “Because mothers have a sixth sense… They were scared and walking slowly and dragging each other.
The site in Brazil where witnesses say they saw the UFO crash
More than two decades after they allegedly encountered the aliens, witnesses drew likenesses of the creatures for “Moment of Contact’s” filmmakers
The site in Brazil where witnesses say they first came in contact with the aliens
“We were children of Catholics and thought it could be a demon. That’s why we were so scared,” said Liliane. Luiza made the girls return and when they got back to the spot, their mother saw the footprint in the dirt, which she drew for filmmaker Fox. It was a round foot with three long toes. “For 20 days I smelled its smell,” said Luiza. “I couldn’t stand the smell. I don’t know where it came from. I even washed my nose with alcohol and water. “It was an ammonia smell,” says Katia. ‘I couldn’t stand the smell. I don’t know where it came from. It smelled worse than sulfer.’ “No, it wasn’t ammonia,” says the mother. “It smelled worse than sulfur. What a strange smell…I grabbed Katia and said, ‘Let’s get out of here!”
They told their story to the press and were met mostly with ridicule at the time. But the girls have not changed their testimony in the 25 years that passed between the event and the making of the film in 2021. Six miles away from the crash site, according to the film, the military set up a blockade in a residential neighborhood. Sources say the local fire department, which is under the control of the military police, captured one of the creatures in the morning, and another officer captured a second near where the three girls had seen it later that afternoon.
Sources say Marco Chereze (in photo shown by his sister) died after one of the creatures scratched him
Vitório Pacaccini claimed to see the creatures. He said death threats forced him to move to Italy
Patricia Fernandes Silva claimed to have also seen the creatures
A drawing by Patricia Fernandes Silva of the aliens she reported seeing in 1996
That was when the creature scratched the young officer, Marco Chereze, who soon grew sick, and sought help at the hospital, according to the film. The doctor who treated him said Chereze spoke openly about what happened because he feared he was dying and was fighting to survive. Two people who did not participate in “Moment of Contact” spoke exclusively to The Post about senior Brazilian officials who told them about their own encounters with the creatures.
“It was skinny, weak, and fragile,” said Vitório Pacaccini, a civilian UFO investigator who said he was shown a 35-second film fragment of the creature by a senior officer in 2012. “It had brown skin with an oil or grease on the body. It had a big head with red eyes and no pupils. The face was like a reptile, like a frog with strange red eyes three times bigger than ours and three protuberances on the top of its head.” Pacaccini said the creature was alive but looked like it was about to die. “It made a little sound,” he said. “Like a bee.”
Patricia Fernandes Silva described two creatures that were nearly identical to the one described by Pacaccini and the three girls. She says the former sheriff of Virginha who learned she was a UFO researcher invited her into an office building in 2014 where he and four other officers interrogated her for hours. “The whole time they were asking me about my relationship to Varginha but I had never investigated the case. I knew about it, but I had nothing to do with it!”
Finally, the senior officer asked the other officers to leave the room. It was then that he showed her a color photo, shot on film, and printed on Kodak paper. In the photo, says Silva, were two creatures, one dead, and the other crouched in the same way the three girls had described it. “It had three — I won’t say horns — but three high abscesses on the forehead,” she said.
“He took the picture and said, ‘Are you sure you don’t know anything about this day? Look at the photo!’ I was scared! But I said, ‘No. I had no knowledge.’”
The former sheriff told Silva that his hands had been paralyzed ever since he grabbed the creature by the legs. The man’s hands were cupped, and he struggled awkwardly to pull the photo out of an old newspaper he kept in a transparent folder, she said. Unlike Pacaccini and the girls, Silva said the eyes of the creature were black, not red. But otherwise, she described identical creatures. “The mouth was very small,” she said. “The skin of the alive one had a shine, but it was not an oily shine. It was kind of gooey like he just stepped out of a swimming pool. It was wet, damp skin.”
Pacaccini said he has videotaped interviews with at least seven military officers about the encounter that he is keeping in secure locations. After he accused the military of a cover-up, he said hostile drivers on four separate occasions bumped his car on the highway. On the fourth time, two shots were fired at his car. He said he has received hundreds of death threats over the years and, in 2004, he moved to Italy to escape. “Moment of Contact” comes at a moment of heightened interest in UFOs. In 2017, mainstream news media covered reports by Navy pilots of UFOs — renamed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) — recorded on infrared films.
In May of this year, a Navy intelligence officer said the military had a database of 400 UAP incidents, but no evidence that aliens had ever been found. At the same time, the military has not ruled out that the UAPs are operated by ETs. In June, NASA announced it was joining the military’s investigation into UAPs.
Jacques Vallée, an astronomer and leading ufologist, said members of the public are increasingly starting to believe extraterrestrials are real.
“At the National Cathedral a couple of years ago… the director of the Department of National Intelligence said that this is a subject for science, and not just an intelligence topic,” he told The Post. “A subject for open science. And the subtext was, ‘No more ridicule. This is a real topic and nobody has any explanation.’ “I’m just as puzzled as everybody else,” he added. “And the Air Force is just as puzzled. And the Navy is just as puzzled. The Air Force didn’t say anything. It remembers the good old days and may not want to be part of the dialogue.”
Source:https://nypost.com/2022/10/29/people-saw-aliens-after-ufo-crashed-in-brazil-in-1996-doc/
Through the investigations of many Brazilian and foreign ufologists, including the impeccable work of researchers Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, Claudeir Covo, Vitório Pacaccini, and Marco Antônio Petit, dozens of witnesses have surfaced—most of the time without citing their true names, for their own safety—to allege that the Brazilian Army, the Fire Department of Varginha, and the Brazilian Air Force worked together to locate, capture, and transfer alien beings. UFO cases, at least those linked by a chain of evidence, do not get harder to believe than this.
What is known today, however, is not that different from what was known in 1996. According to investigations, in the days before the events that occurred on January 20, the most important date of the case, many people saw lights around the cities of Varginha and Três Corações, in the interior of Minas Gerais. Most investigators assume that the U.S. military warned the Brazilian military, through the Integrated Air Defense Center (CINDACTA I) in Brasília, that its satellites were detecting the unusual presence of flying objects over the Brazilian territory, and especially to the south of the state of Minas Gerais. Research also suggests that the Brazilian military knew where the point of impact of a downed aircraft was located.
Witnesses to this case played an important role in directing these conclusions, but what most intrigued ufologists was their inability to confirm reports that a crash had occurred. This changed as witnesses came forward.
On a farm located 10 kilometers from the center of Varginha, Oralina Augusta de Freitas, who was watching television, heard the cattle running. She opened the door of her house to see what was happening, and was surprised to see a UFO flying over the property. She called her husband, Eurico Rodrigues de Freitas, and they watched the solitary flight of the object together. “It was the size of a micro-bus and the shape of a submarine,” he said. For 40 minutes the object flew less than five meters off the ground above the farm, and appeared to be heading toward Varginha. The couple reported that the object had a hole in its structure, through which white smoke was billowing. Pieces of fuselage swayed in the wind as if they were no more than pieces of cloth. It made no sound.
What happened from there nobody knows, but no pieces of the fuselage were officially found.
Another impressive report, although not yet proven true, was made by businessman and ultralight pilot Carlos de Souza. Souza said that, on the night of January 12, he left São Paulo and stayed overnight at a roadside hotel on the edge of the Fernão Dias Highway. On January 13, around 4 a.m., he started his trip to the city of Três Corações (according to investigators, Souza initially thought that the date of these events was January 20, but friends later informed him that the correct date was the twelfth).
Illustrative image of the UFO that Oralina and Eurico de Freitas say they saw (ET&ETC)
Artistic illustration of Varginha extraterrestrial (UFO Magazine Brazil)
Kátia Andrade Xavier, Liliane Fátima da Silva, and Valquíria Aparecida Silva said that they saw a “demon” (UFO Magazine Brazil)
As he drove along the highway, five kilometers from the entrance to Varginha, he heard a muffled engine rumble. Thinking that the car was experiencing engine trouble, he stopped along the side of the road. When he got out of the vehicle, he saw a cylindrical airship between 10 and 12 meters long and four and five meters in diameter flying about 120 meters above him in the direction of Varginha to Três Corações. It was metallic, polished, and reflected the morning sunlight. He noticed a one and a half meter hole in the right side of the ship, and a lot of whitish smoke pouring out.
The craft crossed the highway and Souza got into his car and started chasing it. Suddenly, he realized that the object was crashing into the woods. When it disappeared behind vegetation, he searched for a road that would lead him to the probable location of impact and finally found a dirt road. It took him 30 minutes to reach the accident scene, which he described as covered with debris that looked like tinfoil. He could see a larger piece of the craft a little farther away. Souza picked up a piece of the material and saw that it was thin and light. When he kneaded it, he was startled to see it return to its original state. Farther away, he saw an Army helicopter, two tarpaulins, an ambulance, and three cars. He smelled a powerful ammonia odor and was startled by a military police officer who approached him and shouted, “Go away! You saw nothing.” [This story echoes, some might deem suspiciously, a part of the widely published testimony concerning the famous, still controversial Roswell incident. —Jerome Clark]
Souza tried to determine what was happening, but two more soldiers appeared and forced him to leave. Still confused by what he had witnessed, he returned to his car and drove away, but could think of nothing else. He decided to stop at a restaurant, where a man approached him and asked him if he was Carlos de Souza. He said yes and the man called him over to talk. “What you saw I saw, too. You should not talk to anyone about it.” The man then related details about Souza’s private life.
According to ufologists Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues and Claudeir Covo, before they ever heard Souza’s account, two soldiers from the Air Force Sargentos de Armas School (ESA) in Três Corações had already contacted the investigators to tell them that the area had been banned and that trucks were loading foreign material. They also learned that, at 8 a.m. on January 20, 1996, the Varginha Fire Department received an unidentified call from a person who asked the firefighters to investigate a strange creature seen in a park north of the Jardim Andere neighborhood. Two hours later, firefighters arrived and expected to find a wild animal. They were equipped with what they though was the appropriate equipment, such as cages and nets, but what they encounterd instead was a five-foot-tall bipedal entity with red eyes and brown skin.
Although several people claim to have witnessed this operation, only a few have talked—or maybe, if one accepts the story as grounded in fact, risked talking—about it. One of them was João Bosco Manoel, a fish peddler. According to his account, he reached the corner of One Street and saw a parked fire truck. Thinking that something might have happened, he walked to the top of the street, where he saw six firefighters in two groups of three.
On a grassy terrain with a slight decline, João spotted four gloved firefighters carrying a net with a strange being inside it. Apparently they had captured it out of the thicket. He did not have an unobstructed view of it but could see that one of its feet was brown. Firefighters were trying to conceal the creature from curious onlookers. When they reached the truck, their colleagues helped them load the being into the back. According to information obtained during the investigation, the military found that the creature offered no resistance. Researchers determined that the firefighters who captured the being were Sgt. Palhares, Corp. Rubens, and soldiers Santos and Nivaldo. João and two others closely watched events unfold as a smell of ammonia permeated the scene.
Military police officer Marco Eli Chereze died after having physical contact with the strange creature that he helped capture (UFO Magazine Brazil)
Other witnesses observed a fire truck and police cars that morning and afternoon. A military man told investigators that two or three blocks below the capture site the firefighters delivered the strange creature to the ESA military. The being, still netted, was placed in a wooden box and taken to Three Hearts. It was kept in captivity for two days, then placed in a metal box and sent to Unicamp in São Paulo for posthumous examination by doctors Fortunato Badan Palhares and Conradin Metz. (The former is believed to have participated in the autopsy, although he vehemently denied it).
The fish peddler’s account conflicts with the military’s and remains unconfirmed.
But there is much more to this story. That same afternoon, according to testimony an ex-soldier provided to investigators, FAL-type rifle shots were fired by uniformed military men carrying out a sweep of the small forest where the first creature had been found. The soldier claimed that a soldier had been frightened when he sighted a creature apparently helping a wounded comrade, so he opened fire. Two shots struck its belly and one its chest. A fourth shot hit its shoulder. The military man said that these differed from the other one and had black hair. Immediately afterward, soldiers came out of the woods carrying the creatures in two black sacks. Something was moving in one of them.
At this juncture, we allegedly have three creatures, two living and one dead.
The most publicized and well-known report of the case was made by Kátia Andrade Xavier, Liliane Fátima da Silva, and Valquíria Aparecida Silva, who were 22, 16, and 14 respectively. The young women were crossing a vacant lot at Rua Benevenuto Bráz Vieira when they saw something frightening: a thin, hairless, dark-skinned creature with dark veins, two legs with enormous feet featuring two toes each, two arms featuring three fingers each, a huge head with three bony protrusions—one on each side and one in the center—and huge red eyes. It was crouched beside a wall. Military reports coincide with this description, but add that the being had two holes in place of the nose, a very small mouth, a thin dark tongue, and it smelled strongly of ammonia.
First, they thought it was a statue, but when the being turned its head, they saw its huge red eyes and thought it was the devil himself. They ran home and called Liliane and Valquíria’s mother. Dona Luzia Helena da Silva and her neighbors comforted the girls and then went to the vacant lot, but found only two footprints and an awful smell. Possibly, the creature was running away from the military in the hours before soldiers captured one of its companions.
January 20 would be an unusual day in more ways than one. It rained hail in the late afternoon and that night residents of Jardim Andere saw a fire truck and police car surveying the site again. The weather served as cover for their claim that they were searching for damage caused by the storm, but if we are to believe accounts, they knew there were more creatures in the region—the one seen by the girls, and at least another one they had captured.
As before, the creature offered no resistance when soldier Marco Eli Chereze of the Military Police Intelligence Service (P2) and his companion captured it. They took the being to a health post in the city, but were turned away. Then they decided to refer it to the Regional Hospital, where the first examinations were performed. As early as Sunday morning, January 21, the strange creatures were transferred to Humanitas Hospital and there are many reports of unusual movement of the Army, the police, and the Fire Department between regional hospitals and Humanitas. Their vehicles were also seen arriving at the hospital in Belo Horizonte. The being that arrived at the hospital alive died inside.
On January 22, an operation to remove the beings began. The military used three trucks and several other vehicles to move the covered bodies. The trucks were parked on the side of Humanitas Hospital and a series of cover-up maneuvers were performed. Fifteen people were part of the operation, among them doctors, nurses, Army soldiers, fire brigades, and the military police. With the bodies inside, the three trucks left for ESA. Witnesses in Três Corações, Dr. Marcos Carvalho, and Eduardo Bertoldo Praxedes, watchman of the Parmalat Factory, saw these trucks entering the Army Cadets Preparatory school. The lookout also said that for several days there had been unusual movement of vehicles entering and exiting the school.
On January 23, at 4 a.m., a military convoy left ESA bound for Campinas. Around 9 a.m. they arrived at the school. Later, the creatures were taken to University of Campinas (Unicamp), where medical examiners Badan Palhares and Conradin Metz began performing the autopsies. Laboratory workers were prevented from entering the site—something that had never happened before. According to three other military sources, at least one creature was taken to underground labs located at the university. The other creature was referred to the Legal Medical Institute at the Amarais Cemetery. The intense movement of Army officials at Unicamp in February, March, and April of 1996, was surprising, even for the military. There were also rumors that metal fragments of an unknown origin had been taken to the Aeronautical Technological Center (CTA) in São José dos Campos, in the state of São Paulo, where they were examined in secret underground facilities.
Returning to Unicamp, employees of the Hospital das Clínicas, located inside the campus of the university and linked to Dr. Badan Palhares, said they saw a metallic box displaying numerous small holes, as if it had been made for air intake. A nurse led the two soldiers carrying the box to a room, where they left it, but were forbidden to enter. In the days that followed, Badan Palhares asked for fruits, vegetables, and milk. Food for a corpse? Some even said they had heard the doctor comment that when the doors opened he would like to see the military guarding the creature, and also complained about the terrible smell that it exuded.
The situation grew even more bizarre when, on January 23, a Buffalo aircraft, normally used to load tons of cargo, took off from Canoas Air Base in Rio Grande do Sul state. Inside it were three containers, a box, and several soldiers. The plane was said to be carrying a sophisticated radar system to be placed in a city near Varginha due to the large movement of UFOs in the region. On January 25, the United States military arrived on the scene by helicopter. The whole school was on standby. Several intelligence agents were also moved to the scene. This great movement of the military caught the attention of the residents of the city.
The next day, several scientists and military personnel linked to the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) arrived at Unicamp. The excuse was that American scientists were choosing Brazilian scientists to take part in future space missions.
It is worth mentioning again that on January 20, Marco Eli Chereze and another military police officer captured one of the creatures, despite the military police’s contrary claim that he did not work that day. His family, in turn, stated that he had not returned home until 2 a.m. when he went to his mother’s place to change clothes, because his were drenched with rain. From then on, Marco began to feel ill. Ufologists who investigated the case believe that the firefighters who allegedly participated in the capture of the beings wore gloves, but they do not know if Marco Eli was protected.
About 17 days after the capture, Chereze began exhibiting strange symptoms and noticed inflammation under his left arm. At the baracks infirmary, physician Robson Ferreira Melo performed minor surgery on him. Then Chereze developed a fever and pain all over his body. On February 11, he was admitted to Bom Pastor Hospital. On day 15, he was transferred to the intensive care unit of the Regional Hospital, where he died the following day. The doctors alleged that the disease was serious and ordered that the body be buried immediately, without a wake, but his family would not allow this. The death certificate stated that the cause of his death had been acute respiratory failure, sepsis, and pneumonia. Ever since the soldier’s family has sought justice for their son. Certainly, according to the facts, the death certificate needs to be changed.
But there’s more. On April 21, around 9 p.m., Terezinha Gallo Clepf, 67, celebrating her birthday at the zoo restaurant, stepped out onto a porch to smoke a cigarette. The place was dark, and when she looked to her left, she saw the most horrifying sight of his life: a being exactly like the one described by the girls and the military, although this one had a yellow helmet on its head.
Terezinha reported that the creature’s bright red eyes allowed her to see its face clearly. The creature was behind a fence that circled the porch. The two stared at each other. She was frightened and decided to go into the restaurant, but returned after a few minutes and saw the same creature. She pulled her husband by the arm and asked to leave.
But the story does not end here. On April 29, Luzia Helena Silva, mother of the girls Liliane and Valquíria who saw the “demon” in the vacant lot, was visited by four men in suits who did not identify themselves. After hearing the girls’ story, they offered the family a large sum of money to record a video statement denying what they had seen that day and claimed that the whole thing had been a joke.
The same happened to João Bosco Manoel, who was approached on three separate occasions by strangers who told him not to comment on what he had seen. When the press began to push for the truth, the ESA commander at the time, Brigadier General Sergio Pedro Coelho Lima, gathered all the media for a press conference on the case. On May 8, he read a statement announcing that no ESA officer had participated in the alleged operation. When asked about military personnel who had been quoted by ufologists in a press meeting held at the Ubirajara house, the general reacted with irritation.
Two more interesting claims emerged. Hildo Lúcio Gardino, 20 years old, was journeying from Três Corações to Varginha on May 17. At 8 p.m., she saw a strange creature on the side of the road, identical to the one reported by the three young women. She dimmed the headlights of the car and sped past as the creature placed its hands over its eyes and fled into the woods. If this testimony is true, then at least one creature was still on the loose. Another fact of great importance is a meeting held in Campinas. For the first time in history a minister of state met with all 29 of his generals—that is, the whole high command—outside the federal capital. Certainly, something happened in Varginha and this certainty is becoming more and more concrete.
In 1997, the Brazilian Army completed an military police inquiry (IPM) on the case. This turned out to be a big headache for it. The large (300+ pages) report was analyzed by several ufologists who had been present during investigations of the incident in Varginha, and they found several major errors.
In order to explain the great movement of soldiers at the Sargentos de Armas School at the end of the week in which the Varginha Case occurred and specifically on January 20, the school representatives said that there was a reception of new recruits; in fact, as investigators determined, the reception took place the following week.
In order to explain the great movement between January 20 and 22, 1996, in the city of Varginha of several Army trucks, model 1418, with camouflaged canvas, ESA claimed that the vehicles were sent to the company Automaco Comercial e Importadora Ltda. for wheel balancing and steering alignment. But the business was not open on the weekend.
To explain the great movement of soldiers at the Regional Hospital from January 20 to 22, the report claimed that Dr. Adilson Usier, director of the unit, was there to exhume the body of a young student who had been found hanged in the police jail. According to the report, the body did not fit in the “meat wagon,” and therefore, had to be taken in a fire department truck. Civil and military police accompanied the transport, the report said. This was untrue, because, according to the IML reports, the exhumation occurred on January 30. Capt. Pedro Alvarenga also denied that the fire department had participated in the transport of the corpse of the dead student, and no one could explain why the Army was following the exhumation.
To explain the great movement of soldiers at the Humanitas Hospital, the report claimed that they were there because of the arrival of new equipment for use in heart transplants. But the question remains: Why would the Army, fire department, and military police need to be involved in the arrival of such equipment? No answer was forthcoming.
To explain the great movement of soldiers at Unicamp and Hospital da Clínicas in Campinas (where the two creatures were allegedly taken), the report said that the units were accompanying bones of the dead from Araguaia. However, such bones were already in that unit four years earlier.
On May 4, a citation of the names of ESA military involved in the military actions led to a formal request from the Army for a press conference. On May 8, Brig. Gen. Pedro Coelho Lima, ESA commander, read a statement announcing that “no element or material of the school had any connection with the events of that day, and any contrary communication is untrue.” He insisted to the journalists that nothing unusual had happened in the city and, when asked what the ESA military was doing on January 20, 1996, he replied that the military was “working for the sake of the Army and the nation.” When asked if he could prove this, he replied, “Prove to whom? We do not have to prove anything, and what I had to say was read in this statement.” Then he turned his back on the press, and everyone present left convinced that something was definitely being hidden.
In 1999, in a BBC report that aired on the Discovery channel, Maj. Calza, who participated alongside General Lima in the release of ESA’s first official statement, presented a new version of the facts. According to him, “at that time there was a dwarf, disfigured and mentally retarded, who was badly injured by the hail occurring in that city, and he was walking around Varginha with his wife, also a pregnant dwarf who was going into labor, and this was scaring the locals.” The major added that the dwarf couple had been taken in an Army truck to the Regional Hospital at the same day, time, and place when the second creature was captured by the Marco Eli Chereze on January 20, 1996.
In 2015, prominent ufologist Marco Antônio Petit, coeditor of Revista UFO magazine and the author of eight well-researched books, published Varginha, Toda Verdade Revelada (Varginha, All the Truth Revealed). In this book, Petit reveals secrets that had previously been kept under lock and key. According to the author, the Military Police Inquiry had included testimony from two ufology investigators of the case, including himself, who had provided testimony at the Sargentos de Armas School. This testimony had been kept secrect.
The book makes it clear, in an unprecedented manner, why this happened and what interests were involved. Patit alleged that among the evidence not yet disclosed by ufologists are videotapes of military personnel who participated in operations to capture the aliens and transported the beings and the UFO, in addition to other cover-ups. These statements remain confidential for the time being, but investigators continue to pressure the Brazilian Army to release all the secret documents involving the Varginha Case.
—Thiago Luiz Ticchetti
Editor’s Note
This complex story, ably relayed by our friend and colleague Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, is surely the single most extraordinary claim made anywhere in this encyclopedia. It relates a high-strangeness CE3—there is no shortage of those worldwide—but more fundamentally, it demands that we believe the Brazilian government possesses ironclad proof of otherworldly visitation in the form of actual biological entities. That would make this the story of the century, if not of the millennium. Our advice is to suspend judgment and wait for new, clarifying developments.—Jerome Clark
Sources:
Pacaccini, Vitório. PORTES, Maxs. Incidente em Varginha. Belo Horizonte (MG), Brazil: Edições Guatiara, 1996.
Petit, Marco Antonio. Varginha: Toda a Verdade Revelada.. Curitiba (PR), Brazil: Ed. Biblioteca UFO, 2015.
Ticchetti, Thiago Luiz. Guia da Tipologia dos Extraterrestres. Curitiba (PR), Brazil: Ed. Biblioteca UFO, 2014.
Revista UFO Special issues 13, 17, 34, 43, 230.