Late in the afternoon of 20 January 1996, in the Jardim Andere neighbourhood of Varginha, a coffee-growing city of about 120,000 people in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, three young women were walking home together when one of them noticed something crouched beside a low wall in a vacant lot. They were sisters Liliane Fátima Silva and Valquíria Aparecida Silva, and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier, aged between 14 and 22. What they described, in a single account they have repeated consistently ever since, was a being roughly 1.5 metres tall, with hairless, dark-brown, oily skin, a large head bearing three raised bumps, long thin arms and legs, large feet, and very large red eyes. It appeared to be in distress, unsteady on its feet, as if injured. The women ran. Their mother, first convinced they were making it up, went back with them to the lot that evening and found footprints in the ground. What the three women saw that afternoon became the core of the most famous alleged extraterrestrial-encounter case in Brazilian history, and one of the most persistent UFO stories in the world. It is known as the Varginha incident.
The sighting did not happen in isolation. In the days before 20 January, residents of Varginha and the surrounding region had reported unusual lights in the sky, and there were claims, never verified, of a crash in the countryside on about 13 January, a week before the girls’ encounter. Those claims set the context in which the women’s report was received: a town already talking about lights and a possible crash, now faced with three frightened teenagers describing a creature. The story spread fast. Within days, Brazilian media were reporting it, and ufologists from across the country were on their way to Varginha.
The capture claims
The story that grew around the sighting was far larger than the sighting itself. According to claims that circulated in the weeks that followed, firefighters and military police had captured one or more beings on the same day, and the creatures had been taken to hospitals in Varginha and in neighbouring towns. The claims named names: hospital staff, including Dr. Cesário Lincoln Furtado, were said to have been involved. Military police corporal Marco Eli Chereze, a 23-year-old who served in the intelligence section of the local military police, was said by some accounts to have handled a creature, and he died on 15 February 1996, 26 days after the girls’ sighting, of an infection that his doctors could not identify. His death became a central element of the story, and it should be said plainly that no medical evidence has ever connected his illness to any creature, and his medical records do not support such a link.
The investigation of the case was taken up by civilian researchers, above all by the lawyer and ufologist Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, who began his inquiry the day after the sighting and published his book O Caso Varginha in 2001, and by the journalists Vitório Pacaccini and Maxs Portes, whose book Incidente em Varginha appeared in 1996. Their work collected witness statements, hospital records, and the accounts of military personnel, and it built the case as it is known today: a crash, a capture, a hospital, a death, and a cover-up. James Fox’s 2022 documentary Moment of Contact brought the story to a new international audience, presenting the witnesses’ accounts and the investigators’ claims in detail.
The army’s inquiry
The Brazilian Army did not ignore the story. In February 1997, it opened a formal military police inquiry, designated IPM 18/97, which ran until June 1997 and produced two volumes of material, described in different sources as 357 folios or roughly 600 pages. The inquiry’s conclusion was blunt: the story was fictitious. Its central explanation was that the three women had mistaken a local man, Luiz Antônio de Paula, nicknamed “Mudinho,” a resident with disabilities who moved in a crouched posture, for a creature. The witnesses reject that explanation completely. Valquíria Silva has said repeatedly that they knew Mudinho from childhood, that he was a familiar figure in the neighbourhood, and that what they saw was not him. The inquiry’s finding, in other words, depends on three young women failing to recognise a man they had known all their lives.
For nearly thirty years, the inquiry’s full text remained out of public view. Then, in January 2026, on the thirtieth anniversary of the incident, Brazil’s Superior Military Court, the STM, released the full inquiry publicly. The release confirmed the inquiry’s conclusion and its reasoning, and it confirmed what the investigators had and had not found: no body, no verified biological sample, no hospital record of a creature, no official photograph of any being. The file is now available for anyone to read, and it is the most complete official record of the case that exists. It does not prove the story false. It proves that the army’s investigation found no evidence to support it, and that its explanation was the Mudinho identification.
Thirty years on
The Varginha incident has survived for thirty years because it sits at the intersection of two things that rarely meet: a consistent, detailed eyewitness account by three people who have never changed their story, and an official investigation that produced a complete, documented, and publicly available file reaching the opposite conclusion. The witnesses are credible in the ordinary sense: they were not seeking publicity, they were frightened, and they have repeated the same description, in the same words, for three decades. The inquiry is credible in the ordinary sense: it was conducted by a formal military process, it interviewed witnesses, it examined records, and it produced a written conclusion. Both cannot be right about what the women saw, and there is no third source left to consult. The vacant lot is still there. The footprints are long gone. The hospital records show nothing. The army’s file shows an investigation that found nothing.
What Varginha proves, at minimum, is how a UFO story grows. A sighting by three young women became, within weeks, a story about a crash, a capture, a hospital, a death, and a cover-up, each element added by a different person, each one harder to verify than the last. The core account, the three women and the creature by the wall, has never been disproved. The elaborate structure built around it has never been proved. And the release of the full military file in 2026, thirty years after the event, changed the case in one important way: it made the official answer public, and it showed that the official answer rests on a single identification that the witnesses themselves reject. The question of what three young women saw in a vacant lot in Varginha on 20 January 1996 remains, after thirty years, exactly where it was on the evening of the sighting: open.
The case also shows something about the witnesses themselves. Liliane, Valquíria, and Kátia were teenagers, and they have spent their adult lives repeating the same account to journalists, researchers, and documentary crews, without embellishment and without payment of any consequence. They have not become professional UFO personalities. They have simply refused to withdraw what they said they saw. That consistency is not proof, but it is the reason the case has outlived every attempt to close it, and it is the reason the release of the military file in 2026 was news rather than a footnote. A file can say a story is fictitious. It cannot make three people forget what they saw.
What is documented — and what is not
Documented: On 20 January 1996, at about 3:30 p.m., three young women in Jardim Andere, Varginha, Minas Gerais — sisters Liliane Fátima Silva and Valquíria Aparecida Silva, and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier, aged 14 to 22 — reported seeing a creature about 1.5 metres tall, with hairless dark-brown oily skin, a large head with three bumps, thin arms and legs, large feet, and large red eyes, crouched by a wall in a vacant lot. Unusual lights had been reported in the region in the days before, and a possible crash on about 13 January was claimed but never verified. Military Police Corporal Marco Eli Chereze, 23, died on 15 February 1996 of an unexplained infection; no medical evidence connects his death to any creature. The Brazilian Army opened military police inquiry IPM 18/97 in February 1997, which concluded the story was fictitious and that the women had mistaken local resident Luiz Antônio de Paula, nicknamed “Mudinho,” for a creature; the witnesses reject this. In January 2026, the Superior Military Court released the full inquiry publicly. No body, verified biological sample, hospital record, or official photograph of a creature has ever been produced.
Unverified or unproven: That a craft crashed near Varginha on about 13 January 1996; that firefighters or military police captured one or more beings; that any creature was taken to a hospital; that Chereze’s death was connected to a creature; that the women mistook Mudinho for a creature, which the witnesses deny; that the beings were of extraterrestrial origin.