Decades after “demonic aliens” allegedly crash-landed in a Brazilian city, the bizarre event remains a mystery with a series of unanswered questions.
In 1996, military vehicles stormed Varginha after dozens of panicked residents reported evidence of extraterrestrial life – an incident later dubbed the “Roswell of Brazil”.
Zoo animals collapsed and died and a police officer who grabbed the ‘alien’ died mysteriously with no explanation to this day.
Varginha – 300 kilometers northwest of Rio de Janeiro in the state of Minas Gerais – became infamous for the city’s obsession with a gray, submarine-shaped object the size of a minibus crash-landed in their city.
What really happened on January 20, 1996 remains to be proven or unproven by both sides of the debate.
Government officials bizarrely blamed the “alien” sightings on a dwarven couple and a scruffy disabled man – but decades of cover-up and happy coincidences fueled the conspiracy.
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Multiple witnesses reportedly saw a creature that was “100 percent not human.”
Locals described the animal as having wobbly legs and a very unsteady posture, as it looked seriously ill and injured from the crash.
With two huge red balls for eyes and brown, oily skin, the alien was certainly memorable.
The small creature appeared hairless and terrified and was apparently tracked down by petrified police.
Mysterious death of officer
Officer Marco Eli Chereze, 23, was the first person to come into contact with the creature, but after trying to handle it with his bare hands, he fell ill with a mysterious illness.
According to reports, the man suffered a full-body infection and died just weeks later.
Other reports from the Varginha crowd say they saw a strange metal object slowly fall from the sky before slamming into the ground.
A powerful and almost overpowering smell of sulfur then wafted through the area.
Carlos de Souza saw the first emergency landing when the strange object fell from the sky.
He spoke to researcher Claudeir Covo in 1996 and gave a chilling description of what he saw.
Carlos said: ‘He was floating and slowly losing altitude.
“It looked like a washing machine struggling, fighting to stay level, and the side of it was completely torn and white smoke was coming out.”
But when Carlos spoke again more than twenty years later, he had even more to say.
He later described: “I saw a lot of debris, pieces and when I got out of the car I immediately smelled ammonia, like rotten eggs.
“A very strong smell, so strong that I had to cover my nose with the shirt I was wearing. My eyes watered.
“I took a small piece (debris), it was very light. I crumpled it up, but when I let it go, it returned to its original shape.
Then he remembers being chased away by the military, who arrived at the crash site very quickly, carrying big guns and telling him to leave.
Shortly afterwards, the entire city was overrun by military trucks and people in army uniforms who blocked roads and stopped anyone entering the city or near the site of the accident.
Eyewitnesses ‘ignored’
A few hours after the original sightings, three sisters, ranging from 14 to 22 years old, reported to their mother that they had seen something strange “thing” near a fence.
The trio of women described the creature as having a large head, with “spots like veins on the skin and some bumps on the head.”
One of the girls Liliane Silva told the media afterwards: “What we saw was not a human being. It was not an animal either.”
Sister Valquiria agreed, saying, “It wasn’t a man, it wasn’t an animal.
“I don’t know what it was, I can’t say. I can’t describe it.”
When they saw the alien, they quickly looked away and headed to the comfort of their parents’ home where their mother told them they had seen the “devil.”
Military ‘cover-up’
Rumors then began to spread through the tight-knit area, with several more reports of UFO sightings in the days before.
The claims include people seeing unidentified creatures being collected and taken to the local hospital for examination.
After the initial sightings, military trucks patrolled the city for a few days when a very strange animal creature was seen prowling through a forest and several unexplained animal deaths occurred at the local zoo.
Ufologists would later claim that the alien may have impregnated the animals as a possible explanation for the random deaths.
The official investigation, led by the Brazilian military, only ended in 2010, when they attributed the apparent sightings to pure coincidence and rather convenient events for the people of Varginha.
The young women’s claims were spectacularly attributed to a homeless, mentally and physically unstable man nicknamed ‘Mudinho’.
A military commander showed photos of Mudinho and said his physical characteristics matched the description given by the sisters.
The reasons for the man’s devilish appearance and awkward posture were due to the fact that he was “probably dirty from the heavy rain and was seen crouching near a wall”.
The commander claimed that Mudinho was “mistaken for a space alien by the three terrified girls” and that he probably had an “intellectual disability”.
The head of the official investigation further said that the military trucks and the people present were simply carrying out a routine night near Varginha so that they could quickly arrive in the city.
He said: “The departure of the vehicles were real facts that were wrongly interpreted as firefighters and military personnel taking part in the capture and later transport of the alleged creature to Campinas.
“The presence of the firefighters and parking of army trucks in the vicinity of the area would ensure that their periodic maintenance would be carried out.”
Brazilian authorities also made a crazy, coincidental statement that the aliens reportedly seen in the hospital a few days later were actually just a dwarf couple expecting their first child.
To this day, the Brazilian government continues to deny all conspiracy theories claiming that it is hiding aliens.
Despite the lack of any real evidence of the alien encounters, the city of Varginha is still celebrating what they believe to be the truest human encounter with aliens ever.
Tourism in the town has since boomed, with small gray alien dolls being sold in large numbers and the town even using the alien descriptions in advertising campaigns for the area.
Bus stops were shaped like spaceships and a 20-meter-high water tower, identical to a UFO, stood in the middle of the city in 2001.
It was called the Nave Espacial de Varginha or the Varginha Spaceship.
Missing video ‘evidence’
Last year, popular filmmaker James Fox released Moment of Contact, a hit documentary that retells the alleged events that took place in Brazil 27 years ago.
The key witness in the film was an anonymous military expert known as “Military was transported.
The person also said a video was taken that exists somewhere in government hands but has never been released.
The US government was ostensibly there to help get rid of any evidence of the UFO crash and was also given the bodies that had been recovered.
If all of this is true, it fits very well with recent claims from UFO officials and whistleblowers in the US and around the world.
Top UFO chief Sean Kirkpatrick told the world he will resign from his position next month after his stern warning about activity “in our backyard.”
The Pentagon’s UFO Analysis Office launched a UFO reporting service to the public after admitting it uncovered “some things” and calling the high number of suspicious activity a foreign power or aliens.
Footage from naval aircraft has revealed the intriguing images of a government-confirmed UFO that is baffling the internet.
The United States government launched the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022 to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Researchers also recently verified the legitimacy of a series of three-fingered mummies as potential evidence of ‘non-human’ life forms.
A line of doctors confirmed to Mexico’s Congress on Tuesday that the bodies, apparently not from this Earth, were in fact real, once-living organisms.