The Varginha incident: creature reports, an alleged military response, and Brazil's most famous case

On the afternoon of January 20, 1996, sisters Liliane and Valquíria Fátima Silva and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier reported encountering a small creature crouched against a wall in a vacant lot in Varginha, a city of roughly 100,000 in southern Minas Gerais: brown-skinned, with an oversized head, large red eyes, and what they described as three protuberances on its scalp. Their account, given the same day and never recanted, set off a wave of claims that has never fully subsided — that the city's fire brigade and Army personnel captured one or more creatures that week, that one was transferred through the Regional and Humanitas hospitals, and that unusual military traffic moved through the city in the days that followed.

None of the capture and hospital claims has ever been substantiated with physical evidence, and the Brazilian Army's 1996 inquiry concluded the 'creature' was most plausibly a local homeless man known as Mudinho, who suffered from mental illness and was sometimes seen crouching in the rain. Ufologists who investigated — including Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues and Vitório Pacaccini — assembled named-witness testimony they argue is inconsistent with that explanation. The death of military police officer Marco Eli Chereze from a sudden infection weeks after the events is cited by proponents and attributed by skeptics to an unrelated medical condition; his family's lawsuit produced no official finding linking the death to the case.

The case returned to international attention with James Fox's 2022 documentary Moment of Contact, which put several witnesses — including a physician — on camera with first-person accounts, and in June 2022 the Brazilian Senate's Foreign Relations Committee held the country's first formal public hearing on UAP records. Varginha remains unresolved: a dense cluster of consistent named testimony on one side, and an official explanation that has never been withdrawn on the other.