The Varginha
ETs
By
BOB PRATT and CYNTHIA LUCE
(A similar version of this story was
published in the August and
September 1998 issues of the MUFON UFO
Journal)
On the night of January 13,
1996, the North American Aerospace Defense Command reportedly notified Brazilian
authorities it had tracked a number of UFOs over the western hemisphere that
night and one or more had come down near the city of Varginha in the state of
Minas Gerais.
Brazilian authorities were
quickly notified and they immediately alerted Army units near Varginha
(Var-ZJEEN-yuh).
It was the
beginning of one of the most intriguing events in UFO history, the “Varginha ET
Case.” Civilian investigators believe that over the next several weeks at least
two and perhaps as many as six alien creatures were captured or killed and
turned over to American authorities, and that a UFO may have
crashed.
Eyewitnesses described the
creatures as humanoid, three to four feet tall. They had dark brown, hairless
skin that was very oily, big triangular heads with three short “horns” on top,
and huge red eyes that were vertically oval. The arms were long and thin, the
legs short and thin. They had no obvious noses or ears and only slits for
mouths.
The creatures weren’t wearing
clothing and no sex organs were visible. They had unusually large veins growing
out of their necks and running down their shoulders, arms, chest and back,
making them look like weight lifters.
The “Varginha case” is a
complicated one involving a series of incidents that began Saturday January 13,
but did not come to public attention until more than a week later after three
young women spotted one of the creatures in a vacant
lot.
SHORT CUT
TURNS SCARY
The women had just finished
helping a woman get ready to move to a new home and were walking home. Around
three in the afternoon on Saturday January 20, they 
were passing
through the Jardim Andere district of Varginha.
"We decided to take a short
cut through a vacant lot," said Liliane da Silva, then sixteen, who was with her
sister Valquíria, fourteen, and a friend, Kátia Xavier, twenty-two (shown from
left to right in photo provided by Vitório Pacaccini; the white paint mark on
the cinderblock wall is about where creature was
seen).
Kátia was a maid for the woman
who was moving, and the sisters, still in school, were helping her pack
household goods. The three were walking to their homes in the Santana
neighborhood just north of Jardim Andere.
The short cut took them on a
narrow path through a vacant lot that was filled with tall grass and weeds. On
their left was an empty cinder block building. When they were about fifty feet
into the lot, something caught Liliane's
attention.
"Look at that!" she cried.
About twenty feet away was a strange creature squatting next to the building
with its left side to them (the yellow spot in photo below shows where the
creature was crouching.).
Its left arm was
between its legs and the right was next to the building. Its feet were hidden in
the grass, and the girls never saw the hands or
feet.
"It had oily brown skin with
big eyes and three 'horns' on its head," Liliane
said.
The huge veins reminded
Valquíria of “a big, soft bull’s heart. We thought it was the
Devil.”
To Kátia, who was married and
had three children, it was “not a human or an animal, nothing like a monkey or
anteater. We got a good look at the creature.”
RUN TWENTY
BLOCKS HOME
They found it repulsive but
the huge red eyes and the “horns” were what disturbed them most. They
stared for a stunned few seconds, then screamed and recoiled in
fright.
The creature turned its head
and looked at them, seemed almost frightened and crouched a bit lower, perhaps
trying to hide from them. The women fled back to the street behind them, turned
right and ran away as fast as they could. They didn't stop until they reached
the Silva home more than twenty blocks away.
After they calmed down
about twenty minutes later, Kátia and the girls' mother Luiza asked a neighbor
to drive them back to the vacant lot. By the time they got there, the creature
was gone, Kátia said, “but we could see the grass mashed down and we could smell
sulfur or ammonia.”
News of the incident spread
quickly throughout the neighborhood and about ten thirty the next morning
reached the ears of Varginha’s leading UFO investigator, Ubirajara Franco
Rodrigues. He was then forty-two and lived less than a mile from where the women
saw the creature.
He got a phone call from a
shop owner who had heard that “some girls had seen a weird animal, like a little
monster.“
The report was interesting but
it meant nothing to Ubirajara, a lawyer and university professor who has been
investigating UFOs in the Varginha area since the 1970s. By evening, though, he
had heard more rumors and then began trying to find out what had
happened.
A friend named Sergio who
worked at a TV station helped him and it took them several days to identify and
locate Kátia and the sisters. These were days in which confusing and seemingly
contradictory rumors were flying all over the
city.
WOMAN CRY
AS THEY TELL THEIR STORY
“Some people were saying a
creature had been captured by Military Police and taken to Regional Hospital,
that it had a big belly, seemed to be pregnant and made a noise like it was
crying,” Ubirajara said.
“We talked to a boy who said
he saw the capture but his words didn’t make any sense. He was too childish and
very confused.”
They tracked down a woman who
also supposedly had witnessed the capture “but she ran away the moment we
approached her. Her husband tried to convince her to talk to us but she
refused.”
When Ubirajara (left) finally
talked to the three women, they were still quite 
emotional about what
happened. All three cried as they told their
story.
In the following days he
questioned them several more times and each time they related the same details
without variation, bursting into tears the first several times. He became
convinced they were telling the truth.
The rumors continued. A nurse
reluctantly told Ubirajara that a section of Regional Hospital had been blocked
off for some hours the night of January 20, with access being denied to
patients, visitors and even employees. Soldiers and Army vehicles had been
parked outside, and unidentified physicians from other cities had come to the
hospital.
On Monday the 22nd, all
hospital employees were called together and told that everything that had
happened that weekend was to be ignored because “it was just a training exercise
for doctors and military personnel.”
Then they were told that if
anyone (“especially that lawyer Ubirajara”) should inquire about it, they were
to deny everything.
The creature was reportedly
transferred from Regional Hospital to Humanitas Hospital, which is much smaller
and is in a more secluded location. More troops were seen
there.
POLICE
COLONEL TURNS MUM
One report said the creature,
apparently dead, was seen lying in an open box propped up by two sawhorses in
the hospital’s walled-in parking lot. Fifteen people – military men, doctors and
others – stood around the box, watching as one of the doctors used tweezers to
pull a long, thin black tongue out of the creature's
mouth.
Rumors abounded, even in
schoolyards. One youngster was heard saying: “My daddy told me about the ET and
said everything is true and he has seen a film but this is very dangerous and
you cannot tell anyone.”
Ubirajara checked around and
learned that a relative of the child’s father worked at a nearby Army base and
was under house arrest at the base.
Ubirajara went to Military
Police headquarters and talked to the commander, a lieutenant colonel. When
Ubirajara explained why he was there, the colonel said he knew nothing about any
creature but offered to check it out. Ubirajara phoned repeatedly over the next
few days but was never able to reach the man
again.
That was when Ubirajara began
to believe something unusual really had taken place and that officials were
hiding it. He became certain a day or so later when a friend talked with a
policewoman who had been on duty on Saturday, January
20.
She said the police received a
number of phone calls that morning through the emergency number from people
“saying they saw a little monster. But we thought they were kidding and didn’t
pay any attention to them.”
For nearly a month the
investigation proceeded in the belief that only one incident had occurred – that
the three women had seen a creature which was later captured – and that for
unknown reasons the authorities were trying to hush it
up.
INVESTIGATORS JOIN
FORCES
What was difficult to
understand was that some of the rumors said the creature had been captured in
the morning of January 20 BEFORE the girls saw it in the
afternoon.
The investigation entered a new phase in mid-February
when Vitório Pacaccini joined the investigation. Pacaccini, who lived a hundred
and ninety miles away in the state capital, Belo Horizonte, did not know
Ubirajara at the time. He had learned about the case only on Sunday February 11,
when he read a newspaper story about the three women and the
creature.
Pacaccini (right), then thirty-two, had been a member
of CICOANI, a UFO organization in Belo Horizonte, for eighteen years. At a
special meeting two nights later, the 
members discussed
the Varginha report, decided to investigate and chose Pacaccini to go to
Varginha.
This was a practical choice for several reasons.
First, his job as an import-export consultant had no set hours and allowed him
considerable free time. Secondly, he had grown up in Três Corações, a city just
fifteen miles east of Varginha. Furthermore, he had already made plans to go to
Três Corações, where his widowed mother still lives, for the annual Carnaval
festivities at the end of the week.
Três Corações plays a significant role in the case.
ESA (Escola de Sargentos das Armas, or the Army’s school for sergeants),
the area’s largest Army base, is located there and personnel from the base are
believed to have taken a major role in the hunt for and capture of the
creatures.
The day after the CICOANI meeting, February 14th,
Pacaccini drove to Três Corações, phoned Ubirajara to introduce himself and set
up a meeting for the following day.
INFORMANT
CLARIFIES SITUATION
In an extraordinary coincidence, shortly after
arriving at his mother’s home Pacaccini got a phone call from a friend saying a
man who knew about the capture of the creature would be willing to talk to
him.
The three met late that night in a secluded area,
where the man described how four firemen had captured the creature on the
MORNING of January 20 and took it to ESA.
The informant’s story helped clear up the confusing
rumors. Only then did Ubirajara and Pacaccini realize there had been two
creatures, one captured in the morning and taken to ESA and one seen by the
three women, which may have been caught later and taken to the
hospital.
Eventually, Ubirajara and Pacaccini came to believe
the authorities had captured or killed at least four others and possibly as many
as six.
Originally Pacaccini had intended to conduct his own
investigation but after meeting with Ubirajara and exchanging information with
him, the two agreed to work together.
Over the next six months or so Pacaccini was able to
make frequent trips to Varginha from Belo Horizonte. This took much of the
burden off Ubirajara, who had a busy law practice and taught two nights a week
at a university where he was a law professor and a lecturer in
philosophy.
The two weren’t working blind.
The case quickly attracted the attention of newspapers, radio and TV stations
and began to get considerable publicity, both locally and nationally. Ubirajara
received hundreds of phone calls, many from people who knew something about what
had happened, or knew someone who knew someone
who…
They checked out every rumor and report, and tracked
down every witness or potential witness.
ALL
INVOLVED IDENTIFIED
Among other things, they heard about a farm couple
who saw a UFO very early on the morning of January 20 (true); a woman who saw a
creature at the city’s zoo (true); a portable radar station that was trucked in
from southern Brazil (unconfirmed); a motorist who saw a creature weeks later
(true); and a military man who told a friend he had helped capture “an ET”
(unconfirmed).
There were also rumors about another military person
whose uniform got so “oily” in capturing a creature that his wife burned his
clothing (unconfirmed); the mysterious death of a policeman who had captured one
creature (true); and the puzzling deaths of five animals at the zoo
(true).
Ubirajara and Pacaccini eventually were able to talk
to twenty-five firsthand witnesses – civilians, Military Policemen, Army
personnel, doctors and others. They also learned the identities of nearly every
military person involved with the creatures in any
way.
At the same time,
investigators in other cities were also helping, mainly by checking rumors that
on January 23 several creatures had been convoyed to the renowned University of
Campinas, where an autopsy was performed on one creature. The university is
located in Campinas, a city more than two hundred miles
south.
This story is based mainly on visits we made to
Varginha in March 1996, just two months after most of these events took place,
and again in August 1997. We spent four days there the first time, talking with
Ubirajara and Pacaccini, before very much was known, and six days the second
visit.
We were able to interview the three young women
involved, Liliane on both visits, and another witness, a jogger whose testimony
is related later.
In addition we were able to visit several sites where
things occurred. This included the then-vacant lot where the girls saw a
creature, a steep embankment where another creature was seen, the woods where it
was captured, and the huge pasture beside it. The lot is no longer vacant and
several houses have been built there.
Only Ubirajara was available the second time we went
to Varginha, Pacaccini being elsewhere in the state. Ubirajara’s time was
limited because of his law practice and his teaching. In addition, he was
leading a UFO conference in a nearby city the last four days of our visit.
In the beginning Ubirajara told us: "As an attorney,
if I was in a court of law and had to prove that the firemen had captured an
alien from another planet – with proof coming from an accredited place like the
University of Campinas which would issue an official notice that said, ‘One dead
alien blah, blah, blah, of this blood type or other’ – we have not been able to
get that.
"We believe such reports exist
and that this actually happened. I can prove – with testimony and witnesses, and
we HAVE the witnesses – that these things occurred, but we don't have any
official reports. A creature was captured but where it came from we can't prove
without analysis.”
THE
SETTING:
Most of these events took
place in or near Varginha. It is a lively, busy city of about a hundred and
twenty thousand people in the south of Minas Gerais, a state nearly as large as
Texas. Minas has thousands of cities, towns and villages, nearly twenty million
people, many ore-rich mines and other natural resources and lots of industries,
including auto manufacturing plants.
Varginha(seen from the air in
this photo provided by Vitório Pacaccini) is almost 
equidistant from
Brazil’s three largest cities – about two hundred miles north of São Paulo, two
hundred miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro and nearly two hundred miles south of
Belo Horizonte.
It has a number of industries,
including multinational corporations (American, Canadian, English and French),
and is a leading coffee exporting center. It has three hospitals, four
universities and vocational-technical training centers, four daily newspapers,
four radio stations and three TV stations.
Much of the state is
mountainous. Varginha is thirty one hundred feet above sea level and is spread
out over a number of hills. Contrary to some Internet reports about the case,
there are no jungles or predatory wild animals within at least a thousand miles.
The countryside is lush and green, with much of it devoted to growing
coffee.
THE MAIN
CAPTURE SITE:
Many of the main incidents in
the case occurred in or near a big patch of woods that separates the Jardim
Andere and Santana neighborhoods. Both are about a mile and a half east of
downtown. The woods run a bit more than a mile north and south and are up to
three hundred yards wide east and west. A small stream runs through the
woods.
An east-west street connecting
Jardim Andere and Santana cuts through the middle of the woods, and a single set
of railroad tracks runs north-south through the area, skirting the upper edge of
the woods on the Jardim Andere side.
A number of well-worn paths
run through the woods and a huge adjoining pasture. People going to and from
Jardim Andere and Santana use them regularly.
The three young women who saw the creature had
planned to go through these woods as they took a short cut home. They were
walking downhill when they entered the vacant lot, which is three blocks above
the railroad tracks and the woods.
NORAD,
JANUARY 13:
Pacaccini – who owns a business arranging for the
shipment of goods into and out of Brazil in seagoing cargo containers and also
manages his family’s three coffee farms – was told that NORAD had notified
Brazilian authorities about the UFOs.
In his book about the incident, Incidente em
Varginha, Pacaccini said that in Belo Horizonte in July 1996 a Brazilian Air
Force officer told him NORAD had notified CINDACTA, the Brazilian
civilian-military air traffic control system, and CINDACTA alerted the ESA Army
command in Três Corações. This was on January 13, but what time of day or night
is not known.
Other than one incident to be related in a moment,
there were no UFO sightings in the vicinity of Varginha on January 13 or 20, but
many were reported throughout the region as well as around the country before
and after, continuing through much of the year.
THE
CRASH, JANUARY 13:
On Friday January 12,
thirty-five-year-old Carlos da Souza drove across São Paulo, one of the largest
cities in the world, and checked into a hotel in the northern suburb of
Mairiporã. He was going to Três Corações, about one hundred fifty miles to the
north, and wanted to get an early start the next
morning.
Souza owned an exterminating
business and his hobby is flying ultra light planes. He planned to meet other
ultra light pilots in Três Corações to arrange for a
competition.
He awakened at four o'clock on
the morning of Saturday, January 13, got into 
his red pickup
truck and headed north on the heavily traveled Fernão Dias highway which
connects São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.
The drive was uneventful until
about eight o'clock, when he was about three miles south of the intersection of
a highway that leads to Varginha to the west and Três Corações to the east. A
muffled roaring sound interrupted his thoughts, and he wondered if something was
wrong with the truck.
He stopped to check but when
he stepped down from the cab he realized the noise was coming from a
cigar-shaped craft about four hundred feet in the air just west of the highway.
The sun was reflecting off it.
The craft was traveling north,
almost parallel to the highway, at forty to fifty miles an hour. It was
silver-colored and appeared to be thirty to forty feet long and twelve to
fifteen wide.
It had at least four windows
along the side and what looked like a big jagged hole four or five feet in
diameter in the front. There was a long dent or crack running from the hole back
to the middle of the craft, from which point white smoke or vapor was coming
out.
Astonished and excited, Souza
jumped in his pickup and followed the UFO for about ten miles. It soon crossed
over to the east side of the highway and eventually passed over some small
mountains. Then it went into a sharp thirty-degree dive and disappeared from
sight.
Souza thought it had crashed
and began looking for a way to get to the area. About twenty minutes later he
found a dirt road and turned onto it.
Minutes later he drove over
the crest of a hill and there before him was wreckage spread all over a hilly
field of knee-high grass. He also saw about forty soldiers and two male nurses,
two trucks, a helicopter, an ambulance and three cars. All were Army
vehicles.
Everyone was busily running
around picking up pieces of debris. One truck already held a chunk half the size
of a mini-van. A strong smell of ammonia and ether hung in the
air.
It was a terrible crash and
Souza doubted that anyone had lived through it. He was surprised to see anyone
there, let alone the military. He didn’t know at the time that the site was only
seven miles from the ESA Army base in Três
Corações.
He parked and walked toward
the wreckage, thinking he could help. He picked up a piece of aluminum-like
material that was very light. It floated to the ground when he dropped
it.
Then one of the men spotted
him, shouted and in an instant armed soldiers rushed toward him. They ordered
him to leave immediately. He protested, thinking someone had been badly hurt or
killed, but a corporal screamed at him to get out and that “this is none of your
business!”
Souza got back in his truck
and drove away. But he was so astounded by what he’d seen that he abandoned his
trip and headed back toward São Paulo. About ten minutes later he stopped at a
roadside restaurant to have coffee and think about what had
happened.
The emotional impact was so
great that he was still sitting there two hours later when a car drove up with
two men in civilian clothes but military haircuts and bearing. One got out and
walked up to him, asked if his name was Carlos da Souza, then asked what he’d
seen.
“I saw everything and I know
something happened there,” Souza said.
“You haven’t seen anything,”
the man replied, then related many details of Souza’s personal life. “You live
on such and such a road, in such and such a city, you’re married to so and so,
and you’re the father of so many children, and your mother is so and so. If you
tell people what you saw, it’s going to be very bad for you. We already have a
complete printout on your whole life.”
Such personal information is
readily available to authorities by computer once someone’s license number is
known. The man warned him not to say anything to anybody, and then
left.
All this occurred on January
13, one week before the three women saw the creature in nearby Varginha, but for
nine months Souza told no one except his wife and two close
friends.
He explained that he was
frightened by the man’s threat. A twenty-year military dictatorship had ended
only a few years earlier, and some of Souza’s relatives “disappeared” during the
dictatorship, so he kept quiet.
He was not aware of the “ETs”
in Varginha until the following September when he read a magazine article
written by Claudeir Covo, a São Paulo safety engineer and a lifelong ufologist
who had been working with Ubirajara and
Pacaccini.
Souza contacted Covo, who
eventually persuaded him to return to Varginha to show him and Ubirajara where
he had seen the wreckage.
An inspection of the area –
now nine months later – showed no indication that a crash had occurred, nor was
Ubirajara subsequently able to find any farmers, farm workers or anyone else in
the area who knew anything about a crash.
Not everyone believes Souza’s story, and even
Ubirajara and Covo have reservations about it because no other witnesses could
be found. Also, some elements of his story were similar to things that had been
portrayed in the movie Roswell.
In addition, Souza’s description of the UFO was
almost identical to one seen by a farm couple on the morning of January 20 that
Ubirajara – and much of the public – had known about since early in the
investigation.
However, on a later visit to the site, Ubirajara and
members of his Varginha UFO group found an area of ground about four hundred
feet square that seemed to have been replaced by
sod.
Furthermore, during the early stages of the
investigation, several military witnesses said they had seen pieces of a crashed
craft being transported into ESA by two Army trucks on January 13 and that later
the wreckage was convoyed to the national aerospace center in São José dos
Campos near São Paulo.
“There are things that favored
Souza’s report,” Ubirajara told us, “but we have to say we could not verify
it.”
THE FARM
COUPLE, JANUARY 20:
Early on the morning of
Saturday January 20 on a farm six miles east of Varginha, Oralina de Freitas,
then thirty-seven, was awakened by the sound of cattle milling around, mooing
and bellowing. A digital clock on the bedside table said one fourteen in the
morning.
Oralina opened the window and
saw the cattle were very agitated and stampeding all over the pasture three
hundred to four hundred feet away. Then she saw a cigar-shaped object just above
the cattle. There was no moon but the craft gave off a faint
light.
Oralina called out to her
husband, Eurico, forty, and he rushed to the window. “My God!” he cried.
“There’s a submarine above my pasture.”
They could see gray smoke or
vapor coming out of the back as it moved slowly, in a sort of rocking motion,
only fifteen to twenty feet above the ground.
Neither Eurico nor Oralina
ventured outside, but stood at the window watching as the object took forty-five
minutes to pass ever so slowly out of sight over a ridge about two thousand feet
away, heading in the direction of Varginha.
They had the impression that
it was having difficulties of some kind because of the very slow way it was
moving. If the UFO was making any sound, the bellowing of the cows drowned it
out.
All this time the cattle
remained panicky and frightened but the couple’s four dogs, although awake,
showed no reaction. Eurico and Oralina’s four children, aged twelve to twenty,
slept through it all.
Ubirajara learned about the
incident six days later. The couple, who oversee the farm, told the owner what
happened. He in turn told a friend of Ubirajara’s who passed the story on to
him.
The farm house is only about
five miles cross country from the spot where Carlos da Souza said he first saw a
similar UFO on January 13.
THE MORNING CAPTURE, JANUARY
20:
In Brazil, the Military Police are not members of a military organization or part of the armed forces. Instead, they are state police under the control of a state's governor.
Military policemen perform a
variety of duties, including patrolling highways, putting down riots, and
rescuing people in floods and other disasters. They are also the
firemen for the entire nation, and one of their duties as firefighters is
capturing mad dogs, wild animals and dangerous
snakes.
It was in this latter capacity
that four firemen answered a call around eight thirty on the morning of January
20 about a strange creature being seen near the woods in Jardim Andere. One or
more persons had phoned police, who alerted the Fire
Department.
By the time the firemen
responded, three boys twelve to fourteen years old had seen the creature as they
were walking along Rua Suécia. This is the first street above the woods and runs
parallel to the woods. A steep, two hundred-foot-long embankment begins at the
street level and leads down to the railroad tracks and the woods just
beyond.
As the kids were watching, a
man and a woman came walking by, not together, and they saw the creature also.
At the time the creature was slowly shuffling down the precipitous bank toward
the woods. The boys had been throwing stones at it trying to get a reaction from
it, but the woman told them to stop.
When the firemen arrived in a
fire truck, they told everyone to leave immediately, saying it was a secret Army
operation. By then the creature had disappeared into the woods.
Wearing their
regular uniforms and heavy gloves and carrying nets, the firemen went down the
bank, crossed the tracks and entered the woods in search of the
creature.
It took them two hours to
capture it, partly because it kept running away from them in the dense growth,
and partly because they didn’t know what it was and they were wary of it. They
caught glimpses of it from time to time but it kept scurrying away from them.
If you walk into the woods
(left), as we have, it’s easy to see why the creature was able to elude the
firemen for so long. Thick, tangled bushes and countless trees (below) prevent
you from seeing very far, and the footing is tricky even 
when
following one of the paths. The terrain is rough and uneven, all up and down
with almost no level areas. Cars and trucks can be heard on nearby streets but
are seldom seen.
When the men were finally able to throw a net over the creature, it offered no resistance. It made a buzzing or humming sound as they struggled up the hill with it in the net.
At some time during the
search, one of the firemen had returned to the truck and radioed his commander,
told him what was happening and asked him to join them. By the time the creature
was carried up to the street, the commander had arrived – as had an Army truck
with two officers and a sergeant. It is believed that the fire commander had
notified them.
The firemen handed the
creature over to the Army men with little or no discussion. It was put in a
wooden box, which was then covered by a canvas and put in the back of the truck
with two men sitting beside it. The truck then left in a hurry to return to the
Army base in Três Corações. The firemen and their commander then returned to the
fire station.
THE
JOGGER, JANUARY 20:
Some time between one thirty
and two in the afternoon, a jogger saw seven armed soldiers cross a small
footbridge from Santana and enter the pasture next to the woods in Jardim
Andere. The pasture is on the side of a long hill 
leading five
to six hundred yards up to the railroad tracks and Suécia Street above, where
the fire truck had parked that morning.
Two of the soldiers were
carrying automatic rifles and all were wearing side arms. Two also carried small
rectangular, aluminum-colored boxes or suitcases.
The jogger wondered what they
were doing. He had intended to take a short cut down through the pasture and
across the same bridge but changed his mind.
The soldiers grouped into a V
formation and moved up the hill. They searched a small grove of trees just below
the tracks, apparently found nothing, then turned and moved toward the big
woods.
The jogger, seeing them enter
the woods, continued straight ahead for several blocks and then turned to his
right into the street that leads through the woods to Santana. Just a minute or
so later, he heard three distinct shots.
Astonished and extremely
curious, the jogger returned to the street that overlooks the woods and saw an
army truck with soldiers in it now parked there.
At that moment, four of the
soldiers who had gone into the woods came 
struggling up the
steep embankment carrying two bags, two soldiers to each bag. One bag was
squirming as if something alive was in it, but the other had no
movement.
The bags were heaved into the
truck, the soldiers climbed in and the truck sped away.
Just what was in the bags is
not known. However, it would seem safe to assume it wouldn’t take seven armed
soldiers to capture a wild animal when four firemen without weapons had captured
another “wild animal” in the same woods a few hours earlier and had turned it
over to Army personnel without any discussion.
CREATURE
ENCOUNTER, JANUARY 20:
This was the encounter the three women had. For some
weeks the only thing most people knew about the “Varginha ET” was that Liliane,
Valquíria and Kátia had seen a creature at three o'clock in the afternoon on
January 20.
That incident, described in detail earlier, was
publicized literally around the world. But, as we now know, it was just one in a
series of related events.
THE
STORM, JANUARY 20:
Luiza da Silva, the mother of the two sisters, said
that when she and Kátia went to the vacant lot, they saw an impression in the
grass where the creature had been and they also noticed a strong odor. But less
than three hours later all that vanished.
"There was a hailstorm at six o'clock that was
absolutely unprecedented," said Ubirajara. "It lasted only three or four minutes
but it broke windshields and everything and wiped out all traces of the creature
in the vacant lot."
THE DEATH OF AN
OFFICER:
During or just after the storm, soldiers and military policemen continued their search. Among them were two plainclothes Military Police agents who spotted yet another creature – possibly the one that the three women had seen that afternoon. It was hiding in a construction site in the Santana-Jardim Andere area not far from the woods.
The two men were able to capture it and force it into the back seat of their unmarked police car. It may have been ill because the men reportedly took it to a small public health clinic for treatment. However, the doctor there refused to go near the creature and told them to take it to a hospital.
Sometime during all this, one of the officers,
twenty-three-year-old Marco Chereze, stopped by his parents’ house, soaked from
the rain. He told his mother he was on a mission and would be working all night.
He asked her to tell his wife he wouldn't be home for dinner, changed his
clothes and left.
Only Chereze is believed to have handled the creature
with his bare hands while capturing it, and he became gravely ill some days
later with an unusual infection. He was admitted to a hospital with a very high
fever.
He rapidly lost use of his arms and legs, and was
unable to feed himself. At the end, he turned blue and failed to respond to
treatment. He
The only advice authorities gave his family was that
his coffin should be sealed, that the funeral should take place without delay,
and that burial should take place within a few hours.
His father later recalled that several weeks earlier
when rumors of ETs first began to circulate, Marco was convinced that this was
only the beginning of a lot of trouble.
Marco's grandmother said that one night when the
first reports of ETs came out in the newspapers, she was watching TV with him
and his wife when a movie about aliens came on. Marco immediately switched the
set off and said sharply: "Don't watch that – it's nonsense!" His outburst was
puzzling and he offered no explanation.
Chereze's family reportedly sued the Military Police
because (1) the cause of his death was never explained, (2) the results of any
autopsy were never revealed – the only thing of note was a lab report saying a
"small quantity of toxic material" had been found in his body – and (3)
allegedly his official records were altered to state that he wasn't on duty that
night.
THE
CREATURE AT THE ZOO, APRIL 21:
On the evening of April 21,
Terezinha Clepf, her husband and some friends attended a birthday party at a
restaurant in Varginha’s zoo. Around nine o'clock, after Mrs. Clepf finished
eating, she went outside to sit on the verandah by herself and smoke a
cigarette. Several minutes she began to feel
uneasy.
“I felt that someone was
looking at me,” she said later. The porch was dark but some light was coming
from the restaurant. “I turned to my left and saw a strange creature staring at
me.”
It was about fifteen feet away
and appeared to be four to five feet tall. “I didn’t know what it was, an animal
or whatever,” Mrs. Clepf, then sixty-seven,
said.
“It was very ugly. It was
brown and had a brightness or shininess to the skin. The eyes were big and red
and the mouth was just a stroke. He stayed there looking at
me.”
She was so terrified she could
barely move for about several minutes. Then, afraid to make any sudden movement,
she slowly got up and walked back inside. She looked back once and the creature
was still staring at her. It was several days before she could tell her husband
about it.
THE ZOO
DEATHS:
After that incident was
publicized, Leila Cabral, director of the zoo, contacted Ubirajara and Pacaccini
and told them that five animals had mysteriously died at the zoo about a week
before Mrs. Clepf’s experience. An anteater, two deer, a blue macaw and a bobcat
died suddenly and unexpectedly.
The anteater was healthy and
tame. It died because of an “unidentified toxic substance,” Ms. Cabral said. The
deer died of “caustic intoxication without apparent cause” and no cause of death
could be determined for the macaw and bobcat.
THE
THREAT TO THE SISTERS:
Around ten o'clock on the
night of May 3 or 4, Liliane and Valquíria da Silva and their mother Luiza were
asleep at their home in Santana when someone knocked on the front door. The
father was working as a fare collector on a bus and the family’s two older
daughters were at school.
Mrs. Silva went to the front
door and saw four men dressed in dark suits. She thought they were associated
with Ubirajara but soon realized they were strangers. By then, however, the men
had gently pushed their way inside and insisted on talking to Liliane and
Valquíria.
Luiza got the girls up and
everyone gathered in the small living room, with the girls and mother sitting on
one sofa, the four men on another sofa opposite
them.
One man was about fifty, the
others in their early thirties. They were polite but businesslike. Only the
older man and one of the others talked.
They never identified
themselves but spent more than an hour trying to get the girls to change their
story and even implied they would be paid a lot of money if they made their
denials publicly on TV.
Afraid to object, Luiza said
they would think it over.
“They never raised their
voices but we felt intimidated,” Liliane told us when we talked to her for the
second time in 1997.
The men finally left but told
them not to follow them or try to see what kind of car they were driving. The
men were never seen again and the girls did not withdraw their
story.
HIGHWAY
SIGHTING, MAY 15:
A twenty-one-year-old biology
student, Ildo Lúcio Gordino, was driving from Três Corações to Varginha around
seven thirty that night. As he was rounding a curve, a strange animal started to
cross the highway.
“I had slowed because of the
curve,” Ildo said. “About forty meters ahead the headlights shone on a dark
brown thing with hair all over its body. It had huge eyes that reflected red in
the headlights. It covered its face with its hands and crouched
down.”
Ildo was badly frightened and
he drove past the creature, which rose up and hurried back into the
bushes.
When Ubirajara and Pacaccini
investigated, they were surprised to find it had happened almost in front of the
farm where Eurico and Oralina de Freitas had seen a UFO on January
20.
THE
PASSOS CREATURE:
A seventh creature was seen several times in May 1996
in Passos, a city about forty miles north of Varginha, but whether it should be
included as part of the “Varginha ET” case is questionable because this one was
violent.
A twenty-year-old man named Luciano said he was
walking home late one dark night when a hairy creature about five-foot-five and
with a strange growl jumped out from the trees and attacked him. Luciano is
six-foot-five and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds but was knocked to the
ground, his shirt and jacket ripped by sharp
claws.
He kicked out and knocked the creature off balance,
jumped up and ran but was knocked down again. In the scuffle, Luciano kicked the
creature in the groin, causing it to double over, and Luciano was finally able
to escape to a nearby house.
Pacaccini investigated the incident and he saw
Luciano’s injuries and torn clothing. He is convinced Luciano was telling the
truth.
A week later Pacaccini and another investigator found
three other persons in Passos who said they too had been attacked. Not knowing
what the creature was and for lack of a more accurate term, all four victims
described it as a “werewolf. “
Pacaccini believes the Passos creature is real and
unexplained but doubts it is related to the Varginha creatures because of its
size, hairiness and vicious nature.
“We are talking about a completely different
creature, in a totally different situation,” Pacaccini said.
THE
AMERICANS:
Almost from the beginning, some investigators were convinced that the creatures dead and alive had been taken to the United States.
This conviction was based largely on (1) the belief that these creatures truly were from some place other than Earth, and (2) statements made by disgruntled military personnel who resented the idea that Brazil would relinquish control of the aliens and turn them over to the U.S.
This conviction was further strengthened in early March 1996 – just five weeks after the initial incidents – by the visit to São Paulo and other parts of Brazil of Warren Christopher, then U.S. Secretary of State, and NASA Director Daniel S. Goldin, ostensibly to arrange for a Brazilian astronaut to join a future Space Shuttle flight.
CONCLUSIONS:
We have felt from the very beginning that this is a strong case. There were just too many witnesses, even though most of them cannot be identified for fear of official retribution.
It was probably inevitable that from the beginning
the case would be compared to Roswell. The constant denials by authorities
indicate an official cover-up – as many believe is true in the Roswell case.
However, many ufologists now believe the Roswell case has been
discredited.
The Varginha case, on the other hand, is still
relatively fresh and UFO investigators were immediately able to gather
considerable evidence, including testimony from more than two dozen firsthand
witnesses.
The investigation continues, although it is doubtful
that any of those witnesses will ever be able to come forward and tell publicly
what they know, or whether the government will ever acknowledge what
happened.
Copyright
1998 by Bob Pratt and Cynthia Luce
NOTE: All of the military
and police personnel involved in this incident were reassigned to other parts of
the country within months of 
the incident. 
The two chief
investigators, Ubirajara Rodrigues and Vitório Pacaccini, have continued their
investigations, but separately.
Each has also written a book about the case, both in Portuguese. Pacaccini published Incidente em Varginha in late 1996. Ubirajara’s book, O Caso Varginha, was published in late 2001. Pacaccini has also written an English version that has not yet been published. (In March 2002 Pacaccini cut back on some of his business activities to enroll in a two-year university program that will lead to a Ph.D. in business administration.)
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