| Yesterday’s National Press Club event with filmmaker James Fox dragged the Varginha case back into the harsh light of global scrutiny, three decades after a handful of terrified Brazilian witnesses said they saw something not of this world in the municipality of Varginha, southwest Minas Gerais state, Brazil. As |
By
The UFO Chronicles 1-21-2026 © All Rights Reserved |
Birdsall, a leading UK UFO researcher/journalist who co-founded UFO Magazine with his brother, Mark (and died in 2003) was among the first Western researchers to sit down with the Brazilian investigators at the heart of the case and to stitch together a timeline from dozens of frightened locals, military insiders, and medical staff. His early reporting still frames much of what the public thinks it knows about what happened in Varginha in January 1996.
The Crash Before the Creatures
In Birdsall’s reconstruction, the story begins a week earlier with a wave of UFO sightings over southern Minas Gerais. On 13 January 1996, he reports, resident Afrânio da Costa Brasil and his nine year old daughter Emeline watched a strange craft hovering near their home; Emeline’s drawing of a cigar or submarine shaped object would later echo in multiple testimonies.
By the early hours of 20 January, that aerial mystery turned into something much stranger. Farmer Eurico de Freitas and his partner, Oralina Augusta, were jolted awake around 1 a.m. by agitated horses and furious dogs, only to step outside and see a grey, tube like object gliding silently just a few meters above the fields, trailing what looked like smoke. Both compared it to a “submarine” or “flying cigar,” and Birdsall notes that this description matched the earlier drawing almost exactly, suggesting a continuity of events rather than isolated misidentifications.
The First Capture: Firefighters and a Small Bi-ped
According to Birdsall, the most explosive claims begin later that same morning in Varginha’s Jardim Andere district. An anonymous caller phoned the city fire department around 8 a.m., asking them to deal with a mysterious “animal” in a local park—a routine request in a country where fire crews often handle wild fauna that stray into urban areas.
When the fire truck arrived near Switzerland Street around 10 a.m., the crew allegedly didn’t find a jaguar or stray boar. Instead, they encountered a crouching, roughly 3.5 foot tall biped with oily brown skin, disproportionately large, blood red eyes, and three raised ridges on its head. Birdsall reports that the being appeared injured, emitted a faint buzzing sound “like bees,” and had only a tiny mouth opening.
Witnesses told investigators that the firefighters wrestled the creature into a net, placed it into a wooden box, and turned it over to soldiers from the nearby Escola de Sargentos das Armas at Três Corações, whose commander, Gen. Sérgio Coelho Lima, had allegedly ordered the area sealed off. One builder’s assistant, watching from a rooftop, later described four firemen involved in the capture and a rapid handoff to the military before everyone vanished from the scene.
The Girls, the ‘Devil,’ and a Second Being
If that were all, Varginha would be just another contested UFO anecdote. Birdsall’s article, however, details a second encounter just hours later that would burn this case into Brazilian popular culture. At around 3:30 p.m., three young women—Liliane and Valquíria Fátima Silva and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier—were walking home from work when they spotted a strange figure squatting by a building on Benevenuto Brás Vieira Street, not far from the morning’s alleged capture.
At a distance of about 25 feet, they described a small, brown, oily skinned creature with a large head, the same three protrusions on its forehead, and huge red eyes, so unsettling that their first reaction was that they were looking at “the devil.” They fled in panic, and Birdsall relates how neighbors, alerted by their screams, then watched as firemen and military personnel arrived, netted the being, and removed it while some children reportedly threw stones at the wounded figure.
Local ufologist Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues quickly interviewed the three girls and found them still visibly traumatized, while fellow investigator Vitório Pacaccini—initially focused on the morning incident—soon realized he was dealing with a second, independent capture narrative in the same neighborhood.
Hospitals, Convoys, and a Body in a Box
Based on multiple unnamed medical and military sources, Birdsall recounts how the first being was taken to the sergeants’ school at Três Corações, while the second was delivered to the Varginha Regional Hospital and later transferred to the better equipped Humanitas Hospital. © The UFO Chronicles. All rights reserved.
On the evening of 22 January, three military trucks were reportedly seen outside Humanitas between 3 and 6 p.m., and by nightfall the being was said to be dead. Witnesses described a small wooden casket in a hospital room thick with an ammonia like odor, surrounded by at least 15 doctors along with firefighters and soldiers. One doctor allegedly used forceps to pull out a black tongue from the creature’s tiny mouth, which snapped back when released, while observers noted three fingers, no visible sexual organs, no navel, and shiny brown skin with grazed knees.
After the lid was screwed down, Birdsall reports, masked military personnel wrapped the casket in black plastic and loaded it into a truck, which later joined a pre dawn convoy heading toward Campinas and the University of Campinas (Unicamp) for presumed further analysis.
Names, Threats, and an American Shadow
Unlike many early UFO stories, Birdsall’s article names names. Among the officers and enlisted personnel allegedly present in one key operation he lists Lt. Col. Olímpio Wanderley Santos, an intelligence NCO identified as Sgt. Pedrosa, and privates De Mello and Cirillo, said to be involved in moving the body. He also relays claims that a young military policeman who handled one of the creatures later died under disputed circumstances, officially of pneumonia, prompting his family to push—unsuccessfully—for exhumation.
The piece also introduces what would later become a staple of Varginha lore: the American angle. A Brazilian Air Force radar operator reportedly told Pacaccini that Brazil’s integrated air defense network, CINDACTA, had been tipped off by the United States about a UFO entering Brazilian airspace, complete with coordinates but no clarity on whether it would land or crash. Birdsall further notes claims that a large U.S. Air Force transport—described as a C 5 or C 17—was seen at São Paulo’s international airport on 20 January and at Campinas on 22 January, feeding crash retrieval suspicions that James Fox’s new testimony is now poised to amplify.
A Case That Refused to End
For Birdsall, the Varginha narrative does not neatly wrap up once the alleged bodies are trucked away. He recounts later claims, including a sighting by 67 year old Terezinha Gallo Clepf at the Varginha Zoo restaurant in April 1996, where she said she came face to face with a being matching earlier descriptions, and further reports of a similar creature seen crossing a road at night and shielding its red eyes from headlights.
The article closes with a blunt assessment from U.S. abduction researcher John Carpenter, who, after interviewing key Brazilian investigators and witnesses alongside Birdsall and physicist Stanton Friedman, judged the case “a darn good one” that might stand “equal to Roswell” in its weight of converging testimony. Birdsall stops short of declaring it proven extraterrestrial, but he is unequivocal that “something extraordinary” happened in Varginha—and that Brazilian field investigators beat both their own military and any foreign partners to the scene.
As James Fox leverages yesterday’s Washington spotlight to press for congressional action and greater transparency around alleged crash retrievals, his narrative stands on the shoulders of work done in the 1990s by researchers like Graham Birdsall, who treated a frightened Brazilian town not as tabloid fodder but as a live crime scene demanding methodical documentation. Whether history ultimately files Varginha under “mass misidentification,” “folklore,” or “contact,” revisiting that early reporting reminds readers that this story has always been about more than a single “alien” photo or leaked clip—it is about how quickly a mystery can be locked down, and how stubbornly it can refuse to disappear.
No comments :
Post a Comment
Dear Reader/Contributor,
Your input is greatly appreciated, and coveted; however, blatant mis-use of this site's bandwidth will not be tolerated (e.g., SPAM, non-related links, etc).
Additionally, healthy debate is invited; however, ad hominem and or vitriolic attacks will not be published, nor will "anonymous" criticisms. Please keep your arguments/comments to the issues and subject matter of this article and present them with civility and proper decorum. -FW