Aliens at Varginha? Inside James Fox’s National Press Club UFO Bombshell

"James Fox did not go to Washington to sell a movie; he went to give one of the most contentious UFO cases on record a direct line into the U.S. political bloodstream. Between a closed door briefing on Capitol Hill and a high profile press conference at the National Press Club, the 1996 Varginha incident—long dubbed “Brazil’s Roswell”—is now being treated by lawmakers, doctors, and investigators as a live, unresolved case with potentially historic implications"

From Capitol Hill Briefing to National Press Club

On January 15, 2026, three members of Congress—Tim Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna, and Eric Burlison—met in the former’s office in the Longworth House Office Building with Brazilian witnesses and researchers to hear detailed testimony on Varginha. As The Debrief reports, the scene was disarmingly

By The UFO Chronicles 2-29-2026 © All Rights Reserved

ordinary—lawmakers at a conference table, staff nearby, a box of donuts on the side—until the content of the briefing shifted the room into far stranger territory.
© The UFO Chronicles. All rights reserved–NOT FOR REPUBLICATION

Five days later, Fox hosted a full scale UAP event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., bringing together first hand Brazilian witnesses, medical professionals, investigators, and U.S. insiders to present the same case in a public forum. NewsNationn carried hours of live coverage, with Ross Coulthart and Meagan Medick framing the gathering as part of a wider debate over alleged crash retrieval programs and non human intelligences. FanBolt, in a detailed feature, described the National Press Club event as a “landmark” moment that moved Fox’s previous documentary work on Varginha directly “into the heart of Washington, D.C.” and tied it explicitly to the broader push for UAP transparency.

Alien Captured, 'The Varginha Incident' – Early Reporting

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

cameras rolled in Washington, it was hard not to think back to one of the earliest, most detailed English-language accounts of the affair: a long-form investigation by British UFO magazine editor Graham W. Birdsall, published in the late 1990s, which treated the “Varginha Incident” as potentially “equal to Roswell.”© The UFO Chronicles. 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.

Police Spot UFO – Rapid Reaction Force Alerted

An Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), spotted near the Lithuanian border on 25 June by two duty motor police patrol officers, Jaunius Poera and Laimis Kraujalis placed the whole Vilius police on the alert.

By Itar-Tass 6-26-1996

Vehicle loads of soldiers from the ARAS Rapid Reaction Force, sniffer dogs and police reinforcements immediately arrived on scene of the emergency.

According to eyewitness accounts ... they noticed a spherical object hanging and "pulsing," alternately shrinking and expanding. At the same time, they heard what they described as "a strange sound like an electric or electronic crackle,"wanting to take a closer look at the UFO, the policemen moved toward it. When they advanced about 50 meters through the long grass, the police said the sphere moved away, rose higher and rapidly departed in the direction of Vilnius.

[...]

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Astronaut Gordon Cooper Talks About UFOs | VIDEO – 1996

This video (below) documents Gordon Cooper’s UFO sightings. It originally aired in 1996/1997 (exact airdate unknown) on the television series The Paranormal Borderline, hosted by Jonathan Frakes.

By The Black Vault 4-6-16

[...]

Cooper claimed to have seen his first UFO while flying over West Germany in 1951, although he denied reports he had seen a UFO during his Mercury flight.

In 1957, when Cooper was 30 and a Captain, he was assigned to Fighter Section of the Experimental Flight Test Engineering Division at Edwards AFB in California. He acted as a test pilot and project manager. On May 3 of that year, he had a crew setting up an Askania Cinetheodolite precision landing system on a dry lake bed. This cinetheodolite system would take pictures at one frame per second as an aircraft landed. The crew consisted of James Bittick and Jack Gettys who began work at the site just before 0800, using both still and motion picture cameras. According to his accounts, later that morning they returned to report to Cooper that they saw a “strange-looking, saucer-like” aircraft that did not make a sound either on landing or take-off.

According to his accounts, Cooper realized that these men, who on a regular basis have seen experimental aircraft flying and landing around them as part of their job of filming those aircraft, were clearly worked up and unnerved. They explained how the saucer hovered over them, landed 50 yards away from them using three extended landing gears and then took off as they approached for a closer look. Being photographers with cameras in hand, they of course shot images with 35mm and 4×5 still cameras as well as motion picture film. There was a special Pentagon number to call to report incidents like this. He called and it immediately went up the chain of command until he was instructed by a general to have the film developed (but to make no prints of it) and send it right away in a locked courier pouch. As he had not been instructed to not look at the negatives before sending them, he did. He said the quality of the photography was excellent as would be expected from the experienced photographers who took them. What he saw was exactly what they had described to him. He did not see the movie film before everything was sent away. He expected that there would be a follow up investigation since an aircraft of unknown origin had landed in a highly classified military installation, but nothing was ever said of the incident again. He was never able to track down what happened to those photos. He assumed that they ended up going to the Air Force’s official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, which was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

He held claim until his death that the U.S. government was indeed covering up information about UFOs. [...]

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Triangular Shaped UFO Seen in the Hinckley Skies

[...] Mike had his own triangular UFO encounter back in March of 1996. Mike left home at 2.30am, he was alone as usual and driving to work where he would normally start at 3am trunk driving to London. Mike left the village of Sharnford heading in the direction of the A5. As he left the one way system he could see some lights further along the road at a very low altitude.

Colin Saunders www.hinckleytimes.net 2-28-16

Mike wound the window down to get a better look at the object as he drove towards it. The object was hovering at the junction to Bumblebee Lane. Mike quickly parked his car outside Wayside Farm by the post box.

Bravely he got out of the car and stood underneath a huge triangular UFO. He described the object as the size of a football pitch, the object was only 150 feet away and approx 100 feet off the ground.

The triangle was totally silent and just hung there in the sky, crystal clear, no vibrations, no smells, no noise. The bottom of the craft was tilted towards Mike and he could see the underneath quite clearly, a large central red light with three additional white lights, one in each corner of the craft. [...]

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Kidnapped By UFOS: Interview with Philip Klass

By www.pbs.org
2-27-1996

NOVA: Phil, you've been following the so-called alien abduction movement very closely, perhaps more closely than anyone. Tell us how long you've been studying this, and how much evidence you have found to date, that supports the contentions of people like John Mack and Budd Hopkins?

KLASS: ... I've been interested in and investigating and following claims of UFO abductions for almost 30 years.


NOVA: In all that time, how much hard evidence have you found?


KLASS:...In nearly 30 years of searching, investigating famous cases, I have yet to find one that cannot be explained in down-to-earth prosaic terms. Therefore, if somebody says to me, "I have been abducted by strange looking creatures that do these dreadful things to me," I'm quite confident that they could not possibly be extraterrestrials. Maybe they're mischievous Irish leprechauns; maybe they're the mischievous elves of Santa Claus; maybe they are agents of the devil—now I don't believe in any of these. But I have not spent 30 years investigating whether the leprechauns exist. But I am quite confident that there is no scientific credible evidence to show that we've had alien visitors, let alone that they're doing these dreadful things. [...]

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UFO Video From Space Shuttle Discussed By Astronaut, Tom Jones | VIDEO

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By Alejandro Rojas
www.openminds.tv
6-18-13

     Astronaut Tom Jones was on board the Space Shuttle during STS-80 in 1996. On this flight purported UFOs were caught on camera. YouTuber Shepherd Johnson recently asked Jones his thoughts on the UFO video, which has since become an internet sensation.

Jones is well aware of the controversial online video and has commented on it in his blog. Shepherd makes note of that when he asked Jones about his thoughts on the UFO video in question. Jones told Shepherd:

On every mission you see lots of debris that is released from the shuttle’s payload bay, or frozen propellant from the main engines or the thrusters that drifts along with you, in some cases for several days after you arrive in orbit. And so that little cloud of particles gets captured by the low light TV cameras on the space shuttle that are used by the ground controllers at night, and when those wind up on video, and if you don’t know the context for when those pictures were taken, those little particles might seem to you like distant stars or moving objects in space. The video I have seen in STS-80 is just that. It’s the low light TV camera capturing those ice particles in the very near field, only 10 or 20 feet away, and in the camera view they look like they are flashing, in fact they are just tumbling little ice flakes.

. . . As for STS-80, take a look at the video below and decide for yourself whether you believe the objects to be ice flakes, or something else.

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UFO CHRONICLE | Historians Banned From Hiking Area 51

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By State Press
11-20-1996

* Special Thanks To Grant Cameron


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