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.
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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.