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.