{"it":{"id":"CR-VAR","kind":"crash","sub":"Alleged capture","name":"Varginha incident","place":"Varginha, Minas Gerais, Brazil","lat":-21.551,"lon":-45.43,"date":"January 1996","rep":"Three young women described a creature; claims spread of captures.","off":"A Brazilian Army inquiry said a local resident had been mistaken for an alien and military movements were routine.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Varginha UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident"},{"t":"Brazilian Army IPM 18/1997 on the Varginha case (scan, third-party host)","u":"https://wherearethey.info/document/brazilian-army-military-police-inquiry-ipm-no-18-1997-into-the"}],"tags":["Military","Brazil"],"sum":"On the afternoon of 20 January 1996, three young women in Varginha, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, ran home and told their mother they had seen the devil. Crouched by a wall, they said, was a large-headed creature with veined skin, three bumps on its head and eyes like two red balls. It looked unsteady, as if hurt.\n\nThe women were aged 14 to 22. Within weeks the story had grown. People said they had seen UFOs in the days before, that soldiers and firefighters had captured one or more beings, that a creature had been taken to a hospital and that a police officer had died. A book by the ufologist Vitório Pacaccini and Maxs Portes named army personnel as having carried an extraterrestrial away.\n\nThat book prompted an army inquiry in 1997, run from the sergeants' school at Três Corações. Its officer concluded that the girls had most likely seen a local man known as \"Mudinho\", probably dirty from heavy rain and crouched by a wall. The other sightings had ordinary causes: firefighters called out to the storm, army trucks parked near a dealership for maintenance, school vehicles sent to Jaguariúna for horse fodder. A military judge closed the case and called the claims about the army untrue.\n\nSceptics of the inquiry note that the accused institution investigated itself, that its subject was a book rather than the witnesses, and that it never heard the soldiers who spoke anonymously to ufologists. Supporters of the inquiry reply that no one has produced a body, a photograph or a named soldier.\n\nThe court file, 357 sheets in two volumes, was put online in January 2026. Whether it settles anything depends on whom you were already inclined to trust.","qs":["Can an inquiry run by the institution accused of a cover-up ever be persuasive to people who suspect one?","How do separate events in a small town, such as a storm, a fire crew and army traffic, get joined into one story?","Anonymous soldiers versus a named officer's report: what would make either kind of testimony hold up?"],"yt":"List what the Army inquiry explains and which witness details it leaves open.","rel":["UFO-COL1977"],"hook":"Three young women in Varginha ran home and told their mother they had seen the devil","why":"Varginha is Brazil's best-known UFO case, and one of the few where the army's own inquiry file is now open to the public."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"CR-VAR","sum":"In the centre of Varginha, a town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a water tower 20 metres tall holds its reservoir in a disc shaped like a flying saucer. The town calls it the Nave Espacial de Varginha, the Varginha Spaceship. Some of its bus stops are built as spaceships too. Grey alien dolls dressed in football kit are sold at the spot where, the town's story goes, something not human once crouched against a wall. Few places have turned a single afternoon into an identity so completely, and fewer still have the files to argue about it.\n\nThe afternoon was 20 January 1996. At about half past three, three young women, aged 14 to 22, were walking near a subdivision on a street called Rua Dr. Benevenuto Braz Vieira. They said they saw a being there. It stood on two legs and had a large head, with \"spots like veins on the skin and three bumps on the head.\" Its \"eyes were two red balls.\" It seemed wobbly, unsteady on its feet, and the women took that to mean it was hurt or ill. They ran. At home they told their mother they had seen the devil.\n\nThe creature was soon being called the \"ET de Varginha,\" and the town gave it company. In the weeks that followed, people came forward to say they had seen UFOs in the days before the sighting. Others said more beings had been taken and examined at a hospital. There was talk of military, police and government vehicles moving through the area, of an unknown animal prowling a local forest, and of a police officer who had died. At the town zoo a tapir, an ocelot and two gray brockets, a small South American deer, had died without explanation. Ufologists began to join these threads into a single account: firefighters and soldiers had captured one or more non-human beings, and in the fullest telling the United States had flown them out of Brazil.\n\nIn 1996 the ufologist Vitório Pacaccini and the writer Maxs Portes published that account as a book, Incidente em Varginha. It named military personnel as having captured and carried away an extraterrestrial on 20 January. That was the move that changed the case, because it pointed at a particular institution. The soldiers in the story were said to belong to the Escola de Sargentos das Armas, the Army's school for sergeants at Três Corações.\n\nThe school's commander responded in 1997 by opening a military police inquiry, the IPM nº 18/1997. It is worth being precise about what it was for. Its job was to establish whether the book, by naming the school's soldiers, amounted to a crime. It was not a scientific investigation of what three young women had seen. The officer placed in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Lúcio Carlos Finholdt Pereira, delivered his conclusions on 11 April 1997.\n\nHis explanation for the creature was a man. A local resident, Luiz Antônio de Paula, was known around town as \"Mudinho,\" which means \"Little Mute.\" The commander of the 24th Military Police Battalion supplied photographs of him, saying he \"probably has some mental disability\" and that his physical characteristics matched the description. The school made a photo-simulation study to test the idea. The report's conclusion was that \"this citizen, probably being dirty, due to the heavy rains and seen crouching by a wall, was mistaken by the three terrified girls as a space creature.\"\n\nThe soldiers and trucks had explanations too. There had been heavy rain, and firefighters had been called out to the district of Jardim Andere. Army trucks had been parked near a vehicle dealership where their regular maintenance was due. Vehicles from the sergeants' school had gone to Jaguariúna to collect fodder for horses. These, the report said, \"were real facts,\" but they had been \"incorrectly interpreted as Firefighters and the Military participating in the capture and later the transport of the alleged creature to Campinas.\" No evidence had been presented for the book's claims, and its informants could not be identified. The report gave the book the character of fiction and found no sign that its authors had committed any crime. A military judge, agreeing with the military prosecutors, ordered the case closed and described the claims about the Army as untrue.\n\nFor the inquiry's defenders that is the end of it, and the sceptic Brian Dunning put the case at its bluntest. Varginha, in his words, \"is the most compelling example of a case where literally nothing at all happened that was remotely unusual, and was magnified into a case considered unassailable proof of alien visitation by many.\" His advice to believers was to recalibrate \"where you set the bar for quality of evidence.\" In thirty years no one has produced a body, a photograph of a being or a soldier willing to be named. The storm, the fire crews, the parked trucks and the fodder run are ordinary events, and in a small town ordinary events are exactly the kind that get stitched together once a frightening story is loose.\n\nYet the inquiry has never quieted its critics, and their objections are about method, not monsters. The institution accused of the capture investigated itself. Its subject was a book, not the witnesses, so what the three young women saw was examined chiefly to show that a book about soldiers was wrong. And it never heard from the soldiers who had spoken anonymously to the ufologists, the very people whose accounts gave the book its claims. An inquiry that cannot identify the informants has shown that it could not find them. Whether they exist is a separate question.\n\nThe investigators who kept going did not stop with the Army's verdict. Ubirajara Rodrigues, the ufologist regarded as the main investigator of the case, published O Caso Varginha in 2001. The American surgeon and ufologist Roger Leir wrote UFO Crash in Brazil in 2005. The documentary maker James Fox took up the case in Moment of Contact in 2022, and another documentary, O Mistério de Varginha, followed in 2025. In March 2026, on the thirtieth anniversary, the Brazilian broadcaster SBT News aired a doctor who said he had examined the Varginha creature, a claim that, like every first-hand account in this case, still waits for a document to stand beside it.\n\nThe documents, at least, are now in the open. The court file of the inquiry, 357 sheets in two volumes covering February to June 1997, had been archived at Brazil's Superior Tribunal Militar, the military court. In January 2026 it was released online. It is one of the few cases of its kind in which the army's own working papers can be read by anyone: the photographs of Mudinho, the simulation study, the explanations of the trucks and the fire crews, the judge's order closing the matter.\n\nRead side by side, the two versions of Varginha are not really arguing about the same thing. One is a careful answer to whether a book had defamed soldiers. The other is a set of claims about what happened to the people of a town, made by witnesses the inquiry never questioned. The file explains a great deal. It does not explain why a story built on so little has held for three decades, or why, of all the possible explanations, it was a man the town knew by name who had to stand in for whatever three frightened young women said they saw by that wall.\n\nAbove the rooftops the saucer-shaped water tower still catches the afternoon light, a monument raised by a town that has not decided whether it is commemorating a mistake or a secret."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/CR-VAR-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Varginha incident, Varginha, Minas Gerais, Brazil — Vista de Varginha","by":"Felipe Trombini","lic":"CC BY 3.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vista_de_Varginha_-_panoramio.jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/CR-VAR.webp","by":"Olimor","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cxdagua_varginha.jpg","cap":"Cxdagua varginha.jpg"}]},"hh":[{"v":"Army inquiry","h":"Concluded a local resident was mistaken for an alien","s":[344]},{"v":"January 1996","h":"Date","s":[344]},{"v":"Varginha","h":"Location: Varginha, Minas Gerais, Brazil","s":[344]}],"hs":{"344":["Wikipedia: Varginha UFO incident","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident"]}}