EL PAÍS EnglishO episódio relembra o caso do ET de Varginha, que completa 30 anos. Discute o avistamento por três meninas, a descrição da criatura, e o envolvimento militar. Apresenta a versão oficial do Exército, que atribui o evento a confusão, e os depoimentos que sustentam a presença extraterrestre, mantendo o mistério vivo.
The ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after sighting dismissed by a military investigation
Read original at EL PAÍS English →On January 20, 1996, three decades ago this Tuesday, three Brazilian teenagers glimpsed a strange creature crouching by a wall in a vacant lot in the city of Varginha. “It had arms and legs, like a human being, but also horns, three horns,” Liliane Silva recounted at the time. The three girls described a being with a heart-shaped face, large red eyes, three small horns on its forehead, and a shiny, brownish body.
A few days later, a lawyer and ufologist from the city, Ubirajara Rodrigues, met with them to gather information; after listening to them, he assured them: “You didn’t see a demon or an ape, you saw an extraterrestrial,” says Silva, now a teacher, in a recently released documentary.The story quickly became national news.
Thus was born the “ET of Varginha,” named after the Steven Speilberg film E.T., the endearing being that in the 1980s had teenagers across the globe dreaming of having a friend from outer space. No other alien or UFO has achieved such prominence in the Brazilian popular imagination.The city of Varginha, in Minas Gerais, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the sighting with an international UFO conference.
On the eve of the event, the Superior Military Court released its official investigation, which concluded that the story was fabricated. The incident that drew ufologists from around the world to this coffee-growing corner of Brazil remains inexhaustible. New testimonies, collected in documentaries such as O Mistério de Varginha (The Varginha Mystery), released by Globo for the anniversary, are fueling the legend.
The Varginha ET case did not fade into oblivion, unlike many other accounts of alien encounters or UFO sightings investigated by the Brazilian Armed Forces and meticulously preserved by the National Archives. After a few months, the story gained traction thanks to anonymous military testimonies, their voices distorted, collected by ufologists.
They claimed the alien was captured alive, taken to a hospital, then to the Três Corações barracks — in Pelé’s hometown — and from there to a secret university laboratory in Campinas for analysis.The story then grew more complex. It was no longer just an encounter with an extraterrestrial; the military was now accused of covering it up.
One of the soldiers recounted that “it barely had a nose, its eyes were very red, and its mouth was small.” Several residents claimed to have seen a UFO fly over the area before landing.The Sergeants’ School of Arms, a nearby barracks, opened an official investigation into the rumors — by then published as a book — and to neutralize any damage to the army’s image.
The dictatorship had ended just over a decade earlier. Military investigators questioned the implicated soldiers, their superiors, firefighters, the ufologists who wrote the book — one of them, Vitório Pacaccini, is still active, maintaining the cover-up theory — and reviewed the movements of all the barracks’ vehicles during those days.
Nothing.The official army investigation — two volumes, 600 pages — concluded that the story was fictitious. “The military personnel cited by the press did not participate in any operation transporting any type of cargo. The media are mistaken, publicizing untrue events,” the military investigation concludes.
And it proposes the following theory: that afternoon there was a spectacular storm; the sky darkened, as often happens during the summer in the tropics. It rained cats and dogs and there were even hailstones in the middle of summer. In the middle of the tempest, the teenagers “misinterpreted” what they saw.
It was possibly Luís Antônio de Paula, known in Varginha as Mudinho (little mute), a resident with mental disabilities who crouched while walking around the city.The girls who witnessed the sighting deny the theory to this day. “We had known Mudinho since we were children; he was always crouching low,” says Valquiria Silva, another of the three witnesses, in the documentary.
“Without a doubt, it wasn’t him,” she states categorically.The city of Varginha embraced the alien story. Located 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Rio, it has 135,000 inhabitants and until then was known as a major coffee-producing center. The extraterrestrial proved to be an excellent tourist attraction.
City Hall disguised a central water tower as a flying saucer. They erected several statues in its honor and even opened an ET Memorial, which will host the ufology congress next weekend. Extraterrestrial souvenirs are sold everywhere.The star testimony in the aforementioned Globo documentary comes from a neurologist, Ítalo Venturelli.
He recounts that he was in the hospital when a colleague asked him to examine a strange creature that had just undergone surgery. “It was like a child, neither green nor brown, as they said. What I saw was white, with a teardrop-shaped skull and lilac eyes. I looked at it, it looked at me, it looked out the window and back at me,” says this doctor, who explains that he kept quiet for 30 years for fear of being considered insane.
But, he says, a serious illness that nearly killed him finally compelled him to reveal his secret. “It was completely different from a human. It was very calm, it seemed like an angel.”The City Council reports that it has never officially commented on the military investigation into the case. However, the current mayor, Leonardo Ciacci, appears in the documentary and fuels the suspicions.
He recounts that in 1996 he was the manager of the local bakery and reveals that, on that very day, the hospital where the ET was allegedly taken refused to accept the daily bread delivery.The thousands of documents on UFOs are among the most-consulted in Brazil’s National Archives. Perhaps for this reason, the Superior Military Court points out that the complete official investigation into the Varginha ET incident is fully digitized and available to any internet user.
It also notes that it is the oldest court in Brazil — established in 1808 with the arrival of the Portuguese royal family — and that it houses an archive of 26 million pages of Armed Forces documents.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
