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The skies over this far-flung coffee-growing hub went charcoal black, the heavens opened and one of Brazil’s greatest mysteries was born.
“It really was something unique,” recalls Marco Antônio Reis, a zoo director, who was at his ranch outside Varginha one stormy day in January 1996 when, he says, an otherworldly creature came to town.
Reis and other locals claim the unusually ferocious downpour heralded a series of disturbing and seemingly paranormal events.
At least six of the zoo’s animals, including a spider monkey, a tapir and a raccoon, died mysteriously after a horned interloper with bulging red eyes was spotted in the vicinity by a woman who had gone out for a smoke. When a vet examined their corpses, “they were all black inside”, Reis claims.
On a nearby wasteland, three young women spotted a peculiar and malodorous being with a heart-shaped face and three lumps on its head cowering beside a wall. “I’ve seen the devil,” one of those witnesses would later tell her mum.
Soon afterwards, an unexplained infection was rumoured to have killed a strapping police intelligence officer who was said to have grappled with the oleaginous unidentified being.
Three decades later, Reis says he is convinced Varginha received a non-human visit. His only doubt was from where it came.
“We don’t know if it was extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial,” the 71-year-old says as he climbs a staircase to the veranda where the smoker claims to have seen what, in reference to Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film, became known as the “ET of Varginha”. A 2ft statue of a two-toed alien now marks the spot.
“It’s possible it was an intraterrestrial, from inside the Earth … They don’t just come from space,” Reis says. “It might have come from the depths of the Earth, too. We don’t even know what it’s like at the bottom of the sea, do we?”
As Varginha marks the 30th anniversary of an enigma that turned the little-known agricultural city into a household name, debate continues to rage over the events of January 1996.
A recently released documentary series, The Mystery of Varginha, suggests much of the story was a hoax, turbocharged by attention-seeking ufologists, audience-chasing TV executives and key witnesses who allegedly fabricated their stories for financial gain.
“It was all built on assumptions, untruths and general nonsense,” Ubirajara Rodrigues, the ufologist who first claimed the three young women had seen an alien, says in the programme.
One remorseful witness – a former soldier who once sensationally claimed troops had captured an alien in Varginha – admits having spread fake news after being offered a bribe worth thousands of dollars. “There’s no such thing as the ET of Varginha,” he says, calling claims of a military cover-up “one of the biggest farces ever”.
An army investigation – published in full to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the sightings and rebuff allegations of a conspiracy – also concluded the story was a sham, possibly the result of mass hysteria that saw people link ordinary occurrences, such as the animal deaths to the initial sightings of the “ET”. The report suggested the three young women had confused a local man with an alien as he sheltered from the heavy rain.
But Reis and many others in Varginha remain convinced something out of the ordinary did take place. “To this day this business is being covered up,” he says during a tour of the places where the interplanetary sojourner is said to have been seen.
“I believe,” says Felipe Ramos, a 33-year-old city hall official, adding: “I think there were three of them.”
New witnesses have also emerged, such as the neurologist Ítalo Venturelli, who uses the recent documentary to break a three-decade silence about the white alien he claims to have seen in Varginha’s hospital in 1996. “Its skull was droplet-shaped … it had a small mouth, and lilac droplet-shaped eyes,” says the doctor, who ignored the Guardian’s requests for an interview.
The ufologist Vitório Pacaccini, who has written a book about the saga called The Varginha Incident, said: “Thirty years on, I remain convinced something extraordinary happened in Varginha in January 1996.”
Pacaccini, who the new documentary accuses of paying witnesses for interviews confirming the ET yarn, rejected the programme’s “tendentious” findings, insisting Varginha had witnessed “an event of unconventional nature, possibly involving [an] extraterrestrial presence”. The ufologist claimed there was ample evidence suggesting a UFO had crashed in the region, triggering “a large military operation to capture and remove its occupants”.
Whatever the truth, the saga has been good business for Varginha, where authorities are trying to cash in on unexpectedly becoming Brazil’s “Land of the ET”.
The city’s tourism secretary, Rosana Carvalho, claimed 200,000 visitors from nearly 40 different countries, including New Zealand and Japan, had visited Varginha’s flying saucer-shaped ET museum since it opened in 2022. The gift shop boasts a cornucopia of themed merch, including ET mugs, key rings and T-shirts stamped with cartoons of green aliens and the words “humans are terrible”. In January the museum hosted a two-day UFO conference.
Carvalho said the government recently acquired the weed-covered wasteland where the three young women supposedly saw the ET and planned to build a monument to the region’s most famous guest. American investors had visited this mountainous corner of Minas Gerais state, a seven-hour drive from Rio, with plans for a theme park. “We really see the chance to turn this into a substantial economic activity for the municipality,” Carvalho said, citing the multimillion dollar tourist industry that grew up around the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.
Those who claim to have encountered the extraterrestrial have also tried to monetise Varginha’s claim to fame. “If you’re paying a fee I can talk to the girls,” one of the three witnesses told the Guardian when contacted about a possible interview. After being informed that this was against the newspaper’s policies, she replied: “I’m very busy, thanks OK”.
Others were happier to share their thoughts.
As he sat in the shade of a spaceship-shaped bus stop, not far from Varginha’s rocket-shaped city hall, near a mural asking passersby “Have you been abducted?”, José Reis scoffed at claims his home town had received a visit from beyond.
Reis supported the official version: that the three young women had confused a scrawny man with an alien as he sought sanctuary from the rain. “I don’t believe any of it – but it’s not for us to judge,” the 71-year-old said.
As Reis spoke, another commuter furrowed her brow in disapproval. “Young people don’t lie,” said Helena Narciso, 47, insisting the story of the close encounter was 100% true.
What was more, Narciso believed the aliens would one day return to Varginha as a result of supernatural powers, which she claimed allowed her to perform “the miracle of the sun”.
“I think they are looking for me,” the woman said, with a conspiratorial glance.
