Published by Luiza Villamea in the Brazilian magazine IstoE
THE VARGINHA ET CASE
IstoE/1390-22/5/96
It fell from heaven, the recent economic boom in the town of Varginha, in
Minas Gerais. A known coffee exporter, the municipality gained sudden national
fame thanks to a product that has nothing to do with soil. On last Monday 20th,
its inhabitants celebrated four months of the most extraordinary report of a
close encounter of the third kind between humans and an extraterrestrial being
in the country.
At 15h30 of a sunny Saturday, 20th of January, three girls going down a track
of an empty plot of land in the grounds of Jardim Andere, and two kilometers
away from the town center, when one of them, Liliane Fatima da Silva, 16,
looked over her left side and screamed. A strange creature, with three
protuberances on the head and viscous skin was about seven meters away, near a
wall which separates the lot from a garage.
"It was squatting, with the long arms between its legs", recalls the girl.
"At first I saw the eyes, enormous and red." Frightened, Liliane turned her
back to the creature, while her sister Valquiria, 14, and her friend Katia
Andrade Xavier, 22, continued to observe. "It was not animal or human, it was
a horrible thing", says Katia, who works as a housemaid and has three kids.
"It looked dumb, didn't make any noise", adds Valquiria. The creature,
however, appeared to move slightly with the head and the three girls run away.
Forty minutes later, the mother of Liliane and Valquiria, Luiza Helana Silva,
38, arrived at the empty plot of ground to look for what had frightened her
daughters. She found nothing. The story gained proportions because, apparently
without any communications with Liliane, Valquiria and Katia, the couple of farm
workers Oralina Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues assured to have seen, after midnight
on 20th, an unidentified flying object. They were sleeping in the house of the farm
that sits at the edge of the road that leads from Varginha to Tres Coracoes when
they were awakened by noise of the animals.
"The cattle ran from one side to another of the pasture before our
window", says Eurico. "We looked at the sky and we saw a grey object, with the
shape similar to a submarine, about the size of a small bus, slowly hovering
over the grazing land, at 5 meter above the ground", describes Oralina. "It
was releasing a whitish smoke, did not have lights nor made any noise." In the
town, the association between the craft and the ET that had shown up 14 hours
later was immediate.
Lawyer and Law professor in one of the four Faculties of the town, Ubirajara
Franco Rodrigues, 40, started to investigate the case on the following day.
Ufologist for more then two decades, he estimates that only 1% of the
descriptions of sightings of space ships are true. For him, the Varginha case
is the exception that confirms the rule. "What they saw was, as a matter of
fact, a creature unknown on Earth", assured Rodrigues. He concluded, still,
that at least two extraterrestrial biological entities, name by which the
ufologist designate the ETs, were in the town on day 20th of January. Since
then, a legion of researchers of the phenomena have arrived in Varginha. More
precisely, 66 ufologists have already passed by the town to make their
investigations.
"It's a case without precedence in our logs", says the engineer Claudeir
Covo, president of Instituto Nacional de Investigacao de Fenomenos
Aerospaciais (INFA). The psychiatrist professor at the Harvard Medical School,
John Mack, who researched human encounters with aliens, came down from the
United States to make a series of interviews with the women.
The phenomena ended up outside the circle of researchers of the theme.
Fantastico, of Rede Globo, alone, dedicated three reports to
the case. Under the skin of the actor Reinaldo, the ET arrived at the program
"Casseta & Planeta" on Tuesday, 14th.
Watching himself on television, the mayor Aloysio Ribeiro da Silva (PPB) was
happy. "The ET gave a tremendous publicity to Varginha", he celebrated.
"I am willing to sponsor an international ufology meeting." Before organizing
an event of this kind, the ufologist intend to conclude an investigation that
takes already four months and points out the Army as responsible for the
capture and occultation of at least one of the two ETs that allegedly appeared
in Varginha. In a document signed by ten persons, they point out "a true and
complex operation involving military authorities and civil professionals, that
resulted in the capture of creatures non biologically classified, which were
maintained under medical observation and later taken away from the town."
Besides the lawyer Rodrigues, coordinating the investigation is the ufologist
Vitorio Pacaccini, 31, who lives in Belo Horizonte and went down to the region
in the last two weeks. Both swear that they already heard 14 witnesses of the
ET apparition, among them four military people. But they refuse to reveal any
name or proof, besides a photo of a alleged interview with two military people
who would have participated in the operation. The ufologists support that one
creature would have been captured by four men of the Fire brigade of Varginha
at 10h30 of 20th of January, in the neighbourhood of a wood, only three blocks
away from the empty plot of land in which the girls would have seen an alien
only five hours later. Put in a wooden box covered by a white fabric, the ET,
say the ufologists, was immediately taken by a military truck to the Escola de
Sargento das Armas (ESA), to the town of Tres Coracoes, 25 kilometers away
from Varginha.
On the following day, still according to the ufologists, another creature had
been seen in the Hospital Regional, in the center of Varginha - and there the
ET would be observed closely by the three friends. In an
operation involving military people from ESA, Military Police officials and
men from the Fire Brigade of Varginha, the ET, in Rodrigues and Pacaccini
version, had been transported after midnight on Monday 22nd to the Hospital
Humanitas, 1.5 kilometers away from the center, the most well-equipped of the
region.
At about 18 hours of the same day, the creature, already dead, had been taken
to ESA, in a convoy formed by three army transportation trucks.
The same convoy had left Tres Coracoes military school at 4 hours, Tuesday,
23rd January heading towards Campinas (Sao Paulo state), where the cargo had
been delivered to another military unit, possibly Escola Preparatoria de
Cadetes. "The whole operation was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Olimpio
Wanderley Santos", says Rodrigues. "We have the testimony of one military
person at ESA, directly involved in the operation, describing the manouvres",
assures Pacaccini. In the recording of 42 minutes, the military tells that, on
leaving the Hospital Humanitas the body smelled very bad.
The Army denies the story. The Comando Militar do Leste spokesman, Colonel
Luiz Cesario da Silveira Leite, says that no military people of the
corporation captured any ET. "Our concerns are with national and foreign
aliens, but terrestrials, and not with extraterrestrials that, I hope, are in
peace", he told the reporter Helio Contreiras, from IstoE. The Colonel
classified as "exagerated information that makes relation between the Varginha
ET and the Army". "The ufologists statements are so absurd that come to be
ridiculous", adds the general Sergio Pedro Coelho Lima, ESA commander. In his
office, the general keeps a yellow file entitled Caso Extraterrestre whose
cover reproduces the solar system. Inside it are filed all the publications
about the subject.
Pointed out as the ET abduction and transportation operation from Varginha to
Campinas, the Lieutenant Colonel Olimpio Wanderley Santos says that he knew
about his involvement in the case through telephone calls. "At that time, I thought
it was a joke." In the Army Forces the Air Force is more concerned about the
extraterrestrial phenomena. The I Centro Integrado de Defesa Aerea e Controle
de Trafego Aereo (CINDACTA - Air traffic control), localized in Brasilia, has
a dossier about OVNIS (UFOs). "There are today non explained cases by the Air
Force in relation to the OVNIS (UFOs)", assured Brigadier Cherubin Rosa Filho
(Air Force), minister of Superior Tribunal Militar. In one of these most
famous cases that involved a former minister, had the approval of the then
Ministro da Aeronautica (Air Force Minister), brigadier Octavio Moreira Lima,
and is completing ten years without the investigation having reached any
conclusion.
The Varginha's ET problem is an episode not clarified and a coincidence of
facts only now revealed increase even more the mystery that moves the case.
The housemaid Luza Helena, mother of two of the three girls that had seen the
alien, denounced that in the beginning of this month four men in suits visited
her in her house and proposed to pay for her daughters to deny publicly the ET
contact. "They said they would pay in cash", says Luiza Helena. "They said
they would return, but we don't want to hide the truth." The quartet did
not identify themselves and the visit was only witnessed by the girls. Their
father, a bus conductor Joao Lopes da Silva, was working when the bribe
attempt took place. The coincidence between the version of ufologists and the
facts only was made public last week.
The Hospital Regional Administator, Adilson Usier Leite, reveals that in the
following week of the alleged ET appearance, the two town hospitals were stage
of exceptional movement. In Hospital Regional, a Fire Brigade car took a
exhumated body to have an spine x-ray. It was a engineering student, son of a
traditional family of the town, that was found dead in his civil Police cell,
after being arrested, accused of stealing. In Hospital Humanitas, that Leite
also administrated on that occasion, the exceptional movements was because of the
arrival of equipment for the realization of the first heart transplant in the
town.
"When this ET story appeared, I thought better not to comment that police and
fire brigade had been in the Regional", says Leite. None of this, however,
convinced the ufologists. They insist that they speak the truth when they say
that, instead of new equipment or any special case, the town hospitals as well
as the fire brigade were acting, yes, around a dead ET. And they go even more:
last Tuesday, Rodrigues and Pacaccini returned to Varginha after a
investigation trip to Campinas. "We know absolutely for sure that the creature
had its necropsy done by Badan Palhares", says Rodrigues, refering to a known
pathologyst of Universidade de Campinas (UNICAMP).
"At this point, there is a possibility that the creature had been taken from
Brazil to the United States", adds Pacaccini. "I don't know where they had
this imaginative idea", says Palhares in Campinas.
"Effectively I don't know any type of alien matter that had come to IML
(Instituto Medico Legal) or to the UNICAMP."
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