The Varginha, Brazil Entity — January 1996, rendered in the indigo-charcoal, period-accurate dossier style used across the UAP/Entity Archive.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP | ENTITY REPORT
1996: The Varginha, Brazil Entity
On a single day in January 1996, a small Brazilian coffee town produced one of the most independently corroborated entity encounters in the UFO record: three teenage witnesses, a squad of firefighters, and a military policeman all described capturing or confronting a small, red-eyed, ammonia-scented creature — and one of those men, Corporal Marco Eli Chereze, was dead of an unexplained infection twenty-six days later. Nearly three decades on, the Brazilian military still denies it happened, and the case remains open.
Date: January 20, 1996 (with a possible related sighting/crash on January 13, 1996)
Sighting Time: Approximately 12:00 A.M. (initial radar/military alert); further entity encounters occurred through the afternoon, roughly 3:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Day/Night: Both — overnight for the initial alert, daylight for the entity encounters
Location: Varginha, Minas Gerais, Brazil (Jardim Andere neighborhood)
Urban or Rural: Urban
No. of Entity(s): Reported as high as seven in some accounts (unconfirmed); at least two separate captures are documented through named witnesses
Entity Type: Identified in this archive’s Alien Type Summary as Akart, also called the Varginha EBEs
Entity Description: A small, bipedal being roughly four to five feet tall, with a disproportionately large head bearing three rounded protuberances, large red eyes, dark brown oily-textured skin, long arms, short legs, and large feet. Witnesses reported a faint buzzing sound and a strong ammonia-like odor.
Hynek Classification: CE-III (Close Encounter with animate beings)
No. of Object(s): At least one UFO reported and reportedly tracked by radar; precise number undocumented
Height & Speed: Undocumented
Size of Object(s): Undocumented
Distance to Object(s): Undocumented
Shape of Object(s): Described elsewhere by separate witnesses that same day as cigar-shaped; not specified in the primary military-alert account
Color of Object(s): Reported by one set of witnesses as unlit (“without lights”)
Number of Witnesses: Multiple, named — Liliane Fátima Silva, Valquíria Aparecida Silva, and Kátia Andrade Xavier; Military Police Corporal Marco Eli Chereze; farmers Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues; multiple firefighters; hospital medical staff including Dr. Cesário Lincoln Furtado
Case Status: Unexplained
Source: Brazilian UFO Magazine, edition #100 (June 2004) and edition #102, reporting by Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues and A.J. Gevaerd; interview material with Dr. Cesário Lincoln Furtado, translated by C. Sannazzaro and summarized by Gildas Bourdais
FULL REPORT
Around midnight on January 20, 1996, NORAD’s Brazilian counterpart CINDACTA (the Integrated Center on Air Defense and Air Traffic Control) reportedly received a warning of a UFO descending over the southern part of Minas Gerais state — a warning later leaked by a Brazilian Air Force soldier and a radar-facility employee at Air Force Base VI COMAR. That same night, farmers Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues were woken by their frightened farm animals and, looking outside, saw a silent, unlit UFO in the sky.
The next morning, the Varginha Fire Department began receiving calls reporting a “strange creature” near Jardim Andere. The calls were initially dismissed as a hoax, but as more calls came in, firefighters were sent to investigate. They found the creature in a dazed condition and captured it in a net roughly two and a half hours after the first call. It had three protrusions on top of its head, glowing red eyes, long arms, short legs, and large feet, and emitted a buzzing sound as it was taken.
Later that same day, around 3:00–3:30 PM, three young women — sisters Liliane Fátima Silva and Valquíria Aparecida Silva, and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier — were taking a shortcut through a vacant, wooded lot in Jardim Andere when they encountered a second such creature. Their description matched the one captured earlier almost exactly. Frightened, they ran home and told Liliane and Valquíria’s mother, Luiza Helena de Silva, that they had seen “the devil.” When she went to investigate, the creature was gone, but she found a three-toed footprint in the grass and a lingering smell of ammonia.
Around 5:30 PM that evening, Military Police Corporal Marco Eli Chereze, a member of the Military Police’s secret service (P2), was reportedly involved in the capture of another entity nearby. According to witnesses who later spoke to investigators, the creature made a brief resisting motion during the struggle, and Chereze made contact with it without gloves.
Reports from the following days described as many as seven entities captured in total, with creatures reportedly taken to a regional hospital before transfer to the larger Humanitas facility, escorted by military personnel. At least one entity reportedly died and was sent for autopsy to the University of Campinas, with two others said to have been examined at the University of São Paulo. No photographs, video, or official findings from any of these autopsies have ever been released, beyond an artist’s rendering of the entity.
Approximately four months later, the three young women reported being visited at home by several men in dark suits, who offered a large sum of money in exchange for recorded statements describing the creature as a sick animal or a sick person rather than what they had described. Luiza Helena de Silva refused the offer. Military and Fire Department officials, when questioned by the press, denied any knowledge of a captured entity, even as reports circulated of unusually heavy troop movement in Varginha that day. Pathologist Badan Palhares, reportedly involved in examining one of the entities, publicly denied involvement but stated he might have more to say later.
The case’s most serious development was the death of Corporal Chereze. On February 12, 1996, he was admitted to the emergency ward of the Hospital Regional with intense lower-back pain, then transferred to Hospital Bom Pastor. Blood tests showed signs of a significant infection. Over the following days his condition worsened despite antibiotic treatment; on the morning of February 15, showing signs of cyanosis and a fever consistent with blood poisoning, he was transferred to intensive care at Hospital Regional, where he died within hours — twenty-six days after the January 20 events.
Dr. Cesário Lincoln Furtado, one of the physicians who treated Chereze, later gave a detailed account of the case to Rodrigues. Furtado confirmed that Chereze had developed a small abscess under one armpit shortly after the January 20 incident, attributed at the time to an unrelated staphylococcus infection, and stated it had largely healed by the time Chereze was hospitalized. Furtado was emphatic that the eventual cause of death — a rapid, severe systemic infection that overwhelmed a previously healthy 23-year-old with no history of immune trouble — could not be explained by the abscess, a mild pneumonia found at autopsy, or the urinary infection initially suspected. He described the case as medically “strange, without rational explanation,” while stopping short of attributing it to contact with the entity. Chereze’s family, and several ufologists investigating the case, believed the two were connected; Brazilian military authorities denied Chereze had even been present at the January 20 events.
The Varginha case has never received official confirmation from the Brazilian military, which has consistently denied any capture or cover-up. It remains, by the account of researchers who have worked it for decades, one of the most extensively witnessed and least officially resolved entity encounters on record.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The Varginha, Brazil Entity — Convergent Witnesses, No Official Resolution
- Witness Convergence: The strength of this case rests on independent parties — teenage civilians, firefighters, and a military policeman — describing the same physical entity within hours of each other, without any indication they coordinated their accounts beforehand.
- The Skeptical Explanation: Brazilian authorities have offered a partial official explanation for one strand of the case: that the three young women encountered a well-known local man with mental and physical disabilities who was often seen crouching low to the ground. That explanation, even if accepted, does not address the firefighters’ earlier capture that same morning, Corporal Chereze’s involvement that evening, or the subsequent hospital transfers and autopsy reports — all of which rest on separate witness chains.
- Chereze’s Death: The medical record here is genuinely ambiguous rather than confirmatory. Dr. Furtado’s own account describes the infection as unexplained in origin, not as evidence of alien contamination; no documented source in this case — including the treating physicians — makes a clinical claim that Chereze was infected by extraterrestrial contact. The connection to the January 20 entity remains circumstantial, built on timing and the family’s suspicion rather than diagnosis.
- Classification Note: This case is classified CE-III under Hynek’s system because it centers on direct observation of and contact with animate entities, not on a documented craft crash-and-retrieval; the UFO sightings that frame the case are treated here as a separate, related element rather than the basis for the classification.
Nearly thirty years on, Varginha remains defined less by any single piece of evidence than by the sheer number of independent people who told overlapping versions of the same story — and by a military and government response that has never moved past denial. Case Status is marked Unexplained rather than Explained because the official skeptical account, even taken at face value, only accounts for part of what was reported.
Dr. Cesário Lincoln Furtado, on the cause of Chereze’s death:
“A strange death, without rational explanation.”
