While there are many purported sightings of UFOs every year,
stories of earthly encounters with actual alien beings are relatively rare. However, there have
been a few famous cases, some of which gain so much notoriety that they become a part of the DNA
of the places they occurred in, such as Roswell, New Mexico or Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
One such case occurred in 1996 when the city of Varginha, Brazil was overrun with a string
of reports concerning UFOs and alien creatures. So what exactly happened,
and why is it remembered as one of the most chilling cases of alien encounters ever?
At around 1 AM on January 20, 1996 a farmer named Oralina de Freitas was sleeping with her husband
Eurico when she heard their cattle rustling outside. She got up to see what had spooked the
cows and noticed a strange object in the sky. It was the size of a bus and seemed to be surrounded
by billowing smoke. She woke her husband and they stared at the craft for nearly 40 minutes,
as it got lower and lower on the horizon before disappearing from their view.
On a nearby highway around the same time,
a pilot named Carlos de Souza was driving down the highway when he noticed the falling object.
Believing it to be an airplane, Carlos chased the object to look for the wreckage.
When he got there, he saw that the military had already arrived and were surrounding
the burning wreckage. He didn’t see any dead bodies, only bizarre silver shards.
He was eventually asked to leave and told not to speak about what he saw.
Later that day, things got even stranger.
The fire department received a call from someone claiming that they spotted a strange animal
walking in a forest that was nestled in between two neighborhoods. According to witnesses,
firemen showed up to search the woods followed by soldiers carrying guns. The sounds of two gunshots
were heard and the soldiers were seen leaving sometime later while carrying two large bags.
That afternoon at around 3 PM, two sisters named Liliane and Valquiria
Fatima Silva, and their friend Katia Andrade Xavier were walking
home through an empty road when they spotted a creature crouching next to a
wall. Katia let out a scream and the creature turned to look at them. They ran away in fear
and when they got home, the sisters told their mother they had seen the devil.
That evening, Varginha was hit with a storm. At around 6PM, two police officers spotted a strange
animal collapsed on the road. One of the officers, a man named Marcho Chereze, picked the creature up
and took it to a local hospital, where there was a special quarantine area already set up.
The official explanation from the government was that this
area was designated as a place for the hospital’s first ever cardiac surgery.
In the following days, residents reported seeing a lot of military activity surrounding both of
the hospitals in the city. There were also reports of animals dying without explanation
at the local zoo in the following weeks. Allegedly, the dead animals were examined
in a lab, where they found a bizarre toxic substance in their intestines.
On February 15th, police officer Marcho Chereze who had been the
one to reportedly pick up the creature, died in a local hospital. It was said that he had
developed an abscess and come down with flu-like symptoms before dying of sepsis
but the doctors never found out exactly what caused his symptoms. He was only 23 years old.
In an interview in 2006, the three women who first spotted the creature said that 4 months
after their encounter, they were visited by five men who offered them money if they would
retract their statements about what they saw. Many believe that they were government agents
and that all of the events that occurred during that time were covered up as part of a conspiracy.
The Brazilian military opened an official inquiry on the events and concluded that
the girls had probably scene a known local homeless man covered in mud,
who had physical and mental disabilities. He was very thin with an abnormally large head and
was known to crouch on streets. When asked, the three women denied this and stuck to their story.
The military also denied that there was increased military activity in that area,
and that what people saw were just military trucks operating on their normal schedule.
And as for the supposed aliens at the hospital, they explained it as people
seeing a couple with dwarfism who were there expecting a baby and being helped by a soldier.
Interestingly, in recent years a document from the Ministry of Aeronautics was discovered that
showed that there had actually been an earlier UFO sighting in Varginha in 1971
as well. It was spotted by a few people, who said it was oval and silver and emitted a loud noise.
So what exactly happened in Varginha? Without any hard evidence, it’s impossible to say. It’s worth
noting that the story of the initial sighting of the creature by the three women was aired
on a popular TV show in Brazil, and this is what lead to the flurry of other purported sightings.
Also, you have to put into context when this case happened. This was the mid-90s,
when all of Latin America as well as the Southwestern US were inundated with reports
of a creature called the Chupacabra, which is a similar alien creature
who was blamed for livestock killings. The Chupacabra was insanely popular at the time,
there were countless news stories and it seemed like every week there was a different sighting.
I have a suspicion that this was also an influence on the Varginha story.
Today, the city has embraced their reputation as an alien
hotspot and have even put up a huge water tower in the shape of a UFO.
So what do you think? Were the events in Varginha just a series of coincidences that were
exaggerated due to mass hysteria or do you think there was really something more sinister going on?
Let me know what you think in the comments,
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