The text below is an shortened version (repeated parts are not transcribed here) of an article published in the brazilian news magazine Isto E', Issue #1447, 25 June 1997, pages 121-122. Translation by P.H. Andrade.
Report of a close encounter of the third kind made Varginha the Brazilian Roswell.
Luiza Villamea, from Varginha (MG)
The city of Varginha, in the southern Minas Gerais state, is the [Brazilian] national version of Roswell. With 120 thousand inhabitants, Varginha has become the Brazilian capital of Ufology since the report of a strange creature sighting by three girls crossed its mountains and gained the world. [...]
The most extraordinary close encounter of the third kind ever reported in Brazil gained prominence when associated to other testimonies and even to mysterious deaths.
Less than a month after the incident, the military policeman Marco Eli Chereze, then with 23, succumbed to a multiple infection without an apparent cause. "He must has been infected when he touched the creature", supposes his older sister, Marta. Member of the P-2, the Military Police's intelligence service, Chereze is pointed by the ufologists who investigate the case as a victim of a complex MP operation which has culminated in the capture of two extraterrestrials. [...]
All the institutions cited by ufologists deny the occurrence. According to the records released by the MP, Chereze is not even known to be in the working schedule on that Jan. 20th [1996]. The mother of the policeman, Lourdes, contests the information. She emphasizes she remembers well that Saturday - a day that begun sunny and that had an astonishing change in the weather by sunset, with hailstones that even untiled houses. Lourdes tells Chereze worked in plain clothes and used to drive around in a white Fiat car (model "Premio") from the MP that was without the window in the driver's side. "My son passed at home at about 6:00 PM, with his shirt soaked", she remembers. "He changed his clothes and asked me to tell his wife he was not coming for dinner because he was in mission". [...]
Involved in the investigations around the ETs of Varginha since the day after the encounter reported by the three girls, the lawyer Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, an ufologist for more than 20 years, attests that the involvement of [the MP soldier] Chereze in the episode is confirmed by FIFTEEN TESTIMONIES RECORDED IN VIDEO. It's eight military witnesses and seven civilian, whose identities are kept in silence, due to security reasons. "Varginha Case is not closed", affirms Rodrigues. "It is likely that it will only be cleared up after a few decades".
Among the many questions raised by the ufologists, is the death of five animals from the city's Zoo : two deer, a blue macaw, a jaguar and a tapir. With no apparent reason, it all died at the same time the housewife Terezinha Galo Clepf, 67, affirms she saw another alien at the Zoo, on April, 1996. The place, by the way, will receive a concrete-made clone-copy of the alien. [...]
Because of episodes like this, over eighty studious of Ufology have already been in the region. One of them, the Spanish writer J.J. Benitez, author of the book series "Trojan Horse Operation" has even announced the discovery of landing marks from a spaceship. "This is completely false", says engineer Claudeir Covo, president of the INFA - National Institute on the investigation of Aerospatial Phenomena. "The alleged marks are nothing else but two holes made by a vertical digger and the vestiges of plucked white-ant", agrees Rodrigues.
At present time, these two ufologists analyze the testimony of the small entrepreneur Carlos de Souza, resident of the city of Sao Paulo, who recently presented himself as a witness of the retrieval of an unidentified object by the Army, when he was travelling near to the city [of Varginha]. "When they saw me, they forced me to get out of there", says Souza. [...]
