By Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal
OVER A LARGE BOX of untouched donuts in Washington’s Longworth House Office Building, Congressional representatives sat rapt as a visiting Brazilian neurosurgeon described what it was like to stare back at the large lilac-colored eyes of a highly intelligent, nonhuman being.
So, not your usual Capitol Hill meeting.
The closed-door session on Jan. 15 brought together three members of Congress seeking greater government transparency on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, long called UFOs, and a group of Brazilians who say they witnessed the crash of an otherworldly spacecraft and later encountered its nonhuman occupants.
Coming thirty years after the striking events, the private Washington meeting (to which we alone had media access), followed by a public press conference five days later, raised the prospect of unprecedented Brazilian-American cooperation in unraveling the mysteries of one of the best researched—and shocking—UFO cases on record.
The witnesses included the highly respected neurosurgeon, a forensic pathologist, and a geography teacher. They were brought to the United States by filmmaker James Fox, who interviewed more than two dozen witnesses for a new feature documentary that expands on a 2022 version of his film Moment of Contact. Fox has been investigating the case, with his Brazilian counterpart Marco Aurelio Leal, for over two decades.
“This could settle the debate once and for all that we’re not alone,” Fox told the packed news conference, which he organized at the National Press Club on Jan. 20.
The story is this: On January 13, 1996, in the countryside outside the municipality of Varginha, Brazil, the geography teacher—also an ultralight pilot—reported seeing a cylindrical craft trailing smoke and crashing to Earth. A week later, three girls walking home through a vacant lot reported encountering a cowering creature with reddish eyes and brown oily skin that reportedly communicated its suffering through its eyes. Before long, the streets of Varginha were filled with military trucks and emergency vehicles amid rumors of the capture of two nonhuman beings, one later hospitalized, and a clandestine American operation that spirited them out of Brazil.
Fox said that now, for the first time, he knows the names of those who were in possession of videos of the purported nonhuman entities. Despite the difficulties in obtaining them, he said, “I never give up.”
Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson, did not reply to requests for comment.
The Department of Defense All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), with a mission to scientifically investigate UAP, stated in a 2024 report that “none of these investigations (including USG, foreign, and U.S. academic efforts) reached the conclusion that any of the UAP reports indicated extraterrestrial origin.”
But AARO may not have a free hand. As Fox recalled, in 2024, he met with AARO staff to discuss a video staff members had obtained. They discussed the Varginha case, among others. At one point, AARO director Dr. Jon T. Kosloski came into the room. Fox says he asked Kosloski if there was a plan to inform the public about “what we are ultimately dealing with.” Kosloski replied, “I can’t part my hair without the approval of the DOD. And you can quote me on that.”
There is no question that the Varginha case lacks hard data. No one has yet been able to come up with photographs or videos, physical evidence, official documentation, or medical records that could help verify the episode. Yet over two dozen witnesses to many aspects of the case have come forward independently, providing pieces of a puzzle that seem to fit together to tell a compelling story.
The Congressional meeting, held in Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett’s office, drew two fellow Republicans—Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, chairwoman of the House’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and Eric Burlison of Missouri—along with staff members. Two Democrats with a longstanding interest in UAP issues—Jared Moskowitz of Florida, and Andre Carson of Indiana, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence—were invited but unable to attend.
“Can you take it from the top?” Luna asked the visiting neurosurgeon, Dr. Italo Venturelli, 73, at the beginning of the meeting, “Who brought the being in? I want detail about what the interaction was, from point A to point B.”
Burchett also pressed a question: “Was the being able to communicate in any way? Was it telepathic or anything like that?”
Dr. Italo (as he prefers to be called), who was on duty that day in Regional Hospital in Varginha, said the captured being was initially treated by his colleague, Dr. Marcos Vinico Neves, who sutured a wound on its cranium. Neves died in 2018, and no medical records were kept of this procedure, according to Dr. Italo.
He says he was shown a brief black and white video of the patient and then spent three or four minutes at its bedside, having been asked to visually examine it after the procedure.
“I’ve been a doctor for forty-six years and have performed thousands of surgeries,” Dr. Italo said in an interview before the meeting. “To me, it was obvious that this was not a human being.”
“It looked like a seven-year-old child,” the neurosurgeon told the representatives with help from a translator in attendance. “Its eyes were lilac color. Both eyes and the cranium were teardrop-shaped. It transmitted calm and tranquility.”
The doctor said it seemed to him that his patient was at peace with everything that was happening, and that he sensed it possessed intelligence greater than his own. He also described feeling as if he were looking at an angel.
“I wouldn’t say it communicated telepathically; it communicated empathetically,” he said, “through its eyes.”
“What did the hands look like?” Luna asked.
Dr. Italo demonstrated, holding up three fingers and a thumb.
He said he had fixated on the eyes, which seemed to communicate power, concentration, and compassion. At one point, the being looked at him, looked out the window at the blue sky, and then looked back at the doctor, as if to communicate its wish to be released.
Burlison, taking notes, asked if it was wearing clothing. Bare above the sheet, said Dr. Italo. The skin was white, the torso was slim, and there were no nipples. A small mouth. A sliver of ears.
Burlison asked if any other medical staff or doctors could corroborate the story.
Yes, said Dr. Italo, but most doctors are afraid to speak out because they have been threatened, or for fear of damage to their careers.
“It’s very important to get the others,” Burlison said.
Dr. Italo said that a near-fatal heart attack and other recent medical issues persuaded him to break his silence last year and provide his full story to Fox for the first time, even though he still works full-time at Regional Hospital.
Carlos de Sousa, the geography teacher and ultralight pilot, told the representatives that he saw a “cigar-shaped” craft that he first thought was a blimp with a lateral tear trailing white smoke and struggling to stay aloft before crashing near a highway.
He said he drove over to help any survivors and was overtaken by a strong odor of ammonia and rotten eggs. Picking up a piece of what looked like aluminum, de Sousa said he was able to crumple it in his fist, but it then immediately sprang back to its original shape. Military trucks arrived within minutes. A soldier approached him and aimed a gun at his head, demanding, “Leave now, or I’ll split your skull,” de Sousa said. Dropping the fragment, de Sousa fled, but said he was confronted shortly afterwards by two men in an unmarked dark vehicle who threatened his family and demanded his silence. He did not speak about the incident for decades.
A third Brazilian visitor, Dr. Armando Fortunato, who has been a forensic pathologist and criminal medical examiner for the Civil Police for over three decades, told the representatives that he had performed an autopsy on a young military police officer, Marco Chereze, who had grabbed one of the beings during its capture and then died a few weeks later from a severe infection after it inadvertently scratched him.
Dr. Armando, as he likes to be called, said a legal request has been filed to exhume Chereze’s body with hopes of collecting bacteria—or even DNA samples—that could undergo further analysis.
Dr. Armando handed the representatives a signed statement from Dr. João Janini, 89, a specialist in pathological anatomy whose biography states he has performed over 50,000 autopsies. Janini attested that he had found a rare form of a bacterium “of extremely high aggressiveness and lethality” in the tissue samples from Chereze. The characteristics of the infection went so far beyond the limits of what is conventional that, in his opinion, “it raises the hypothesis of its alien origin.”
Accounts from former U.S. officials involving alleged UAP crash retrievals and related recoveries of nonhuman bodies have continued to surface, although the Defense Department dismisses them as unfounded.
In a 2023 Congressional hearing, David Grusch, a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Department’s UAP Task Force, testified under oath that the U.S. has retrieved vehicles and “biologics” of exotic origin.
“Biologics came with some of these recoveries,” he asserted, referring to nonhuman bodies and tissue samples, citing “people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.” Since then, other former officials with high security clearances have echoed his statements, sometimes under oath.
Kirk McConnell, who served for 37 years on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee until retiring in early 2024, opened the Jan. 20 press event. He was among the staff from the two Senate Committees who collaboratively investigated the UAP issue on behalf of senators from both parties.
McConnell told the audience that reports similar to those from the Varginha case reached senators and staff conducting these investigations. The interested senators, who included now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, held meetings and interviews in sensitive compartmented intelligence facilities “with very credible sources reporting both direct and secondhand knowledge of the reality of highly intelligent nonhuman beings, government retrievals and reverse engineering of craft not made by human beings, and the recovery of bodies of non-human beings,” McConnell said.
He had attended some of these classified meetings.
The reports provided to Congress included alleged hidden government activities similar to those recounted in the Varginha case, stretching across many decades. “So what these folks are going to tell you today are astounding, but they’re not the only credible testimony about such events,” McConnell said.
In a video statement screened at the press conference, Jacques Vallée, a French-American computer scientist who has worked on projects at NASA and DARPA, and has been a leading thinker and writer on UFOs for over fifty years, cited a “data warehouse system” that he and a scientific team compiled for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In addition to over 200,000 reports of anomalous objects in flight, Vallée said the database includes “hundreds of reports of creatures, live or dead, associated with crashed or landed vehicles of unknown provenance, including some similar to those in Varginha,” and that creatures in other documented cases breathed air normally.
Vallée said that the Varginha case is similar to many classified cases in scientific and medical records, but it also “presents exceptional new knowledge”, especially “in the professional description of the anatomical and behavioral features of the live creature recovered by authorities within a short time of the crash, and to the point of its death.”
During the private discussion in Burchett’s office, Dr. Italo said he had learned that the being he saw was taken to ESA military base, then to Campinas, and then to the States.
“All the people we talked to said the exact same thing,” Fox told the representatives.
Luna said Congress should seek Air Force flight logs and a landing permit to confirm any American retrieval operation of bodies and crash debris from Varginha, although it is uncertain whether any paper trail exists.
Later, at the press conference, Col. Fred Claussen, a retired and highly decorated U.S. Air Force colonel who held a top-secret clearance, outlined ways the alleged secret U.S. mission might yet be documented. He said that a Brazilian air traffic controller, Marco Feres, reported that on or about Jan. 20, 1996, a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, most likely a C17, took off from an American base and landed at Viracopos airport in Campinas to pick up an unusual cargo before departing for an unknown location in the U.S.
Any such cargo plane mission, the colonel said, would require paperwork from Air Mobility Command at Scott AFB in Illinois and the Air Mobility Wing at Charleston AFB in South Carolina. Air refueling would require more documentation, as would an international flight plan to Brazil, even if the mission were classified, Claussen said, adding that at Campinas, there would need to be more refueling records and another international flight plan.
Even without a paper trail, he said he believed that thirty to forty Americans involved with the operation should have direct knowledge of this flight and its purpose.
“Here is my plea,” Claussen concluded. “If you were a participant and have knowledge of this mission, come forward.”
McConnell followed by saying there was general misunderstanding that nondisclosure agreements signed by intelligence figures barred them from sharing their information about UAP recoveries with Congress. They were not liable, he said, if they presented their accounts in properly secure facilities like SCIFs. In fact, he said, “It’s illegal to withhold information from Congress.”
No one has ever been prosecuted for providing classified information to Congress, McConnell said. In fact, the President himself “could affirm disclosure to Congress with the stroke of a pen or [on] social media.”
While greater UAP disclosure has been widely regarded as a bipartisan issue in Congress, “we’re not yet at the tipping point for most members of Congress,” McConnell said.
A joint evidence-seeking operation between Brazilians and Americans could be in the works. Brazilian Senator Eduardo Girão, who represents the coastal state of Ceará and led a Brazilian Senate hearing on UAP in 2022, came to Washington to meet with members of Congress and attend the press event.
Acting as a private citizen and not representing the Brazilian Senate, Girão spoke from the podium and commended the three Brazilian witnesses for their courage in speaking out.
During a break, he spoke with Burlison, who said he had gotten up at 4 a.m. that morning to fly from Missouri so he could attend the news conference and present a public statement (the other members did not fly back in time to attend).
“Are there videos that you think you might be able to get access to, any other material evidence?” Burlison asked Girão.
“I’m going to try,” Girão said.
The two discussed the need for a joint effort to acquire tangible evidence that could help validate the incident. Burlison described having seen interesting UAP videos, but “nothing that is definitive 4K.” He told the Brazilian senator about key American officials who have come forward, including the current Secretary of State.
Obtaining the evidence he would like to see has been difficult, Burlison said, because “there are several government entities that are controlling this and some are willing to be more cooperative, so unfortunately we’re not getting everything.”
Six other Brazilians who wanted to provide testimony on the Varginha case were denied visas by the State Department on the grounds that they might overstay their visas and attempt to remain in the U.S. So, in December, Fox and his producing partner, Aline Kras, returned to Brazil to compile their testimonies on videotape for presentation at the press conference.
One of these witnesses, Liliane Silva, now a 46-year-old early childhood teacher, said that on Jan. 20, 1996, at about 3:20 p.m., she and her sister and a friend were taking a shortcut home when she noticed some graffiti on a wall. Underneath it, she stated, “I saw the creature.”
“It was short in stature, with red eyes, brown skin, as if covered in oil,” Liliane recounted.
“When I saw it, I had a terrible feeling as if the world had stopped.” She screamed to alert the others. “The creature looked at me,” she continued. “I looked into its eyes. It gave me a sensation that it was suffering, that it was asking for help, hiding from someone.”
Then, she and the other girls ran.
Her sister, Valquira Silva, and their friend Katia Xavier provided similar details in their own video statements. It had “three fingers on its hand, a big foot,” Katia said, adding: “It seemed he was suffering, asking me for help.”
In her statement, the mother of the Silva sisters, Luiza Helena da Silva, said she went back with Katia about twenty or thirty minutes later to find the creature gone. But she said it left behind a footprint with three large toes and an acrid odor that remained in her nose for several weeks.
Sometime later, the mother said she was visited by four strange men dressed in black, offering a briefcase filled with cash if her daughters would go on television and lie by describing the creature as a calf, a sick dog, or a sick human. She refused, saying she was very frightened by the visit.
Yet another videotaped witness, unnamed and his face obscured, said he was in the army in 1996 and helped transport the being from the hospital in Varginha to Três Corações and from there to Campinas, where other soldiers took over. Upon returning to Três Corações, he said, “There was talk the Americans had the creature, having transported it to an undisclosed location.”
At the news conference, Dr. Italo was questioned about his contact with the nonhuman being in the Varginha hospital room. Was it bleeding? Agitated?
“It was initially OK, it just looked out the window,” Dr. Italo replied. He said that instantly, “I was not there as a doctor anymore. The being was looking straight at me. The more he looked at me, the more I had a feeling of peace; it was transmitting peace. It looked at everything happening as if it was taking notes, like a great observer of everything happening around it.”
Asked if he had had any subsequent contacts with nonhuman intelligence, the doctor replied simply, “No.”
Fox said the videos of the entities are held by people too afraid to release them, but that for the first time, he may have the help of Brazilian Senator Girão and Representative Burlison, who is currently working on strengthening whistleblower protection for UAP witnesses.
In Varginha, individuals continue to come forward. On Jan. 26, Rosangela Ramos appeared on camera with James Fox, saying that her late husband, Pedro Luiz Aguiar, the chief of police in Três Corações in 1996, who had been on duty during the incident, claimed he had also witnessed the creature, although she had no further details. Aguiar died in December.
At the news conference, Burlison called for international transparency.
“If there’s any government that’s holding information about the knowledge of whether or not we are alone or not alone in the universe, that is not for any government, no matter how powerful it is, to withhold from the rest of humanity,” Burlison said, to general applause.
Dr. Italo says he has no regrets about coming forward.
“The truth is, I saw the being,” he said. “He was not a being from our planet. We are talking about something that changes the concept of humanity.”
“It’s important for people to know.”
Additional materials related to this story, including written statements and video recordings of testimony from Brazilian witnesses, can be found here.
A Portuguese language translation of this article will soon be published by The Debrief.
Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, with Helene Cooper, co-authored the 2017 New York Times exclusive that revealed the secret Pentagon unit investigating UFOs, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Blumenthal and Kean broke the story of whistleblower David Grusch in The Debrief in 2023. Blumenthal was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009 and is the author of The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (2021, University of New Mexico Press). Kean has reported on UFOs for twenty-five years and is the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010, Harmony Books/Crown), a New York Times bestseller.
Images featured in this article have been provided courtesy of their respective creators and may not be reproduced elsewhere without express written permission.
