Liliane, Valquiria, and Kátia were the three women. Their account - a humanoid crouched in the grass, seemingly wounded - reached local ufologists quickly, and ufologists began hearing from others. Someone had seen a strange flying object in the sky days earlier. Someone else had noticed army vehicles moving through town. A 23-year-old military police officer named Marco Eron Chereze died two months later from multiple organ failure, and his family wondered whether he had handled something he shouldn't have. Four animals at the Varginha Zoo died in the period - a tapir, an ocelot, and two gray brocket deer - and that fact, too, entered the circulating theories. The Brazilian Army eventually ran an inquiry. Its conclusion: the creature had most likely been Luis Antonio da Silva, a local man with developmental differences who sometimes wandered shirtless near that lot. The troop movements were ordinary training exercises. The zoo deaths were unrelated. None of this satisfied believers, who had by then built a parallel narrative.

According to the version that coalesced in books, documentaries, and eventually video games, multiple creatures came down that weekend in one or more craft. Military personnel captured them, living, and transported them to Hospital Humanitas in Varginha for observation. Some were transferred to São Paulo, where at least one died. A woman was allegedly impregnated through contact with an extraterrestrial. American surgeon and ufologist Roger Leir wrote a book titled UFO Crash in Brazil in 2005. Filmmaker James Fox released Moment of Contact in 2022. A 2025 documentary by Ricardo Calil and Paulo Gonçalves, O Mistério de Varginha, revisited the case with new interviews on the 30th anniversary. Skeptic Brian Dunning, summarizing the skeptical position, wrote that it is 'the most compelling example of a case where literally nothing at all happened that was remotely unusual, and was magnified into a case considered unassailable proof of alien visitation by many.' Thirty years on, the two narratives still do not touch.

What Varginha did with the ambiguity is remarkable. Rather than deny the story or embrace it credulously, the city turned it into infrastructure. In the central park, workers erected a 20-meter water tower shaped like a flying saucer - the Nave Espacial de Varginha, officially a utility structure, unofficially a tourist magnet. Bus stops around town were rebuilt in the form of spaceships. Shops sell grey alien dolls dressed in the jersey of Varginha's local football clubs. Billboards and municipal advertising lean cheerfully into the imagery; the city's visual identity for tourism purposes is unapologetically extraterrestrial. A character named Ginho - an anthropomorphized 'ET de Varginha' in comic books and on merchandise - serves as informal mascot. The annual anniversary of the sighting draws visitors. There are walking tours of the sighting sites. The city's approach is neither believing nor debunking; it is profiting, gently, from a good story that will not go away. Few municipalities have monetized ambiguity so successfully.

Varginha is a coffee-trading city of about 120,000 people, 300 kilometers south of Belo Horizonte in the heart of the south Minas coffee belt. Before 1996 it was nationally known mostly for its commodity role - a hub for roasters and export houses, an unglamorous place where harvests were graded and warehoused. After 1996 it became the Brazilian Roswell. The Incidente em Varginha video game appeared in 1998, followed by the Nintendo Switch game ET Varginha in 2022. Books in Portuguese, English, and French. Documentaries on National Geographic and in national theatrical release. The teenage witnesses, now in their forties, have mostly declined to do press. The skeptics' explanation involving Luis Antonio da Silva - a vulnerable man whom the story treated with insufficient dignity - lingers uncomfortably in the official record. Whatever one believes about extraterrestrials, that part of the case deserves remembering. He was a person, not a plot point.