Memorial do ET, Varginha
Three young women told police they saw a crouching creature with red eyes in a vacant lot on January 20, 1996. The Army investigated and concluded they had mistaken a local man in bad weather. The town built a water tower shaped like a flying saucer and, in 2022, a museum.
Field Guide Entry
At about 3:30pm on January 20, 1996, three young women aged 14 to 22 were crossing a vacant lot on Rua Dr. Benevenuto Braz Vieira in Varginha when they saw something crouching against a wall. They described brown skin, large red eyes, and three lumps on its head. They ran, told their family, and the family took them to the police.
Within weeks the town was full of accounts of military vehicles moving something under tarpaulins, and of a body taken to the hospital.
What the Army said
The Brazilian Army ran its own inquiry and published a conclusion: the women had seen a local man, Luis Antonio de Paula, known in Varginha as Mudinho, in poor visibility, and the troop movements in the area that week were routine. That is the on-the-record institutional answer and it has never been withdrawn.
The lawyer Ubirajara Rodrigues and the ufologist Vitorio Pacaccini each published book-length investigations arguing the opposite, based on interviews with people who said they had seen more. A military police corporal named Marco Eli Chereze, rumored to have handled the creature, died on February 15, 1996, and his medical records give respiratory failure, septicemia, and bacterial shock.
A town that decided
Varginha converted a 100,000-liter municipal water tower into a flying saucer in 2001 and lit it in 2005. There is an alien statue near the bus station. The Memorial do ET, a building shaped like a spacecraft with a planetarium and an archive of the press coverage, opened on November 9, 2022, closed for around seven months, and reopened in June 2024.
In 2023 the municipality formally declared the case part of the city's intangible cultural heritage. The local economy runs on coffee.
Visiting Information
Open daily, 9am to 6:30pm, free. The building stands on high ground with a view over the city and also houses the municipal tourism office, so it is the practical first stop in town.
The saucer water tower is a separate structure elsewhere in Varginha and is visible from the street at any hour, which is what most people photograph.
Varginha is about 3 hours from Sao Paulo and 5 from Belo Horizonte by road, in the coffee country of southern Minas Gerais. The exhibition is in Portuguese. Brazil carried a US advisory of Level 2 as of 2026, with the listed Do Not Travel areas confined to international land borders far from here.
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