Liliane Silva, her sister Valquiria Silva and their friend Katia Andrade Xavier reported seeing an unfamiliar crouched figure in Varginha on 20 January 1996. Their encounter became the starting point for a much larger story involving captures, hospitals and military transport. Reading the three accounts together preserves the shared setting while showing which details belong to a particular witness or publication. The military inquiry of 1997 examined allegations about military personnel in a subsequent book. Its proposed explanation for the sighting and its decision on criminal responsibility need to be read within that scope.
Older Silva sister and participant in the reported figure sighting
Liliane Silva
The appearance description and later recollection
Rodrigo Vergara's Folha de S.Paulo report of 18 August 1996 identifies Liliane, then sixteen, as the first to notice something in a vacant lot at about 3.30 pm. It attributes to her a description of red eyes without visible pupils, dark brown skin that looked oily and a crouched posture. She said that she could not see a mouth or nose and thought the figure appeared to shelter from strong sunlight. These features are her reported visual impressions, rather than an anatomical examination.
Roger Leir's 2005 book presents a later interview in which Liliane described three head bumps, said that she screamed and recalled staying slightly longer than her companions. She denied smelling anything. The English presentation was interpreted and edited; it is a later account of a filmed interview, rather than an untouched statement recorded in January 1996.
Evidence review
The August 1996 article provides a named source for several features often repeated as the trio's common description. Assigning its quotation equally to all three witnesses would erase the reporting distinction. Liliane's description records what she thought she saw; the unavailable creature and absence of an encounter photograph prevent a direct comparison with those visual details.
Accounts of the return to the site concern a separate observer and a later time. Folha attributes alleged footprints and a sulphur-like smell to the sisters' mother, not to Liliane during the encounter. The aftermath cannot simply be inserted into her original sighting as an additional sense observation. Leir later records the mother denying a circulated account that combined seeing the figure with noticing a peculiar smell. That bundled account differs from Folha's description of her site visit; it is not a clear retraction of each detail attributed to her in the newspaper.
Statement and reporting history
20 January 1996: reported sighting with Valquiria and Xavier.
18 August 1996: Folha publishes her named appearance description and distinguishes the mother's subsequent visit.
2005: Leir's book publishes an edited English presentation of a later interview.
Folha de S.Paulo, 18 August 1996. Complete short Portuguese article read. Attributes the appearance quotation to Liliane, the scream to Xavier and alleged footprints and odour to the mother's subsequent visit. English descriptions are paraphrases, not translations presented as verbatim testimony.
UFO Crash in Brazil, Book Tree, 2005; publication year checked against bibliographic metadata. Selected PDF pages 32–36 inspected. Interpreted English interview presentation, edited by the author. Original Portuguese filming was not inspected.
Selected original Portuguese report pages 130 and 134–138 inspected, together with the 18 April command solution on page 141 and the 4 July judicial decision on page 151. The report's official assessment and criminal-investigation scope are separately attributed. The entire two-volume inquiry was not read.
Younger Silva sister and participant in the reported figure sighting
Valquiria Silva
Her view within the shared encounter
The 1996 reporting identifies Valquiria as fourteen at the time of the sighting. Her presence with the other two is part of the early public record, although Folha's detailed appearance quotation belongs to Liliane. The article does not preserve an equivalent individual description from Valquiria.
In Leir's later interview presentation, Valquiria described a brief view of a kneeling figure, a glimpse of its red eyes and no smell. She attributed the scream to Liliane and thought she might have been the first to run. Her account of footprints concerned what her mother subsequently reported.
Evidence review
Valquiria's evidence has its own viewing limit: a short glimpse during an episode that ended in flight. Reading that account separately preserves her stated access instead of giving her every feature accumulated in the case's illustrations and retellings. The record supports comparing descriptions, without supplying measured duration, distance or a preserved image of the figure.
The encounter involved companions at the same place, reacting to one another before reporting it. Their agreement would therefore have a different evidential basis from accounts obtained from separated observers. This shared context does not determine whether they misidentified what they saw; it prevents treating later similar wording as three independent repetitions recorded before discussion.
Statement and reporting history
20 January 1996: reported shared observation and flight from the site.
18 August 1996: identified in Folha's report as Liliane's fourteen-year-old sister.
2005: her separately presented interview appears in Leir's book.
Folha de S.Paulo, 18 August 1996. Complete short Portuguese article read. Attributes the appearance quotation to Liliane, the scream to Xavier and alleged footprints and odour to the mother's subsequent visit. English descriptions are paraphrases, not translations presented as verbatim testimony.
UFO Crash in Brazil, Book Tree, 2005; publication year checked against bibliographic metadata. Selected PDF pages 32–36 inspected. Interpreted English interview presentation, edited by the author. Original Portuguese filming was not inspected.
Selected original Portuguese report pages 130 and 134–138 inspected, together with the 18 April command solution on page 141 and the 4 July judicial decision on page 151. The report's official assessment and criminal-investigation scope are separately attributed. The entire two-volume inquiry was not read.
Friend accompanying the Silva sisters and participant in the reported figure sighting
Katia Andrade Xavier
The July 1996 account attributed to Xavier
A reproduction of Matt Moffett's Wall Street Journal article, dated 12 July 1996, attributes to Katia Andrade a judgement that the figure looked unlike a person or animal, followed by brown oily-looking skin and unusual limbs. The article's following narration describes three rounded protrusions on a large head. The article describes the trio encountering it in vegetation while taking a shortcut. This is a reporter's presentation published in July 1996, available here through a later book reproduction rather than the original newspaper page.
Folha's August account identifies Xavier as twenty-two and attributes the scream to her, followed by the figure turning towards the women and their flight. The differing attribution of the scream in the later sister interviews leaves the precise reaction sequence unresolved. The broad account of a frightening shared observation survives that difference.
Evidence review
Xavier's named appearance description provides a separate attribution within the early reporting history. It is still a report about the same scene experienced with the sisters. Moffett's wider discussion of odour and the group's impressions should be read as his reporting, rather than recast as a complete verbatim interview with Xavier.
The sisters' subsequent interviews cannot stand in for Xavier's testimony. Keeping her panel anchored to identified material avoids constructing a composite witness who has every detail mentioned in any account. Her role in the vacant-lot encounter also supplies no direct access to alleged capture operations or hospital examinations elsewhere.
Statement and reporting history
20 January 1996: reported encounter while walking with the sisters.
12 July 1996: Moffett's newspaper article attributes an appearance description to Katia Andrade; a later book preserves a reproduction.
18 August 1996: Folha identifies Xavier and attributes the scream to her.
PDF page 26 inspected in Leir's book reproduction. Bears Moffett's name, Wall Street Journal credit and 12 July 1996 date. The opening report was read; the original newspaper page and reporter's interview recordings were not acquired.
Folha de S.Paulo, 18 August 1996. Complete short Portuguese article read. Attributes the appearance quotation to Liliane, the scream to Xavier and alleged footprints and odour to the mother's subsequent visit. English descriptions are paraphrases, not translations presented as verbatim testimony.
Selected original Portuguese report pages 130 and 134–138 inspected, together with the 18 April command solution on page 141 and the 4 July judicial decision on page 151. The report's official assessment and criminal-investigation scope are separately attributed. The entire two-volume inquiry was not read.
Comparing the evidence
The official file preserves an investigation into published accusations, not a record made at the time of an alleged capture. Lieutenant Colonel Lúcio Carlos Finholdt Pereira's report identifies the authorising order as dated 29 January 1997 and the subject as Pacaccini and Portes's book Incidente em Varginha. The inquiry questioned military personnel and investigators and assembled supporting material. The fact that those allegations became the subject of an inquiry establishes their administrative examination; it does not authenticate their underlying recovery narrative.
The proposed human identification has a traceable documentary basis. In his statement of 11 March 1997, Lieutenant Colonel Maurício Antônio Santos, commander of the 24th Military Police Battalion, suggested that the women might have mistaken a local resident known as Mudinho for a creature. He referred to crouching posture and proposed poor viewing conditions involving rain, wind and lightning. He also acknowledged exceptions to the anatomical resemblance, including the reported eyes and horns. The statement offers a candidate and a hypothesis; it contains no account of Santos witnessing the women's encounter or recognising its figure at the time.
The inquiry's photographs require particular care. The original images of the crouching resident are marked as taken on 11 March 1997. A later sequence, entered into the file on 5 April, applies photographic transformations and compares the result with an illustration of the reported creature. The report treats this simulation as supporting mistaken identification. These images document a later explanatory exercise using a known person. They do not record the figure encountered in January 1996 or establish that the photographed resident occupied that location at the relevant moment.
Weather is part of the official explanation, with a chronology that remains problematic in the inspected statement. Santos says that he assumed command in January of the current year and recalls a storm probably on 19 January; his statement is dated March 1997. The April report applies his account to the 1996 episode. Those words cannot be silently converted into a precise meteorological record for the women's sighting. Evaluating the proposed conditions requires weather and location evidence for 20 January 1996, rather than an assumption that the visual episode occurred during the storm described in the inquiry. Liliane's strong-sun impression in the August newspaper account provides a different stated viewing context. It remains her interpretation, rather than an independent meteorological measurement.
The official report rejected the book's extraterrestrial narrative and attributed the cited vehicle movements to ordinary activities such as maintenance and collecting horse fodder. Its concluding assessment of the book as fiction accompanied a finding of no indications of criminal conduct by its authors. The command solution of 18 April forwarded the file, and Judge Telma Queiroz ordered its archival closure on 4 July. The judicial decision concerned possible criminal wrongdoing in the publication. The adverse judgement of the narrative arose within that criminal-investigation context; it does not supply a forensic identification of the figure seen by the women.
Claims about military-police officer Marco Eli Chereze have a different evidential chain. Santos discussed the officer's death in his inquiry testimony, attributing it to an infection following surgery and citing medical material supplied to the file. He denied an official occurrence linking the officer to an extraterrestrial. That is the commander's account of clinical records and allegations, not medical evidence from the three sighting witnesses. Neither their description nor his testimony establishes contact between Chereze and their reported figure. A biological cause derived from that alleged contact would require evidence beyond this visual episode.
The source differences remain useful even when they complicate a familiar case image. Liliane's quoted appearance, the mother's reported site observations, Xavier's newspaper description and the sisters' later interviews represent different access and different moments of recording. They can be compared without deciding in advance that every discrepancy demonstrates fabrication or that continued commitment establishes an unknown species. The retained question is what the companions saw in the vacant lot. Their testimony does not supply the missing connection between that observation and the separate crash, capture or hospital stories.
Key dates
20 January 1996
The three companions report encountering an unfamiliar crouched figure in Varginha.
12 July 1996
Moffett's Wall Street Journal report includes a description attributed to Katia Andrade, preserved in a later reproduction.
18 August 1996
Folha publishes a named account, distinguishing Liliane's visual description from the mother's site visit.
29 January 1997
The order later identified in the inquiry report authorises investigation of allegations in Incidente em Varginha.
11 March 1997
Santos gives his statement proposing mistaken identification; the original resident photographs bear this date.
5 April 1997
Pacaccini is questioned and a photographic simulation is entered into the file.
11 April 1997
Finholdt Pereira signs the investigative report, rejecting the extraterrestrial narrative and finding no indication of criminal conduct by the authors.
18 April 1997
The command solution forwards the inquiry and orders internal publication of its report and photographic material.
4 July 1997
Queiroz orders archival closure of the inquiry into possible criminal wrongdoing in the publication.
2005
Leir's book publishes a retrospective, edited English presentation of interviews with the sisters.
Folha de S.Paulo, 18 August 1996. Complete short Portuguese article read. Attributes the appearance quotation to Liliane, the scream to Xavier and alleged footprints and odour to the mother's subsequent visit. English descriptions are paraphrases, not translations presented as verbatim testimony.
PDF page 26 inspected in Leir's book reproduction. Bears Moffett's name, Wall Street Journal credit and 12 July 1996 date. The opening report was read; the original newspaper page and reporter's interview recordings were not acquired.
UFO Crash in Brazil, Book Tree, 2005; publication year checked against bibliographic metadata. Selected PDF pages 32–36 inspected. Interpreted English interview presentation, edited by the author. Original Portuguese filming was not inspected.
Official catalogue read. Identifies two volumes and 357 archival folios, describing the subject as allegations of military capture and transport in Pacaccini and Portes's 1996 book. Downloaded scans contain 208 and 157 PDF pages, including covers and additional image pages; PDF page counts are distinct from archival folios.
Official Portuguese scans inspected: PDF pages 16–18, folios 219–220 and signature continuation, and PDF page 60, folio 261. Statement dated 11 March 1997. The photographs are marked as taken that day. The clinical explanation is the commander's testimony; cited medical attachments were not independently reviewed here.
PDF pages 122–128, folios 322–328, inspected as original scans. Entered on 5 April 1997. Includes transformed resident images and an illustration labelled as the creature reported by the women. These are explanatory reconstructions, not encounter photographs.
Selected original Portuguese report pages 130 and 134–138 inspected, together with the 18 April command solution on page 141 and the 4 July judicial decision on page 151. The report's official assessment and criminal-investigation scope are separately attributed. The entire two-volume inquiry was not read.