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~;~f ~ .' ~ ;.~.' ..' ~~,~':."',~ , .''?\ ~ ->.. ".~ .:.x.· .....~.: .......;., BRAZILIAN MILITARY tN ALLEGED ALIEN COVER-UP Varginiha, a sman town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, has become famous overnight because of something other than its excellent coffee. Local people are now celebrating the four-month anniversary of the most extraordinary dose encounter with extraterrestrials ever to be registered in the country. On Saturday 20th January at 3.30 pm, a sunny and bright afternoon, three girls were coming down a narrow path in the area known as Jardim Andere, two kilometres awa.y from the city centre, when one of them, Liliane Fatima Silva" 16 years old, looked left and screamed. She saw a strange creature with slippery brownish skin and what looked like three small, rounded horns protruding from its head. It was about seven metres from the point where they were standing, and Rear the back wall of an old garage. "He was squatting, with his long arms between his legs," the girl said. "Tlhe first thing to call my attention were his eyes, huge and red." Terrified, Liliane turned her bac!( while her sister Valquiria, 14 years old, and their friend Karia Andrade Xavier, 22 years old, stayed ~ooking at the creature, unable to move. "It was not an animal and it certainly wasn't human. It was a horrible thing!" 56 • NEXUS said Katia, who works as a maid and has three children. "He seemed stupefied. He didn't make any noise," said Valquiria. But then the creature made a small movemem and the thre-e girls ran fOF dear life. Forty minutes Later, Liliane and Valquiria's mother, Luiza Helena, 38 years old, arrived at the place to find out what had scared her daughters so much. She found nothing. The story h.as been widely puMicised because, apparently without knowing about the incident involving the three girls, an elderly couple, Oralina Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues, who work as farmhands, insist on having seen a UFO very early in the morning on 20th January. They were sleeping in their house which is located near Ithe road which goes from Varginha to Tres Cora~5es when they woken by the noise made by the cows. They looked out of the window to see the animals totally disoriented and running around the house. "We looked at the sky and saw a grey object, similar to a submarine, the size of a small bus, flying very sllow[y over the ground," Oralina Augusta described. "There was something like white smoke coming out of it. There were no lights and it wasn't making any noise." Local people immediately associated this spaceship with the ET who appeared 14 hours later. The day after, Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, a ufologist and a lawyer who teaches at on.e of the four colLeges in Varginha, started investigating the incident. Mr Rodrigues has b.een studying UFOs for over 20 years and he says that only one per cent of the so-called UFO sightings are authentic. For him, the Varginha episode is the exception which confirms the rule. "What these women saw was, without any doubt, an alien creature," sai-d Rodrigues. After his investigation he also concludes that at least two EBEs (extraterrestrial bio logical entities), not just one, were seen in town on 20th January. Since then, a great number of ufologists have visitedl Varginha. To be more precise, 66 specialists have been to the city to investigate the event. "It is certainly the most extraordinary thing we have ever heard about, and we have lots of registers of UFO apparitions," said Claudeir Covo, an engineer who is the President of the Instituto Nacional de Investigafllo de Fenomenos Aeroespaciais (/NFA). Dr John Mack, a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a specialist in research with human beings who have been ill close contact with ETs. He trav elled all the way from the US to Varginha to do a series of interviews with the three women who said they had seen the alien. AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1996