On the afternoon of January 20, 1996, three young women walking home through a vacant lot in Varginha, a city of about 100,000 in southern Brazil, saw something crouched against a wall. They described a creature about four feet tall, with oily brown skin, a large head, three bumps on the skull, and red eyes. It seemed hurt. They ran. Their story reached the local paper within days, and from there the whole country.
Then the other stories came out. Residents said that earlier that morning the fire department had been called to the same part of town to capture an animal nobody could identify, and that army trucks had arrived and taken something away in a tarp. A 23 year old military policeman named Marco Eli Chereze, who was said to have handled the creature with his bare hands during the capture, developed an infection and died a month later. Hospital staff said a second creature was brought into the regional hospital, and that the wing was sealed by soldiers. A woman at the zoo reported that several animals died that week without explanation.
The Brazilian army said it had been in Varginha on a routine exercise and had captured nothing. In 2010 it released a file saying the women had seen a local man, a mentally ill dwarf who squatted by the wall in the rain. The women never changed their account.
A dead policeman, a sealed hospital, and three witnesses who have told the same story for thirty years. What do you think?
