Varginha, Minas Gerais, is not Roswell with better weather. It is a living-witness case from January 1996: the women are still talking, the doctors have names, the army wrote six hundred pages saying nothing happened, and James Fox spent years putting cameras on people the English-speaking internet had never heard. This desk is that stack — Fox’s films and interviews on one side, the Brazilian street and the IPM on the other. Claims are labeled. The sketches you see in YouTube thumbnails are usually copyrighted; the reconstruction below is drawn from published descriptions, not a scan of someone else’s art.
Who James Fox is, and what he thinks
James Fox is an American documentary director who has been on this beat since the early 2000s. The films that matter for this desk: Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009), The Phenomenon (2020), Moment of Contact (2022), the 2025–26 recut Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters, and The Program (2024). He is not a FOIA clerk. He is a camera with a thesis: professionals saw structured craft, governments sit on crash retrievals, and Varginha is the modern case with living medical witnesses.
“There’s clearly a preponderance of evidence from around the world that there are structured craft, physical craft, that are displaying flight characteristics that are so far beyond anything conventional. I’m absolutely convinced that these objects are real.” James Fox to The Guardian, on The Phenomenon, October 2020
On Varginha specifically he has said, across Rogan, Jesse Michels / American Alchemy, Area 52, Danny Jones, and Richard Dolan, that this is the strongest crash-retrieval / live-being file he has ever worked — because the witnesses are not anonymous forum posts. They are a neurosurgeon still working the hospital, pathologists with autopsy paper, a police chief, and the three women from the lot. He has also said, on camera, that some of what he has been told by U.S. insiders he will not put in a film. Treat that as his opinion, not as a document.
Fox’s method: find the person, sit them down, do not pay them for the story, come back years later when they are ready. That is why Dr. Ítalo Venturelli is in the 2026 cut and not the 2022 one. The cost of the method is cinematic edit — you are watching Fox’s cut of Varginha, not the raw Portuguese press of 1996.
Watch — films and interviews
Some of the features sit free on YouTube. Moment of Contact is usually a paid stream. Interviews are the public record of what Fox will say on the record.
Also: JRE #1574 (4 Dec 2020) — Jacques Vallée and James Fox on The Phenomenon.
Map — the town and the barracks
Pins are the public geography of the story, not proof that a being stood on each one. Jardim Andere is the civilian core. EsSA at Três Corações is the army school in Pelé’s hometown. Campinas is the later rumor of a lab transfer.
20 January 1996 — what the street said happened
Strip the later army trucks and the 2026 press conference and you still have a Saturday in a town of then ~120–130 thousand. Summer storm country. Coffee. A neighborhood called Jardim Andere.
13 January — the ultralight
Ufologist timelines (Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues and later Brazilian UFO press) put a cylindrical or cigar-shaped object trailing smoke near the Fernão Dias highway, seen by geography teacher / ultralight pilot Carlos de Souza. Fox’s film treats Souza as first-on-scene at a crash-adjacent farm: sulphur-ammonia smell, material in the hand, then a “man in black” type who already knew his name. That last beat is Souza’s testimony, not a document.
20 January, morning — capture rumors
The capture layer, as told by ufologists and later anonymous soldiers: firefighters and/or army in Jardim Andere, a net, a box, something moving. Major José Francisco Maciel Dias Ferreira of the 13th Special Fire Company is named in that literature as on scene. The fire service, in the army IPM, denied a strange-animal call. Keep those two sentences stapled together.
20 January, ~15:30 — the three women
Sisters Liliane Silva (about 14) and Valquíria Silva (about 16) and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier (about 21–22) took a shortcut across a vacant lot near Rua Dr. Benevenuto Braz Vieira. They say they saw a being crouched against a wall. They ran home and told their mother they had seen the devil. The mother later described an ammonia smell, not the being.
“It had arms and legs, like a human being, but also horns, three horns.” Liliane Silva, contemporaneous description, quoted in El País, 20 Jan 2026
“It seemed he was suffering, asking me for help.” Kátia Xavier, on the being’s eyes — The Debrief / Falcon Scout archive stills, 2026
Description that stuck: roughly 1.2–1.5 m, hunched, brown oily or shiny skin with vein-like marks, large red eyes, heart-shaped or V-shaped face, three bumps or small horns on the head, three fingers. Not a grey from a poster. A wet, injured-looking thing in a lot after rain.
Late afternoon: hail, one of the worst summer storms locals remembered. Night: military police in civilian clothes, more capture talk, hospital talk.
The being — description vs reconstruction
Original 1996 witness sketches circulated in Brazilian UFO magazines and later in Fox’s stills. Those drawings are copyrighted. Cosmolink is not going to scrape them. What follows is a desk reconstruction from the published verbal description, labeled as such.
Two description families now sit on the same desk, and they do not match: the women’s oily brown red-eyed “devil,” and Dr. Venturelli’s later hospital being — pale, teardrop skull, lilac eyes, “like a child,” “like an angel.” Fox’s 2026 witnesses also talk three-fingered, three-toed non-humans under army control. Either there was more than one body, or memory and cinema have split the file. Say that out loud.
Soldiers, firefighters, the catch
The capture narrative, as ufologists wrote it in 1996–97 and as Fox still tells it: firefighters in the morning with a net; army soldiers along the rail line with FAL rifles; Military Police at night; something live in a bag or box; trucks between Varginha and Três Corações.
Named people in that layer (spellings wander in English): Marco Eli Chereze (also Chiereze / Cherese in print), military policeman, 24th MP Battalion, reportedly intelligence (P2). The story is he grabbed a being with bare hands, took a scratch under the arm, was hospitalized 12 February, died 15 February 1996, age 23, of a raging infection that would not answer antibiotics.
Fox’s later medical chain on that death: Dr. Cesario treated Chereze while he was alive (“I threw the kitchen sink… this bacteria didn’t respond”); Dr. Armando did the autopsy; Dr. Giannini of IPD Labs looked at tissue and, on camera in the New Revelations cut, said he had never seen bacteria like it. NewsNation (20 Jan 2026) put a medical examiner and a pathologist statement in front of a U.S. press crowd. That is testimony plus lab talk. It is not a published genome.
Fox has also said a former Varginha police chief later admitted, on camera, that the official calm was a lie. Treat that as Fox’s interview, not as the IPM.
The hospital
The hospital layer is the one that made English YouTube sit up in 2025–26. Rumor in 1996: a creature at a pronto-socorro, refused, then Regional Hospital, then Humanitas, then army trucks, then EsSA, then Campinas. Skeptoid and the army IPM have prosaic answers ready: new cardiovascular kit being delivered, an exhumed corpse in a bag, little people having a baby. Those answers exist. So do the doctors who now say they are wrong.
Dr. Ítalo Venturelli (also spelled Italo), neurosurgeon at Regional Hospital, kept quiet for thirty years. Fox’s team chased him over a video he was said to have seen. After a near-fatal heart attack he sat down. El País quotes him on the anniversary:
“It was like a child, neither green nor brown, as they said. What I saw was white, with a teardrop-shaped skull and lilac eyes. I looked at it, it looked at me, it looked out the window and back at me… It was completely different from a human. It was very calm, it seemed like an angel.” Dr. Ítalo Venturelli, El País, 20 January 2026
Fox’s longer interviews (Danny Jones, Area 52, Coulthart) add: he was asked to check a colleague’s minor surgery on the being; stitches; three to four minutes face to face; alleged telepathy; he is willing to take a public polygraph with a hand on a Bible; he is still the hospital’s neurosurgeon; he is not selling a book. Fox is blunt that earlier he thought Venturelli had only seen a video — “that was us,” chasing the tape — and the doctor later said he had been in the room. Memory, fear, and a filmmaker’s second pass. Leave all three on the table.
Fox says they have not got the hospital video. Mayor Leonardo Ciacci, who in 1996 managed a bakery, told a Globo documentary the hospital refused the daily bread run that day. Small-town texture. Not a chain of custody.
What the army wrote
The Escola de Sargentos das Armas opened an IPM — inquérito policial militar — two volumes, about 600 pages. The Superior Military Court has since said the file is digitized. Conclusion: the story is fictitious. Vehicles were on ordinary business. Named soldiers did not haul a creature to Campinas.
“The military personnel cited by the press did not participate in any operation transporting any type of cargo. The media are mistaken, publicizing untrue events.” Brazilian Army IPM, as quoted by El País, 20 January 2026
The IPM’s preferred civilian explanation: a summer hailstorm, darkness, and Luís Antônio de Paula, known as Mudinho, a local man with disabilities who crouched as he walked. Valquíria Silva has been shutting that door for thirty years:
“We had known Mudinho since we were children; he was always crouching low. Without a doubt, it wasn’t him.” Valquíria Silva, El País / Globo documentary, 2026
Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid pass (2022) is the English-language cold water: dirty hunched man, hospital deliveries, rumor cascade. Read it. Then read Fox. Then decide which sentences are documents.
Moment of Contact — and what the recut did
Moment of Contact (2022) is Fox’s Varginha picture: the women, Souza, the smell, the army rumors, the town that built a saucer tower. It made the case an English-language object. Rogan #1976 is the companion interview.
The 2025–26 recut, New Revelations of Alien Encounters, is the impact. Fox put pathologists and the neurosurgeon on the record, took witnesses to Washington, and stood them at the National Press Club on the 30th anniversary (20 January 2026). NewsNation ran the doctor and the soldier’s sister. Coulthart clipped ten testimonies. AARO-era Washington got a Brazilian hospital story whether it wanted one or not.
What the recut does not do: produce the being, the video, or a public lab sequence that a hostile journal would print. What it does do: make it harder to call Varginha “three scared girls in the rain” without also naming Venturelli, Armando, Giannini, Cesario, and Chereze.
Cosmolink take
Hold four files at once. One: three women on a lot, consistent for thirty years, and they know Mudinho. Two: a dead 23-year-old MP and doctors who say the infection was wrong. Three: a neurosurgeon who changed when he almost died. Four: a 600-page army “nothing happened” and a city that sells ET souvenirs. Fox believes this is a live retrieval. The IPM believes it is a storm and a rumor. Cosmolink’s job is to keep the names, the map, the quotes, and the links in one place so you can watch the films and still smell the hail.