02/09/2026
Liliane Santana, ValquĂria Silva & Katia Xavier were teenagers in January 1996 when they were walking home through a residential area of Varginha, Brazil.
As they passed near a vacant lot, both noticed something out of place.
Among the vegetation, they saw a figure crouched low and motionless. At first, they thought it might be a person. As they got closer, they realized it was not.
They described a small being with dark or brown skin, an oversized head, large red eyes, and a hunched posture. One detail stood out to both of them: a strong, penetrating odor, difficult to compare to anything familiar.
The encounter lasted only seconds, but the impact was immediate.
The girls fled in panic, crying and visibly shaken.
When Liliane arrived home, her mother witnessed the aftermath firsthand.
She did not hear a calm or structured story. She saw a daughter terrified, trembling, and struggling to speak, clearly affected by something she could not process.
Concerned, Liliane’s mother decided to accompany the girls back to the site of the encounter. She did not go as an investigator or a curious observer, but as a mother trying to understand what had caused such fear.
At the vacant lot, she did not see any creature.
But she noticed something deeply unsettling.
According to her testimony, the same strange, strong odor the girls had described was still present. An unusual smell she could not attribute to animals, garbage, or any obvious environmental cause.
For her, this detail was key.
She could not confirm what her daughter saw, but she felt something abnormal had been there.
In the days that followed, she observed clear changes in her daughter’s behavior: persistent fear, anxiety, and emotional distress that did not fade quickly. To her, the experience was neither an invention nor a fleeting misunderstanding.
Decades later, neither Liliane, ValquĂria nor Katia has altered their account.
No new dramatic details were added. No uncomfortable details were removed.
When they reappeared publicly, along with the mother’s testimony, they did not present a new version of events. They presented the same story they told from the very beginning.
Last month, the three women provided their testimony remotely during a public hearing organized by filmmaker James Fox, where key witnesses of the Varginha case were invited to speak on record. Appearing together via an online call, Liliane Santana, ValquĂria Silva, and Katia Xavier recounted the events once again as adults, describing what they personally saw and experienced in January 1996 from their own perspectives.
They did not speculate about the nature of the being, nor did they attempt to reinterpret the encounter through new theories. Instead, they focused on the details that had remained consistent since their teenage years — the location, the appearance, the odor, and the fear that followed.
Nearly three decades later, the story they shared remotely was the same story they had told since the beginning.