The Varginha UFO

[Perene]

An African species in Brazil (1), with alopecia (2), and conjunctivitis (3), running around loose (4).
You now have four unlikely things to explain, instead of accepting one. My goodness, you're persistent.

What is unlikely is that a human was what they saw.

From their description:

- Big, red eyes.

- I have a hard time believing any human would have prominent eyes of any color noticeable, unless seen from a very close distance. An animal could make anything red in its face more visible.

- Bald.

- A baboon with severe alopecia is totally bald, so we can already discard monkeys with fur or humans with any hair, including "Mudinho".

- The skin was very smooth, brown. A muscular body with visible veins, oily... It had very large feet.

-- All those things don't match Mudinho (was he naked?), but may totally be applicable to said animal (see my previous post/image/Youtube video).

The description of "horns" in the head don't match any human, but can totally do it for said hairless monkey.

I can't explain why an african animal would appear in Brazil, it could very well be one that exists in the country, yet it's not known by the girls and rest of the town. Were they ever asked about monkeys, and shown images of the many that exist? My point is that a more mundane explanation besides aliens from outer space is plausible. And if it's an animal, it lost its fur.

- Oh, and the awful smell could not have come from a human being (based on the descriptions).

 

[Gaspa]

I have personally made a formal request to get historical meteorological data for the date of the sighting to the responsible authority (INMET). I have yet to receive their reply.

When/if you get this data, consider the location of the weather station (by the airport is a common location) and the sampling rate, i.e. how often the data is logged.

An African species in Brazil (1), with alopecia (2), and conjunctivitis (3), running around loose (4).
You now have four unlikely things to explain, instead of accepting one. My goodness, you're persistent.

As for point 1, there are monkeys that reach up to almost 1,5 meter in Brazil (Muriqui do Norte), even in the State of Minas Gerais. But they are a critically endangered species (currently. don't know about 1996), their range doesn't really reach Varginha, and an adult monkey of any species showing up in the middle of the city would be quite unlikely. It is also strange that no monkey was found or seen by anyone else before or after the girls.

As far as I was able to ascertain, there are no labs that do experiments with monkeys in the region. But, if there were, I think it's likely that investigators at the time would have looked into that possibility.

The zoo is nearby, but if there were any animals that escaped from the Zoo, I think that explanation would have been given right away.

But, hey, I guess it could be. Just doesn't sound very likely.

 

[john.phil]

there are monkeys that reach up to almost 1,5 meter in Brazil (Muriqui do Norte)

That's the length in all fours and including the tail, not the height in a squatting position. The country lacks a monkey or ape that would fit the accounts, hence the suggestion of an imported species.

They can reach 4.3 feet or 1.3 metres long

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_muriqui

 

[JMartJr]

Oh, and the awful smell could not have come from a human being (based on the descriptions).

Two thoughts occur:

A smell need not be coming from the thing you are looking at while smelling it.

and

You may have been more fortunate than I gave been, in not being around some surprisingly stinky people. In addition to the variety of smells we can produce on our own, we can of course get any number if stinky substances on ourselves.

 

[john.phil]

A smell need not be coming from the thing you are looking at while smelling it

The location was an abandoned lot, a place where you would expect people to relieve themselves (probably mostly men urinating on the wall), and where dead creatures such as rats, cats, birds, and other small animals might be found, releasing one of the most pungent smells known to man, especially in the heat. The rain later that day would probably wash most of it away.

 

[Andreas]

All this talk about how flawed the human memory, perception, etc. are is BS and nonsense, because it assumes our experience in 100% of cases need to be discarded

Human memory isn't "flawed", and I don't think anyone is claiming such a thing. What actual memory science shows (decades of research, Elizabeth Loftus and others) is that memory isn't a video recording—it doesn't passively store events like a tape or camera for perfect playback. It's reconstructive: we rebuild the scene each time we recall it, pulling from fragments, expectations, emotions, and sometimes later information. That's not a bug; it's how the system evolved to help us survive and make sense of the world. The result? Memories can be vivid, confident, and mostly accurate… yet still contain real distortions without anyone lying or being "flawed." Dismissing that basic fact doesn't make unreliable reports more reliable—it just ignores how brains actually work.

 

[Ann K]

What is unlikely is that a human was what they saw.

From their own words, your quote:

To me, looking at it, it wasn't something normal. But it had arms, legs, a head. "We couldn't really make out details".

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-varginha-ufo.12725/post-363788

You cannot quote that and then place all your faith on the "details" they couldn't make out.

Next followed the stunning non sequitur:

38s:
"Wasn't it a human being?" (the reporter asks)
40s:
"No. It wasn't, because it looked at us."

Unless something major is lost in translation, I have no idea what she meant by that.

 

[deirdre]

You cannot quote that and then place all your faith on the "details" they couldn't make out.

you are picking and choosing which memory to believe, the same as @Perene is doing.