Residents of Varginha report a creature and a heavy military presence

No footage of the reported creature exists. The record consists of witness statements gathered by researchers and journalists in the weeks afterwards, together with later interviews. Photographs circulated at the time show the vacant lot and the streets involved, not the reported figure.

Three young women, sisters Liliane and Valquíria Silva and their friend Kátia Xavier, said they came across a crouching figure of roughly human height in a vacant lot and ran from it. Their accounts have remained broadly consistent in the decades since. Other residents reported seeing military vehicles moving through the town. A firefighter and several soldiers have been quoted by researchers as describing a capture operation, though the sourcing for those claims varies in quality and some rest on second-hand relay. Brazilian military authorities have denied that any such operation occurred.

No Brazilian government body has confirmed a recovery operation, and no official file corresponding to the claims has been released. Researchers have pursued the case for decades and produced witness testimony, but no physical evidence, no photograph of the reported figure, and no document has entered the public record. A conventional explanation has been proposed, that the women encountered a person who was unwell or disoriented; it has not been established either.

What the three women saw has not been determined. Whether any military operation took place is unresolved, and rests entirely on testimony that Brazilian authorities dispute. No physical evidence exists. Several widely repeated details of the story, including claimed hospital involvement and a claimed death, trace to second-hand accounts rather than documents, and should not be treated as established.