Corporal Eric Lopes may be the most important living witness in the 1996 Varginha UFO case, and he has never given a full public account. 🛸👽
On 20 January 1996 in Varginha, Brazil, three young women reported seeing a small, hunched being with oily brown skin, three bumps on its head and large red eyes. That same night, according to later testimony collected by filmmaker James Fox, military policemen Marco Eli Chereze and Eric Lopes were on duty together. The account that spread through the case is that a creature crossed in front of their vehicle, Chereze handled it, and the pair took it toward hospital.
Chereze, 23, fell ill shortly afterward. He died on 15 February 1996 of a generalized infection after surgery on an abscess under his arm. Official records list postoperative sepsis. Believers in the case have long tied his death to contact with the being. Lopes was his colleague in the Military Police intelligence unit known as P2, and later married one of Chereze’s sisters.
James Fox spent years documenting the case for Moment of Contact. When his team approached Lopes’s property, Lopes warned them off. In Portuguese he told them that if they came to the door he would remove them with bullets. Fox has said a security man later claimed Lopes was seconds from drawing a weapon. When Fox asked Lopes’s wife what it would take for her husband to speak, she answered: bring my brother back to life and he will come forward.
Fox has put his reputation on the line for Varginha. He has said he believes a craft came down and that beings were recovered, one of them still alive. Lopes is the surviving officer from the pair at the center of the capture story. If he ever speaks on the record, he could confirm, deny, or rewrite the most contested night of the entire case.
Thirty years on, the official Brazilian military inquiry called the alien story fiction. Witnesses, doctors and investigators have kept adding testimony. Lopes remains silent. That silence is why so many researchers still treat him as the missing key.