UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

When it comes to how much more advanced extraterrestrial civilizations may be than us, the Kardashev scale is often mentioned. It suggests the possibility of civilizations that can control the energy of entire galaxies. But does that mean they are truly advanced?

How powerful could extraterrestrial civilizations be?

Aliens

The science of extraterrestrial civilizations is still in its infancy. This is not surprising, given that no representative of such civilizations has ever been seen or heard. However, several concepts have already been developed in this field, which are widely used both in research and in popular presentations of the state of affairs in this area.

One of them is the Kardashev scale, which describes how advanced civilizations we may encounter. They are divided into three types based on the total power of all their activities (machines, power plants, etc.). Type I – those that operate with all the energy of their own planet, 1.74·10¹⁷ W. Type II – those that operate with energy comparable to a star (3.828·10²⁶ W for the Sun). Type III – those that operate with energies comparable to an entire galaxy, 8·10³⁶ W.

As you can easily see, the difference between types I and II is nine orders of magnitude, or approximately one billion times, and between types II and III it is ten orders of magnitude, or 10 billion times. Earth’s civilization does not even reach the first type, and this always shocks people who see this picture for the first time.

Kardashev scale.

Source: Wikipedia

The Kardashev scale is often presented as something that really helps us understand how far ahead of us aliens whose civilizations existed millions or even billions of years ago might be. But is this really the case? Let’s figure it out together.

Signal transmission over distance

The main thing to know about where the scale of civilization development came from and why it is the way we know it is that Nikolai Kardashev, its author, was an astrophysicist. He was not a historian, a robotics expert, or a biologist, but rather a person who was accustomed to looking at distant lights in the sky and constructing theories about what they were.

The scale itself was presented in the report “Transmission of information by extraterrestrial civilizations,” presented at the 1964 Byurakan Conference, which took place at the observatory of the same name in Armenia. On the one hand, this meant that the concept very quickly became known to all leading world experts in the study of extraterrestrial life. On the other hand, it was a report read by an astrophysicist for astrophysicists.

Nikolai Kardashev.

Source: kardashev.fandom.com

Kardashev began by asking himself at what distance an extraterrestrial civilization could send a signal to everyone else in such a way that a meaningful response could be heard, and what would be required to do so. To do this, he uses the Shannon-Hartley theorem, which links the speed of information transmission to the signal-to-noise ratio. In simpler terms, it describes how many bits can be transmitted per second so that most of them are not lost on the way to the recipient.

Kardashev showed that the noise level in a signal traveling through millions of light-years of space is related to the temperature of background radiation. And it depends on the frequency at which the transmission is carried out. That is why the lowest noise level and the highest channel capacity are possible in the centimeter and decimeter ranges. That is, approximately where radio, television, and Wi-Fi operate, and slightly into the operating range of microwave ovens. It is no coincidence that the latter have played a cruel joke on alien hunters at least once.

In fact, it was this part of Kardashev’s Burakan report that had the greatest impact on the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, as it determined the frequencies at which it is best to send signals in space, regardless of biological origin and way of thinking. The most popular wavelength turned out to be 21 cm, but scientists have not yet heard anything about it.

Noise levels for different frequencies.
Source: Kardashev, Nikolai S. (1964). “Transmission of information by extraterrestrial civilizations”

The original Kardashev scale

However, Kardashev did not stop there and moved on from the question of frequency to the required transmitter power. He did not delve into the technical details of its design, simply setting its upper limit as all the energy available to civilization – almost the only figure on Earth that can be estimated without speculation, not only in absolute terms, but also in terms of annual growth.

During Kardashev’s time, these figures were 4×10¹² W and 3-4%, respectively. Currently, the total amount of energy used by humans is approximately 24×10¹³, which is still very little compared to the 1.74·10¹⁷ W that our planet receives from the Sun. As for the growth rate of Earth’s civilization, it has changed several times since the Byurakan Conference, but now, with Asia and Africa in a phase of active industrial growth, it is roughly the same as in the 1960s.

Be that as it may, Kardashev resorted to linear extrapolation of the figures available to him in his work and found that with steady growth in energy consumption, in 3,200 years, we will reach a level of energy consumption comparable to that of the Sun, and in 5,800 years, to that of the entire Milky Way. He called these states civilizations of types II and III and continued to consider them, because we were talking about truly cosmic distances.

The Milky Way galaxy.

Source: phys.org

Kardashev calculated that if a Type II civilization used all its energy to transmit a signal, useful information from it could be received at any point in our galaxy, even with the antennas that were available to humans in the second half of the 20th century.

At the same time, the maximum speed of information transfer, calculated using the Shannon theorem, is so high that aliens could transmit 10,000 medium-sized volumes of their scientific knowledge every 100 seconds. A Type III civilization could do the same for the entire visible part of the universe.

Where to look for aliens

Based on his own calculations, Kardashev even gives recommendations on how other astrophysicists should search for extraterrestrials. In his opinion, attention should be paid to very powerful but point sources of radiation, i.e., those whose area in the sky is tiny, but which emit an extremely large amount of energy.

Of course, the peak of this energy should fall precisely in the centimeter and decimeter ranges, meaning that it should be best visible using radio telescopes. In addition, the radiation must be polarized, meaning that its oscillations will occur in a single plane.

Scientists now know that CTA 102 is an active galactic nucleus.

Source: phys.org

Kardashev himself was convinced that if not Type II, then Type III civilizations must exist in places where we can currently receive their signals. In particular, he considered the recently discovered CTA 102 source, which was extremely powerful and demonstrated variability, as a candidate for their transmitter.

Unfortunately, Kardashev underestimated the diversity of cosmic objects. We now know of many point sources that exhibit the behavior he described and are completely natural. In particular, STA 102 turned out to be an active galactic nucleus – a quasar that absorbs matter and changes brightness due to the unevenness of this process.

Will energy consumption really grow at a constant rate?

The Kardashev scale became popular thanks to American astrophysicist Carl Sagan. We also owe him the fact that it has changed from a purely rank-based scale, i.e., one with three marks, to a discrete scale, i.e., one that can accept fractional values.

This helped, in particular, to reconcile the numbers named by Kardashev with the amount of energy that the Earth receives from the Sun. It is now believed that humanity has a rating of 0.73 on the energy consumption scale. On the one hand, this makes the situation clearer, but on the other hand, it creates the impression that we are almost three-quarters of the way to reaching “one,” but in reality this is not the case, because the scale is logarithmic, meaning that the further you move, the more watts of power you need to add to the total treasury to add another hundredth. Therefore, in reality, all of human civilization still consumes a fraction of a percent of what the Earth receives from the Sun.

Carl Sagan.

Source: Wikipedia

All this raises a much more important question: can our civilization’s energy consumption really reach the levels predicted by Kardashev? Observations of its growth rates over the 60 years since the astrophysicist made his report do not provide a clear answer to this question.

Now scientists, including renowned futurologist Michio Kaku, say that we are still 100-200 years away from Type I civilization, a millennium away from Type II, and hundreds of thousands of years away from Type III. For comparison, it is worth noting that only 10,000 years have passed since the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, when agriculture began to play a greater role than hunting for people in the Middle East for the first time on Earth. So it turns out that our civilization is at the very beginning of an incredibly long journey.

Does development really mean an increase in power?

In fact, nothing is surprising in the fact that the path to Type III civilization can take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Kardashev himself suggested that for some time (thousands of years) the exchange of information would be one-sided, i.e., signals from Type III to Type I would reach their destination, but not vice versa. But eventually, all intelligent beings will get to the point where they can signal across the entire galaxy like a flashlight.

Growth in energy consumption on Earth.

Source: Wikipedia

But this view is very one-sided, as Sagan himself pointed out. It is clear that Kardashev was an astrophysicist and, of all the models of extraterrestrial civilization behavior, he chose the one that would be easiest for him and his colleagues to detect. Because if aliens do not use most of their civilization’s power to signal to the entire universe that they are here and they are intelligent, then they remain invisible.

On the other hand, this view of the essence of civilization was very characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s in general. The Cold War was in full swing, and the US and the USSR were spending a lot of resources on demonstrating their power. After all, the Tsar Bomb was tested just three years before the Byurakan Conference.

But as time went on, the situation where an overdeveloped civilization spent most of its enormous power on sharing knowledge with other forms of life that were millions of years behind it seemed increasingly strange. This was because questions arose about the expediency of such activity.

The explosion of the Tsar Bomb.

Source: Wikipedia

Currently, Liu Cixin’s “dark forest” theory is considered one of the main antitheses to Kardashev’s idea and a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox. Civilizations sit silently because telling everyone around you that you exist and are intelligent means inviting attacks from all sides, because there are no friends in space, only competitors.

In fact, the dark forest theory is no better than Kardashev’s idea of civilizations gushing knowledge throughout the universe, because instead of peaceful megalomaniacal projects, they envisage spending most of a civilization’s power on military projects of no less absurd scale.

In reality, it is much simpler: neither the first nor the second civilizations are really necessary, because most of their members live their own lives and are not interested in other civilizations. Even large-scale projects such as generation ships, space stations for millions of inhabitants, or even terraforming planets require a lot of power, but significantly less than that needed to support Type II and Type III civilization transmitters.

The activities of Type II and Type III civilizations will almost certainly be accompanied by the creation of megastructures similar to Dyson spheres.

Source: www.space.com

Ultimately, even the very thesis of increasing machine power as the essence of civilization’s development can be questioned. The fact is that 60 years have passed since the Burakan Conference, and the Tsar Bomb remains the most powerful explosion ever created by humans. Moreover, the increase in the power of nuclear reactors essentially stopped several decades ago.

Instead of power, technological development specialists are increasingly talking about efficiency. And in most cases, this means “emitting less energy where it is not needed.” This is particularly evident in the example of information transmission systems. In the 1960s, the main devices used for this purpose were television and radio towers.

The principle behind their effectiveness was simple: raise the most powerful transmitter as high as possible. However, the advent of communication satellites made transmitters capable of sending signals further than 500 km unnecessary. Then, the emergence of various cable networks and automatic data routing systems revolutionized the field of information transmission. Modern cellular networks are generally based on transmitters with a range of several hundred meters. Why would you need more than that if data packets can simply be passed along like a baton?

Kardashev made his calculations for undirected signal radiation, and his followers have long since calculated that it is extremely ineffective at cosmic distances. Our terrestrial television is difficult to receive even near Alpha Centauri, and beyond that, it is lost in noise. But a directional signal can travel much greater distances with less transmitter power.

A mesh network does not require tall towers and powerful transmitters.
Source: pervasivecomputinginfo.blogspot.com

That is why space communications now increasingly rely on messages sent by a narrow beam, ideally a laser beam, and the problem is that it is practically impossible to intercept them accidentally in space. The argument that “aliens must communicate with each other somehow, and we will definitely hear it” falls away by itself.

Every day, on any city bus, dozens of people communicate with someone outside the bus, and other passengers have no idea what they are talking about. They only know that their neighbor, like themselves, is looking at a smartphone screen.

And in other industries, everything is moving in the same direction. A quadcopter has ridiculous power compared to a ballistic missile from the 1960s. At the same time, to the designers of that missile, it would have looked like a true creation of an extraterrestrial civilization. This is because it uses automatic control and feedback systems that were considered impossible just a couple of decades ago, especially on such a small machine.

All our experience over the past decades shows that power is not unnecessary. It is not the main thing. It is much better to improve the efficiency, reliability, and sophistication of our machines. In many ways, the fact that energy consumption continues to grow is explained by the fact that the world’s population continues to grow, and now even in countries that we are accustomed to calling the “third world,” people want to live according to energy consumption standards that even residents of developed countries in the 1960s would have considered luxurious.

A quadcopter is significantly less powerful than a rocket, but it can do things that a rocket cannot.
Source: phys.org

No one knows how energy consumption will change when people across the planet satisfy their needs for the wonders of consumer electronics and electrical engineering, and when these technologies themselves become even more efficient. It is entirely possible that in the coming centuries we will not even reach Type I on the Kardashev scale.

It is quite possible that the future is not a stairway to heaven powered by clean energy, but a house built, at first glance, in the same way as houses were built centuries ago, but in fact filled with clever technology that surpasses a smartphone in functionality as much as a smartphone surpasses a rotary dial telephone.

Ultimately, Kardashev’s theory does not take into account even a more traditional scenario for the development of civilization: settlement within its own star system and beyond. In that case, intelligent beings could indeed have a total machine power comparable, if not to all solar radiation, then to the fraction that reaches Earth. But it would be scattered across a dozen star systems and mainly concentrated on ships flying between them. And there would be no question of any megastructures.

However, Kardashev himself should not be blamed for anything. He was a man of his time and, from the very beginning, did not claim to be anything more than a describer of the characteristics of civilization, the signals of which he could pick up as an astrophysicist. All other interpretations of his scale are later interpretations, and who is to blame for the fact that people continue to repeat them even though the experience of the development of Earth’s civilization increasingly diverges from his assumptions?

OVER A LARGE BOX of untouched donuts in Washington’s Longworth House Office Building, Congressional representatives sat rapt as a visiting Brazilian neurosurgeon described what it was like to stare back at the large lilac-colored eyes of a highly intelligent, nonhuman being.

So, not your usual Capitol Hill meeting.

The closed-door session on Jan. 15 brought together three members of Congress seeking greater government transparency on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, long called UFOs, and a group of Brazilians who say they witnessed the crash of an otherworldly spacecraft and later encountered its nonhuman occupants.

Coming thirty years after the striking events, the private Washington meeting (to which we alone had media access), followed by a public press conference five days later, raised the prospect of unprecedented Brazilian-American cooperation in unraveling the mysteries of one of the best researched—and shocking—UFO cases on record.

The witnesses included the highly respected neurosurgeon, a forensic pathologist, and a geography teacher. They were brought to the United States by filmmaker James Fox, who interviewed more than two dozen witnesses for a new feature documentary that expands on a 2022 version of his film Moment of Contact. Fox has been investigating the case, with his Brazilian counterpart Marco Aurelio Leal, for over two decades.

“This could settle the debate once and for all that we’re not alone,” Fox told the packed news conference, which he organized at the National Press Club on Jan. 20.

(Left to Right) Carlos de Sousa, James Fox, Dr. Italo Venturelli, and Dr. Armando Fortunato after meeting with three members of Congress in Rep. Tim Burchett’s office on Jan. 15

The story is this: On January 13, 1996, in the countryside outside the municipality of Varginha, Brazil, the geography teacher—also an ultralight pilot—reported seeing a cylindrical craft trailing smoke and crashing to Earth. A week later, three girls walking home through a vacant lot reported encountering a cowering creature with reddish eyes and brown oily skin that reportedly communicated its suffering through its eyes. Before long, the streets of Varginha were filled with military trucks and emergency vehicles amid rumors of the capture of two nonhuman beings, one later hospitalized, and a clandestine American operation that spirited them out of Brazil.

Fox said that now, for the first time, he knows the names of those who were in possession of videos of the purported nonhuman entities. Despite the difficulties in obtaining them, he said, “I never give up.”

Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson, did not reply to requests for comment.

The Department of Defense All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), with a mission to scientifically investigate UAP, stated in a 2024 report that “none of these investigations (including USG, foreign, and U.S. academic efforts) reached the conclusion that any of the UAP reports indicated extraterrestrial origin.”

But AARO may not have a free hand. As Fox recalled, in 2024, he met with AARO staff to discuss a video staff members had obtained. They discussed the Varginha case, among others. At one point, AARO director Dr. Jon T. Kosloski came into the room. Fox says he asked Kosloski if there was a plan to inform the public about “what we are ultimately dealing with.” Kosloski replied, “I can’t part my hair without the approval of the DOD. And you can quote me on that.”

There is no question that the Varginha case lacks hard data. No one has yet been able to come up with photographs or videos, physical evidence, official documentation, or medical records that could help verify the episode. Yet over two dozen witnesses to many aspects of the case have come forward independently, providing pieces of a puzzle that seem to fit together to tell a compelling story.

The Congressional meeting, held in Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett’s office, drew two fellow Republicans—Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, chairwoman of the House’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and Eric Burlison of Missouri—along with staff members. Two Democrats with a longstanding interest in UAP issues—Jared Moskowitz of Florida, and Andre Carson of Indiana, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence—were invited but unable to attend.

Rep. Tim Burchett (right) greets Dr. Armando Fortunato in his office as Carlos de Sousa looks on

“Can you take it from the top?” Luna asked the visiting neurosurgeon, Dr. Italo Venturelli, 73, at the beginning of the meeting, “Who brought the being in? I want detail about what the interaction was, from point A to point B.”

Burchett also pressed a question: “Was the being able to communicate in any way? Was it telepathic or anything like that?”

Dr. Italo (as he prefers to be called), who was on duty that day in Regional Hospital in Varginha, said the captured being was initially treated by his colleague, Dr. Marcos Vinico Neves, who sutured a wound on its cranium. Neves died in 2018, and no medical records were kept of this procedure, according to Dr. Italo.

He says he was shown a brief black and white video of the patient and then spent three or four minutes at its bedside, having been asked to visually examine it after the procedure.

“I’ve been a doctor for forty-six years and have performed thousands of surgeries,” Dr. Italo said in an interview before the meeting. “To me, it was obvious that this was not a human being.”

“It looked like a seven-year-old child,” the neurosurgeon told the representatives with help from a translator in attendance. “Its eyes were lilac color. Both eyes and the cranium were teardrop-shaped. It transmitted calm and tranquility.”

The doctor said it seemed to him that his patient was at peace with everything that was happening, and that he sensed it possessed intelligence greater than his own. He also described feeling as if he were looking at an angel.

“I wouldn’t say it communicated telepathically; it communicated empathetically,” he said, “through its eyes.”

“What did the hands look like?” Luna asked.

Dr. Italo demonstrated, holding up three fingers and a thumb.

He said he had fixated on the eyes, which seemed to communicate power, concentration, and compassion. At one point, the being looked at him, looked out the window at the blue sky, and then looked back at the doctor, as if to communicate its wish to be released.

Burlison, taking notes, asked if it was wearing clothing. Bare above the sheet, said Dr. Italo. The skin was white, the torso was slim, and there were no nipples. A small mouth. A sliver of ears.

Dr. Italo Venturelli demonstrates the size of the captured being in the same room at Regional Hospital where the being was lying when he examined it

Burlison asked if any other medical staff or doctors could corroborate the story.

Yes, said Dr. Italo, but most doctors are afraid to speak out because they have been threatened, or for fear of damage to their careers.

“It’s very important to get the others,” Burlison said.

Dr. Italo said that a near-fatal heart attack and other recent medical issues persuaded him to break his silence last year and provide his full story to Fox for the first time, even though he still works full-time at Regional Hospital.

Carlos de Sousa, the geography teacher and ultralight pilot, told the representatives that he saw a “cigar-shaped” craft that he first thought was a blimp with a lateral tear trailing white smoke and struggling to stay aloft before crashing near a highway.

At the press conference in Washington, Carlos de Sousa describes the object he saw at the crash site outside Varginha

He said he drove over to help any survivors and was overtaken by a strong odor of ammonia and rotten eggs. Picking up a piece of what looked like aluminum, de Sousa said he was able to crumple it in his fist, but it then immediately sprang back to its original shape. Military trucks arrived within minutes. A soldier approached him and aimed a gun at his head, demanding, “Leave now, or I’ll split your skull,” de Sousa said. Dropping the fragment, de Sousa fled, but said he was confronted shortly afterwards by two men in an unmarked dark vehicle who threatened his family and demanded his silence. He did not speak about the incident for decades.

A third Brazilian visitor, Dr. Armando Fortunato, who has been a forensic pathologist and criminal medical examiner for the Civil Police for over three decades, told the representatives that he had performed an autopsy on a young military police officer, Marco Chereze, who had grabbed one of the beings during its capture and then died a few weeks later from a severe infection after it inadvertently scratched him.

Dr. Armando, as he likes to be called, said a legal request has been filed to exhume Chereze’s body with hopes of collecting bacteria—or even DNA samples—that could undergo further analysis.

Dr. Armando handed the representatives a signed statement from Dr. João Janini, 89, a specialist in pathological anatomy whose biography states he has performed over 50,000 autopsies. Janini attested that he had found a rare form of a bacterium “of extremely high aggressiveness and lethality” in the tissue samples from Chereze. The characteristics of the infection went so far beyond the limits of what is conventional that, in his opinion, “it raises the hypothesis of its alien origin.”

Image used with permission).

Accounts from former U.S. officials involving alleged UAP crash retrievals and related recoveries of nonhuman bodies have continued to surface, although the Defense Department dismisses them as unfounded.

In a 2023 Congressional hearing, David Grusch, a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Department’s UAP Task Force, testified under oath that the U.S. has retrieved vehicles and “biologics” of exotic origin.

“Biologics came with some of these recoveries,” he asserted, referring to nonhuman bodies and tissue samples, citing “people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.” Since then, other former officials with high security clearances have echoed his statements, sometimes under oath.

Kirk McConnell, who served for 37 years on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee until retiring in early 2024, opened the Jan. 20 press event. He was among the staff from the two Senate Committees who collaboratively investigated the UAP issue on behalf of senators from both parties.

Kirk McConnell, while serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee

(Image Credit: Courtesy of Kirk McConnell).

McConnell told the audience that reports similar to those from the Varginha case reached senators and staff conducting these investigations. The interested senators, who included now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, held meetings and interviews in sensitive compartmented intelligence facilities “with very credible sources reporting both direct and secondhand knowledge of the reality of highly intelligent nonhuman beings, government retrievals and reverse engineering of craft not made by human beings, and the recovery of bodies of non-human beings,” McConnell said.

He had attended some of these classified meetings.

The reports provided to Congress included alleged hidden government activities similar to those recounted in the Varginha case, stretching across many decades. “So what these folks are going to tell you today are astounding, but they’re not the only credible testimony about such events,” McConnell said.

In a video statement screened at the press conference, Jacques Vallée, a French-American computer scientist who has worked on projects at NASA and DARPA, and has been a leading thinker and writer on UFOs for over fifty years, cited a “data warehouse system” that he and a scientific team compiled for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

In addition to over 200,000 reports of anomalous objects in flight, Vallée said the database includes “hundreds of reports of creatures, live or dead, associated with crashed or landed vehicles of unknown provenance, including some similar to those in Varginha,” and that creatures in other documented cases breathed air normally.

Jacques Vallée, Ph.D., provided a video statement recorded for the press conference on Jan. 20

Vallée said that the Varginha case is similar to many classified cases in scientific and medical records, but it also “presents exceptional new knowledge”, especially “in the professional description of the anatomical and behavioral features of the live creature recovered by authorities within a short time of the crash, and to the point of its death.”

During the private discussion in Burchett’s office, Dr. Italo said he had learned that the being he saw was taken to ESA military base, then to Campinas, and then to the States.

“All the people we talked to said the exact same thing,” Fox told the representatives.

Inside the private meeting on Jan. 15. (Left to right) Rep. Anna Paulina Luna; Rep. Eric Burlison; Andrew Bates, former Biden White House deputy press secretary; Dr. Armando Fortunato, James Fox, and Dr. Italo Venturelli; William Christian (standing), chief of staff for Rep. Luna; Carlos de Sousa. (Not visible) Rep. Burchett and Leslie Kean.

Luna said Congress should seek Air Force flight logs and a landing permit to confirm any American retrieval operation of bodies and crash debris from Varginha, although it is uncertain whether any paper trail exists.

Later, at the press conference, Col. Fred Claussen, a retired and highly decorated U.S. Air Force colonel who held a top-secret clearance, outlined ways the alleged secret U.S. mission might yet be documented. He said that a Brazilian air traffic controller, Marco Feres, reported that on or about Jan. 20, 1996, a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, most likely a C17, took off from an American base and landed at Viracopos airport in Campinas to pick up an unusual cargo before departing for an unknown location in the U.S.

Any such cargo plane mission, the colonel said, would require paperwork from Air Mobility Command at Scott AFB in Illinois and the Air Mobility Wing at Charleston AFB in South Carolina. Air refueling would require more documentation, as would an international flight plan to Brazil, even if the mission were classified, Claussen said, adding that at Campinas, there would need to be more refueling records and another international flight plan.

Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Fred Claussen speaks at the National Press Club in Washington, D. C. on Jan. 20, the 30th anniversary of the Varginha incident

Even without a paper trail, he said he believed that thirty to forty Americans involved with the operation should have direct knowledge of this flight and its purpose.

“Here is my plea,” Claussen concluded. “If you were a participant and have knowledge of this mission, come forward.”

McConnell followed by saying there was general misunderstanding that nondisclosure agreements signed by intelligence figures barred them from sharing their information about UAP recoveries with Congress. They were not liable, he said, if they presented their accounts in properly secure facilities like SCIFs. In fact, he said, “It’s illegal to withhold information from Congress.”

No one has ever been prosecuted for providing classified information to Congress, McConnell said. In fact, the President himself “could affirm disclosure to Congress with the stroke of a pen or [on] social media.”

While greater UAP disclosure has been widely regarded as a bipartisan issue in Congress, “we’re not yet at the tipping point for most members of Congress,” McConnell said.

A joint evidence-seeking operation between Brazilians and Americans could be in the works. Brazilian Senator Eduardo Girão, who represents the coastal state of Ceará and led a Brazilian Senate hearing on UAP in 2022, came to Washington to meet with members of Congress and attend the press event.

Acting as a private citizen and not representing the Brazilian Senate, Girão spoke from the podium and commended the three Brazilian witnesses for their courage in speaking out.

During a break, he spoke with Burlison, who said he had gotten up at 4 a.m. that morning to fly from Missouri so he could attend the news conference and present a public statement (the other members did not fly back in time to attend).

See Also

Investigation and Tracking of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Explored in New Publications by Harvard Team

Representative Eric Burlison (left) confers with Brazilian Senator Eduardo Girão during a break at the National Press Club event. They had just met for the first time.

“Are there videos that you think you might be able to get access to, any other material evidence?” Burlison asked Girão.

“I’m going to try,” Girão said.

The two discussed the need for a joint effort to acquire tangible evidence that could help validate the incident. Burlison described having seen interesting UAP videos, but “nothing that is definitive 4K.” He told the Brazilian senator about key American officials who have come forward, including the current Secretary of State.

Obtaining the evidence he would like to see has been difficult, Burlison said, because “there are several government entities that are controlling this and some are willing to be more cooperative, so unfortunately we’re not getting everything.”

Six other Brazilians who wanted to provide testimony on the Varginha case were denied visas by the State Department on the grounds that they might overstay their visas and attempt to remain in the U.S. So, in December, Fox and his producing partner, Aline Kras, returned to Brazil to compile their testimonies on videotape for presentation at the press conference.

One of these witnesses, Liliane Silva, now a 46-year-old early childhood teacher, said that on Jan. 20, 1996, at about 3:20 p.m., she and her sister and a friend were taking a shortcut home when she noticed some graffiti on a wall. Underneath it, she stated, “I saw the creature.”

“It was short in stature, with red eyes, brown skin, as if covered in oil,” Liliane recounted.

“When I saw it, I had a terrible feeling as if the world had stopped.” She screamed to alert the others. “The creature looked at me,” she continued. “I looked into its eyes. It gave me a sensation that it was suffering, that it was asking for help, hiding from someone.”

Then, she and the other girls ran.

Her sister, Valquira Silva, and their friend Katia Xavier provided similar details in their own video statements. It had “three fingers on its hand, a big foot,” Katia said, adding: “It seemed he was suffering, asking me for help.”