One remorseful witness – a former soldier who once sensationally claimed troops had captured an alien in Varginha – admits having spread fake news after being offered a bribe worth thousands of dollars. “There’s no such thing as the ET of Varginha,” he says, calling claims of a military cover-up “one of the biggest farces ever”.

An army investigation – published in full to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the sightings and rebuff allegations of a conspiracy – also concluded the story was a sham

The saga has been good business for Varginha.

As he sat in the shade of a spaceship-shaped bus stop, not far from Varginha’s rocket-shaped city hall,

This is not news. At best, this is a documentary if the people involved had access to some of the best and most modern videotaping equipment and yet couldn’t get any clear high definition pictures to include anything about the thing they were reporting. If there were aliens, they would be laughing at how our species assumes they would be so alike to them morphologically and that for some reason they crossed a galaxy just to ape out on a planet.