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. 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 ... 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 researchedand shocking"UFO cases on record. 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.