The Feira de Santana Case: the Roswell of the Northeast

Feira de Santana is a city in the interior of Bahia. Almost everything known about what happened there in January 1995 comes from one man, Alberto Romero, an Argentine-born ufologist with the Bahia group G-PAZ. He wrote about the case in Revista UFO in July 1995, October 1996 and November 2000, and in his 1999 book Verdades que Incomodam. No government document, photo, radar record or physical trace has ever surfaced.

Thursday, 12 January 1995. About 01:30. Rubens, Antônio and Adriano were coming back from a party when they saw a large luminous ball that seemed to give off flashes. Its colour shifted from green to red. It was coming straight down, at high speed, into the farmland east of the city.

At about the same moment, Feira de Santana went dark. Romero later reported that the meters of Coelba, the Bahia power company, swung wildly that night, and that neither Coelba nor CHESF knew the cause. Residents spoke of army convoys and of Bell helicopters flying low over the farms.

That same day, a farmer known as Beto Lima, a retired Navy sergeant, phoned TV Bahia with a "fantastic scoop". Something had come down in a lagoon on his land. Romero placed it at Fazenda Gravatá, in Lagoa Jenipapinho. Other accounts say Lagoa do Berreca, in the Jaíba district. "It was the size of a Beetle and was floating, partly under water, near the bank." The metal object reflected its surroundings like a kind of camouflage. Then a hatch opened. A slimy liquid began to come out, and two creatures appeared. To him, it seemed like a birth.

Both beings stood about 90 cm tall. One was hairy, with very long claws on its hands and feet. It became known as the "sloth". It was alive, and it moaned a lot. The other was human-shaped, like a fetus, and appeared dead. Pieces of metal very close to gold in colour lay nearby. He said soldiers searched his house and took the beings and the craft, and that Navy officers kept threatening him to stay silent.

In 1995 his wife, Dona M, told Romero's colleague Emanuel Paranhos that nothing had happened and that her husband was "a drunk and a liar". Romero found the story perfectly coherent for a man supposedly drunk and lying. He called the case ambiguous: real, an elaborate hoax, or "a trap that didn't work".

Then new voices came forward. An anonymous soldier, claiming to belong to the recovery force, wrote that the 35th Infantry Battalion left at 05:30 in three trucks, soldiers carrying FAL rifles. The beings were put in plastic bags. The "sloth" moaned and writhed, looking for help. One soldier crossed himself and shouted, "they're beings from another world!" A Coelba electrician, known only as Senhor E, said he saw three military trucks leave the battalion at high speed during the blackout, and was warned to keep quiet. By 2000, Romero argued that the evidence indicated a crash. He also presumed that American surveillance satellites would have detected the fall, framing it openly as a guess.

No Army, Navy or Air Force statement has ever appeared, and neither the soldier nor Senhor E has been named. Romero himself raised the possibility of someone seeking to promote himself for money, and the farmer later ran for town councillor. He noted that the two creatures echo the 1954 Venezuelan hairy dwarf reports. A fast, flashing fireball can also be a bright meteor, and Coelba had already suffered an outage on 2 January. Romero died in 2018 without a firm conclusion. The family has refused to discuss the case further. Yet the Roswell of the Northeast endures, often set beside Varginha, revisited in anniversary articles, a 2019 episode of Casos Ufológicos and a local podcast.