A Congressman Just Asked the CIA and FBI What They Have on Varginha

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO), a member of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, has sent letters to CIA Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel asking them to account for any records their agencies hold on the January 1996 Varginha UAP incident in Brazil. His office publicized both letters in a press release on July 8, 2026.

It would be easy to file this under “congressman chases Brazilian UFO story.” That is not quite what the letters do, and the difference is the whole point.

What the letters actually ask

Burlison is not asking the CIA or the FBI to confirm that a craft crashed or that a creature was recovered. The letters say so explicitly. The FBI letter states: “This letter does not ask the FBI to validate disputed public claims, assume that any particular allegation is true, or prejudge whether any federal law was violated.” The request is narrower and harder to wave off: do records exist, and if so, preserve them and describe what you have.

That framing matters because the agencies have a documented history of not answering. In response to a private Freedom of Information Act request, reference number F-2023-00442, the CIA sent a final response on January 10, 2025 that neither confirmed nor denied the existence of responsive records, a so-called Glomar response. It cited FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3), the classification and statutory-protection exemptions. That denial letter is reproduced inside Burlison’s own letter to the CIA. In it, the agency writes that “the fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is itself currently and properly classified.”

Read plainly, that is the CIA declining to say whether it has anything about a 1996 event in a Brazilian town. Burlison’s letter effectively asks the agency to justify that posture to Congress rather than to a private requester, which is a different audience with different leverage.

One date detail worth getting right, since the coverage has blurred it: the letters are not both from July. The CIA letter is dated July 7, 2026; the FBI letter is dated May 1, 2026. They were announced together on July 8. The FBI letter, per NewsNation, also asked the bureau to help exhume the body of a Brazilian soldier connected to the case; Burlison told NewsNation he had “not heard back directly.”

The Rebelo caveat

The stated trigger for the renewed attention is a set of public comments by former Brazilian Defense Minister Aldo Rebelo. Here rigor matters, because the social-media version of what Rebelo said is stronger than what he actually said.

What is on record is a conditional campaign line. Rebelo, now a stated presidential contender, said he knows what Brazil’s armed forces hold in their archives and that “if the US government releases its documents, I will do the same if elected president of Brazil.” He also indicated that most government secrecy concerns advanced terrestrial technology rather than confirmed alien contact. That is a promise contingent on an election and on U.S. action, not a confirmation of an extraterrestrial event. Claims circulating online that Rebelo “confirmed the Varginha events” go beyond his verifiable words, and Burlison’s own release is careful about it too, saying only that statements “attributed to” Rebelo “underscore the need” to determine whether records exist.

What Varginha is, and isn’t

For readers new to it: the 1996 Varginha incident, often called “the Roswell of Brazil,” began on January 20, 1996 when three young women in Varginha, Minas Gerais reported encountering a red-eyed humanoid creature near a vacant lot. The broader story alleges a crash, a military capture, and a transfer of material to the United States. The Brazilian military denied there were any aliens; skeptical explanations have ranged from a disoriented person to an injured animal; no physical evidence has been publicly verified. It is a disputed case, and Burlison himself told NewsNation he is “not someone that’s going to believe it until I experience it myself.”

That is exactly why the letters are interesting. They do not rest on the case being true. They rest on a simpler question that does not require believing in anything: after 30 years, is “we can neither confirm nor deny” still a defensible answer, and if the agencies have nothing, why not just say so? It is the same records-preservation move Burlison has used on federally funded research centers like MITRE and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Whether the CIA and FBI answer any differently than they answered the FOIA requester is the thing to watch.