VARGINHA, Brazil -- The incident that made this town a hot spot in the intergalactic search for intelligent life started quite innocently. On a Saturday afternoon stroll in January, a trio of young women decided to take a shortcut home through a vacant lot. In a clump of weeds, the three said, they encountered a creature like nothing they had seen before.

"It wasn't a man or an animal -- it was something different," said one of the women, Katia Andrade. The being had oily, brown skin and rubbery limbs, she said. Three rounded protrusions sprouted from its oversized head. Standing out in a different way was the creature's odor: One ghastly whiff weakened the knees. As for the stranger's demeanor, the women unanimously, if tactlessly, agreed: It was "muddle-headed." When the creature wagged its big noggin dizzily in their direction, the three women ran off.

Word of this encounter, spreading rapidly through the coffee bars where Varginha's 120,000 inhabitants trade gossip, would soon meld in the public imagination with other unusual occurrences: sightings of a strange cigar-shaped flying object, a mustering of troops and vehicles at a nearby infantry base and a peculiar bustle at the municipal hospital. Goaded by self-styled UFO savants and a ravenous national media, residents rather matter-of-factly embraced a stupefying conclusion: Several aliens from a wayward space ship had been captured and brutalized by troops from the Brazilian army.

Creature Feature

Bristling denials from the military, which once compiled a lengthy record of abuses against the terrestrial population, have only served to inflame public suspicion. The upshot: The army and the now-famous space aliens find themselves locked in a pitched battle for the hearts and minds of this provincial community. Doltish and malodorous though these space celebrities might be, mere men in uniform are proving no match for the first creatures of any kind from Varginha to land on a national magazine cover.

"For extraterrestrials they may not be much, but they are the biggest thing we've ever had in Varginha," says a young woman named Nilda, scanning the nighttime sky from a downtown park bench. Had the armed forces not interfered, she says, locals might have scrubbed the visitors, taught them the language ... in sum ... made something of them. "But they never had a chance," Nilda says with a sigh. Her anger at the military's alleged inhospitality sparked a tiff with her boyfriend, a private in the infantry.