Ademar José Gevaerd

Early life and the sighting that changed everything

Ademar José Gevaerd was born on 19 March 1962 in Maringá, in the northern part of Paraná state, Brazil. He trained as a chemist and worked as a chemistry teacher through the early 1980s, an unremarkable career track for a man who would go on to become, by most accounts, the single most influential figure in Brazilian ufology.

The turning point came in 1982. Accounts differ slightly on the precise circumstances — some sources place the sighting in Maringá while Gevaerd was still teaching, others describe him watching a cigar-shaped, lighted object during a football match in Campo Grande — but they agree on the essentials: Gevaerd witnessed an unexplained aerial object and learned, in the following days, of a wave of similar reports across São Paulo, Paraná, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. For a man trained in the empirical habits of chemistry, the coincidence of dozens of independent witnesses describing similar phenomena across a wide geographic area was difficult to dismiss. He began investigating UFO reports as a hobby, then increasingly as a vocation. By 1986 he had left the classroom for good, choosing to dedicate himself entirely to the study of unidentified flying objects at a moment when Brazilian ufology was still a fragmented, largely amateur pursuit with little institutional structure.

Building an institution: Revista UFO and CBPDV

Gevaerd's first publishing venture, launched in 1985, was a short-lived magazine called Ufologia Nacional & Internacional, which folded after only a year. The lesson he drew from that failure was that Brazilian ufology needed not just a magazine but an infrastructure: a dedicated research organization to back it, standardized investigative methods, and a durable institutional base. In March 1988, working out of Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, he founded Revista UFO (UFO Magazine) — the publication that would define his career and, arguably, Brazilian ufology itself for the next three and a half decades. The magazine later relocated its operational base alongside his research organization in Curitiba, reaching a circulation reported at roughly 30,000 copies at its peak, and is widely cited as the oldest UFO-themed magazine in continuous print anywhere in the world.

Around the same period Gevaerd founded the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas de Discos Voadores (CBPDV, the Brazilian Center for Flying Saucer Research), which grew into the country's largest UFO research body, with membership estimated at roughly 3,300 people at its height. Under his direction, CBPDV moved away from the anecdotal, poorly documented case files that had characterized much of Brazilian ufology and instituted standardized field-investigation protocols: structured witness interviews, physical-trace documentation, and cross-referencing of reports across regions. Gevaerd is credited with personally conducting more than 700 field investigations of Brazilian UFO cases over his career, a volume of firsthand casework that few researchers anywhere in the world have matched. He also served as Brazilian Director for MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), tying Brazil's investigative apparatus into the largest civilian UFO-research network in the United States, and acted as a Brazilian representative to the Center for UFO Studies.

The combination of magazine, research center, and international affiliations was deliberate. Gevaerd had watched the first generation of Brazilian ufologists operate largely in isolation from one another, duplicating effort and producing case files that rarely survived the researcher who compiled them. His answer was to professionalize the pipeline from sighting report to published investigation: CBPDV volunteers would take initial reports and conduct standardized interviews, Revista UFO would publish and archive the resulting write-ups, and Gevaerd himself would personally travel to the most significant cases to verify claims on the ground — a workflow that, while still reliant on witness testimony rather than physical evidence in the overwhelming majority of cases, was considerably more rigorous than the ad hoc reporting that had preceded it.

The Varginha case and international recognition

No single case defined Gevaerd's public profile more than the Varginha incident of 20 January 1996, in which residents of the Minas Gerais town of Varginha reported an encounter with a strange, foul-smelling creature, followed by rumors of a military operation, alleged captures of non-human beings, and recovered wreckage. Gevaerd was among the first serious researchers to travel to Varginha, interview witnesses, and attempt to reconstruct a timeline from conflicting military, medical, and civilian accounts. He became, in effect, the case's chief archivist — a role Revista UFO maintained for the rest of his life and beyond, with the magazine still publishing detailed retrospectives on the case's 28th and 30th anniversaries.

Gevaerd carried the case onto the international stage strikingly quickly: at the Australian International UFO Symposium in Brisbane in October 1996, only months after the events, he presented what he understood of the alleged captured beings and crashed vehicle to a global ufology audience, helping make Varginha one of the best-known non-U.S. UFO cases in the world. He would go on to speak in more than 29 countries over the following decades and was a keynote speaker at the First World Forum of Ufology, held in Brasília in 1997 — a marker of how far his standing had traveled beyond Brazil in only a few years. His work also drew him toward other physical-trace phenomena: he personally investigated crop circles (agroglifos) in England in 2002 and in Chile between 2008 and 2009, publishing his findings in the book Agroglifos no Brasil.

The Varginha case has never been without controversy, and Gevaerd's association with it cuts both ways in assessing his legacy. Critics of Brazilian ufology have long pointed to the case's shifting witness accounts, its entanglement with unverified military-source claims, and a string of contradictory retellings over the years — including a 2026 documentary produced by Rede Globo that Revista UFO's own successor team publicly criticized for alleged distortions and omissions. Gevaerd cannot answer for developments after his death, but his decades of stewardship over the case's documentary record — for better and worse — made him inseparable from how the world came to know Varginha.

Gevaerd's international profile was reinforced by regular appearances on foreign television, including segments produced by the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and the History Channel, which used him as a Brazilian expert voice whenever their documentaries touched on Latin American UFO phenomena. This media visibility, unusual for a researcher working outside the English-language ufology mainstream, gave Brazilian cases — Varginha above all — a level of international circulation that most non-U.S. UFO incidents never receive, and it reinforced Gevaerd's own conviction that Brazilian ufology deserved to be treated as a serious counterpart to American and European research rather than a regional curiosity.

Freedom of information and institutional advocacy

Beyond casework, Gevaerd was Brazil's most persistent advocate for governmental transparency on UFO matters. In 1996 he founded the Comissão Brasileira de Ufólogos (CBU, Brazilian Commission of Ufologists), an umbrella body intended to coordinate the country's fractious network of independent researchers under shared standards. Operating through the CBU, Gevaerd launched the "UFOs: Freedom of Information Now!" campaign in 2004, a sustained public pressure effort aimed at the Brazilian federal government and Air Force (Força Aérea Brasileira) to declassify and release official records on UFO sightings and encounters. The campaign is widely credited with contributing to a genuine, if incomplete, opening of Brazilian military UFO archives — a level of state cooperation that distinguished Brazil from most other countries during that period and gave Gevaerd's advocacy a concrete, documented policy legacy rather than merely rhetorical influence.

In 2017, as the broader UAP discourse in the United States began shifting toward what is now called the disclosure era, Gevaerd founded the Instituto Brasileiro de Exopolítica (IBEXO, Brazilian Institute of Exopolitics), turning his attention to the political, diplomatic, and social dimensions of a hypothetical confirmed contact scenario. The move reflected a maturing of his interests — from raw case investigation toward the institutional and governmental frameworks that might one day need to respond to non-human intelligence — and positioned him, in his final years, as an early Brazilian voice in the exopolitics current that gained wider traction internationally in the years that followed.

Personal life and loss

Gevaerd had three children — Daniel, Daniela, and Pedro. His daughter Daniela died in a car accident on 8 March 2015, a loss that colleagues later described as one of the defining hardships of his personal life, borne alongside decades of public work that rarely paused for it. Those who worked with him at Revista UFO and CBPDV have said that he returned to fieldwork and editorial duties within a relatively short time of the tragedy, a detail frequently cited in tributes as evidence of how completely his identity had merged with his research.

Death

On 30 November 2022, Gevaerd suffered a fall at his home in Curitiba and was admitted in serious condition to the intensive care unit of Hospital Pilar. He did not recover, dying nine days later, on 9 December 2022, at the age of 60. Tributes poured in from across Brazilian and international ufology; MUFON's obituary called him one of the most respected researchers of his generation, and the Revista UFO staff who inherited his publication described him as someone who was "serious, but knew how to be light, fun and welcoming."

Reception and legacy

Within Brazilian ufology, Gevaerd is remembered less as a theorist than as a builder: he founded the country's longest-running UFO magazine, its largest research organization, its main umbrella coordinating body, and — late in life — its first dedicated exopolitics institute. That combination of durability and institution-building is unusual in a field often characterized by short-lived groups and personality-driven splits. His critics, largely outside Brazil, note that his signature case, Varginha, remains scientifically unresolved and has been muddied over time by inconsistent testimony and unverifiable claims — a critique that applies to the case more than to Gevaerd's documentation of it, though the two are difficult to fully separate given how central he was to shaping the public record. What is not contested is the scale of his output: more than 700 personal field investigations, a magazine that outlived nearly every other UFO periodical in the world, and a policy campaign that produced actual government document releases rather than mere publicity. Revista UFO continues publication after his death, run by colleagues who describe their ongoing work — including continued Varginha retrospectives on the case's 28th and 30th anniversaries — as carrying forward the standards of documentation and independent investigation he insisted on.

Gevaerd's career also illustrates a broader pattern in international ufology: the field's most consequential figures outside the United States have often been the ones who built durable institutions rather than the ones who produced the most sensational individual claims. Measured against contemporaries such as Jacques Vallée or J. Allen Hynek, Gevaerd was less a theorist of the phenomenon than an organizer and archivist of it — closer in spirit to a national editor-in-chief than to a scientist proposing explanatory frameworks. That distinction matters for how his legacy should be read: his lasting contribution to ufology lies less in any single case he cracked than in the fact that Brazil, alone among Latin American countries, ended up with a continuously operating UFO magazine, a national research coordinating body, and a documented history of government transparency pressure — all traceable to one teacher who decided, in 1986, that a strange light in the sky was worth a career.