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Oct. 4, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:30
Edition 484 - Roberto Pinotti

Veteran Italian UFO researcher Roberto Pinotti on amazing cases you won't have heard about including flying aliens, close encounters, "USOs" and UFO landings...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is still Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained.
Well, I hope everything's okay with you.
We're in the United Kingdom talking about all sorts of new restrictions to do with coronavirus.
And I think as we go into the autumn and we look ahead to the winter, none of us knows what is really going to happen.
And maybe it's the same way you're listening to if you're not in the United Kingdom.
My thoughts are with you.
My thoughts are with the students who, as I record this, a lot of them are locked down effectively in their halls of residence because of coronavirus difficulties in their areas.
It's a worrying time.
But we carry on here at The Unexplained.
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Thank you to Adam for his work on the website and getting the shows out to you.
And thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
And thank you to you, more than anything else, for being there for me through all of this.
Now, a word about the guest on this edition.
It is a man who has written a book about Italian UFOs.
He hasn't just written one, he's written a number and done extensive research over many decades.
He is currently 76 years of age.
He is an aviation expert and he's made a big portion of his life, his involvement with the Centro Ufologigo Nazionale in Italy.
Now, you've got to remember that many of the cases that we get to hear about on The Unexplained and other shows in the English language are from North America.
They're from Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, places where English is spoken.
But there are a raft, a huge amount of cases that happen in places like Italy.
And because they're documented in Italian, we never get to hear about them.
So that is why we're going to be speaking to Roberto Pinotti about his current book, which is called UFO Contacts Over Italy, Volume 2.
There's also a Volume 1 and other books that he's written.
We're going to talk about his lifetime of research.
Now, I have to say this.
His first language is not English, so I'd like you to bear that in mind.
I know some people say we don't want to hear people whose first language is not English on the show, but I want you to hear what he has to say because he's got some great stories.
He's a very, very nice man.
So we're going to cross to Florence, near Florence, very soon, and speak to Roberto Pinotti about so many fascinating cases of ufology, strange entities, things that land, things that take off, things that go under the sea from Italy.
And I think it's going to be fascinating.
But please bear in mind that his first language is not English.
And I don't know about you.
I speak no Italian apart from, you know, pizza and pasta.
That's about, you know, the limit of my Italian.
So I think he does incredibly well because I can't speak Italian at all.
So thank you very much for getting in touch with me.
Please be part of the Unexplained.
Let's cross to Near Florence now and speak with Roberto Pinotti about UFO contacts over Italy.
Roberto, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Oh, thank you.
Whereabouts, just so that my listener can position you, whereabouts in Italy are you, Roberto?
In Florence.
Okay, and how is Florence at the moment?
You know, we've all got problems with coronavirus at the moment, and we're all worried about that.
How are things there now?
Not too bad, but frankly, we had a very serious problem in the past months, you know.
And, you know, everybody struggles to deal with this thing, and none of us knows how long it is going to go on for.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, I've been looking at your background here as a researcher into UFOs.
You have been doing this, if I work this out right, for six decades, 60 years?
That's correct.
I am 76, so I began when I was 15 or 16, and this is the story.
And what was it, because you've been doing it for so many years, and you know, some people, they start researching these things and they don't go on for so many years, they give it up.
What is it that's made you want to carry on researching UFOs?
Well, you see, here in Italy, the attention to the UFO team was started by a pioneer, a consul, Consul Alberto Perigo.
I met him when I was a teenager, and then when he had to leave Italy and to go to Brazil as a consul of Italy, we had the necessity to create a center, a Eupho center, in order to go on.
And we did this in 1967.
In fact, our Cintrofologo Nazionale, National Eupho Center, that is, well, presently is 53 years old.
And since then, we did our best to go on, and we did.
And in America, I mean, that's a long time, Roberta.
In America, people tend to think that modern ufology started with Roswell in 1947.
But from what I'm reading, the history of ufology in Italy goes back much further than that.
And that's correct, because we found several sightings before World War II.
And besides, there is Also, a more recent story.
In 1996, we received a group of original documents of the fascist regime having to do with what today we call the EUFA problem.
In other words, these documents were analyzed through forensic analysis, and they are authentic.
And they simply mention several sightings of what at that time in Italy was called unconventional flying vehicles.
You see, in that time, the fascist regime thought that these objects were simply a new weapon of another European country, that is England, France, or Germany, obviously.
But of course, they were not.
These documents mention a crash landing of one of these objects in Lombardy, in northern Italy, in 1933.
But what is much more impressive are the reports of definite sightings.
For instance, one is very, very important over Venice and Maestre in 1936, in August.
And in this case, we have an elongated, gigantic air object, followed by two smaller objects having the shape of a military British war helmet.
And this, the classic flying source with a cupola and with a dome.
And this sighting was probably the most impressive.
It was in broad daylight.
The objects were followed by two planes of the Royal Italian Air Force.
But of course it didn't work because the object left and that's exactly what happened.
In spite of this, consider that all these sightings were the object of studies by a secret group of scientists and astronomers created by Benito Mussolini because he thought, as I told you, that these objects were a new secret weapon of another European country.
So Mussolini, for those who don't know perhaps, was the Hitler of Italy.
He was the great dictator, Ild Duce.
And he thought that there was some kind of defense significance to this.
In fact, just as America now believes that there's a possibility that whatever is flying over the skies of the United States and over its aircraft carriers might be some kind of defense threat from maybe another nation, Mussolini's first threat was that maybe the Americans or maybe the British or maybe the Russians or somebody else had technology that the Italians didn't have and he wanted to find out what it was.
Well, consider that at that time, the Italian Air Force was extremely advanced.
In fact, consider that the aerial cruise by Balbo, who had, you see, the crossing of the Atlantic towards North and South America, impressed the world very much at that time.
So consider that after all, the Italian Air Force was in a very good position.
What Mussolini did not accept was the idea that someone else could have had a better condition or position, you see.
And in fact, don't remember that, for instance, in 1939, the Italians developed the first official jet.
And in spite of the fact that some months before, also the Germans did this.
Really?
You know, I didn't know that.
always thought that the Germans developed the jet engine, so that's interesting.
yes, was not informed of the German invention.
It was an Einkel plane.
They did not mention it because they considered this a military secret.
The Italians, on the contrary, well, developed this plane and admitted it existed.
This is the simple difference.
But you see, what is interesting is that this study group, this aeronautic study group, was headed by Guglielmo Marconi.
At that time, Marconi was the chairman of the Royal Science Academy, and so it was rather normal that this happened.
Right, so this is Marconi, the pioneer of radio, who was involved.
Exactly, exactly, yes, yes, yes.
And up to 1940, there were studies about these sightings by the Italians.
Of course, everything was secret.
Consider that in Italy At that time, we had a dictatorship, and of course, these events were completely unknown to the normal people.
What is interesting is that these studies later, when the war broke off, well, were inherited at a certain extent by the Germans, of course.
And in fact, consider that there were some attempts to build new planes with a different concept.
For instance, there was a sort of flying saucer made, excuse me, studied by a German engineer, Mitte, and an Italian engineer, Belluzzo.
We have only the design of this, but of course it was never built.
Is there any suggestion, Roberto, that some of this advanced technology that Italy was developing and sometimes hand in hand with Germany might have come from, for example, that crash in 1932?
Yes, yes, that's correct.
Because you see, today we think normally that the first UFO crash was the Roswell UFO crash.
Well, probably it is not so.
There are other UFO crashes, and today they began to materialize in our researches.
For instance, it seems that even the Battle of Los Angeles in 1942 had something like that, because there is a letter of General Marshall to the President of the United States mentioning that after the Battle of Los Angeles,
two unknown objects were downed and recovered by the United States Navy and by the United States Army.
And there is also another letter by President Roosevelt, just some months before he died, mentioning this aerial objects.
And what is this?
Nobody knows, you understand.
Besides, there is also the story that UFO crash may have occurred also in Germany during the war.
And then there are other UFO crash later in the United States after Roswell, surely.
So it's a long story.
It's a long story, but what it shows also is that what we call modern ufology goes back an awful lot further.
I'm sorry to interrupt here.
It goes back an awful lot further than we thought.
In fact, I even read reports when I was doing some research for this, Roberta, and you can tell me whether this is correct as far as we know, that there are reports from Italy of potential UFO sightings in pre-Christian times.
Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Consider that, well, there is a Roman author, Julius Subsequence, who wrote the Book of Prodigies.
And he collected all the mysterious phenomena of his age.
And there are really a lot of phenomena, very, very similar to the Eupho phenomena of today.
Absolutely.
They called these flying objects clipe ardentes, which means shining or fiery shields.
And also trabes ignite, which means fiery elongated objects, more or less.
In other words, what later was called the mother ships and five saucers in the 50s and 60s were absolutely described in the book of Julius Obsequence.
And we often think when we look at UFO research and UFO writings that there is some indication that if there are extraterrestrial forces or nations, races out there, they are often interested in power and military capability and technology and conflict sometimes.
So it makes sense that perhaps UFOs would appear in the time of Mussolini when Europe was gearing up for war.
And it would make sense that UFOs would appear around the time of the Roman Empire because the Roman Empire was the most powerful regime on earth at the time.
Yes, frankly, I think that this idea is extremely grounded, you see.
After all, consider that the present UFO era began more or less immediately after 1945 with the atomic blasts, you understand, and during the last part of World War II.
Consider that the FU Fighters phenomena over Germany and Japan in 1944 and 1945 were the first manifestation of what today we call the EUFA phenomena.
So it's absolutely correct.
Besides, we may also consider the fact that many military and atomic plants were hovered by UFOs in different situations and years.
And probably this is not by chance.
I think that really we are at a certain extent monitored by someone else from out of Earth.
You knew, I read in your book, your latest book, you were a friend of Monsignor Balducci at the Vatican, who was the man who was interested, we understand, in extraterrestrials and UFOs.
What did he tell you about this?
Because I've always been fascinated in what it is that interests the Vatican in UFOs and in astronomy.
Yes, yes.
Consider that, well, the Vatican is really a very, very curious and perhaps amazing reality from the standpoint of ufology.
You understand, since 1952, the Vatican, well, had a lot of very positive statements about UFOs.
Everything began in 1952 in the United States, when an American Jesuit in an interview said, told to the Catholics of the United States that the idea that flying sources might have been objects piloted by beings from outer space was absolutely not against the
concepts of the Catholic faith.
And this is very curious.
In 1952...
That's interesting.
Yes, but later we saw that in 1960, a very well-known Catholic theologian and Jesuit as well, Father Domenico Grasso, wrote a series of articles about the possibilities of alien life in the universe, intelligent alien life in the universe, in Civilta Católica, which is the official magazine of the Jesuits.
Besides, later, we had also the so-called Specula Vaticana.
Specula Vaticana is the official astronomical observatory of the Vatican.
It was founded, of course, in the 18th century, and many Vatican astronomers were well known.
Father Sacchi, Father Armellini, Father Cassini considered that the probe to Saturn was called the Cassini, in fact.
So the Catholic astronomers were well considered from the standpoint of science.
Did you believe, and from your conversations with Balducci, that the Vatican perhaps knows more?
The Spectrovaticana presently is operating in the United States, no longer in Italy, of course, on Mount Graham with American astronomers.
Probably you know this.
And today, the heads of Speclovaticana often underlined the idea that surely the cosmos is inhabited and considered that even more recently,
Father Gabriel Luis Funes, a Jesuit, an astronomer, when he was nominated chief of Speculovaticana, said that surely one day we will meet extraterrestrial advanced beings.
And when this will happen, we have to consider them our brothers in the universe.
This was published by L'Oce Romano, which is the official newspaper of the Vatican.
Monsignor Balducci was a very close friend of Pope John Paul II.
They discussed on different occasions privately of this situation.
And they told me that the Pope was really thinking that we had visitors from other space.
And so he began to be involved in our UFO Congresses and simply say that from the standpoint of the Catholic faith, it is obvious that today we may accept the idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships.
You understand that such statements, well, are rather extraordinary from the Catholic Church, I would think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But not only consider that more recently, even Pope Francis made something almost incredible in a public audience.
This was, I know this, the one that you're talking about, this was 2014, wasn't it, when he said effectively that if Martians came here… Who would we be to close the door on them?
Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly.
So consider that.
The Vatican even translated the acronym UFO in Latin and identified flying objects in Latin is res inexplicata volantes.
Res inexplicata volantes.
Yes.
Okay, so, I mean, a lot of people have said over many years, Roberto, have questioned why the Vatican needs, I think, two observatories.
The Vatican has the use of two observatories.
And frequently people ask why are they so interested in space if there isn't something that they know that we don't?
Of course, this suspect is extremely legitimate.
But apart from this, consider that on Mount Graham in the United States, in Arizona, the Vatican built a very advanced binocular telescope.
And what is very curious is that the acronym of this telescope is very, very particular.
Because now I don't remember exactly all the term of this acronym, but is this this acronym is very curious because is Lucifer.
Lucifer.
Light, interop, interometer, and so on.
So the acronym for the telescope is Lucifer.
Bringer of life, of light, of course, in this sense.
Well, it seems so.
So I think, you know, I think I've always thought there's a possibility that the Catholic Church knows more than it's telling us at the moment.
And maybe even some of that might have come out in, for example, the prophecies of Fatima and that sort of thing.
Well, today everybody who studies the Euphor problem is aware of the fact that the Fatima phenomena have surely something to do with Euphor phenomena.
Because the last Fatima phenomena, with more than 70,000 people present in COVID area, in broad daylight, well, was showed a sort of luminous phenomenon seen in the skies.
And people considered this the aerial chariots of the Holy Virgin, but of course it was not.
If we see the photographs of this phenomenon, they were even published by Luceberto Romano, by the official newspaper of the Vatican, well, it seems simply a youthful phenomenon, and that's all.
But what is interesting is that this phenomenon was absolutely real and affected in a physical way the place, because consider that 70,000 people witnessed this phenomenon and they were completely wet because of the rain which was falling during the last two hours.
And after this phenomenon occurred, every people present there was no longer wet.
Everything had completely dried up.
So whatever it was had the power to dry off 70,000 drenched, wet people.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Okay, I understand.
Now, in the new book, UFO Contacts Over Italy, Volume 2, you quoted an astonishing statistic, Roberto.
You say that in the 20th century, in other words, in the modern era, there were 13,000 UFO reports.
That's a huge figure.
Yeah, yes, that's correct.
You see, our problem in Italy, more or less, is the language barrier, in the sense that probably I did a good thing collecting the best of EUFO cases during the last century in these two volumes, because otherwise it's hard that English-speaking people may read Italian, of course.
But believe me, during the last century, we had in Italy a lot of extremely important UFO cases, and many of them are really, really important.
Besides, consider that even the Italian Air Force presently is studying the EUFOFR.
No, well, it is not correct, it is not studying, it is collecting EUFO phenomena.
They have more or less 500 reports on file since 1979 up to this year.
But our center collected about 13,000 cases and investigated most of them, of course, in more than 50 years of activity.
So you understand that there is a lot of submerged cases the world knows nothing of.
Well, exactly.
I mean, it seems to me that you spent decades at the Centro Ufologico Nacional investigating these things.
But because, as you say, of the language barrier and the fact that we tend to concentrate on cases in the United States mainly and Canada and some in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, most of us in the English-speaking world know nothing of these cases.
Unfortunately, it is so, you understand.
For instance, we know that Germany is very poor about EUFO cases, but Spain is very rich, and Italy is very rich, and France is very rich.
But probably considering that today English is the most known and is much easier to speak English all over the world, and this is also a limit for the knowledge of all this.
It stops the stories getting out there, but isn't it funny that the word that we use for English being an international language is the phrase we use is lingua franca?
Yes, in fact, which is not English.
English is very simple.
Everybody may easily speak English.
So it's normal that English is becoming also the language of internet and so on.
But what is important is that all the most important reports are translated into English and known everywhere.
And that's precisely what you've done.
If you're okay with this, I'd like to go through some of the cases in the new book, and they start in 1979.
So if you're all right with that, I would like to go through some of these cases.
The first one is June 1979.
The Italian Air Force Senior Warrant Officer Giancarlo Ciccioni, or is it Ciccioni?
Ciccone, was returning to base.
He was doing photo reconnaissance over the Apennine Mountains.
He was over the area between Rovigo and the hills of Urbano-Terme, and he received a radio signal from radar operators at an airfield who detected an unidentified object moving through the sky at low altitude.
Now, this is a fascinating case, and it was covered up, apparently, wasn't it?
Well, but it was more or less normal that it was considered a secret, of course.
Consider that in this case, we have also more than 80 photographs of this object, because the jet involved in this incident, the Italian Air Force jet involved in this incident, had a gun camera mounted on the plane.
So Cecoli was able to snap dozens of photos, you understand.
And only many, many years later, we had some of these official photographs.
And in my book, I publish the most impressive.
And they are.
I mean, there's a description here.
And as you say, he took about 80 photographs.
The object was eight meters.
That's 24 feet long, three meters, which is, what, nine or 10 feet wide.
It was cigar in shaped, cigar-shaped.
Its upper part was flattened.
It had a small white transparent dome, looking like a drop of water, teardrop or something like that, in the center of it.
And the rest of it was opaque and black.
And apparently this was dismissed later, but only later when I think you in the five or six years after this wrote letters to the defense ministry or the air ministry in Italy.
And in the end, they said it was a cylindrical balloon made from plastic bags.
It was a...
If the object had been a balloon, it would have exploded.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, if the jet had circled it in that way.
What happened to Giancarlo?
What happened to the pilot?
No, he's still alive.
Well, he left the Italian Air Force and became later an instructor, a plane instructor for the Libyan Air Force.
Well, they paid a lot, you understand.
But apart from this, well, he lives in Italy and is still alive.
Does he ever talk about this case now?
Yes, but you see, we had some of this official photography from the Italian Minister of Defense.
But since there was this attempt to explain all this in a normal way, let's call in this way,
then Ciaccone gave us the photograph in his possession, because he was in possession of one of the photographs, since when he landed, he asked his colleagues to give him one of these photographs.
So they gave him one of the pictures.
So one of them, you were able to proceed.
This is not correct from the standpoint of military life and rules, you understand.
But he had this photograph and he kept it.
And what does he believe that he saw?
Well, frankly, he did not know what to believe, but one thing is certain.
The object was a sort of unknown plane, but completely different.
So, well, he did not accept any other kind of possible explanation.
And he said true, and that's all.
And the interesting thing about this case, even though it was covered up subsequently, is that it was noted by the airport in Treviso province.
So even it wasn't just within the military, it was the airport in Treviso who also noted that this thing was there.
Yeah, that's correct.
Yes, yes, yes.
The control tower ordered Cecconi to investigate because they had the object on the radar and said, what's that?
Please go and investigate.
And Ceconi did not see the object by chance.
He was ordered to near to the target.
So this was something that was big.
A lot of people knew it was there.
It was tracked on radar.
And this pilot was ordered to go and check it out, which he did.
And then subsequently, it was all denied and explained as something that was just a balloon made of plastic bags.
Yes, they tried originally to present this possible explanation, but of course it is ridiculous.
And besides, consider that presently, the Italian Air Force filed this case as unidentified.
So this is the final consideration to do.
Four days after that, in 1979, which seems to have been a very busy period, that period 79 to 80, you describe the Rainbow 2, a yacht which encountered, and there are quite a few stories like this in your book.
Yeah, a USO, an unidentified submerged object.
Do you want to tell me about that?
Oh, well, simply, it was in the broad daylight, after all.
There was this yacht, the Rainbow 2, and Well, the captain saw a strange object in the sea just in front of the yacht.
And this thing was extremely big, but it was not a submarine, absolutely.
And so, well, he did not want to do.
The people on the yacht saw the object, and the owner of the yacht asked the captain to go on straight towards this object.
This object, well, entered the water, it passed beneath the yacht and was seen in the rear part, from the rear part of the yacht going away, you understand.
And so they reported all this to the Italian Navy, and there are the official reports of this and also what the Italian Navy said in this occasion.
There was a notice to everybody to watch because there was a floating object in the Mediterranean Sea.
They know nothing about this.
So the Navy alerted other naval ships and other people at sea to look out for whatever this was.
Yeah, in fact, I publish also the official documents, you understand.
And how was that, you know, we talked about that first case with the pilot.
That was dismissed as being unexplained, or it was explained as being unexplained.
How was this defined?
Well, it was defined an unidentified floating object in the sky, and that's all.
But you see, consider that unidentified submerged objects in Italy are often reported.
Consider that in Italy we have five seas, five different seas from circling Italy.
So it's normal that this happened.
Well, you've got a huge amount of coast there, so there's plenty of space.
Do you think that strange phenomena like this are more likely to be seen around Italy?
Because, of course, people forget this, but there are military bases, not only Italian ones, American bases, I think maybe the British have a base there, but there is a military presence up and down the coast.
Yes, but you see, this kind of phenomena, nothing to do with normal activity of the Americans.
No, I'm just wondering whether, you know, something might be interested in I remember hearing the radio station from there was Vicenza.
In Sicily, there is a Sigonella or in Sardinia or also in Taranto.
Yes, there are NATO bases in our country, of course.
Consider that, for instance, well, I investigated also a recent case near Marina di Pisa, that is Pisa, and probably it was a sort of a probe.
This object was on the beach, near Pisa, was seen.
Then this object began to hover the beach, and then it entered the water and was seen in the water getting away.
So what we call UFO and what we call USO are probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of objects in different moments of their activity.
In other words, these objects in our atmosphere, well, they are what we call UFO.
But when they move in our seas, okay, they are exactly what we call USO.
So in other words, it's all the same thing, but they have the capacity to work.
Whereas we have to have ships that go on the sea and planes that go in the sky, they can go anywhere.
Frankly, I suspect that probably the idea of someone from out Earth coming here and going again and going back to the place from where they belong,
well, maybe it is not correct because probably these objects may have some bases in our oceans and in our seas.
And if it is so, it's hard to find them, you understand?
Well, if they have hidden bases under the ocean, under the sea.
Exactly.
It would be hard to find them.
So this means that they are still here and they are always here, you understand?
Going back to the cases, 1982, you have cars followed by UFOs in Sardinia.
January 82, near Isili, not far from Nuoro in Sardinia, the owner of a local printing house and a girl were in the car one evening.
They observed two strange flying lights emitting luminous signals.
The UFO hovered above the car and the engine developed a fault.
We've heard that before with Betty and Barney Hill, of course.
Then the headlights dimmed.
The driver experienced a strange sensation of weightlessness.
Then the UFO left.
Following the incident, the car's battery proved to be defective, but it was new, shouldn't have been.
Both cases were confirmed by your organization.
What happened there?
You see, when UFOs have to do with, for instance, a car is something extremely interesting.
I will tell you another case, very, very important and very much more impressive.
Recently, we had the possibility to find a secret report sent by our Ministry of Defense in August 1963 to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Why?
Because this case was absolutely exceptional.
Because this case had to do with the private car of the President of the Republic of Italy, Senator Antonio Seni.
In that month, in 1963, in the Italian ships of state's estate in Castel Porziano, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, an object was seen.
It overed the estate and it over the car.
And in the car, there was surely the driver.
But you see, since probably the driver of the President of the Republic is not a guy who used the car of the President of the Republic for his own activity, it is probable that the President was inside the car too.
We had a first knowledge of this case by a witness who told us about this.
But today we have the documents because the Americans, well, considered this secret material sent by the Italians to the Pentagon, well, no longer to be a secret.
So today we may read it.
But not only, there is even the drawing of the object with a dome and three port walls and the car beneath.
It's very, very particular.
But you understand that there is really a lot of cases we know nothing of.
And that would have, if you hadn't found those documents or had access to those documents, you wouldn't have known about that.
And this one involves the president.
They are today available.
The problem is that since the blue book documents were no longer kept secret, you have just to find them because they are thousands of pages, you understand.
And in any case, it's normal that the Americans declassify secret materials of other countries.
Yes, but not always their own.
1983 in the book, you talk of a UFO landing at a place called Varsi.
Yes.
And I'm going to read a little bit of the book, if I may.
Quotes, after having traveled some few meters, grazing the ground, still very, very slowly, the machine rose vertically and reaching a height of 20 to 30 meters above the hill, it halted for a few seconds, giving the impression of almost turning back.
Meanwhile, a sort of gas that it had had vanished rapidly so that I could now see the object again.
The cupola came out spinning anti-clockwise.
Exactly.
And this was seen by a number of people.
Where is Varsi?
Varsi is in northern Italy, between Piedmont and Lombardy in the northeast of Italy.
Excuse me, no, in northwest of Italy.
Yes.
And people saw this object land there.
Yeah, exactly.
What did they see?
Traces, yes.
But you see, probably, if I may mention this, probably one of the most impressive landing case and traces also was investigated directly by me and by a colonel of the Italian army in 1979.
And it is a case occurred in Torrita di Siena in Tuscany.
In this case, we had the landing of one of these objects with two entities coming out of the object.
Two entities.
Exactly.
And they were, well, not too tall, probably one meter and 20 centimeters in height.
And it seems they were twins, but they had a sort of scaffander or helmet.
But apart from this, the witness saw them coming out of the object, observe him, and then returning to the object and leaving.
And the object took off with big speed, a great speed.
But what is interesting is that the object left traces on the ground.
And we succeeded in having obtaining samples of the ground and to have them analyzed by the atomic lab of the European community we have in Italy.
And the result of this analysis was that really The samples were absolutely coherent with what the witnesses said.
In other words, the samples show that they were exposed to the heat of about 600 degrees Celsius for no more than three or four seconds.
And it is exactly what happened, you see.
So as I told you, we have really a lot of important cases.
And in that case, Roberto, that would make you question, you know, what on Earth from Earth could produce those kind of temperatures and that kind of effect?
Well, from the standpoint of the witness, the object was the classic flying saucer with a sort of dome in the upper part.
And when it left, ascending to the sky, three beams of light of different colors were in his inferior part.
And all this affected the ground and so created a sort of effect on the ground.
But today, as far as we know, probably it is a sort of microwave effect.
And in fact, this was also studied in classic and official cases, such as the cases studied by the French in the Trans-Provence case in 1981 by the French official group which studies UFOs
in France, Japan.
So you see that a lot of details are completely coherent, no matter where they occurred.
And I read about this case that you reference in Provence in France in 1981.
I read about that in the book, and that left marks on the ground, a circular stain you describe it as, darker than the surroundings.
And the police again collected samples of soil and vegetation from the impact site.
Exactly.
So a very, very similar case.
In France, they consider it a classic manifestation of the real presence, you for presence on the ground, you understand.
You've got a case from 1984.
This is a close encounter of the third kind at Prato Principato Ultra, Naples.
This is a spaceman, a spaceman wearing a helmet and carrying some kind of fork.
Exactly.
But what is interesting is that the case was investigated by our center, of course, but it was investigated also by Carabinieri, Italy's military police.
And a lieutenant of Carabinieri made a very, very positive report about this, even with drawings and everything.
The principal witness was questioned, of course, and everything was absolutely current.
There are traces of the object.
Also, also, this case is considered by the Italian Air Force and identified, of course.
But this was a creature wearing a spacesuit with a helmet and carrying some kind of implement or fork.
That's extraordinary.
Yeah, it's very, very curious.
I wonder what he was doing, really, because nobody knows.
Okay, 1993, you have a case of, quotes, unidentified flying humanoids that were encountered, if I have this right, by five members of a fire brigade team in a helicopter who were on a training flight from Pescara airport.
Yes, yes.
And this was a close encounter there.
They saw something which is, well, it's hard to define this.
I suspect that the concept of a flying humanoid, as someone calls this kind of phenomena, may be or a sort of robot-like probe,
or really some individual able to fly.
And you see, for instance, in 1974, we had a very interesting case of a very curious object, very little, like a sort of chair or something, with a humanoid on it flying over a symmetry, for instance.
So probably we are also facing the reality of unknown entities.
Well, indeed, I mean, I've never heard of flying humanoids, but you talk about them in your book.
There was one in 1997.
I'm really excited about this.
Yes, but if you consider later, later, many other cases all over the world occurred.
Really?
Well, this one is from 1997.
Superhuman humanoid observed in the country near Florence, reported by Mauro Paoletti, May the 18th, 1997.
A direct sighting, it says, in the book, of a flying man in broad daylight.
Really?
Okay, that's Correct, yes.
Well, I mean, that's I've never, in all of the interviews that I've done, I've never heard of flying humanoids.
Maybe I just haven't been doing the right interviews.
No, no, in Italy, we have several cases, but as I told you before, if you may verify this, there are a lot of similar cases also in Latin America, for instance, and also in other countries.
But it is another form of youth activity.
Before, we did not notice phenomena of these kinds.
It is a more recent phenomena from the 90s on.
Now, isn't that interesting?
So I wonder what that is all about.
The last case I want to talk about is from 2006, 14 years ago.
This is an Italian pilot, April, and well, it was in between April and May 2006.
An Italian pilot flying a P-66C aircraft 2,500 feet high experienced a close encounter between Fornia and Gaeta, I think it is, the Tyrannian Sea.
3 o'clock in the afternoon, he noticed an enormous flying mass above his plane.
Its length, and I quote here, says the length was comparable to a chain of four or five buses, and the height was similar to a two-story building.
The shape was triangular.
Now, that is extraordinary, but it isn't the first time that I've heard of something huge and triangular like that.
We've had those off the UK.
For instance, even one of the presidents of our center, a former general in the Italian Air Force, when he was a flight instructor in the Italian Air Force, experienced a close encounter in the night.
He saw a gigantic object green over his plane and he simply did not what to do.
Suddenly this object spin away and disappeared and he remained there without knowing what to do, you understand.
A lot of pilots have this experience, but the problem is that in many occasions, if they report, had reported this, their destiny would have to be questioned, to be questioned also by psychologists and so on.
And this means also that they could not fly for at least two or three weeks before everything was clear.
So that's why a lot of pilots don't report these things.
Like this.
Do you remember that in a world-famous movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Spielberg?
There is a moment in which UFOs are observed by radar, by a tower, and at last the question is, okay, shall we report this?
Everybody stands still, and then they say, no, no, no, it's not the case.
Now, just as we end this, Roberto, and I agree with you that a lot of people don't report these things even in this day and age because of fear that it might affect their career or they might be ridiculed or whatever.
But just there is a memory I have that may be wrong, and I think it's fairly recent, where an Italian pilot is said to have chased a UFO in fairly recent years.
Are you aware of that story?
I might be completely wrong about this.
Excuse me, in what year?
It would have been within the last decade, certainly.
Well, in the last decade, well, An Italian, Alitalia pilot, who had a close encounter with an unknown object over England.
And you know, he suspected that he could have been a massile, but it was not, absolutely.
And there is, in the book I mentioned this, there is also the different documents about this.
He reported the case.
And it's very, very impressive, really.
Okay, this one I think is from the book, and I'm just looking at it here.
It was 1993, wasn't it?
Because I think it was also investigated by the British Ministry of Defense.
Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly.
So, you know, these things are very, very common.
And I'm glad that you're doing your bit, as we say here, to get all of these Italian cases and cases involving Italians out to the world.
Because otherwise, because they're in a different language, they're documented in Italian, we wouldn't get to hear about them.
So I think you're doing some good work here.
Thank you.
I did my best.
I just tried to choose the best in order to cover the last century, more or less.
In fact, the book is updated to this year, to this year, even in spite of the fact that we cannot have, for instance, congresses, because it's impossible in this moment.
No, you can't have meetings at the moment.
So you said the book is updated to this year.
What is the last case?
What date is the last case in the book?
Well, well, well, well, well, well.
And this is very impressive.
You may read it, in fact.
It's a sort of summary of the latest years about the data they have on files.
And this is very interesting.
After all, you see, the Italian Air Force, well, they do not study UFOs.
They simply say that since something strange is reported in our skies, their duty is to mention what is not explained.
And this is exactly what they do.
Not too bad, after all.
Well, Roberto, I'm very pleased that we had this conversation and that we went through some of the cases.
There are many, many more cases in the book.
It's beautifully put together.
You've obtained documents and photographs and testimonials from people.
And I think you did a great job with the book.
The book is called UFO Contacts Over Italy, Volume 2.
There is also a Volume 1, and it is published by Flying Disc, isn't it?
Okay.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Roberto.
Please take care and give my love to beautiful Florence.
Thank you.
Thank you again.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, some amazing cases there that I'd heard nothing about.
What about you?
From Roberto Panotti.
And his book is called UFO Cases Over Italy, Volume 2.
There's also a Volume 1.
And there's a book about the Mussolini years of investigation, secret investigation, which we heard about, of UFOs and strange phenomena in the sky and elsewhere.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until we meet next here on The Unexplained Online, please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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