A senior U.S. intelligence official claims that U.S. World War II forces recovered a UFO that crashed in Italy in 1933. An Italian researcher shared documents that would prove the alleged crash of a UFO that occurred in the north of the European country 14 years before the famous Roswell incident in the United States.
Roberto Pinotti, president of the Italian National Ufological Center (CUN), obtained documents that, according to him, would prove the June 13, 1933 crash and the alleged existence of a secret department created by the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, to study the alleged flying saucer.
“Me and my colleague Alfredo Lissoni started investigating the story of the 1933 UFO crash in Lombardy in 1996 when we received some original secret documents about the case,” Pinotti told the Daily Mail.
Pinotti’s research was first published in 2000 in Italy, where it was met with skepticism.
The documents were mysteriously mailed to Pinotti by an anonymous source who claimed to have inherited them from a relative who worked on Mussolini’s alleged UFO program.
They include two telegrams in Italian from June 1933, one demanding “absolute silence” about an “alleged landing on national soil of unknown aircraft.”
Another, dated June 13, threatens “immediate arrest” and “maximum penalties” for any journalist who reports on an “aircraft of unknown nature and origin.”
The second telegram says: “The immediate recasting of all newspaper reports disseminating such news is ordered.”
Both claim to be Mussolini’s “personal order.”
Other documents sent to Pinotti, which were shared with the Daily Mail, refer to a mysterious government department called “Gabinetto RS/33″, or RS (Special Investigation) Cabinet 33, supposedly created by the Italian dictator to handle the recovery and study of the alleged saucer wreckage, as well as other UFO incidents.
Pinotti claims that RS/33 was headed by inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Nobel Prize winner and inventor of the radio.
To date, Italian historians and UFO researchers have found no other evidence of this alleged shadow group or Marconi’s involvement in the alleged program.
Pinotti also received handwritten notes on government agency letterhead dated August 22, 1936, which included a sketch and description of a cylindrical aircraft with portholes on its sides and red and white lights sighted flying over northern Italy.
After reconstructing the mysterious documents, Pinotti determined that the crash occurred in Magenta, just outside Milan. The alleged wreckage of the alien craft would have been stored at SIAI Marchetti in Vergiate, an aeronautical facility near the alleged crash site.
Skepticism
Pinotti claimed that he could authenticate at least some of his documentation.
The Italian researcher had one of his documents, dated 1936, analyzed by a forensic expert who concluded that the paper and ink were from that era. The 1933 telegrams have not been examined.
“After four years of research and a forensic analysis that proved the documents were actually written in the 1930s, we published a detailed report in a book,” Pinotti told the Daily Mail. “The evidence speaks for itself. And it shows that the first world leader to officially (albeit secretly) confront the UFO problem was not President Harry Truman with the Roswell incident in the United States, but Italy’s Benito Mussolini,” he added.
However, skeptics have pointed out that paper and ink of the time may have been used to forge the papers and that they bear no protocol numbers or official stamps that would help verify them as real government documents, looking instead more like personal memos.
Even other Italian UFO researchers have dismissed the story. Giuseppe Stilo, a member of the Italian Center for UFO Studies, told Vice News Italia: “From a scientific point of view, these are shameful stories. Any historian would pale at seeing how they pretend to prove one thing or another.”
British historian Graeme Rendall, who has written books on UFO sightings in World War II, told the Daily Mail that he believes the evidence is inconclusive.
Connection to recent u.s. revelations
Still, the alleged 1933 incident has taken on new significance as an indicator of the reliability of the claims of David Grush, a senior U.S. intelligence official who shocked the world last month by revealing an alleged secret U.S. UFO recovery program.
Grusch, a former top official of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), claimed that one such alien craft crashed in northern Italy in 1933 and was hidden by Mussolini before being captured by U.S. forces at the end of World War II and sent to the United States.
It was the only UFO crash case Grusch described as authentic.
“In 1933, a bell-shaped craft about ten meters in size was recovered in Magenta, northern Italy. The Mussolini government kept it until 1944 when it was recovered by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, former U.S. intelligence agency),” he told the French newspaper Le Parisien last month.
The site where the craft would have been stored miraculously avoided regular bombing by Allied forces during World War II, and 12 years later, in 1945, the region was secured by U.S. and British troops.
Grusch claims that at that time, the alleged craft was sent to the United States, the first time a saucer was recovered.
“Ironically, it predates anything the public has heard about for decades, like Roswell, etc.,” he said.
Despite the skepticism surrounding the case, the former head of the U.S. government’s UFO investigation unit told the Daily Mail that authorities are taking the case “seriously.”
“The incident is something we have taken seriously and continue to take seriously,” said Lue Elizondo, who helped lead AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Department of Defense until 2017.
However, the Defense Department denied through spokeswoman Susan Gough that the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), an expanded version of the task force that Grusch was part of, has “uncovered any verifiable information that substantiates claims that programs to possess or reverse engineer extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist today.”