Italian UFO Wave of 1978

Background

Italy had a steady trickle of UFO reports through the 1960s and 1970s, handled mostly by civilian groups such as the Centro Ufologico Nazionale (CUN) rather than by the state. Italian ufology was organised early and was unusually active in pressing officials for information, which shaped how the 1978 events were recorded and argued over. The wave drew attention to a country that had largely left UFO reporting to volunteers.

The 1978 wave

The sightings were concentrated in the second half of 1978. The most-cited figures come from the American researcher Richard Hall, who, as summarised by the URECAT catalogue, placed more than 500 cases in the period from roughly October 1978 to early January 1979, including about 130 close encounters and 25 involving humanoid beings. An Italian source gives a much smaller figure of 69 sightings logged by the Air Force for 1978. The two numbers are not measuring the same thing and cannot be reconciled from the available material.

The best-known case is the sighting at Mount Etna on the night of 4 July 1978, around 22:30. Four witnesses, described in catalogues as military personnel from Catania, reported three pulsating red lights, one of which reportedly landed behind a slope about 300 metres away. The object was described as a domed disc roughly 12 metres across, with tall, fair-haired beings in white robes and smaller figures in helmets. The Patrick Gross ufology catalogue notes that Richard Hall, writing in the MUFON Journal, observed the witnesses had attended lectures by a local contactee. Gross concludes that the account is probably a cult-related invention, a judgement that is his and not a settled finding.

Other cases from the year include a reported hovering object at the Brindisi air base in December 1978 and the abduction claim of Pier Fortunato Zanfretta near Genoa, which is covered in its own entry. Several of these reports come only from secondary catalogues, and the primary records are hard to find.

Official response

The Italian government's handling is documented in a Flying Saucer Review article on the Italian Ministry of Defence, a document that is reproduced on the ufoscans archive. It says the Ministry first denied that UFO reports existed and later released files on six sightings from 1977 only after pressure from CUN. The same account covers the Elmas case at Sardinia's air base, where the Air Force later said the object had been an aircraft on an ordinary flight, unidentifiable in twilight conditions.

After the wave, Andreotti's government gave the Air Force responsibility for collecting, verifying and monitoring UFO reports. The Air Force's official UFO page describes the General Security Department as the current office responsible, and says its published archive begins in 2001. Records before that date were being reorganised for future publication. A 2021 Corriere Canadese article on the anniversary of the 2001 release describes Italy as the first country to make such data publicly available.

Assessment

The 1978 wave is significant in two ways. It produced one of the few official UFO-reporting systems in Europe, and it left a body of reports that is large in scale but uneven in quality. The high case counts come from ufology catalogues rather than official records, and the most dramatic cases, such as Etna, depend on witness accounts that were collected decades later and were filtered through contactee and cult circles. Official files show a government that first denied any interest and then accepted a formal role, which is a more interesting story than either a cover-up or a clean bill of health. The wave remains contested: the Air Force's own published data does not settle what the 1978 cases were, and no primary Air Force report for 1978 has been located for this entry.