Script

The air in Milan that October evening carried the first chill of autumn, but the light was still warm on the buildings along Corso Buenos Aires. It was 1944 and a young soldier walked the sidewalk without hurrying, the tram tracks humming faintly ahead of him. He had places to be, but there was nothing so urgent to attend to that it required he ignore the relative peace of the evening. Then he heard voices start rising around him. 

Shouts erupted from up and down the street. Hands pointing skyward. Some civilians on the street were already stumbling toward the nearest shelter entrance, others in uniform fumbled to draw the pistols they carried. All voices were strident - “It’s an attack! Look up!” 

He looked. 

Three hundred meters directly above Piazzale Loreto, a copper-colored disk hung motionless in the clear sky. It had the exact shape of a frying pan — round, shallow, with no handle, no rivets, no markings of any kind. It shone with a steady, unnatural light, as if the metal itself were luminous. There was no sound from it. No propeller wash. No drone of an engine. The disc simply occupied the air. 

The young soldier did not run. 

He had been trained in the special units of the Decima — an elite Italian naval commando unit renowned for its daring raids using human guided torpedoes, explosive motorboats, and frogmen that inflicted significant damage on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean. 

He could identify every aircraft the enemy flew, every weapon they carried, at distances far greater than this. This was not one of them. Nor was it a barrage or sounding balloon.  And certainly, it was not an airplane – it hung in the sky, unnaturally still.  Its design did not even hint at any secret weapon he had been briefed on. 

The air raid sirens began their long, rising wail. 

He stayed on the sidewalk, head tilted back, while the street around him emptied. The anti-aircraft batteries would be tracking it now. They would start firing in seconds. 

But the disk did not move. It did not climb. It did not turn.  It just hovered, ignoring gravity. 

Then it was simply not there. 

One moment it occupied the space above the square. The next, the space was empty. No trail. No fade. Just absence. 

The sirens kept wailing, before winding down into silence. People began to emerge from the shelters, looking at each other, at the sky, at the place where the thing had been. Traffic resumed its slow crawl. No one had an explanation. 

Hundreds had seen it. The anti-aircraft crews had seen it. And not one of them could say what it was. 

The young soldier who stayed on the sidewalk in Corso Buenos Aires that twilight never received an explanation. The craft simply hovered silently over the city.  When it vanished, the sirens stopped and ordinary traffic resumed, as if the interruption had never occurred. He carried the memory of its color, size, and impact for the rest of his life. 

That was 1944, in a country split between Germans in the north and Anglo-Americans army in the south, with fascists and partisans fighting in between. The country was at the end of a long, brutal war.  Still, Italian pilots and soldiers had been reporting the same sightings – without any reasonable explanation - for nearly a decade. 

I’m MF Thomas, and this is My Dark Path through the unexplained. This is Season 6, Episode 86, Italian Disclosure Day of 1933.  

I’ve been deep in research for an upcoming episode on the 1933 Italian Magenta UFO crash, named for the town west of Milan where the UFO and alien corpse recovery reportedly occurred.  During my investigation, I kept stumbling across other Italian cases from the same era — sightings that appeared in a series of reports often known as the Fascist UFO files. Beyond the Magenta crash, Italy in the 1930s and early 1940s was no stranger to objects in the sky that trained observers could not explain. From night training flights over the Mediterranean to the streets of Milan and the brutal front lines of the Gothic Line, pilots and soldiers kept encountering craft that matched nothing in their manuals or their training.   

So, let’s go to the date of August 22, 1936 — eight years before the events in Milan — near Mestre and the Venice Lagoon.  This day would see a series of UFO encounters throughout the northern part of Italy – encounters will astonishing similarities.   

Dawn had not yet burned the last mist from the lagoon when the first calls reached the Prefecture of Venice. A metallic disk, clean and shining, ten to twelve meters across, held position in the sky over Mestre. It generated no sound.  Military observers called the nearby airbase, requesting an urgent intercept. 

Two pilots of Italian air force – called the Regia Aeronautica - ran for the nearest aircraft at San Nicolò del Lido air base. The Italian pilots were likely flying the Fiat CR.32 biplane fighters.  They were the fastest interceptors the base could put into the air in minutes. Fabric-covered wings stretched between struts and bracing wires. Open cockpits. The pilots pulled on leather helmets and goggles, swung into the narrow seats, and felt the familiar vibration as ground crews pulled the chocks. The Fiat A.30 V12 engines barked to life, propellers blurring, the cold slipstream already tearing at the pilots’ faces even as they taxied. 

They took off quickly and climbed toward the disk. It had not moved since it had first been sighted, but now, the two approaching aircraft forced a reaction.  The disc leapt into motion, rocketing away from the approaching biplanes.  Even at full throttle, the biplanes strained to catch up.  

One pilot later reported they were flying at 130 kilometers per hour and still lost ground. The disk simply accelerated away — silent, effortless, leaving the fighters far behind. One interceptor had been near enough to take a few photographs.  

Within mere minutes of the their arrival, the disc had disappeared and the airplanes, after circling the water for a time, returned to their base.  

Those negatives left the aircraft almost before the pilot’s boots touched the tarmac. They did not go through normal squadron channels or routine intelligence desks. Reportedly, the plates showed a bright, featureless disk with no markings and no visible means of lift or propulsion.  They traveled under seal — in a locked courier pouch, marked for immediate hand delivery — directly to Galeazzo Ciano.   

In the summer of 1936, Galeazzo Ciano was not merely another minister. He was Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, married to the Duce’s daughter Edda, and he had just been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Every major question of war, peace, alliance, or foreign threat passed across his desk. The regime’s response to the Magenta crash 3 years earlier was immediate and total. That same day the Agenzia Stefani — Mussolini’s official news agency — fired off a series of urgent telegrams. One, marked “Top Secret — Lightning — Priority Above All Priorities” “Riservatissimo — Lampo — priorità su tutte le priorità,” carried the personal order of the Duce: absolute silence was to be imposed on any report of a mysterious aircraft - that had overflew or landed on Italian soil. Maximum penalties, up to referral to the Tribunal for the Defense of the State, awaited journalists or personnel who spoke. A follow-up telegram instructed editors to treat the event as nothing more than a meteor confirmed by the Brera Astronomical Observatory. A third telegram stopped circulation of the story entirely. The Magenta cover-up was coordinated at the highest levels.  But that is a story for another day. 

And three years later, the same dictate from Mussolini’s government remained in place – any unidentified flying object was to be treated with the utmost secrecy. 

As the evidence bypassed every intermediate layer and went straight to Ciano told every officer who handled the pouch that this sighting had already been elevated to the highest level of the regime. 

While this unidentified disc sighting and its photographic evidence was still being pursued in Venice, pilots from other Regia Aeronautica units based further northeast — at Campoformido close to the Slovenian border — reported a second, mysterious object in the sky. 

This sighting originated with Italian pilots already inflight.  One of these was a pilot named Marinelli. He was flying that morning with his unit when an extraordinary object appeared ahead and slightly above his altitude. The first object he saw was a long, gray metallic tube — what the report would later call an “aerial torpedo.”  It moved steadily and relentlessly across their field of view. It had the color of slate and showed no rivets or seams that any of the pilots could make out. Along its side ran a row of rectangular openings. From these openings came light that shifted from white to red and back again in a regular rhythm, described at the time like signal lamps but far brighter and larger. 

As the planes approached the cylinder, they were stunned to see two smaller objects flying in formation behind the cylinder. Marinelli immediately thought they looked like the kind of broad-brimmed hats worn by priests in Italy at the time. They were disc shaped with a dome in the middle. 

Like the mothership, they appeared metallic, with no visible markings, yet the two discs poured thick white smoke that trailed behind them in long, straight plumes. The smoke did not billow or disperse the way smoke from an engine or flare normally would. It held its form as if it were being laid down deliberately. 

The pilots swung into position to follow the 3 unidentified objects and watched as they maintained continued to fly in perfect formation.  The two domed craft never drifted, never corrected, never showed the small adjustments any pilot would expect from human pilots and aircraft flying in formation. They simply held their places beside the torpedo shaped craft with the expertise of an experienced flight team. 

Marinelli and the other pilots in his flight pushed their throttles forward to keep up with the three UFOs. Their own engines roared, the biplane wings vibrating in the slipstream, the wind loud against their goggles and helmets. Yet the formation ahead gave no sign it had noticed them. The craft produced no sound that carried over the noise of their own aircraft. There was no exhaust plume, no propeller blur, no change in pitch or tone. The three objects simply continued on their course at a speed the Italian pilots could not match. 

The pilots watched until the objects were lost in the distance, finally losing them in a massive cloud.  Dumbfounded by their sighting, they returned to their base and they filed reports with careful, technical language, describing the size, the lights, the smoke, the perfect formation flying, and the complete absence of any sound or visible means of propulsion. The reports moved upward immediately. By the end of the day they had reached the same desk that had already received the photographs of the disk over Mestre.  And, like the others, they were for the eyes of Galeazzo Ciano and, through him, the Duce himself. 

But the day of anomalies over Mestre were still not over.  That afternoon, a soldier by the name of Faustino, watched a metallic cylinder flying slowly but at a high altitude. It was longer than any fighter he knew, with a truncated-cone nose and a blunt rear – just like the one seen earlier in the morning by Marinelli. Openings along its side emitted yellow and red light.  But Faustino witnessed something the pilots hat not – he watched in amazement as the the cylindrical UFO released smaller disc-shaped craft topped with domes detached and moved on their own.  

Faustino reported his sighting but without knowing of the other sightings that had occurred that day.  The Venice Prosecutor’s Office briefly opened an inquiry and then closed it without a trace. Total silence was ordered for military and civilian alike. The Duce wanted the matter shutdown — it would be studied in silence and kept from every eye that did not need to know. 

No doubt, all of these observers had heard the rumors that circulated in the officers’ mess after the Magenta recovery — the sealed hangars at Vergiate, the hurried creation of the RS/33 group, the quiet removal of anyone who asked too many questions. Each understood immediately what speaking beyond the minimum reporting would cost them and their families.  

A single letter home, a misplaced word in the mess, and he would become the next problem the Duce’s special cabinet was required to solve. So each observer said nothing. They never again spoke of that day in any official channel, even though the images of what they saw returned to each of them for the rest of their lives. 

These accounts would likely have stayed buried if not for the work of Italy’s Centro Ufologico Nazionale. In the mid-1990s its founder and president, Roberto Pinotti — a former NATO intelligence officer turned one of Europe’s most serious ufologists — began receiving anonymous packages from a source who identified himself only as Mister X, claiming to be an heir to one of the RS/33 members. Inside were the very documents we have been tracing: Mussolini’s personal telegrams ordering absolute silence, the 1936 handwritten report and sketches by the informant known as Andrea depicting the cigar-shaped craft and its two metallic “hats” over Mestre and Venice, and the first explicit references to the secret scientific cabinet itself. Working with researcher Alfredo Lissoni, Pinotti submitted key pages to forensic examination; the paper and ink were judged consistent with the 1930s. Though other Italian groups, notably the CISU, have long argued the files are an elaborate forgery, it was the CUN that gathered these scattered fragments, tested what it could, and brought them into the light at the 2000 World UFO Symposium in San Marino — ensuring Italy’s pre-Roswell encounter would not vanish into the night.  Their book, Gli “X-Files” del Nazifascismo.  Mussolini e gli UFO, is the source of much of this material.  Unfortunately it’s only published in Italian and so I’ve been using AI to help translate it.  The Magenta story is the crown jewel of the sightings found in the book. 

What are we left with today from these Italian encounters?  Like many documented stories of UFOs from the past centuries, there is little to substantiate these events beyond what is already published.  And so, we keep searching.  

I’m MF Thomas.  Thanks for joining me in this episode of My Dark Path through the unexplained.  Until next time my friends, good night.