Script

The mist clung low across the fields west of Magenta, a thin gray veil over the Lombardy plain fifteen miles west of Milan.

It’s just after first light on the thirteenth of June 1933.

A few farmers and laborers were already out on their bicycles, headed to work in the fields or trade in town. Each pedaled the narrow tracks on dirt roads between the fields, a typical morning in the countryside.  Suddenly, a sharp, screeching sound erupted above them.  Something punched through the overcast sky.

It came down fast. Witnesses later struggled to describe it easily.  But they agreed that it was metallic and gray—either a long cylinder with a swollen midsection, narrowing near the rear, or something like two discs locked together into a single craft. Along the flank ran a row of oval openings.  As the craft crashed to earth, those openings flared white, then a deep red before fading black.

The craft had no wings. No propeller. But witnesses heard the roar of the object cutting through the air.

It struck hard enough to tear a long scar in the soft earth, throwing up a spray of soil and broken stalks. The nearest three witnesses stopped their bicycles. Through the settling dust they saw the object resting at an awkward angle, its surface unbroken in places, but smashed in others. 

Two of the men left their bicycles at the edge of the crash and moved forward on foot. The first stepped carefully between the uprooted stalks, the second followed a few paces behind, a third man hung back, still gripping his handlebars – as if ready to flee. As the two drew closer the dust thinned somewhat. The craft’s metal skin caught the morning light in dull, unfamiliar planes. Near it, half-spilled from an opening—lay two figures. 

They were broken and lifeless. At first glance they appeared human, yet something was wrong. They were both tall – perhaps 6 feet – and unusually thin.  Both had fair hair that lay disheveled over their faces. Yet their skin was too smooth, the features too fine despite the trauma of the crash.  Their stillness was absolute.

Now close enough to see entire crash, the first of the men stopped dead still and crossed himself. The second took another step closer, then froze, his mouth open, as if the air itself had thickened in his lungs. The third simply stared where he still stood with his bicycle, the color draining from his face. No one spoke.  Odd mechanical sounds faded, perhaps from the cooling of overheated metal.  Then, for a long moment the only sound was the faint settling of soil still falling from the broken earth around the craft.  And then, the men fled. 

Perhaps today, the witnesses might have surmised they were witnessing something otherworldly.  But in 1933 rural Italy, their expectations drew their attention to other possibilities. To them, it must have been a horrible accident of an unknown aircraft.  And if it wasn’t Italian, it was possibly a secret German design or a spy plane infiltrating Italian airspace.  Their minds were full of these explanations as the news had been full of portentous changes in the world.

Just months ago, Hitler had seized power.  Mussolini – already Italy’s dictator for over a decade - viewed Hitler with a mixture of curiosity and caution, while regarding him as a potential imitator rather than an equal. Mussolini’s regime was heavily invested in aviation and military modernization—exactly the climate in which a strange aircraft falling from the sky would have been treated as matter of state secrecy. In the minds of the witnesses, what crashed that afternoon was simply one more sign that the old order of the world was breaking down.  New, terrible weapons were being prepared for the future European battlefields.

Word of the crashed aircraft spread the way it always does in the countryside: first a shout, a hurried conversation, then a bicycle racing toward the nearest village. By mid-morning the local carabinieri had arrived, soon followed by military units from Milan. The site was sealed off. Civilians were turned back. The few who had gotten close were taken aside and questioned, then told to stay silent, under threat of their lives.

This is the story of the 1933 Magenta UFO Crash and the creation of the secret Cabinet RS 33 tasked with investigating it.

I’m MF Thomas and this is my dark path through the unexplained.

As the Italian military took control of the crash site, its first responders must have had thoughts similar to those of the first civilian observers.  Surely, this crashed aircraft was an incredibly advanced design being developed by their country.  By 1933 Italy had developed one of Europe’s most advanced aerospace industries, with firms such as SIAI-Marchetti, Caproni, and Fiat producing sophisticated aircraft that regularly set world records. 

As the military units investigated throughout the day, they sent a stream of facts back to senior officials in the Italian government.  Now, we can only surmise, but at some terrible moment, a military leader with knowledge of his country’s aerospace programs must have realized that the object and its dead pilots were not Italian nor that of any other world-power.  The object that crashed just outside Magenta was not of earthly origin.

And with that insight, the government demanded that the site be completely locked down to prevent any more news and rumor leaking out.  A cover story of the crashed object and dead pilots was already being written at the highest levels of the Italian government.  And to complete the investigation, Mussolini’s government created a secret group, called RS33, dedicated to the study of anomalous flying objects.

So, how did the story of the Magenta crash come to light?  Is it just another wishful tale from ufologists wanting to exploit another rumor of a UFO crash that predated Roswell in July 1947?  While the recent David Grush testimony has brought the Magenta story into focus, the story actually surfaced decades earlier with the delivery of an unusual package to a famous Italian ufologist.

Let’s jump to the third of February, 1996.

On that morning, at a home in Florence Italy, a mailman dropped a plain envelope through a mail slot. The postage had been paid but the post mark was illegible. It had no return address. The thin package was addressed to Roberto Pinotti who opened it immediately.  Even before he started reading, it was clear to him that the papers inside were decades old. 

Pinotti was a well known Italian ufologist and founder of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale or CUN.  He was born in Venice in 1944, graduated in political science from the University of Florence and served as a reserve officer in the Italian Army.

He spread out the envelope’s contents on his kitchen table. An aged envelope bore the heading of the Senato del Regno — the Senate of the Kingdom.  Across the front, the envelope states in capital letters: Most confidential. For the hands of His Excellency, Galeazzo Ciano alone.  Ciano was a senior government official and son in law of Mussolini.

Folded within the envelope, there were four pages from the same official letterhead, dated 22 August 1936. They were written precise fountain-pen hand and signed simply “Andrea.”

Pinotti read the letter, incredulous.  The old document described a flying disk, ten or twelve meters across, that had appeared over Mestre and Venice on a Monday morning just weeks before. Two fighter aircraft – biplanes at this time - scrambled from a nearby base. Even at one hundred thirty kilometers an hour they could not close the distance as the disk fled. The object made no sound as it flew.

Later that day, observers also witnessed a long gray metallic tube — an aerial torpedo with rectangular windows that flashed alternating white and red light — followed by two smaller, disk-shaped craft that trailed it , trailing thick white smoke.

And then Pinotti read the author’s quiet, chilling instruction: Mussolini himself had read the accounts of these flying objects and ordered absolute silence about the matter. He demanded military and civilian investigation to cease, and all publicity was to be suppressed.

By the way, if you’re interested in this event and the other sighting that occured that day in Northern Italy, watch my video here.

Pinotti, as you might imagine read and reread this astonishing document.  I’m sharing the images of the letters here.  You can find them on my website at mydarkpath.com as well.

Eight days later, another package arrived at Pinotti’s home.  Inside, there’s another letter from 1936 written on the same aged letterhead, signed by Andrea, the author of the first letter Pinotti had examined.

In this letter, the writer Andrea provided more details about the Maestre UFO, disclosing that the Italian air force pilots had taken at least a dozen photos while they pursued it over Venice. Andrea noted that only Mussolini and a handful of others had been able to view the photos. 

And then the letter then obliquely disclosed the Magenta crash.  Pinotti read Andrea’s account that, late on the afternoon of 13 June 1933, the teleprinters of the Agenzia Stefani began to chatter.  The telegram that emerged was short, cold, and absolute. By personal order of the Duce himself, absolute silence was imposed. An unknown aircraft had come down on Italian soil. No one was to speak of it. The official version already prepared for the day’s dispatch would be the only truth permitted. The same command bound every official and every journalist. Anyone who defied it would face the full machinery of the state—the Tribunal for State Security, and whatever followed.

Minutes later a second telegram arrived, sharper still. Any newspaper that had already set the story in type was ordered to melt the plates at once. The news itself was to be stopped before it could breathe.  The prepared cover story was a meteor or a ball of lightning. The wreckage had been moved under guard to the SIAI-Marchetti hangars at Vergiate. A new secret research body had been organized at the University La Sapienza in Rome. Its name: Gabinetto RS/33 — the Cabinet of Special Research and the number indicating the year of its founding.

And the purpose of RS33?  The study of what the documents called “velivoli non convenzionali” — non-conventional flying machines.

In the rooms that received those two telegrams, the air seemed to change. Something had fallen from the sky that afternoon. And the regime had decided that Italy would never be allowed to know it. 

Pinotti digested all of these communications – received across 3 packages over a few months – but he did not rush to publish them or even disclose their existence to the public. Instead, for years he and his colleagues at the Centro Ufologico Nazionale kept the material in quiet circulation among trusted researchers while they tested it. They discovered the paper was consistent with that manufactured in the 1930s. The ink was fountain-pen ink consistent with the time. In March 2000 a formal forensic examination subjected the documents to chemical analysis, accelerated aging tests, and comparison with known authentic papers of the era. The conclusion was unambiguous: the materials were genuine. There was no evidence of modern forgery.

Pinotti’s historical research filled the gaps that the anonymous sender left. Aviation records identified which units could have scrambled over the upper Adriatic in 1936. Linguistic analysis confirmed that terms such as “cacciatori” for fighter pilots matched the usage of the mid-1930s before fading from use in the 1940s. An elderly former infantryman stationed in Mestre, Faustino V., independently confirmed through a CUN researcher that he had seen the long metallic tube and the two trailing disks on the afternoon of 22 August 1936. Searches in the State Archives of Milan turned up records about “suspicious airplanes” and “unconventional aircraft” from the same period.  These were ordinary bureaucratic records that aligned with the extraordinary claims in the letters.

CUN’s research also turned up one potentially corroborating piece of evidence that something odd happened that spring of 1933 outside Magenta.

On 9 July 1933 the popular illustrated weekly La Domenica del Corriere published a dramatic full-page drawing by Achille Beltrame. The scene was set on the open road between Novara and Magenta. Five workers on bicycles, riding home through a sudden thunderstorm, were shown being hurled to the ground by a violent flash. The caption was straightforward and clinical: the men had been struck by lightning; one was seriously injured.

The location of the event was precise. The timing was about the time given for the crash. The victims were ordinary laborers on bicycles—the same kind of local people who, according to the later accounts, had been the first to approach the site. But the account appeared to be a cover story for the crash that the government had offered to the public. This single page article and illustration is regarded as the carefully managed official account released to the public while the wreckage and any recovered bodies were moved to the SIAI-Marchetti hangars to be studied by RS33.

Only when the paper, the ink, the language, the geography, and the independent testimony began to converge did Pinotti and his colleague Alfredo Lissoni bring the material into the open. They presented it at the World UFO Symposium in San Marino in 2000. The anonymous sender—now referred to Mister X—continued to write, always under the same strict conditions of anonymity, claiming a family connection to one of the original members of the RS/33 Cabinet and warning that some of the remaining papers he still had in his possession could still endanger lives if released.  

So what of the RS33 group?  What do we know about it?  Was it a public investigation group like the Condon committee that would be formed in the US decades later?  Or did it operate more like the men in black who stalk the shadows of many US UFO histories.

The RS33 Cabinet’s first responsibility was the investigation of the the damaged metallic craft and the two tall, fair-haired bodies preserved in formalin at the hangar in Verigate.  It’s mandate reportedly widened beyond that single case.  It was to gather every new report of non-conventional flying machines, evaluate them in secret, and ensure that nothing reached the public except the approved explanations—meteor, lightning, optical illusion, or experimental aircraft. Orders of absolute silence moved outward through the political police and the regime’s press agency. Reports from RS33 moved only upward, to Mussolini and a handful of men he trusted.

At the center of investigative effort stood the Duce himself, together with his son in law Galeazzo Ciano and Italo Balbo. Balbo was Italo Balbo was one of Fascist Italy’s most prominent figures: Blackshirt leader and builder of the Italian air force.  On the scientific side, Pinotti’s documents place Guglielmo Marconi at the head of the Cabinet. The Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Academy gave the group an irreproachable name. Whether he attended meetings or merely allowed his prestige to serve as cover is left unclear; some accounts say he was largely absent. Around him the papers name a small constellation of specialists—an astronomer, Gino Cecchini; engineers and professors including Vallauri, Pirotta, Crocco, Severi, Bottazzi and others. Later retellings of the story of RS33 have occasionally added the young Enrico Fermi to the scientific circle. Security and the enforcement of silence belonged to the OVRA.   OVRA is repeatedly described as the enforcement arm that helped seal the crash site, question witnesses, impose silence, and ensure that no unauthorized information reached the press or the public.

In the history books, RS33 itself left no bureaucratic footprint. It had no published budget, no entry in ordinary government directories, and no open scientific output. Its meetings, when they occurred, were said to have been held under strict compartmentalization, sometimes associated with rooms at a university in Rome or, in later claims, the underground facilities at Monte Soratte. What it produced, according to the same source, was a slim internal dossier summarizing the aerial anomalies of the 1930s and a standing set of instructions that kept the public record clean.

Of course, all of this — the structure, the membership, Marconi’s nominal leadership — rests on the anonymous chain of documents that Pinotti starting receiving in 1996. No founding decree, no Academy minutes, no contemporary letter from Marconi, and no file in the State Archives has ever confirmed that the Gabinetto RS/33 existed outside those pages. So, at worst RS33 is an Italian equivalent to the Syndicate from the x-Files - a blank slate on which we can write our most fevered conspiracy theories.  But if the Fascist UFO documents are real, then RS33 was a very successful coverup of the Magenta crash and many other alien encounters in Italy during the interwar period.

Final disposition

Through the first years of the war the Gabinetto RS/33 reportedly pursued its secret mandate. The craft and the two bodies remained under guard at Vergiate. Reports of strange machines in the sky still reached the Cabinet; the orders of silence still went out.

If the recovered machine had been studied with any seriousness, the knowledge gained—however fragmentary—could have fed into Italy’s own aeronautical programs. The SIAI-Marchetti works already stood at the forefront of Italian aircraft design. Engineers working under the highest secrecy might have examined unusual materials, novel aerodynamic forms, or propulsion concepts that did not appear in any conventional manual.

Reportedly, around 1941 the secrecy surrounding the Magenta crash and the work of RS33 began to crack. German intelligence, according to the same documents, took an interest and portions of the RS/33 files moved north to Berlin. The Germans were already experimenting with unconventional aircraft of their own. Anything learned from Magenta would have been examined with care and utilized.

The nature of the Italian/German collaboration has drawn intense speculation.  The V-2 was developed at Peenemünde under the direction of Wernher von Braun. If you’re interested in the subject, you can watch one of my very early videos about it here.  It was a tightly controlled German project from the beginning. Even though Italy was an Axis partner, it never received meaningful technology transfer, production rights, or operational missiles from the program. The guidance systems, the large liquid-fuel engines, and the methods of mass production stayed firmly inside German hands.

Nevertheless, there had been some real cooperation between the two countries in the late 1930s – a fact that some use to speculate that the object in Vergate may have been a part of that technology transfer. Under the Rome-Berlin collaboraiton in aviation technology, technicians and researchers were exchanged, and joint work advanced in aerodynamics and high-speed flight. This is all the while Italian research centers such as Guidonia made real advances in jet and rocket propulsion, and in understanding how air behaves when aircraft fly at very high speeds.

After the armistice of September 1943 the collaboration fractured.

The collapse began two months earlier. On the night of 24–25 July the Grand Council of Fascism voted against Mussolini. The following day King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed him and had him arrested. A new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio opened secret talks with the Allies and signed an agreement on the 3rd of September. When the armistice was announced publicly on 8 September, German forces moved swiftly. They occupied Rome, disarmed Italian units across the peninsula, and rescued Mussolini from captivity. In the north they installed him as the figurehead of a new puppet state: the Italian Social Republic, headquartered at Salò on Lake Garda.

From that moment Italy was divided. South of the front the Allies advanced slowly up the peninsula. North of it, German troops and the remaining Fascist forces of the Social Republic held firm. Through the winter of 1944–45—northern Italy, including Lombardy and the hangars at Vergiate, remained outside Allied control.

Some accounts claim that during those final, desperate months remaining technical material from the Gabinetto RS/33 continued to move toward Berlin.  By the spring of 1945 the Allies broke through. In late April the German armies in Italy surrendered, the Social Republic collapsed, and the hangars at Vergiate no longer answered to any axis power that still held the country.

According to the Pinotti documents and the recent statements of David Grusch, American personnel linked to the Office of Strategic Services reached the site at Vergiate in 1944–45, secured whatever remained of the craft and the associated files, and removed them from Italy. Grusch amplified the story beyond the original Pinotti documents, stating that Pope Pius XII and the Vatican had already back-channeled knowledge of the 1933 Magenta recovery to President Roosevelt years earlier, making the final transfer possible. The two bodies, the metallic wreckage, the internal dossiers of RS33—if they had ever been there—vanished into Allied hands.

The verified historical record is more mundane. The United States never ran an Italian equivalent of Operation Paperclip. Scientific intelligence teams did operate on the peninsula: the Alsos Mission began in Italy in late 1943, its job was to find how how far Axis nuclear reserach had gone.  Other US technical recovery units followed the advancing armies. They interrogated Italian scientists, examined research centers such as Guidonia, and seized documents and equipment related to aeronautics and possible German programs. Their focus was conventional advanced technology and knowledge of the German effort, not the recovery of an exotic craft. No confirmed evidence has ever emerged that an unusual vehicle or non-human remains were among the material taken from Italy.

Claims of Vatican involvement rest entirely on the same contested chain of testimony. Independent checks of Vatican archives have found no supporting documentation for any papal communication about a Magenta recovery or for assistance in transferring such material to the Americans.

In the end, the Magenta crash remains a secret that outlived its keepers.

On the thirteenth of June 1933 something came down west of Milan, and by nightfall the field had already begun to look ordinary again.

If the truth of the crash was a secret weapon, an experimental Italian aircraft, or something from another world, it was buried by people who understood that the safest history is the one that never begins. The episode ends there: not with proof, yet not with dismissal.  On a field near Magenta, the object that had opened the gash in the earth was removed and the earth was covered over.  The sky, by evening, looked as if it had never been interrupted.

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