NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
While the Italian UFO crash story has been circulating around UFOlogical circles since the early ‘00s, it came to the forefront recently when Government UFO Whistleblower David Grusch mentioned it in several interviews.
In some discussions I’ve had with a few people, I attempted to point out there is a problem with Grusch relating this story as true, given we can trace the public origins and the permutations in his version. I would argue that Grusch is retelling a publicly available story. The common rebuttal is that Grusch, and to some extent Lue Elizondo, have access to classified files the rest of us don’t and therefore they saw the reports of the Italian crashed UFO case and are relating those classified reports.
Fair enough, but that raises some concerns. If there remain classified files about this case, Grusch is disseminating classified information and that’s a topic for another thread.
What I’ll look into here, is if Grusch’s version of the Italian UFO case is from classified files, then it closely matches what’s in the public domain. One could argue, the supposed classified files corroborate the public version of the story. If that’s the case, it would mean the public sources for the story are accurate.
But as I’ll show, the public version(s) of the story are cobbled together from a variety of sources over the years. If those sources are accurate in this case, then are they accurate in other cases? If so, then this crashed UFO from Italy is a minor occurrence.
I’ll note the discussion of the Italian UFO began in the first thread about Grusch and I’m definitely standing on shoulders here as Mick as well as @JMartJr, @deirdre, @Mendel, @John J. and @Pepijn van Erp among others, provided some of the information about the origins of this claim. I then tracked down some of the secondary claims that were added to create the modern version of it after being pointed in the right direction by @Brian Dunning 's Skeptoid Podcast.
To begin, let's look at a common version of the story now in circulation, then Grusch’s take on it. Here is a version from UFO website Liberation Times. It’s rather prosaic and story like, so I’ve edited for brevity which might make the narrative flow a bit odd, but it gets the main points across. To be fair, this website doesn’t completely endorse everything here.:
Here is Grusch’s recounting of the story to a French magazine:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/143ev70/comment/jn9ctpo/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
And as told to Ross Coulthart
A bell-shaped UFO crashed in Italy in 1933. It was recovered by the Italians and taken to an airbase. The Pope told the Americans about the UFO at some point. The Americans recovered it and took it back to the States.
More recently, Grusch has been telling a slightly different version, but we’ll get into that below.
The version from Liberation Times already has problems. It talks about the Nordics at Wright -Patterson in 1959 as if they are connected to the Italian UFO. They’re not, but by saying the story starts in 1933 and then moving forward in time to 1959 appears to create a pedigree for the story that doesn’t exist. There is no mention of the Italian UFO prior to 1996 and it was William Brophy that added the Nordics to it in the mid ‘00s.
The common origin of the story is the so called “Fascist UFO Files”. This was a set of files, including memos and handwritten notes that was sent anonymously to several Italian media outlets in ~1996, where they were mostly ignored and some of the first ones appeared to have been tossed in the trash. Eventually 2 Italina UFO investigators, Dr. Roberto Pinotti and Alfredo Lissoni investigated and published articles about the files.
For our purposes, I’m using Lissoni’s article that was translated into English and appeared in the UK UFO magazine Flying Saucer Review in 2004. He describes the files and where they came from like this:
Pinotti told a similar version of events in his book:
So, besides the newspaper tossing the original files, even a UFO contactee magazine considered the files fake.
Regardless, the files mention a number of UFO incidents and the Italian government’s response to them, including the 1933 crash as well as a sighting near Venice. Importantly, here is how Pinotti and Lissoni summed up the 1933 crash at an Italian UFO conference in 2000:
In the aforementioned 2004 article from Flying Sauer Review, Lissoni gives even less detail about the 1933 crash. Despite a rather lengthy article, the crash story is more about what the files said about who was involved and speculation that it might have been reverse engineered. It’s mentioned like this (bold by me):
That’s it. A UFO landed or crashed in Magenta, it was taken to an airbase near Milan and a special group called RS/33 was commissioned to study it. No Pope and no Bell-shaped UFO. In fact, when Pinotti and Lissani included UFO descriptions from the files, it’s usually the more saucer or cigar shape (bold by me):
THE UFO FILES OF MUSSOLINI: Fascist UFO Files by Roberto Pinotti - The Black Vault Case Files
In his book, Pinotti even includes a picture of a supposed Nazi prototype that he speculates may have been inspired by the crashed UFO:
No bell-shaped UFOs. The bell shape is often more associated with a supposed Nazi Wonder Weapon, The Bell or Die Glocke:
Cook’s book came out in 2001 and an English translation of Witkowski’s book was released in 2003, the first mention of the crashed Italian UFO in English was the Lissoni article in 2004.
Why does Grusch mention the UFO as “bell-shaped”? Proponents say it is because he has access to classified files that Pinotti and Lissoni don’t. I would argue, it’s because William “Billy” Brophy Jr., mentioned in the modern version of the story above, added the idea of the Italian UFO being Die Glocke, the idea that the Pope got involved and the idea that the US military took the UFO at the end of the war.
Brophy’s source are stories his dad told him in the ‘70s after seeing the TV show In Search Of.
After Lissoni’s 2004 English translation article appeared in Flying Saucer Review, Brophy began writing letters to the magazine detailing his father’s involvement in several UFO cases and mentioning the 1933 Italian one, all be it cryptically in the postscript. I’ll share his first letter here to get the flavor of his writing:
https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/cra...sies-of-billy-brophy-about-his-airman-father/
I’ll post the rest of Brophy’s letters to FSR in a spoiler below for those interested.
Brophy’s claims about his dad figures a lot in Jaques Vallee’s latest UFO case book, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret 2nd Edition about a supposed crashed and retrieved UFO near Trintiy NM in 1945. As such, the Trintiy case and the 1933 Italian case get hopelessly interwoven. The good thing is Douglass Johnston has done a lot of research on the Trintiy case, including reprints of Brophy’s letters and an interview. In an early interview with Vallee’s coauthor Paola Harris of MUFON, Brophy mentions more details about the Italian crash. This interview appeared in Born on The Edge of Ground Zero: Living in the Shadow of Area 51 by Bacca & Padilla. It's an earlier book about the Trintiy New Mexico case (not Area 51, but I guess that makes for a good UFO title) and is out of print, so Johnston provides photos of the book.
One can see either a fertile mind or some very detailed recollections about what his dad told him nearly 30 years earlier. The more likely possibility is Brophy pulling things he’s heard or read and combining them with his strange sense of connectedness.
His dad told him about the ’33 Italian crash because he had witnessed the atomic bomb test at Trinety and was based at Alamogordo which is near the White Sands testing grounds and the Italian UFO crashed on San Antonio day and San Antonio NM is close to the White Sands testing grounds and Enrico Fermi learned things in Italy before coming to White Sands and then Alamogordo where Brophy’s dad was. Or something like that.
Johnston has several pages from the book with the Brophy interview, but I'll just use the 2 that reference the Italian UFO. Note here at the beginning he and Harris mention the Italian UFO conference he attended:
https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/crash-story-file-the-suppressed-tale-of-the-captured-alien/
Brophy seems to have read Lissoni’s article in 2004, got in contact with Penotti and ultimately ended up at a 2010 UFO conference where he presented what his dad had told him about the ’33 Italian UFO crash.
I can’t track down anything in English about this conference other than this screen shot supposedly from Brophy recapping what he presented. This is from a prolific UFO blogger, Major George Filer USAF (Ret) and the Northeast reginal head of MUFON . He has numerous posts, many of which seem to cut and paste from others and his own blogs. The text of this recap from Brophy appeared in at least 3 separate blog posts from Major Filer over the years, often run together with other stories and claims found here: https://nationalufocenter.com/2021/11/filers-files-45-2021-the-1933-europes-ufo-crash/ The actual post from June 2010 is locked and unviewable on Filer's current website as it seems to be from some earlier iteration of it.
The claims here, the semi-rambling style and the strange sense of connectedness seems to sound like Brophy’s other writings:
Imgur: The magic of the Internet
So, here we have the rest of the story. It’s Brophy who adds the Pope talking to the Americans and the Die Glocke or bell-shaped UFO and the Americans recovering the UFO. He also added things Grusch doesn’t mention like the Nordics and their meeting with Eisenhower. There are multiple threads and claims in the 2nd paragraph alone that I could seriously get sidetracked on.
Much of the above writings by Brophy are themselves mishmashes of other stories strung together. We have Whitkoski and Cook’s claim of Die Glocke which he adds to the Italian UFO story, along with Nordic-Asian aliens.
What I find interesting is the way different threads are combined to create a new whole. The version of the story I used above from Liberation Times mentions a French biologist seeing the dead Nordics at Wright-Patterson in ~’59 and just assumes they are from the ’33 Italian UFO crash. Liberation Times cites Brophy as another source, but I think that is incorrect. Brophy is taking the French biologist seeing the Nordics claim and inserting it into the Italian UFO.
The French-Nordic connection goes something like this (bold in the original):
The above appears on the website The Hidden Truth and is taken from Timothy Good’s book Beyond Top Secret. That is in turn taken from the book mentioned in the quote, Preuves Scientifiques and possibly from books by UFOlogist Leonard Stringfield, whom Brophy mentions.
The Eisenhower meeting starts as a letter written by Los Angeles clairvoyant, Harold Light to a friend of his, Meade Layne. He claims that he went to Muroc, now Edwards AFB in the Mojave Desert as part of a delegation with the president to meet the aliens. UFOlogist claim Eisenhower’s supposed vacation to nearby Palm Springs and his supposed dental problems that kept him out of sight for a night were just too convenient so, he must have been meeting with aliens. Light wrote to Layne (edited for brevity):
Note the pending disclosure in May of ’54. There’s no Nordics in Light’s account, just Etherians. It was another former Naval Intelligence guy with Top Secret clearance that added the Nordics to the Eisenhower story.
William “Bill” Cooper started out, much like Elizondo and Grusch, as a former military whistleblower (though he did not file a formal complaint) when he began confirming the UFO conspiracies of ex-CIA pilot John Lear. He would later claim that Lear was a government shill and became a radical conspiracist and militia supporter himself before dying in a shootout with law enforcement.
Summed up by Michael Sallis PhD, an expert in Exopolitics(?) and believer in the Eisenhower alien meeting:
Without going full rabbit hole, we can see Brophy is pulling from all kinds of sources and amalgamating them together in his own unique way. Some of what he learned he added to the Italian UFO story and some of that, like the bell shape, the Pope and the American retrieval, made it to Grusch’s version of the story.
This leaves us with a number of possibilities.
If, as proponents say, Grusch and others have access to classified files, it would appear the publicly available version of the story is very similar to the classified one. That would indicate the public version is essentially correct. That in turn would mean the Fascist UFO files are mostly authentic, something Elizondo claims below and Brophy’s claims about what his father told him are true.
If that’s the case, what else about Brophy’s claims are true? A crashed UFO from the Battle of Los Angeles or Eisenhower meeting the Nordics? It would seem so. Some will use the “broken clock” excuse. Brophy may have heard a few things from his father that turned out to be accurate about the Italian UFO, as confirmed by Grusch, even though he made a lot of other strange and likely untrue claims.
The other possibility is that Grusch is in essence repeating the publicly available version of the story. The problem with that is this thread. I was able to track down where the various elements of the story came from, and I’m not the only one. @Brian Dunning got me started with episode #900 of his Skeptoid podcast. I even came across a reddit thread that is basically saying what I’m saying here, though with less sourcing:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/14dez6j/whistleblower_david_grusch_and_the_italian_ufo/
Surprisingly for what I understand about the reddit UFO crowd, he got very little push back, possibly because there is very little to argue with and Brophy makes a number of strange and often changing and contradictory claims. I only covered some here.
Maybe some of that has come to light, as Grusch tells a slightly different version lately. He is now claiming that the bell or acorn shaped craft, had a disk like part that broke off when it crashed and only the center bell/acorn part was recovered. Here’s a transcript from a YouTube video linked below (I’ve removed some of the time stamps to make it easier to read):
That description that adds the “dinner plates” now sound more like the picture Penotti provided:
Here is one of Elizondo’s takes on the case. A bit vaguer, he seems to rely entirely on the Fascist UFO Files, which he thinks are real. He makes it sound like he is only getting the story from the files, which would preclude him from seeing secret US files possibly. (transcript from YouTube podcast):
As for the claim that the documents have been "proven to be authentic", that seems to be a bit of a stretch. Despite most newspapers that received the original batch of documents concluding they were fake, Pinotti and Lissoni argue that an expert has said the paper and ink is from the time period:
There has never been any corroborating evidence for the Files that I'm aware of. Even if true, it's only half the story with the other half coming from other sources.
It's an interesting case, where we can see how the various and often unrelated elements come together over time to create a story that didn't exist before. We know where the public version of the Italian UFO story comes from, we’ll have to wait to see what the classified version of it is. Assuming it exists.
Here is the other 2 letters Brophy wrote to Flying Saucer Review for those interested:
David Grusch YouTube link:
David Grusch Details The 1933 Magenta UFO Crash With Joe Rogan - YouTube
Lue Elizondo interview YouTube link:
Luis ‘Lue’ Elizondo MOST RECENT NEWS #UAP #UFO SHAPES EXPLAINED - Max Moszkowicz Podcast #Elizondo - YouTube
In some discussions I’ve had with a few people, I attempted to point out there is a problem with Grusch relating this story as true, given we can trace the public origins and the permutations in his version. I would argue that Grusch is retelling a publicly available story. The common rebuttal is that Grusch, and to some extent Lue Elizondo, have access to classified files the rest of us don’t and therefore they saw the reports of the Italian crashed UFO case and are relating those classified reports.
Fair enough, but that raises some concerns. If there remain classified files about this case, Grusch is disseminating classified information and that’s a topic for another thread.
What I’ll look into here, is if Grusch’s version of the Italian UFO case is from classified files, then it closely matches what’s in the public domain. One could argue, the supposed classified files corroborate the public version of the story. If that’s the case, it would mean the public sources for the story are accurate.
But as I’ll show, the public version(s) of the story are cobbled together from a variety of sources over the years. If those sources are accurate in this case, then are they accurate in other cases? If so, then this crashed UFO from Italy is a minor occurrence.
I’ll note the discussion of the Italian UFO began in the first thread about Grusch and I’m definitely standing on shoulders here as Mick as well as @JMartJr, @deirdre, @Mendel, @John J. and @Pepijn van Erp among others, provided some of the information about the origins of this claim. I then tracked down some of the secondary claims that were added to create the modern version of it after being pointed in the right direction by @Brian Dunning 's Skeptoid Podcast.
To begin, let's look at a common version of the story now in circulation, then Grusch’s take on it. Here is a version from UFO website Liberation Times. It’s rather prosaic and story like, so I’ve edited for brevity which might make the narrative flow a bit odd, but it gets the main points across. To be fair, this website doesn’t completely endorse everything here.:
All UFO Disclosure Roads Lead To Rome — Liberation Times | Reimagining Old NewsIf accounts are to be believed, it is a story that began in 1930’s Italy, under the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Ohio, 1959
Two bodies allegedly lay on a table. They look like twins.
They’re dead and preserved with formaldehyde.
But their features trouble a French biologist invited to study the bodies.
Two males, very tall (around 7ft), long blonde hair, very high and spacious foreheads, clear blue eyes that look somewhat Asiatic, small noses, small mouths, small chins, thin lips, very clear pale skin, but no signs of facial hair.
There are two accounts of these alleged recovered bodies within Wright-Patterson, which inform this story.
The first was from William Brophy, whose father claimed to have seen the bodies when serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force (USAF). Brophy claimed that his father told him the story, among those of other UAP encounters whilst serving in the USAF.
The second account is from UAP researcher Leonard Stringfield, who told the story of the French biologist in his 1982 book, named ‘UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence: Status Report III’.
The bodies allegedly came from a UAP crash (according to Brophy’s account), which occurred long before Roswell.
They were apparently recovered in 1933, in Lombardy, Italy, where a mysterious craft had crashed.
Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini took all measures to silence the witnesses and classified the craft as top secret. Documents released from Mussolini’s office support claims of a cover-up. The media was not to report on what had happened and information would not be shared with any scientific institution.
Mussolini’s next priority was to study the craft. Italy’s top scientists and engineers were assembled to form a top-secret group, supposedly headed by the celebrated engineer Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio.
However, the Pope later became uneasy about the craft being in Italian possession, as Mussolini’s Italy grew closer and eventually allied with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
The Pope acted on his misgivings, leading to information about the craft apparently being leaked to the USA from the Vatican.
Due to the Vatican’s intervention, the alleged facility (which supposedly held the craft) was spared the wrath of allied air bombings during the war, despite all other nearby facilities being heavily targeted throughout northern Italy.
After the war, the craft was allegedly brought to the USA, where it supposedly remains today.
Here is Grusch’s recounting of the story to a French magazine:
Int.: Can we know more about where these "ships" were recovered?
D.G.: One was recovered in Italy in 1933, which is the earliest case I've been briefed on. I can't talk about the others.
Int.: What allegedly happened there?
D.G.: In 1933, a bell-like craft, around ten meters in size was recovered in Magenta, northern Italy. It was kept by Mussolini's government until 1944 when it was recovered by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a former US intelligence agency). Ironically, it predates anything the public has heard about for decades, such as Roswell, etc. I was authorized to talk about it by the Department of Defense's Office of Prepublication and Security Review.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/143ev70/comment/jn9ctpo/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
And as told to Ross Coulthart
Grusch tells a more sanitized version leaving out the Nordic aliens, and adds the bell-shape, which does appear in other versions, nevertheless the main components are consistent:1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy. They recovered a partially intact vehicle. The Italian government moved it to a secure air base in Italy for the rest of kind of the fascist regime until 1944-1945. And, you know, the Pope Pius XII backchanneled that… {So the Vatican was involved?} …Yeah, and told the Americans what the Italians had, and we ended up scooping it.
A bell-shaped UFO crashed in Italy in 1933. It was recovered by the Italians and taken to an airbase. The Pope told the Americans about the UFO at some point. The Americans recovered it and took it back to the States.
More recently, Grusch has been telling a slightly different version, but we’ll get into that below.
The version from Liberation Times already has problems. It talks about the Nordics at Wright -Patterson in 1959 as if they are connected to the Italian UFO. They’re not, but by saying the story starts in 1933 and then moving forward in time to 1959 appears to create a pedigree for the story that doesn’t exist. There is no mention of the Italian UFO prior to 1996 and it was William Brophy that added the Nordics to it in the mid ‘00s.
The common origin of the story is the so called “Fascist UFO Files”. This was a set of files, including memos and handwritten notes that was sent anonymously to several Italian media outlets in ~1996, where they were mostly ignored and some of the first ones appeared to have been tossed in the trash. Eventually 2 Italina UFO investigators, Dr. Roberto Pinotti and Alfredo Lissoni investigated and published articles about the files.
For our purposes, I’m using Lissoni’s article that was translated into English and appeared in the UK UFO magazine Flying Saucer Review in 2004. He describes the files and where they came from like this:
Lissoni also notes that it was difficult to corroborate the files 50 years on, though they found a few 2nd hand stories:One of the first packages was addressed to the Bologna daily newspaper *Il Resto del Carlino*, and *contained a bulky dossier of 34 photocopied pages covering various UFO sightings in the regions of Italy between 1933 and 1940 - some of them in fact reports from the Royal Italian Air Force, with the recommendation "SAY NOTHING TO IL DUCE"!
One of the newspaper's editors, thinking it was all a joke, assigned a reporter to conduct an enquiry in quarters that were involved with secret prototypes (domestic) but the results were nil, and so the material was never published, and ended up in the waste-paper basket.
Then a second series of missives, in three different packages, posted in March-April 1996, were sent by "MR. X" to the top Italian ufologist Dr. Roberto Pinotti, Director of the Italian
UFO research journal NOTIZIARIO UFO (and long-term FSR Consultant !).
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1885.htmA long time passed. In particular the search for the eyewitnesses of the episode was fruitless. The document had indicated *three names*, all of which were now untraceable. Then finally a C.U.N. member managed to secure the testimony of a relative, FAUSTINO V - (unfortunately deceased shortly afterwards), but who had confirmed that he had been present and had seen the incredible
thing flying over Venice
Pinotti told a similar version of events in his book:
https://www.theblackvault.com/casef...ssolini-fascist-ufo-files-by-roberto-pinotti/Indeed, other caches of documents sent by the anonymous “Mr. X” (as we decided to call him) were received by CUN, before the daily newspaper, IL RESTO DEL CARLINO of Bologna, – whose skeptical journalists did not publish them – and by the contactee-oriented magazine, UFO: LA VISITA EXTRATERRESTRE– mentioned in Cabinet RS/33. This magazine was charged with both investigating and covering up what the documents call “Velivoli Non Convenzionali” or VNC as an acronym for (Unconventional Flying Vehicles).
Unfortunately, an original thirty-page dossier about VNC (i.e. the one that had been sent to the newspaper IL RESTO DEL CARLINO of Bologna) was lost, while the first batch of photocopied material sent to UFO: LA VISITA EXTRATERRESTRE did not have the result “Mr. X” had desired. This magazine entrusted their enquiry to the Naples ufologist Umberto Telarico who was skeptic about the case. The material got published, but they considered it a fake.
So, besides the newspaper tossing the original files, even a UFO contactee magazine considered the files fake.
Regardless, the files mention a number of UFO incidents and the Italian government’s response to them, including the 1933 crash as well as a sighting near Venice. Importantly, here is how Pinotti and Lissoni summed up the 1933 crash at an Italian UFO conference in 2000:
https://www.theblackvault.com/casef...ssolini-fascist-ufo-files-by-roberto-pinotti/In 2000, during the annual World UFO Symposium in San Marino, my colleague Alfredo Lissoni and I gave a lecture on the sensational discovery of some new original material, which has been sent to us anonymously on a number of occasions regarding the existence of the so-called “Fascist UFO Files”. This material dealt with a purported flying saucer that had either crashed or landed near Magenta in Lombardy in Italy on April 11th, 1933, some fourteen years before the famous Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash. This event involved a subsequent investigation by an obscure war time intelligence unit called “Gabinetto RS/33” (or RS/33 Cabinet ), ‘RS’ is the acronym for Ricerche Speciali or Special Researches, and 33 means 1933, this group had been authorized by Benito Mussolini to study the problem.
In the aforementioned 2004 article from Flying Sauer Review, Lissoni gives even less detail about the 1933 crash. Despite a rather lengthy article, the crash story is more about what the files said about who was involved and speculation that it might have been reverse engineered. It’s mentioned like this (bold by me):
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1885.htmwhich gave instructions, *on the order of Il Duce Mussolini*, to recuperate [sic] a flying saucer which had landed (it is not known where) on June 13, 1933. There was also a Senatorial letter describing in detail the strategy to be followed after the craft had been recovered; i.e., censorship of the newspapers; arrest of the eyewitnesses by the O.U.R.A. (The Italian Government's Political Police); elaboration of a series of conventional explanations for the UFO (i.e. *sonde* balloons, meteors, perihelia) to be fed to the public via the BRERA ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY at
Milan; and notification of the Prefect (Civil Governor).
The "Moretti" trail led me to the Varese region. My hypothesis is in fact that the saucer recovered in 1933 had been hidden in one of the nearest and most discrete hangars in that region -
namely the hangars of the aeronautical establishments of the Siai Marchetti at Vergiate or of the Sesto Calende in the Varese region of Ticino which at that date were under the control of
General Italo Balbo
Regarding this last-named body, as a result of further material sent to Bongiovanni's "Contactee" Review, it was discovered that the RS/33 CABINET had been a top-secret study commission,
created in the bosom of LA SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY in Rome following upon the recuperation [sic] of the UFO. Headed by the physicist GUGLIELMO MARCONI (known for his belief in Martians, although he
never played an active part in the CABINET, always sending in his place the astronomer GINO CECCHINI from Turin). Among its members the CABINET had many of the most highly respected of
Italian academics, members of the Royal Italian Academy of Sciences. These people had been studying the UFOs, *but only occasionally did they consider the extraterrestrial hypothesis,
being more inclined, as they were, to believe in the existence of secret new Western weaponry*
Had the Fascists and the Nazis managed to achieve any "back- engineering" from the UFO of 1933? The historical reconstruction given above would seem to suggest so.
That’s it. A UFO landed or crashed in Magenta, it was taken to an airbase near Milan and a special group called RS/33 was commissioned to study it. No Pope and no Bell-shaped UFO. In fact, when Pinotti and Lissani included UFO descriptions from the files, it’s usually the more saucer or cigar shape (bold by me):
“It was observed in the morning” he writes “it was a metallic disc, polished and reflecting light, with a length of ten or twelve meters. Two fighter aircraft from a nearby air force base took off, but were not able to reach it even traveling at 130 Km/h. It didn’t emit any sound, which would lead one to consider an aerostat (balloon). But nobody knows of balloons that can fly faster than the wind. I know for sure that it was seen by other pilots… the report arrived in the hands of Ciano [Mussolini’s son-in-law and Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs]. “Then, after approximately an hour and after flying over Mestre, it was seen as a sort of metallic tube, grey or slate in colour”. A drawing by a confidential informant was redrawn by Andrea, who, as far as the two ‘A’ and ‘B’ drawings are concerned, explained that “ ‘A’ was described as being like a kind of aerial torpedo, with very clear windows… and with alternating white and red lights. ‘B’ were two ‘hats’, two hats like those used by priests. They were wide, round with a dome in the center, metallic and followed the torpedo without changing their relative positions”.
THE UFO FILES OF MUSSOLINI: Fascist UFO Files by Roberto Pinotti - The Black Vault Case Files
In his book, Pinotti even includes a picture of a supposed Nazi prototype that he speculates may have been inspired by the crashed UFO:
No bell-shaped UFOs. The bell shape is often more associated with a supposed Nazi Wonder Weapon, The Bell or Die Glocke:
Die Glocke
Die Glocke (conspiracy theory) - Wikipedia(German: [diː ˈɡlɔkə], "The Bell") was a purported top-secret scientific technological device, secret weapon, or Wunderwaffe developed in the 1940s in Nazi Germany. First described by Polish journalist and author Igor Witkowski in Prawda o Wunderwaffe (2000), it was later popularized by military journalist and author Nick Cook, who associated it with Nazi occultism, antigravity, and free energy suppression research. Mainstream reviewers have criticized claims about Die Glocke as being pseudoscientific, recycled rumors, and a hoax. Die Glocke and other alleged Nazi "miracle weapons" have been dramatized in video games, television shows, and novels.
Cook’s book came out in 2001 and an English translation of Witkowski’s book was released in 2003, the first mention of the crashed Italian UFO in English was the Lissoni article in 2004.
Why does Grusch mention the UFO as “bell-shaped”? Proponents say it is because he has access to classified files that Pinotti and Lissoni don’t. I would argue, it’s because William “Billy” Brophy Jr., mentioned in the modern version of the story above, added the idea of the Italian UFO being Die Glocke, the idea that the Pope got involved and the idea that the US military took the UFO at the end of the war.
Brophy’s source are stories his dad told him in the ‘70s after seeing the TV show In Search Of.
After Lissoni’s 2004 English translation article appeared in Flying Saucer Review, Brophy began writing letters to the magazine detailing his father’s involvement in several UFO cases and mentioning the 1933 Italian one, all be it cryptically in the postscript. I’ll share his first letter here to get the flavor of his writing:
https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/cra...sies-of-billy-brophy-about-his-airman-father/
I’ll post the rest of Brophy’s letters to FSR in a spoiler below for those interested.
Brophy’s claims about his dad figures a lot in Jaques Vallee’s latest UFO case book, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret 2nd Edition about a supposed crashed and retrieved UFO near Trintiy NM in 1945. As such, the Trintiy case and the 1933 Italian case get hopelessly interwoven. The good thing is Douglass Johnston has done a lot of research on the Trintiy case, including reprints of Brophy’s letters and an interview. In an early interview with Vallee’s coauthor Paola Harris of MUFON, Brophy mentions more details about the Italian crash. This interview appeared in Born on The Edge of Ground Zero: Living in the Shadow of Area 51 by Bacca & Padilla. It's an earlier book about the Trintiy New Mexico case (not Area 51, but I guess that makes for a good UFO title) and is out of print, so Johnston provides photos of the book.
One can see either a fertile mind or some very detailed recollections about what his dad told him nearly 30 years earlier. The more likely possibility is Brophy pulling things he’s heard or read and combining them with his strange sense of connectedness.
His dad told him about the ’33 Italian crash because he had witnessed the atomic bomb test at Trinety and was based at Alamogordo which is near the White Sands testing grounds and the Italian UFO crashed on San Antonio day and San Antonio NM is close to the White Sands testing grounds and Enrico Fermi learned things in Italy before coming to White Sands and then Alamogordo where Brophy’s dad was. Or something like that.
Johnston has several pages from the book with the Brophy interview, but I'll just use the 2 that reference the Italian UFO. Note here at the beginning he and Harris mention the Italian UFO conference he attended:
https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/crash-story-file-the-suppressed-tale-of-the-captured-alien/
Brophy seems to have read Lissoni’s article in 2004, got in contact with Penotti and ultimately ended up at a 2010 UFO conference where he presented what his dad had told him about the ’33 Italian UFO crash.
I can’t track down anything in English about this conference other than this screen shot supposedly from Brophy recapping what he presented. This is from a prolific UFO blogger, Major George Filer USAF (Ret) and the Northeast reginal head of MUFON . He has numerous posts, many of which seem to cut and paste from others and his own blogs. The text of this recap from Brophy appeared in at least 3 separate blog posts from Major Filer over the years, often run together with other stories and claims found here: https://nationalufocenter.com/2021/11/filers-files-45-2021-the-1933-europes-ufo-crash/ The actual post from June 2010 is locked and unviewable on Filer's current website as it seems to be from some earlier iteration of it.
The claims here, the semi-rambling style and the strange sense of connectedness seems to sound like Brophy’s other writings:
Imgur: The magic of the Internet
So, here we have the rest of the story. It’s Brophy who adds the Pope talking to the Americans and the Die Glocke or bell-shaped UFO and the Americans recovering the UFO. He also added things Grusch doesn’t mention like the Nordics and their meeting with Eisenhower. There are multiple threads and claims in the 2nd paragraph alone that I could seriously get sidetracked on.
Much of the above writings by Brophy are themselves mishmashes of other stories strung together. We have Whitkoski and Cook’s claim of Die Glocke which he adds to the Italian UFO story, along with Nordic-Asian aliens.
What I find interesting is the way different threads are combined to create a new whole. The version of the story I used above from Liberation Times mentions a French biologist seeing the dead Nordics at Wright-Patterson in ~’59 and just assumes they are from the ’33 Italian UFO crash. Liberation Times cites Brophy as another source, but I think that is incorrect. Brophy is taking the French biologist seeing the Nordics claim and inserting it into the Italian UFO.
The French-Nordic connection goes something like this (bold in the original):
1959: Alien Bodies at Wright Paterson AFB | The Hidden TruthIn his book Preuves Scientifiques OVNI (Monaco 1981), Jean-Charles Fumoux relates how Leon B. Visse, an alleged expert on histons (elements connected with cellular genetic material), was invited in 1959 to a military compound at Wright-Patterson AFB, where he was asked to perform an experiment on the histonic weight of particular cells.
To his astonishment, Visse was taken into a special room where the corpses of two humanoids lay
The bodies were very tall, a little over seven feet, and from their terrible injuries appeared to have been in an accident, although the heads were intact, Fumoux relates, and continues:
"The forehead high and broad. Very long blond hair. The eyes were stretched toward the temples which gave them an Asiatic look. The nose and mouth were small. The lips were thin, perfectly delineated. The chin was small and slightly pointed. The two faces were beardless. Despite slight differences in their facial appearances, the two humanoids looked like twins".
Dr. Gilles summarized his feelings about Visse in a letter to Leonard Stringfield in 1982:
”I have no definite opinion if he was the right man or not; for me it’s 50% yes, 50% no. Visse had indeed knowledge about covert operations. It seemed to me, but it could have been my imagination, that he was accustomed to military ways of thinking and behavior. Visse was absolutely unmoved by the Fumoux story when I told him, he didn't show any surprise, he was not shocked at all by the odd subject. In short, I believe Fumoux knew something about alien/retrieval affairs. But what he knew was certainly distorted."
The above appears on the website The Hidden Truth and is taken from Timothy Good’s book Beyond Top Secret. That is in turn taken from the book mentioned in the quote, Preuves Scientifiques and possibly from books by UFOlogist Leonard Stringfield, whom Brophy mentions.
The Eisenhower meeting starts as a letter written by Los Angeles clairvoyant, Harold Light to a friend of his, Meade Layne. He claims that he went to Muroc, now Edwards AFB in the Mojave Desert as part of a delegation with the president to meet the aliens. UFOlogist claim Eisenhower’s supposed vacation to nearby Palm Springs and his supposed dental problems that kept him out of sight for a night were just too convenient so, he must have been meeting with aliens. Light wrote to Layne (edited for brevity):
https://borderlandsciences.org/project/etheria/corr/1954-04-16_-_Gerald_Light_to_Meade_Layne.htmlGerald Light
10545 Scenario Lane
Los Angeles, California
Mr. Meade Layne
San Diego, California
My dear Friend: I have just returned from Muroc. The report is true — devastatingly true!
I made the journey in company with Franklin Allen of the Hearst papers and Edwin Nourse of Brookings Institute (Truman's erstwhile financial advisor) and Bishop MacIntyre of L.A. (confidential names for the present, please).
During my two days' visit I saw five separate and distinct types of aircraft being studied and handled by our Air Force officials -- with the assistance and permission of the Etherians! I have no words to express my reactions.
It has finally happened. It is now a matter of history.
President Eisenhower, as you may already know, was spirited over to Muroc one night during his visit to Palm Springs recently.
From what I could gather, an official statement to the country is being prepared for delivery about the middle of May.
I shall never forget those forty-eight hours at Muroc!
Note the pending disclosure in May of ’54. There’s no Nordics in Light’s account, just Etherians. It was another former Naval Intelligence guy with Top Secret clearance that added the Nordics to the Eisenhower story.
William “Bill” Cooper started out, much like Elizondo and Grusch, as a former military whistleblower (though he did not file a formal complaint) when he began confirming the UFO conspiracies of ex-CIA pilot John Lear. He would later claim that Lear was a government shill and became a radical conspiracist and militia supporter himself before dying in a shootout with law enforcement.
Summed up by Michael Sallis PhD, an expert in Exopolitics(?) and believer in the Eisenhower alien meeting:
Eisenhower’s 1954 Meeting With Extraterrestrials: The Fiftieth Anniversary of First Contact? - UFO EvidenceCooper’s and Lear’s idea of more than one extraterrestrial race interacting with the Eisenhower administration is supported by other whistleblowers such as former Master Sergeant Robert Dean who like Cooper, had access to top secret documents while working in the intelligence division for the Supreme Commander of a major US military command.
Without going full rabbit hole, we can see Brophy is pulling from all kinds of sources and amalgamating them together in his own unique way. Some of what he learned he added to the Italian UFO story and some of that, like the bell shape, the Pope and the American retrieval, made it to Grusch’s version of the story.
This leaves us with a number of possibilities.
If, as proponents say, Grusch and others have access to classified files, it would appear the publicly available version of the story is very similar to the classified one. That would indicate the public version is essentially correct. That in turn would mean the Fascist UFO files are mostly authentic, something Elizondo claims below and Brophy’s claims about what his father told him are true.
If that’s the case, what else about Brophy’s claims are true? A crashed UFO from the Battle of Los Angeles or Eisenhower meeting the Nordics? It would seem so. Some will use the “broken clock” excuse. Brophy may have heard a few things from his father that turned out to be accurate about the Italian UFO, as confirmed by Grusch, even though he made a lot of other strange and likely untrue claims.
The other possibility is that Grusch is in essence repeating the publicly available version of the story. The problem with that is this thread. I was able to track down where the various elements of the story came from, and I’m not the only one. @Brian Dunning got me started with episode #900 of his Skeptoid podcast. I even came across a reddit thread that is basically saying what I’m saying here, though with less sourcing:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/14dez6j/whistleblower_david_grusch_and_the_italian_ufo/
Surprisingly for what I understand about the reddit UFO crowd, he got very little push back, possibly because there is very little to argue with and Brophy makes a number of strange and often changing and contradictory claims. I only covered some here.
Maybe some of that has come to light, as Grusch tells a slightly different version lately. He is now claiming that the bell or acorn shaped craft, had a disk like part that broke off when it crashed and only the center bell/acorn part was recovered. Here’s a transcript from a YouTube video linked below (I’ve removed some of the time stamps to make it easier to read):
Source link below.5:22
that's why I picked that because I
thought that was a interesting case and
then of course the you know Pope pus (Pious) the
12th and the Vatican were involved back
channeling it through the OSS which
became the CIA later to FDR and that's
5:35
how the US knew something weird happened
in Italy during well right before World
War II but so this is 33 was the first
6:05
story behind it so um basically it it it
looked like it crashed right it the
original shape most likely was like a
lenticular disc like craft you know with
like a two dinner plates what does
lenticular mean so like two dinner
plates you know smooshed together right
6:24
the hump and there's like a you know
like a bubble on topic classic like like
that like that but it looks like when it
hits the edges broke off so it became
this like Bell or
Acorn shaped thing um and there was
nothing in it it was like just an
artifact you know there was no
biologicals.
That description that adds the “dinner plates” now sound more like the picture Penotti provided:
Here is one of Elizondo’s takes on the case. A bit vaguer, he seems to rely entirely on the Fascist UFO Files, which he thinks are real. He makes it sound like he is only getting the story from the files, which would preclude him from seeing secret US files possibly. (transcript from YouTube podcast):
Source link below.
i don't want to get too much into the you know conspiracy
1:15:46
side of the house um there is some documentation that has been validated uh that was uh that was from mussolini
1:15:54
himself uh and uh it uh it's you know it's it's
1:15:59
authentic it's been proven to be authentic the the documentation um so certainly interesting and this was
As for the claim that the documents have been "proven to be authentic", that seems to be a bit of a stretch. Despite most newspapers that received the original batch of documents concluding they were fake, Pinotti and Lissoni argue that an expert has said the paper and ink is from the time period:
And another expert said the language was consistent with the time, though a forgery was still possible:(Antonio) Garavaglia conducted a series of chemical tests of the paper and ink – remember, he had originals and not copies – and he concluded they are really authentic, hand written documents from the Fascist era. The color of the paper and ink aging process led him to believe they were absolutely genuine and not modern forgeries
THE UFO FILES OF MUSSOLINI: Fascist UFO Files by Roberto Pinotti - The Black Vault Case FilesAlfredo Lissoni also consulted with Andrea Bedetti, a historian and expert on Italy’s Fascist period. “I cannot exclude the existence of a “RS/33 Cabinet” said Bedetti. He also examined in the documents for the wording and the bureaucratic style of the period”, as well as the stationery (“Kingdom’s Senate” and Stefani Agency telegrams) and aeronautical terminology used. Bedetti found that all of it was consistent with genuine Fascist-era documents. According to debunkers this didn’t rule out a skilled forger, but they have to admit he would have to be someone deeply knowledgeable about Fascist history, style, vocabulary and terminology.
There has never been any corroborating evidence for the Files that I'm aware of. Even if true, it's only half the story with the other half coming from other sources.
It's an interesting case, where we can see how the various and often unrelated elements come together over time to create a story that didn't exist before. We know where the public version of the Italian UFO story comes from, we’ll have to wait to see what the classified version of it is. Assuming it exists.
Here is the other 2 letters Brophy wrote to Flying Saucer Review for those interested:
David Grusch YouTube link:
David Grusch Details The 1933 Magenta UFO Crash With Joe Rogan - YouTube
Lue Elizondo interview YouTube link:
Luis ‘Lue’ Elizondo MOST RECENT NEWS #UAP #UFO SHAPES EXPLAINED - Max Moszkowicz Podcast #Elizondo - YouTube
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