Claim: A UFO crashed in 1933 Italy and the US Recovered it

[Eburacum]

The Caproni was a very early jet aircraft, one of the first to fly anywhere in the world; but it had poor overall performance, and very few were built.

But the name Silverplate was a contraction of "Silver Plated Project"

That's right; it had nothing to do with the 1942 event. Brophy senior seems to have a fabulist, who took tall tales from all over the place to elaborate his story.

Note that the bombers concerned were painted silver to reflect the blast of the atomic bomb;

 

[Ravi]

Note that the bombers concerned were painted silver to reflect the blast of the atomic bomb;

Nope.

The aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs (Enola Gay and Bockscar) were unpainted, bare metal planes made of polished aluminum. [1, 2, 3]
The US Army Air Forces stopped painting bombers olive-drab camouflage in 1943. Leaving the planes unpainted saved weight (which increased the bombers' range and speed) and eliminated drag. [1, 2, 3]
The specific Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers used for the atomic missions were part of a secret modification project known as Silverplate. To safely carry the massive weight of the atomic bombs, these planes had their armor plating and most of their defensive gun turrets stripped out, which further increased their speed and operational range.

 

[Eburacum]

That's a better explanation; thanks.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Brophy senior seems to have a fabulist,

Just to be clear, William J. Brophy Jr. was in fact a pilot during WW2 and latter a Major in the Air Force. He passed away in 1986. William P. Brophy was his older son and seems to be the teller of tall tales. And to make things more difficult, some editions of Vallee and Paola's Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, refer to William J. Brophy Jr., the WW2 pilot, as "Brothy Sr". and/or "Brophy Sr." Some researchers refer to the son, William P Brophy, by his family name of "Billy" to limit the confusion.

Billy does claim that many of his tales were told to him by his father possibly back in the '70s, however many of Billy's stories twist and turn over the years to fit whatever event he was trying to insert his father into, often long after his father had passed away.

In the early '00s, Billy originally had his father involved with a 1947 UFO crash in New Mexico and a 1950 crash in Mexico. By extension, he knew about the recovered Italian UFO. Then appeared at the 2010 Italian UFO conference and by then was mentioning his father's involvement with the supposed 1945 Trinity UFO crash. It's likely all the stories are the result of Billy taking vast amounts of UFO lore and using that to interweave his late father into various events.

 

[jdog]

Just to be clear, William J. Brophy Jr. was in fact a pilot during WW2 and latter a Major in the Air Force. He passed away in 1986. William P. Brophy was his older son and seems to be the teller of tall tales. And to make things more difficult, some editions of Vallee and Paola's Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, refer to William J. Brophy Jr., the WW2 pilot, as "Brothy Sr". and/or "Brophy Sr." Some researchers refer to the son, William P Brophy, by his family name of "Billy" to limit the confusion.

Billy does claim that many of his tales were told to him by his father possibly back in the '70s, however many of Billy's stories twist and turn over the years to fit whatever event he was trying to insert his father into, often long after his father had passed away.

In the early '00s, Billy originally had his father involved with a 1947 UFO crash in New Mexico and a 1950 crash in Mexico. By extension, he knew about the recovered Italian UFO. Then appeared at the 2010 Italian UFO conference and by then was mentioning his father's involvement with the supposed 1945 Trinity UFO crash. It's likely all the stories are the result of Billy taking vast amounts of UFO lore and using that to interweave his late father into various events.

Kind of like how the older Howard Malmgren got, the more (purportedly) involved in world affairs he would say he had been, saving the world as an advisor to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and later UFO shootdowns.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Kind of like how the older Howard Malmgren got, the more (purportedly) involved in world affairs he would say he had been, saving the world as an advisor to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and later UFO shootdowns.

Yeah, but in that case Harold was expanding his own resume. In this case it was Billy expanding his late father's involvement.

I'll have to find it, but one researcher talked to Billy's younger brother. He claimed their dad was a sober guy and that aside from 1 mention of a cigar shaped UFO encounter over Georgia in the '50s, he never spoke of UFOs. He claimed his brother Billy was "eccentric ". Many of Billy's stories use stuff that became popular or came about in the '80s, some after his father's passing.

 

[Fritzkquzerk]

To think that we Italians could have retro-engineered this saucer so we'd have antigravity FIAT Cinquecentos now, what a shame this isn't true!

 

[Jeffknox]

I'll have to find it, but one researcher talked to Billy's younger brother. He claimed their dad was a sober guy and that aside from 1 mention of a cigar shaped UFO encounter over Georgia in the '50s, he never spoke of UFOs. He claimed his brother Billy was "eccentric ". Many of Billy's stories use stuff that became popular or came about in the '80s, some after his father's passing.

That was Douglas. See: https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/cra...sies-of-billy-brophy-about-his-airman-father/

When I edged the conversation back into the details of Billy's crashed-UFO stories, Sean responded:

SEAN BROPHY: Well, I'm going to be honest with you. My brother might be a little eccentric sometimes, but I do not doubt my father knew a bit about UFOs, and I know about the encounter he told me about. My father was very sober, so we had a good conversation about that. I won't forget it. My dad would never lie to me about something like that.

[extraneous material omitted]

I can't speak for him [Billy] at all when it comes to that. He's on his own for the rest of it. I know nothing about the rest, but I do know about the cylindrical craft that my father spoke to me about. That was quite specific.

[extraneous material omitted]

I can't speak as to the veracity of his stories, but I do know about the one with my dad [the aerial encounter].

 

[Julian Vale]

Thanks to Sheffinder and john.phil for locating and translating the report in posts #10–12. In the report PDF, page 3 describes a "documento manoscritto"; page 9 limits its conclusion to "il solo campione esaminato" and identifies "22 agosto 1936". Has anyone located a separate examination report that explicitly identifies and tests either of the two typed 1933 telegrams? A scan with an identifiable specimen would help distinguish testing one item in the collection from testing the core telegrams. I discuss that distinction in my essay, and would welcome a source that changes the assessment.

 

[Mendel]

Thanks to Sheffinder and john.phil for locating and translating the report in posts #10–12. In the report PDF, page 3 describes a "documento manoscritto"; page 9 limits its conclusion to "il solo campione esaminato" and identifies "22 agosto 1936". Has anyone located a separate examination report that explicitly identifies and tests either of the two typed 1933 telegrams? A scan with an identifiable specimen would help distinguish testing one item in the collection from testing the core telegrams. I discuss that distinction in my essay, and would welcome a source that changes the assessment. Disclosure: the essay and this question were prepared with AI assistance.

Well written; I'm not sure I follow your main thesis, but asking for provenance is valuable, and I like how you go about it.

You write:

If a government genuinely has the ability to suppress evidence, that can explain why an authentic secret leaves little public trace. Unfortunately, exactly the same explanation protects a fabrication. A forged document can always be defended with, "Of course you cannot find the other records. They were destroyed because this was secret."

This point deserves a little elaboration. Are there really "authentic secrets" that have "left little public trace", at least for a time—and with the same lack of provenance? (And the same lack of a plausible motive for the alleged coverup.)

I'd also like to draw your attention to the "Hitler Diaries", a forgery that passed muster enough to be published in a major German magazine; if only because they were claimed to originate from the same kind of totalitarian regime.

 

[jon_eir]

Are there really "authentic secrets" that have "left little public trace", at least for a time

Are there really "authentic secrets" that have "left little public trace", at least for a time?

I don't believe a vast government concealment program is real. Any evidence I've ever been quoted on this directly is often taken out of context and based on older, unsupported claims.

To address the quoted post, here are some programs that are cited and fit your criteria. I pulled this text from an essay that was shared privately with me, from a paper titled "A Complex Topology Explaining UAP Belief Endurance." I won't share it in full without permission, and it's not directly related to the post. I inserted supported wiki links

This paper develops a structural model for how a body of belief can persist for multiple decades, generate substantial institutional momentum, and resist successive disconfirmations — without anyone actively coordinating the persistence and without any physical referent at the core of the belief.

ULTRA / Bletchley Park (1939-1974)

Over 12,000 people kept the secret of Allied decryption of German military ciphers for three decades after the war ended. Winston Churchill omitted Bletchley from his six-volume history of the Second World War. Hundreds of memoirs by generals, admirals, and civilian leadership stayed silent. Internally, decrypts were laundered through a fictional MI6 spy called "Boniface" with a fictional network of agents in Germany, so field commanders would believe they were receiving human intelligence rather than signals intelligence — but that was internal cover, not a public mythology. Externally, there wasn't an active public cover story; merely a vague public sense that Allied intelligence had performed well.

Tiny fragments did leak into books from the late 1950s onward, but none communicated the scale of what had happened. A computer science professor named Brian Randell first publicly revealed the existence of Colossus in 1972 while preparing a book on the history of computing, and his subsequent campaign to get the broader Bletchley story declassified initially failed. When F.W. Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret was about to publish in 1974, the British D-Notice Committee couldn't block the American edition, so they allowed a partial authorized account to go out first as a diversionary move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_(cryptography)

Manhattan Project (1942-1945)

The same shape, compressed in time. Approximately 130,000 personnel over three years. Near-zero public discourse. Then disclosure-by-use in August 1945. Workers at Oak Ridge and Hanford famously did not know what they were building. The genuine information penetration that did occur was internal — Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, the Rosenberg ring — and was contents-specific: real espionage went after real contents. No popular mythology grew up around it during classification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

AZORIAN / Glomar Explorer (1968-1974)

The intermediate case. Six years of an industrial cover story. The Hughes Glomar Explorer was publicly presented as a deep-sea manganese mining vessel, and the cover was largely accepted in the press. A handful of investigative reporters got close but were persuaded to hold. The story broke in 1975 and produced the canonical "Glomar response" to FOIA requests, which is now the legal scaffolding underneath much of modern classification fog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

 

[Julian Vale]

Thanks, Mendel. The paper doesn't establish a historical parallel with the same provenance gaps and a comparable motive for a cover-up. I should have said that more clearly. Secrecy can't do the work of authenticating a document, and I don't mean that authenticity and fabrication are equally likely. jon_eir's examples don't resolve that problem for Magenta. The broader information-control argument is still a hypothesis. The Hitler Diaries comparison is worth pursuing, particularly the claimed route from the alleged source to publication. For the telegrams, the immediate question remains which actual specimen was tested.

 

[Mendel]

To address the quoted post, here are some programs that are cited and fit your criteria.

Thank you!
None of these have had a document leaked, though?
They're either secret, or they break big; they don't linger halfway broken for decades. Yet that is what we are supposed to believe: that a governments protects a secret amazingly well, except for one set of documents that miraculously reaches the public without provenance or corroborstion.
I don't think I've seen this pattern anywhere before, outside of hoaxes.

For a hoax it makes sense, because a hoax must be detailed to be believable, but it can't be provenanced or corroborated because it is fake.

 

[jon_eir]

None of these have had a document leaked, though?

I didn't pick up exactly what it was you were looking for, I guess. I would suggest that Skunk Works projects like the U-2, Blackbird and stealth aircraft were all rumoured about before they were officially revealed. Some kind of stealth helicopter had also been rumoured about since at least the 1980s.

For example, regarding the A-12/Oxcart:

With the growing number of A-12s, how much longer could the project remain secret? The Department of Defense was having difficulty concealing its participation because of increasing Oxcart expenditures. It also realized that the technological data would be extremely valuable in connection with feasibility studies for the commercial supersonic transport. Awareness grew in the aircraft industry that something new and remarkable was going on. Commercial airline crews had sighted the A-12 in flight.

In spite of all this, 1963 went by without any public revelation. President Lyndon B. Johnson was brought up to date on the project a week after taking office and ordered an announcement for the spring of 1964."

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/1194oxcart/

If you're looking for something specifically within the UFO sphere, Linda Moulton Howe's discussion with Art Bell brings up an interesting example.

"Phil Leroy described three large, dark helicopters flying extremely low. According to the preserved program transcript, two passed within roughly 250 feet of him at an estimated altitude of only 50 feet. He reported:

• no navigation lights, strobes or identifying markings;
• essentially no engine/rotor noise despite their proximity;
• only a rush/gust of air as they passed;

AI was used to pull the above details from the source."

https://artbellarchive.org/episode/...ost-investigators-dave-oester-and-sharon-gill

By their nature, none of those reports can be tied to an actual encounter with a top-secret aircraft per se. The point is simply that rumours and reports resembling technologies that were later publicly acknowledged can predate their official disclosure.

For actual classified documents being leaked, I would suggest looking at WikiLeaks and similar cases. The clearest pre-internet example is probably the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of classified Department of Defense documents to the New York Times and other newspapers.

https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers

OR Samuel Loring Morison leaks surrounding the KH-11 (1984): Morison supplied Jane's Defence Weekly with classified KH-11 satellite photographs. The photographs were actually published in 1984.

"the images gave the general public around the world a first glance at the capability of America's classified reconnaissance satellites."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spiesfly/phot-04.html

Again, I don't believe there is a black program or psyop secretly covering up a program. This is a particular bugbear of mine, and these sources are often used as evidence of this, which I do not support. I simply offer them as evidence to either support or deny your claim, and realise this may be taking the thread off point.

 

[Mendel]

For actual classified documents being leaked, I would suggest looking at WikiLeaks and similar cases. The clearest pre-internet example is probably the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of classified Department of Defense documents to the New York Times and other newspapers.

Yes, but the provenance of these papers was clear, and they're corroborated.

OR Samuel Loring Morison leaks surrounding the KH-11 (1984): Morison supplied Jane's Defence Weekly with classified KH-11 satellite photographs. The photographs were actually published in 1984.

Yes, but was it a secret that these satellites exist?

What we get with hoaxes (and the Italian UFOs) is a detailed "leak" without any plausible context.

If an oxcart design document was leaked, but the USG still claimed that was fake and it didn't exist, then that'd be in that category. But typically, at that point we'd asume the adversaries know, so the secrecy no longer serves a purpose, and is relaxed.