page_title: Unidentified flying object
section_title: Italy
hierarchical_section_title: Unidentified flying object / Investigations / Italy
caption_attribution_description: Frank Drake (right) and Roberto Pinotti (left) Italiano: --AlfredoBenni (msg) 22:05, 8 feb 2012 (CET), , , ).
context_page_description: An unidentified flying object is any aerial phenomenon that cannot immediately be identified or explained. Most UFOs are identified on investigation as conventional objects or phenomena. The term is widely used for claimed observations of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
context_section_description: According to some Italian ufologists, the first documented case of a UFO sighting in Italy dates back to April 11, 1933, to Varese. Documents of the time show that an alleged UFO crashed or landed near Vergiate. Following this, Benito Mussolini created a secret group to look at it, called Cabinet RS/33.
  Alleged UFO sightings gradually increased since the war, peaking in 1978 and 2005. The total number of sightings since 1947 are 18,500, of which 90% are identifiable.
  In 2000, Italian ufologist Roberto Pinotti published material regarding the so-called "Fascist UFO Files", which dealt with a flying saucer that had crashed near Milan in 1933 (some 14 years before the Roswell, New Mexico, crash), and of the subsequent investigation by a never mentioned before Cabinet RS/33, that allegedly was authorized by Benito Mussolini, and headed by the Nobel scientist Guglielmo Marconi. A spaceship was allegedly stored in the hangars of the SIAI Marchetti in Vergiate near Milan.
caption: Italian ufologist Roberto Pinotti (it) with astrophysicist Josef Allen Hynek in 1981
exif: {}