Author: Maurizio Verga
Publisher: Edizioni Upiar (www.ufo.it/saucers)
Price: €25 (no DVD) /€42 (with DVD)

The UFO mystery is the great­est of all fort­ean enig­mas; how­ever, the mount­ain of data has two hidden veins of rich ore – pre-1947 and foreign language reports.

‘New’ cases that preceded Kenn­eth Arn­old’s land­mark sight­ing are reg­ul­arly unearthed in online news­paper arch­ives by researchers in groups such as the Mag­onia Ex­change. In con­trast, few of the tens of thous­ands of reports from Europe, the former USSR and Asia have been trans­lated for Engl­ish readers.

Verga has done ufo­log­ists a great serv­ice with this trans­lated coll­ect­ion of over 100 selected Ital­ian land­ing and near-land­ing reports from 1912 to the 1954 wave of sight­ings that flooded the country. There were an aston­ish­ing 1,200 Ital­ian cases in 1954 alone, so only the cream of the crop is pre­sented here.

Each sight­ing is ranked from CE0 to CE4 – a mod­if­ied vers­ion of Hynek’s famous “close encount­ers” class­if­ic­at­ions – and given an eval­u­at­ion rating (e.g. INS – insuff­ici­ent data; UNR – unreli­able; and POSS – poss­ible explan­at­ion). Full ref­er­ences for each sight­ing are divided into sect­ions: press reports; mag­a­zine art­icles; books; and ‘other’ (UFO group invest­ig­at­ion reports etc). Some cases are cov­ered in minute detail. I was most int­er­ested to read the story of the 1952 Scers­cen glac­ier hoax photos – the landed disco vol­ante and alien pilot were pre­sented as the real deal in New Zea­land news­papers as late as the mid-1970s.

Another 1954 hoax is exposed. At Tra­date, two men wearing gas masks and stand­ing next to a wooden frame cov­ered in white, glossy paper, caused a mild panic among pat­rons of a nearby pub. Verga sugg­ests that several ‘wit­nesses’ were planted among the crowd to stir them up.

The most famous Ital­ian sighting has a well des­erved 14 pages of cov­er­age. On the morn­ing of 1 Nov­em­ber, 1954, Mrs Rosa Lotti narr­owly avoided abduct­ion by two small human­oids dressed in milit­ary-type uni­forms. They gave up their att­empt to take her and de­parted in a tiny UFO shaped like two cones joined at their bases. Oddly, their clothes and the descript­ion of their “space­ship” were like some­thing imag­ined by Jules Verne. Sev­eral indep­end­ent wit­nesses saw what was app­ar­ently the same UFO before and after Lotti’s encounter. The Lotti case is still one of the most thor­oughly invest­ig­ated and puzzl­ing UFO incidents, so it is unclear why Verga does not credit it with an ‘unexplained’ rating.

When Saucers Came To Earth has a wealth of care­fully chosen ill­ust­rat­ions. Every sight­ing is pin­pointed on a map of Italy, and there are num­er­ous wit­ness sketches, drama­tic art­ists’ impress­ions of the cases and photos through­out.

Three ill­ust­rated sect­ions take up the second half of the book. The first reprod­uces news­paper clipp­ings; and the second has a select­ion of mag­a­zine covers feat­ur­ing dischi volanti. It is a pity they are repro­d­uced in black and white, but a colour sect­ion would have greatly added to the book’s cost and put it out of the reach of some readers.

The last – and most int­er­est­ing – sect­ion com­pares pulp science fict­ion mag­a­zine and comic book ill­ust­rat­ions with the UFOs and aliens sketched by wit­nesses. The sim­i­lar­it­ies stim­u­late thought about the influ­ence of pop­u­lar cult­ure on wit­nesses, which ties in with the Europ­ean UFO scene’s socio­log­ical or psycho­social stance (as opp­osed to the gen­er­ally Amer­ican “nuts and bolts” space­ships-are-really-visit­ing-us stance). Verga admits to some prob­lems with this idea (for example, where cases prec­eded sim­i­larly-themed advert­ise­ments or art­work).

There are very few ways Verga’s book could have been improved, but if a re­vised edit­ion is issued, replac­ing some pages of clipp­ings in Ital­ian and a few of the mag­a­zine covers without UFO art­work would free up 20 or so pages for more sight­ings. In a few places, the text does not read smoothly. This prob­lem – a pit­fall of trans­lat­ion – could be solved by gett­ing a native English speaker to check it. Lastly, a better bond­ing plastic for the cover is needed, as the edges started peel­ing off the review copy after only minor handl­ing.

These few points do not de­tract from the work’s over­all use­ful­ness. It is a must-have for every­one with more than a pass­ing int­er­est in UFOs. It would be won­der­ful if Verga pro­duced a sequel cov­er­ing the years 1955–2005 to bring us up to date on the Ital­ian scene.

If UFO research­ers from other countries pro­duced sim­i­lar eff­orts, they would greatly add to the know­ledge of the gen­e­ral UFO comm­un­ity.