1933 Italian UFO crash: a researcher's decades-old claims
At the Italian National UFO Center's October 6 press conference in Rome, its president revisited the story of an alleged 1933 UFO crash in Lombardy. The story has been circulating for decades, but no publicly verifiable document for it has surfaced to this day.
On October 6, the Italian National UFO Center (Centro Ufologico Nazionale, CUN) held a press conference in Rome, at the Palazzo Valentini, which dealt with the documents being gradually released by the US Pentagon, under its new name the Department of War, and with the Pursue program that Donald Trump announced in a Truth Social post on February 19. The program is run by a consortium made up of the White House, the Department of Energy, NASA and the FBI, and according to the official site it faces the identification and possible release of several million documents, gradually. The CUN is a nonprofit organization that has operated since 1966, with about 150 active members; according to its own data, it has cataloged roughly 13,000 Italian cases between 1900 and 2020, more than a fifth of which remained unexplained, and the organization is also in regular contact with the French GEIPAN.
The Magenta case
At the press conference, the president, Roberto Pinotti, revisited a long-known claim: according to it, on June 13, 1933, an unidentified flying object crashed in Lombardy, between the towns of Magenta and Vergiate. According to the account, agents of the fascist secret police, the OVRA, arrived at the scene, and Benito Mussolini set up a secret research group, the „Gabinetto RS/33”, led by Guglielmo Marconi, to examine the wreckage and any possible remains. The Stefani news agency, the predecessor of Ansa, was allegedly ordered to stay silent on the matter. The article itself refers to the case as alleged (presunto).
What do we know, and what don't we?
No publicly accessible archival document or official Italian state confirmation of the case is known. According to Pinotti, years ago William Brophy Jr., the son of an American military pilot, contacted him, saying that his father had taken part at the end of World War II in the collection of secret materials, possibly including the Magenta wreckage; and in 1972, then Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti allegedly handed him copies of letters relating to the case. These claims rest solely on Pinotti's own account; no independent source or published document supports them.
Two later, external developments also touched on the case, but these do not constitute independent evidence either. In July 2023, David Grusch, a former US intelligence official and Air Force pilot, testified under oath before a House committee that the United States possesses vehicles of non-human origin, and that some of them are allegedly linked to the 1933 find in Italy, which was then acquired in 1945 with the help of the Vatican. And in spring 2024, in an interview given to Oggi magazine, Marconi's daughter, Elettra Marconi, and his grandson, Guglielmo Giovannelli Marconi, confirmed, according to the article's wording based on widely circulated reports, that Marconi worked on Mussolini's program. This latter claim is also known only indirectly, not from a primary source.
The 1933 Magenta case thus stands for now where it has stood for decades: in a UFO researcher's recurring account, supplemented by newer references that are also hard to verify, but to which no independent, publicly accessible document has been attached to this day.
The sober take
According to the source, no publicly accessible archival document or official confirmation exists for the alleged 1933 Magenta case; the claim rests on Roberto Pinotti's own account, repeated for decades, and on indirect references not from a primary source (Grusch's congressional testimony, a report about a family interview).