The latest book by Rome ufologist Francesca Bittarello is titled “UFOs in Rome” and is devoted entirely to sighting reports that occurred within the Italian capital town territory in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Based on the large archives of reports collected over more than forty years by the Italian Center for Ufological Studies (CISU), the author analyzed each case trying to explain what might have caused the sighting. It is not taken for granted that a witness, in the presence of an anomalous aerial phenomenon would find the trouble to tell their case to other people. Yet this is what used to happen, more often than we may image, in the golden age of “flying saucers”, when reporters did their job by going out and interviewing witnesses, far more seriously than what we read in the newspapers today.
The foreword is penned by Army General Domenico Rossi, former Parliament member and Undersecretary of Defense, who describes which Italian Defense offices are charged with collecting reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, though no proper scientific studies follow.
The Lazio region has totalled more than 2,750 UFO reports so far (out of a total of about 34,000 nationwide). More than half (1,520) came from the province of Rome, and nearly 1,000 of those sightings took place from the Capital itself.
As in the rest of Italy, 60% are Nocturnal Lights (luminous phenomena seen at a distance in the night sky), less than 20% are Daylight Objects, and Close Encounters (when the distance between phenomenon and fitness is less than 250 meters) are only 5%. The remaining 15% are "para-ufological" phenomena (tracks on the ground without a UFO sighted, lone humanoid entities, photographs showing objects or lights not visually observed).
These reports are only the tip of the iceberg: on the basis of the survey carried out by Doxa on behalf of CISU in 1987, it can be estimated that the number of observations of unidentified aerial phenomena by witnesses is at least 100 times larger (6.5% of the adult population, i.e. 3.5 millions).
Bittarello's analysis shows an overwhelming majority of natural or technological explanations as well as witness misinterpretations. These are about 95%, while the truly unexplained cases are about 5% of the total: no more than 50 in all.
The result of reading this interesting volume, which will be followed by a second one about the years from 2000 on, is exactly this: you don’t have to believe that all and every UFO sightings are referring to extraterrestrial encounters with entities, but we need a rigorous empirical analysis of each one, trying to find an explanation whenever possible, if we want to understand the reality of the UFO phenomena.
The book “UFO a Roma” (120 pages) is published by LuxCo Editions.
