by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In the fall of 1978, there seems to have been a flap in the comune (municipality) of Torrita di Siena in the Tuscany region of Italy from September 13th to the 20th. This is mentioned by Maurizio Verga in his introduction to the article (page 6 of the pdf) he translated by Dr. Roberto Pinotti headlined “Landing, E.M. Effects and Entities at Torrita di Siena” published in the Vol. 25, No. 4 (November 1979) Flying Saucer Review. According to Verga, during that week, “there was a massive onset of the UFO phenomenon” with a peak of 40 reports on the 14th and a total of 120 cases. He speculates that many of these were the result of “the heavy TV, radio and press coverage of the main UFO sightings and encounters,” and he describes the case covered in the article by Pinotti, who did a thorough boots-on the-ground investigation, as “one of these.” He describes Pinotti as “the leading authority of Italian ufology and well known to FSR readers.” What Pinotti reported was apparently intriguing enough that this case ended up being recounted in numerous publications and was revisited in 2011 by a reporter from one of the first Italian newspapers to cover it.
Pinotti is identified as Vice-President of the Italian UFO Research Centre (CUN). According to him, between 8:15 p.m. and 8:20 p.m. on September 17, 1978, Ultimina Boscagli and her 12-year-old son Riccardo were standing in front of their house in Torrita di Siena when they heard a loud noise like “artillery fire.” They looked up and saw a yellow-orange fireball with a reddish trail that then suddenly vanished “in a blinding dazzle.” Frightened, they went inside.
Pinotti describes another witness, Santina Faralli, hearing the noise and being aware of the light outside while watching television. According to Pinotti, she said “the electric light” went out and then came back on. Soon after that, her 25-year-old son, Rivo, “a barber by profession,” is said to have arrived and to have stayed for a half hour until 9:00 p.m. and then to have left and gone to his car, a Fiat 127.
According to Pinotti, Rivo got in his car, started it and only managed to drive a few metres before it stalled with an electrical system failure. At this point, a “strange bright object preceded by a beam of red light” is described as landing in front of him on the road. Its lower part is said to be disc shaped and its upper part is described as “hemispherical and orange in colour like the colour of a priest’s hat.”
Pinotti goes into more detail saying the object was bright and lit up the area around it and that it seemed to be supported “on three iridescent beams of light varying from yellow, to green, to red, to sky blue.” He says it “hung in the air” at the height of the car’s hood, was three metres in diameter (as wide as the road) and touched a wall “with one edge.”
According to Pinotti, a double door opened and two creatures 1.o-1.10 metres tall came out and “descended in a fluctuating motion until they were 10 centimetres from the ground” with their heads at the same level as Faralli’s face. They are described as wearing green coveralls and big helmets that had two “cylindrical protuberances like springs” (the illustration shows what look like antennas) coming off the front. Their skin is said to have been green and their faces are described as lean and human-like with bony, arched cheeks (zygomatic), regular noses and thin lipless mouths.”
Pinotti describes the limbs of the creatures as “normal” in terms of their proportion and says the creatures circled the car with an “awkward” gait and seemed to have more interest in the car than in Faralli. He says they went back to the “UFO” after circling the car and “ascended with the same fluctuating motion as they had displayed when descending.”
According to Pinotti, as one creature was seen by Faralli to be settling in in the hemispherical section of the craft, the other creature paused before entering and turned back and looked at Faralli as if it was going to say something, then turned away and went inside.
Pinotti describes “two very intense beams” coming from the bottom of the craft after the door shut. The craft is described as rising up to about 10 metres and then shooting off “in a level flight leaving a bright horizontal trail.” After that, the headlights of the car are said to have come back on, and the car is said to have moved forward as the gears were engaged when it shut down. Faralli is described as having been “at first stupefied and bewildered and then almost paralyzed with terror” and to have suffered burning eyes for three days afterwards.
Pinotti says there were reports from the next street that at around 9:30 p.m., televisions “went off for about a minute.”
According to Pinotti, he went to the scene and found “strange traces in the road.” These are said to include a 50 cm circle in the middle of the road that seemed to have been blackened by heat, other “traces of fire” to the left and right of the circle and close to some bushes where there were also broken stones that Pinotti speculates were broken by heat that were “burned and hard but very light in weight.” He says one sample was taken from the circle and another “from beyond the broken ground.” According to him, these, along with blackened gravel picked up by Faralli the next day, “were subjected to chemical analysis by CUN consultants in the Eurotom laboratories of Ispra.” He says the results were “not very conclusive.”
In the UFO Related Entities Catalog (URECAT) included on the website UFOs at Close Sight managed by Patrick Gross, the case has an extended entry that includes a list of the many publications, from the Italian newspaper accounts close to the time of the event, to UFO journals, newsletters, magazines, and books that covered the story. Included and reproduced in an English translation is a fairly recent article, that can still be found on the website of one of the original Italian newspapers that covered the story in 1979.
The article is headlined “The Story of Rivo, Barber of Torrita Who Saw UFOs,” posted December 5, 2011, on the La Nazione website. In an interview with him in his barbershop 33 years after the reported encounter, Faralli tells the same story that appears in the FSR account.
The article starts off dramatically: “Never pronounce this word: UFO.” Faralli is said to be 57 years old at this point, and he is described showing a sketch of the creatures he reported seeing made by “the famous Molino.” This is likely to have been Walter Molino, who did cover illustrations for the magazine Domenica Del Corriere
After telling his story, he says he didn’t go to the police because he was afraid he wouldn’t be believed and would be called “a crackpot.” Even so, he says word got out and “my life became hell.” According to him, for over a month, people from newspapers and television, and those who were just curious, knocked on his door constantly. He mentions Pinotti coming to see him and being interviewed by La Nazione.
Asked if there were “physical consequences” from his encounter, he mentions his eyes burning but adds that “during a few years, I had been afraid, even to move from one room to another.” He says he was taken to Sienna hospital because he was sick and depressed. According to him, his symptoms were psychological and not physical. He says “I was hypnotized, one had to check if I had visions.”
Asked if he was drunk, he says “Absolutely not!” Asked “How can you forget?” he says “It is hard, but I am calm. I went on with my life. Of course, it is impossible to forget.”
The article ends as dramatically as it started: “Don’t say the UFO word, Rivo Faralli. In his heart, despite everything, he still cannot believe this could have happened. Especially not to him”