THE SERCHIO FISHERMAN

Opening

On the night of 24 to 25 July 1952, Carlo Rossi, a 53-year-old man from San Pietro a Vico near Lucca in Tuscany, was fishing in the river Serchio when, he said, a large black disc came down and hovered low over the water. A pipe hung from it into the river, as if it were drawing water. A face in something like a diver's helmet looked out at him through a window, and when he tried to get away a green ray swept over him and he felt an electric shock. The disc left towards the east.

Some time later a tall, thin stranger with a foreign accent found him at the same spot, asked whether he had seen aeroplanes or flying saucers, and gave him a gold-tipped cigarette that left him dizzy and sick. The stranger took it back and threw it in the river. Seventeen years later John Keel printed the story in his newsletter ANOMALY, in Jacques Vallée's version, as an early sighting of what Keel called the Men in Black.

Timeline

Night of 24 to 25 July 1952Rossi sees the disc over the Serchio. Accounts put it at 20 to 25 metres across, about 2 metres thick at the rim, black, with oval openings around the edge glowing orange, propellers, and a turret or dome on top. It hovers for about ten minutes.

"Six days later", or 15 SeptemberThe stranger appears. Vallée's version says six days later, while several Italian and French accounts give 15 September. All agree on the questions about aircraft and saucers, the gold-tipped cigarette, and the accent, which Vallée's version calls "rather Scandinavian than American".

26 September 1952The Florence daily La Nazione runs the story with a drawing. Vallée's summary gives the date as 25 September. One French account says Rossi went to the authorities in Lucca the same month to say his story was true.

1954The French writer Jimmy Guieu retells it, names the witness only as "Carlo", and calls the stranger scene melodrama.

1969Vallée includes the case in Passport to Magonia, and a short version by him appears in Flying Saucer Review.

September 1969Keel reprints Vallée's box on page 30 of ANOMALY no. 2, at the foot of his own essay arguing that many UFO witnesses suffer "mind tampering" rather than a physical experience.

2000 and 2002Martin Kottmeyer studies the newspaper drawing, and the Italian researcher Giuseppe Stilo re-examines the case in his book Ultimatum alla Terra.

Key figures

Carlo Rossi is the only witness. Even his job is unsettled: different accounts call him a farmer, a fisherman, a peasant and a post office employee.

The stranger is unnamed and was never traced. Later versions add details the early ones lack: a dark blue suit that made him look like a soldier, a very angular face, a short cane.

Jacques Vallée carried the case into English, and John Keel carried it into the Men in Black story.

The Italian ufologists of CISU, the Italian Centre for UFO Studies, and Giuseppe Stilo did the work on the Italian side, and found far less underneath the story than the retellings suggest.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the La Nazione article of September 1952 and its drawing, two months after the night it describes, and the chain of books that copied it. The drawing that survives shows a man in an aviator's cap and goggles and a flat disc with stacked rotor blades on top. The full text of the article has not been republished.

What is missing is nearly everything else. There is no investigation report from 1952, no record from the Lucca authorities, and no other witness on the river. CISU notes that the only real source is the short local article, and that a later inquiry gathering family statements may have been carried out by Rossi's own nephew, whose versions changed over time. Italian ufologists have also said the journalist who wrote the piece was known for pranks.

Keel's page reprints the Flying Saucer Review box, so it is not shown here. It can be read in summary on page 30 of the John Keel Archive.

The witness began smoking it, and thought he was about to die as his head reeled.

Things you might not know

• The newspaper half-doubted it. According to accounts of the article, La Nazione closed with the Italian saying "se non è vero, è ben trovato": if it isn't true, it's a good story.
• Its craft could not have flown. Martin Kottmeyer pointed out that the drawing stacks rotor blades smaller than the disc on top of it, which would push air straight down onto the disc.
• The ray missed him in one version. Some accounts have the green ray pass over his head, giving him the feeling of a shock without touching him.
• A helicopter has been suggested. CISU raised one as a possible source of the propeller detail, while noting that helicopters were far from common in Italy in 1952.
• One believer saw a prophecy in it. The Italian writer Eugenio Almerio called the encounter an attempt by beings from Alpha Centauri and predicted "new messengers" for 1985.

Competing explanations

A journalist's joke. The story surfaced two months late, in one local article by a writer said to enjoy pranks, with a drawing of a machine that could not fly. The paper itself hedged. This explains why nothing else was ever found.

A witness's story that grew. Rossi may have seen something on the river at night, and the details, the helmet, the ray, the stranger, gathered round it in the telling, at home and then in print. The shifting dates and the changing descriptions fit a story retold rather than recorded.

An early Men in Black case. This is the reading Keel and Vallée gave it: a sighting followed by a stranger who knows about it, asks questions, and leaves the witness ill. It rests entirely on the same single newspaper report.

Later life of the case

Through Vallée and Keel, the Serchio stranger became one of the earliest cases in the Men in Black catalogue, often listed alongside Albert Bender's visitors of 1953. In Italy the case has gone the other way. The closer researchers have looked, the more it has narrowed to one article, one drawing and one man whose own family's accounts did not stay the same.

Finding

A man named Carlo Rossi told a Florence newspaper in September 1952 that he had seen a disc over the Serchio and later met a stranger with a strange cigarette, and that story travelled through French and American books until John Keel printed it in 1969. No record from 1952 besides the article itself has been found, and the article's own drawing shows a machine that could not fly. The strongest reading is a local story, possibly a newspaper joke, that grew in the retelling, though Rossi's own account can't now be tested either way.

What still will not resolve: the full text of the La Nazione article and the name of the journalist who wrote it, which would show how much of the story was Rossi's and how much was the paper's.