ZANFRETTA INCIDENT

Opening

On the night of 6 December 1978, a 26-year-old security guard named Pier Fortunato Zanfretta was making his rounds in the hills above Genoa, in northern Italy, when he noticed four unusual lights in the garden of a big country house called Casa Nostra, at Marzano, near Torriglia. The gate and the front door stood open. Thinking thieves were about, he went in through the backyard with his torch and his pistol. What he said he found next was a red, oval object more than ten metres across hanging over the grass, and then three-metre beings with mottled skin, yellow triangular eyes and clawed feet.

He shouted into his radio, asked by his supervisor whether men were attacking him, and answered, in a sentence that is still quoted in Italy, that they were not men. Then contact was lost. Colleagues found him later, unconscious and in shock. Over the next three years Zanfretta said he was taken again and again, eleven times by his own count. It became the best-known abduction case in Italy, and one of the most argued over.

Timeline

6 December 1978The Marzano encounter. Zanfretta reports, then loses radio contact. He is found later, in shock. The time is given as about 11:30 p.m. in one account and 12:33 a.m. in the Carabinieri dossier.

7 December 1978The owner of the security company reports the matter to the Carabinieri. Brigadier Antonio Nucchi gathers 52 accounts of strange events in the area. The Carabinieri note a flattened, semicircular patch of grass about two metres by three in the garden.

December 1978Zanfretta appears on the television programme Portobello.

23 December 1978At the suggestion of the journalist Rino Di Stefano, the psychotherapist and hypnotist Mauro Moretti puts Zanfretta under regressive hypnosis in front of journalists and ufologists. Under hypnosis he describes being taken into a brightly lit room aboard a craft and subjected to painful experiments.

27 December 1978He disappears again after reporting that his car has stopped. He is found more than an hour later, in deep shock, with dry clothes and an unusually warm body. Large footprints are reported nearby.

31 January 1979A neurologist certifies that he shows no thinking or psychosensory alterations.

30 July 1979After his employer reassigns him and gives him a Vespa scooter, he disappears a third time and is found about two kilometres from it.

2 December 1979A fourth incident of the same kind.

Early 1980sThe police commissioner of Genoa revokes his gun licence, and he loses his job as a guard.

1981The last of the claimed episodes. In all, he claims eleven abductions and an alien object that he has never produced.

2014Di Stefano publishes a book that quotes the detailed description of the beings Zanfretta gave under hypnosis.

Key figures

Pier Fortunato Zanfretta was a night watchman for a security company in the Genoa area. Sceptical journalists generally accepted that he was sincere and had no mental disorder, while rejecting the explanation.

Antonio Nucchi, a Carabinieri brigadier, collected the first accounts from the neighbourhood.

Rino Di Stefano, a journalist, proposed the hypnosis and later wrote about the case. Mauro Moretti, a psychotherapist, conducted the session. Moretti said Zanfretta was unfamiliar with science fiction, which critics disputed given how much of it was in Italian media in the late 1970s.

The Centro Ufologico Nazionale, Italy's national UFO centre, repeatedly said it did not consider the case reliable.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the Carabinieri dossier, the accounts collected by Nucchi, the television appearance, the hypnosis sessions, the neurologist's certificate and the later books. The Carabinieri noted lights seen over Marzano by many people that night, and one account says they recorded violence to the villa's door and the disappearance of two stuffed birds. I have not found the dossier itself, and the reliability of the witnesses has not been verified.

The weak points are the physical traces. The flattened patch of grass has an ordinary explanation offered for it: the owners had tied up a horse there. The warmth of his clothes and body fits his having sat in a car. The "footprints" matched puddles, according to the sceptical accounts. The sightings in the sky that night were never independently verified, and the alien object he claimed to hold has never been shown.

The hypnosis is the most criticised part. It was used without safeguards, and the questions were reportedly discussed while he was already hypnotised. The use of sodium thiopental was also questioned. Sceptical journalists judged that the hypnosis invalidated his recollections of the experiences, since hypnotic memories are open to suggestion.

Things you might not know

• Fifty-two accounts were collected. The Carabinieri brigadier gathered them within days.
• The name "Dargos" has a source. It resembles Hydargos, the villain of the Italian anime Grendizer, and the creature's description resembles a monster in the Italian comic Zagor, according to critics.
• He was on television within weeks. Portobello, a popular Italian programme, had him on in December 1978.
• The hypnosis was public. It took place in front of journalists and ufologists on 23 December 1978.
• He lost his gun licence. The police revoked it in the early 1980s, and he lost his job as a guard.
• It became a play. The case inspired a stage work, Loro, a true story of the most famous alien abduction in Italy.
• The key time is uncertain. One account gives the start as about 11:30 p.m., the dossier as 12:33 a.m.

Competing explanations

Suggestion and the hypnosis. The strongest reading. Zanfretta may have been sincere, but his detailed account came after a public hypnotic session in the presence of enthusiasts, and the beings and the name resemble Italian comics and cartoons of the time.

A real encounter. Supporters point to the witnesses, to the Carabinieri's notes, to the physical traces at the villa and to the sincerity that sceptics themselves accept. The difficulty is that every trace has an ordinary explanation offered for it, and no object has been produced.

A mixture. Something may have startled him on the first night, with later episodes shaped by the attention that followed. The sources do not allow this to be tested.

Later life of the case

Zanfretta remains the central figure in Italian abduction lore and has been written about, filmed and staged in the decades since. Italy's own UFO bodies have never endorsed the case. It sits beside other European cases such as Cussac and Trans-en-Provence.

Finding

The Zanfretta case rests on one man's account, a public hypnotic session and a set of ordinary-looking traces. The man himself appears to have believed what he said, and the investigation by the Carabinieri did record real events in the neighbourhood. The best explanation is that the later, detailed story was shaped by hypnosis and by Italian popular fiction, with the first night's events still unexplained.

What still will not resolve: what Zanfretta actually saw in the garden at Marzano before the hypnosis, since his own first account to his supervisor is the only unprompted one.