Zanfretta UFO incident

Case dossier

On the night of 6–7 December 1978, Zanfretta was a guard for the private Val Bisagno institute, checking property near Marzano, a hamlet of Torriglia in the Genoese Apennines. The first-report core is that he treated lights near a villa as possible burglars, contacted the radio room, then described something frightening before communication stopped. Colleagues Walter Lauria and Raimondo Mascia were later named as the men who found him distressed. The exact dialogue, temperature claims and creature anatomy vary or come through later interviews, so they are not all equal to the first administrative notice.

A one-page Carabinieri report and a five-page court dossier circulate online through journalist Rino Di Stefano’s case website. The report says Val Bisagno owner Luigi Cereda notified the Torriglia command around noon on 7 December and summarizes Zanfretta’s claim of a large humanoid and a luminous object. The dossier copies also indicate later referral to Genoa judicial authorities. These are relevant scans of documents presented as official-origin records, but they are not served by the Carabinieri, a court or a state archive, and this audit could not establish custody, completeness or alterations. Their strongest safe use is to confirm that police and court paperwork was generated, not every claim within it.

The employer and colleagues are therefore corroborators of a workplace emergency, a search and Zanfretta’s distressed condition—not independent observers of the being he described. Later accounts attribute unusual lights to residents and say Brigadier Antonio Nucchi collected 52 statements. The accessible dossier does not expose a complete set of 52 signed first statements, dates and sight lines, so the number cannot be converted into 52 witnesses to the same encounter. Some may concern lights, other dates or later recollections.

The narrative expanded quickly. Di Stefano’s retrospective says he proposed hypnosis and that physician Mauro Moretti conducted a session on 23 December 1978 in the presence of journalists and UFO investigators. Under hypnosis Zanfretta described being taken into a hot, luminous place, fitted with a device and examined. Those details were then previewed by La Stampa on 12 January 1979 for a 53-minute local TV special. This sequence makes the hypnosis part of the media history, not an independent recording made before outside questioning.

Zanfretta later reported further disappearances or encounters from late December 1978 into 1981, and eventually said the beings were ‘Dargos’ and had entrusted him with a hidden sphere. Employer staff and colleagues appear in later interviews, sometimes describing searches, radio traffic or lights. These accounts can corroborate that further alarms and searches were reported; they do not independently confirm what happened during missing intervals. No sphere with an examinable custody chain, authenticated event photograph, original sensor data or complete police file has been made public.

Media exposure was not neutral evidence collection. The case appeared in contemporary newspapers, a local television hypnosis special and Enzo Tortora’s Portobello; RAI Liguria later produced the two-part 1984 program UFO a Genova? and republished excerpts in 2021. RAI’s catalogue page confirms the broadcast history and repeats the story, but it does not publish the underlying police statements or adjudicate the claim. The case is valuable as an Italian media and memory case: repeated broadcasting helps explain fame, while also increasing the need to separate first report, hypnotic recall and retrospective testimony.