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Hey, I've been looking into the Zanfretta case from Italy in 1978, specifically the first incident in December, and there are a few things from the actual police records that often get mixed up with the later stories.

On the night of December 6–7, 1978, security guard Pier Fortunato Zanfretta noticed lights behind a villa near Torriglia, outside Genoa. He went to check it out, thinking someone might be breaking in.

He later told police that something hit him in the back. When he turned around, he saw a humanoid figure roughly three metres tall. He also described a brilliant red oval object, more than ten metres across, that rose vertically with a whistling sound.

His colleagues lost radio contact with him. They found him about an hour later, distressed, hot and sweating even though it was cold out.

Carabinieri commander Antonio Nucchi checked the location and recorded a horseshoe-shaped mark on the lawn, about two metres wide and three metres long. The initial message and the rest of the investigation are available in published scans of the police and judicial records.

One detail that usually gets mixed up when people retell this: the “more than fifty witnesses” mentioned in the investigation had reported luminous objects around the area during the previous months. They did not witness Zanfretta’s encounter. The initial message specifically says there were no other witnesses to that event.

The records even disagree about the weather. One describes a clear sky; another describes freezing, adverse conditions. That discrepancy is still there.

The judicial file was eventually closed because there were no grounds for a criminal offence. It did not determine what Zanfretta had encountered.

Has anyone here looked into that first December incident on its own, separately from the later stories? There’s a pretty clear difference between what shows up in those early records and how the wider case is usually told.