Description

Italy, Abbiate Guazzone, 1950
Bruno Facchini said he thought they were pilots. A storm had just blown through Abbiate Guazzone, near Tradate, on the night of 24 April 1950, and he went out to check sparks by the power line. He was a factory worker, about forty. What he found in the field was not a downed cable.

He described a large object like a flattened ball, its skin marked in a regular grid of horizontal and vertical strips. A ladder came down from a lit rectangular opening. He got within four or five metres. Inside, he said, he could make out another ladder, pipes, a row of cylinders, and dials that looked like pressure gauges.

Two figures stood by the outside ladder. A third was up on something he compared to a mechanical lift, working a bundle of pipes fixed to the craft. To him it looked like welding. Those were the sparks that had brought him outside.

The suits bothered him more than the shape of the machine. Roughly human height, closed in like diving gear, with clear panels over the eyes and very pale faces behind them. He thought there might have been liquid in those panels. Tubes hung from the mouth area. Accounts usually put the number at three or four; Facchini was not always precise about that.

He still assumed an aircraft crew with a mechanical fault. Nearby airfields made that a reasonable guess. He offered to help. They turned, gestured, and answered in sounds he could not place. He lost his nerve and ran.

One of them, he said, raised something that had been hanging at its neck. A beam hit him in the back and put him on the ground. From there he watched them go back aboard. The hum rose, the thing lifted, and it was gone.

Next morning he went back. Four circular marks, about a metre across, set out in a square. Scorched grass. Bits of metal. Those bits took on a life of their own. Renato Vesco had some of them analysed; the material was called an anti-friction metal. In the late 1950s Umberto Corazzi got another small piece from Facchini. That one was later lost.

Nothing in the papers shows up until more than two years later. The earliest item in the case bibliography is La Domenica del Corriere, 24 August 1952, under Guido Capra’s byline. The page has Facchini sketching, another shot of him shaping the thing with his hands, and a photograph of a claimed metal fragment. Most of the space goes to a big illustrated reconstruction.

Those pictures are doing different jobs. The photographs are of Facchini talking to a reporter. The encounter drawing is a press reconstruction, not a photo of the night and not a confirmed drawing by Facchini. Later artists kept the ladder, the suits and the repair work, and changed almost everything else.

Investigators kept coming back. A long piece ran in Dischi Volanti in 1960. A 1962 article brought in unnamed neighbours who had supposedly seen it and wanted nothing to do with it, and claimed one of Facchini’s sons had taken an interest in flying saucers. A family check in 2008 did not back that up. Even the date slips: the main dossier and the 1952 article say 24 April; another surviving clipping puts it in July 1950.

The 2008 inquiry also turned up a memory of a radio reporter turning up after an acquaintance passed the story on. The interview, according to that recollection, was never broadcast. How the thing first reached journalists is still unclear.

Facchini said the publicity made him a joke in the village and that he wished he had kept quiet. His sister later remembered him looking ill and keeping to himself after that night. In his version he had done something ordinary: seen people struggling with a machine and offered a hand. Years afterward he was still being asked what happened next.