Was Rome visited by Unidentified Flying Objects? Definitely, and once again the sightings in the skies over Vatican City stirred newspaper headlines and numerous TV news reports in Italy. According to recent reports, it seems that a UFO flap is taking place in Rome and that strange objects were also recorded on camera several times. The most important one is the footage of an odd luminous formation taken by three security guards stationed in front of the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican (Holy See). These were qualified witnesses since they are artillerymen, trained experts in air surveillance.
It was at 4 am in the night of June 7th when three men belonging to the 17° antiaircraft Regiment at the “Santa Barbara” station in Sabaudia (Latina province), spotted three spherical bright objects hovering in the sky above St. Peter’s dome in the Vatican, right in the center of Rome. They promptly filmed the unexpected nocturnal air show with a cell phone.
From their point of observation in the Roman Monteverde area (overlooked by the Gianicolo hill), they immediately stopped a police patrol. Well trained in spotting aircraft, the artillerymen excluded the possibility of a commercial plane, a jet fighter or a balloon. They described the object’s swift maneuvers, mentioning a “darting move toward the sky,” a “delta formation,” and “luminous dots suspended at about three hundred feet above the ground.” They added that there is “no way a conventional airplane can do such things.” The UFO disappeared and reappeared for brief moments, with sudden changes of altitude before it darted westbound at a 40 degree angle. The police patrol took the report very seriously and the central police station in Rome was immediately alerted. The footage, more than a minute in length, was acquired by the Italian police, pending further investigations.
Thanks to the technical background of the witnesses, many TV networks took the news seriously. “Studio Aperto” (Mediaset, Italia Uno newscast) anchorwoman Elena Guarnieri introduced the segment saying: “We will show you now an exclusive video footage of a UFO sighting in Rome, this video was filmed by three soldiers, take a look.” Staff journalist Paolo Capresi then describes the images: “They are three flying objects and they are floating in the air, they were filmed last night in the sky above Rome. The images were taken with a cell phone by three soldiers who were in service in front of the U.S. ambassador’s residence in the Vatican City (Holy See), Monteverde district, two steps from St. Peter’s Square, and were immediately handed over to the Carabinieri [police]. As you can see there are no objects around to use as reference points that can give us the exact distance and size of the UFOs. It seems that they are spherical in shape and they hover above the Vatican. They appear and disappear often changing altitude.”
The journalist concluded, almost ironically: “The soldiers who have filmed these objects are based in the antiaircraft division and are specialized in recognizing the flight path of aircraft. Since 1978 it’s the Air Force that is in charge of registering sightings (over Italy)”. Colonel Marco Picciau of the Italian Air Force specifies that “statistics of sightings reported before 2001 were 300, after 2001 we have a more precise statistic on 50, 55, sightings [every year]”.
You can see the full coverage by the Italia Uno network here:
The June 7th sighting was preceded approximately eight hours before by another relevant sighting. As reported in the Roman newspaper “Il Messaggero”, “Just last Sunday [June 6], at 8 pm, many motorists traveling along the Via Aurelia and the A12 highway in the section between Civitavecchia and Santa Marinella, said they saw a very bright circular object flying across the sky.”
In the just released second issue of Open Minds magazine, my colleague Antonio Huneeus wrote the cover story about the Vatican Extraterrestrial Connection, which includes a section about UFO sightings in Rome going all the way back to 214 B.C. The article describes in detail a famous report in 1954 when a formation of unidentified objects flew right on top of St. Peter’s square and made a St. Andrew’s cross for a few seconds. It seems that UFOs are still flying over the Roman airspace and particularly the area around Vatican City.
