The Duce, The Pope, and Guglielmo Marconi: the Strange Case of the 1933 UFO Crash in Italy

Before the recovery of an anomalous disk at Roswell in 1947—even before the 1945 crash near the Trinity nuclear test site—a downed non-human craft was recovered in 1933 in northern Italy, according to former intelligence official turned UAP whistleblower David Grusch. An oft-overlooked incident that may prove to be the real granddaddy of UFO crash retrieval cases, the incident involved not only then-dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, but was investigated by famed inventor Guglielmo Marconi, with the existence of the craft eventually being revealed to the U.S. government by none other than Pope Pius XII.

In his NewsNation interview with Ross Coulthart, David Grusch said that “1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy. They recovered a partially-intact vehicle.”

Indeed, UFO reports in pre-World War II Italy were well documented by the Italian government, to the point where Mussolini appointed radio inventor and pioneer Guglielmo Marconi as the head of a secret commission that was tasked with investigating the country’s UFO sightings in 1931.

“The Italian government moved it to a secure airbase in Italy for the rest of the fascist regime, until 1944-1945,” Grusch continued. But the “unconventional flying vehicle”, as Mussolini referred to the recovered craft, didn’t remain in Europe for very long.

 “Pope Pius XII back-channeled that… and told the Americans what the Italians had, and we ended up scooping it,” Grusch said, meaning the Vatican—or at least certain individuals within the Catholic Church—have first-hand knowledge of non-human entities visiting Earth.

This might explain the Vatican’s progressive attitude toward the possibility of extraterrestrial life, with the director of the Vatican Observatory, Father Jose Funes, saying that Christians should welcome otherworldly visitors as “extraterrestrial brothers” that are a part of God’s creation, and, presumably having a different relationship with the divine “might have remained in full friendship with their creator.”

Regardless of whether or not the 1933 case has had an influence on the Church’s modern stance on extraterrestrial life, Italian UFO researcher Roberto Pinotti documented the history of the crash in his 2020 book, UFO Contacts in Italy: Volume Two. The craft either landed or crashed in Magenta, a town in Italy’s Lombardy region, on April 11, 1933. The strange case was investigated by an intelligence unit called “Gabinetto RS/33” (or RS/33 Cabinet), dispatched by Mussolini himself to deal with the incident.

Initially thought to simply be a secret weapon of British, French or German origin by Mussolini, the crashed object was stored at a hangar belonging to SIAI Marchetti, an aircraft manufacturing company, in nearby Vergiate; the craft was later determined to be extraterrestrial in origin by Marconi.

Grusch isn’t the only informant claiming to have seen documentation regarding the 1933 crash in Italy: in a 2021 interview on Max Moszkowicz’s podcast the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), Luis Elizondo, said that he had seen what he described as “compelling” documentation that backs up this story.

“Roswell may not have been the first event,” Elizondo said. “I’ve seen personally some documentation that’s very compelling from a particular foreign country where they had a recovery of a vehicle, and they had some countries conducting scientific analysis on it, and after World War II, allegedly, parts of that vehicle were brought to the United States.”

After confirming that the country in question was Italy, Elizondo said that he had seen some documentation “that has been validated that was from Mussolini himself” and that “it’s authentic, it’s been proven to be authentic, so certainly interesting.”

The stories told by other informants suggest that the bodies of two tall humanoid entities were recovered from the crash; a description is offered by an anonymous French biologist who claimed to have examined the bodies, as documented by UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield in his 2015 book, UFO Crash Retrievals – Status Report III: Amassing the Evidence:

“Two bodies allegedly lay on a table. They look like twins. They’re dead and preserved with formaldehyde. The bodies are in bad shape. They look like victims of a bad car accident – but the heads remain intact. But their features trouble a French biologist invited to study the bodies.

“Two males, very tall (around 7ft), long blonde hair, very high and spacious foreheads, clear blue eyes that look somewhat Asiatic, small noses, small mouths, small chins, thin lips, very clear pale skin, but no signs of facial hair. Their hands, although slender are human-like, their toes are small and their feet flat.

“The story gets weirder. Their skin appears perfectly white but shows no signs of keratin granules, which play an important role in providing natural moisturization for the skin, in addition to UV protection, and water retention.

“Startlingly, the biologist discovered that their lymphatic systems were dominant and practically replaced the blood system, providing a high degree of protection from any disease. They were not human, at least as we know it,” the entry concludes. “That’s at least how the story goes.