Vol. 2 No. 1
     31 January 1996

     10TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

     This issue of ITUFOR marks the first decade of activity of Centro Italiano Studi
     Ufologici (CISU), which was founded on December 15, 1985, by a handful of former
     members of Centro Ufologico Nazionale (CUN), and it was registered at the Public
     Record Office on January 2, 1986.
 

     FIRST ITALIAN SIGHTINGS OF 1996

     The very first UFO sighting of the current year in Italy took place on January 2nd, at
     18:30: a couple on the road between Tindari and Castroreale (province of Messina)
     watched a hovering white light in front of the clouds. It seemed to blink off every half a
     minute, then blink on again after 10 seconds, for about 15 minutes.

     On the evening of January 4, several people in Rimini watched a white bright spot high
     in the sky and called journals and the police. But it was only the planet Venus, very
     prominent. Venus was probably cause also of the repeated sightings of a bright light
     regularly appearing over Taranto every evening at 17:30 and visible each time for 45
     minutes, in early January.

     On the night of January 5, at 22:20, four motorists at Romito Magra (La Spezia)
     stopped and looked at an oval-shaped body with ten bright spots in the middle. It
     looked like vibrating and rotating, until it suddenly disappeared.

     On the evening of January 7, two round, white lights in the sky were seen at Erba and
     Como, but disappeared after a few seconds. The local newspaper "La Provincia"
     published the phone numbers of CISU members Corrado Guarisco and Maurizio
     Verga calling for witnesses, which resulted in more reports for the Como province: on
     January 10, two taxi drivers in Camerlata noticed an antenna-shaped object among the
     clouds for a few seconds; on January 11, a woman in Asso saw three parallel rows of
     white rectangular lights hovering high and slowly fading away after 3-4 minutes; on that
     same evening, a family in Canzo saw a large disc-shaped white light seemingly
     descending behind the woods.

     At 21:30 on January 8, a few people saw a bright globe suddenly appearing 200
     meters above the ground at Torrile (Parma). After hovering a few minutes, it
     disappeared.

     On January 14, at 20:10, a young woman in Cimpello (Pordenone) saw twice in a
     minute the high and fast passage of a white triangle in the sky.

     INTERROGATION AT THE SENATE?

     Pordenone ufologist Antonio Chiumiento claimed in a recent interview (in "Il
     Gazzettino", Jan. 17) that he got a negative reply from the Defense Staff about
     releasing more info on the famed airplane-radar-photo case happened over Treviso in
     1979, a new picture of which was unexpectedly found and released by the pilot witness
     and published in the Italian press in August, 1995. According to Chiumiento, a senator
     of Forza Italia Party would be interested in asking a formal interrogation to the Minister
     of Defense about that case.

     AN "AREA 51" IN ITALY?

     An article and a photo by Robert Irving published in the December-January issue of
     UK journal of strange phenomena, "Fortean Times", has caused quite a sensation and
     controversy in Italy, too, after the Internet UFO community had been talking about it
     for about a month.

     While Irving's article is factual about the mystery sky booms over Pordenone in May,
     1995, the accompanying photo is unbelievable: it shows an hangar at Aviano NATO
     AFB, and an apparently saucer-shaped object (identical to Bob Lazar's S-4 "sporty
     model", indeed) protruding out of it.

     The local daily Il Gazzettino gave it front-page treatment on January 27, and national
     newspaper Il Giornale (Jan. 28) even suggested it might have been an Aurora.

     A secret US spy-plane? A fruit of reverse-technology on alien spacecrafts? Or more
     probably an ordinary F-15 fighter shown under an unusual angle, as suggested by
     CISU aeronautical consultants?

     The correct answer is: neither. On January 29, a Robert Irving's fax to Edoardo Russo
     revealed that the image had been created with a PC using Adobe Photoshop
     photo-retouching software, by superimposing the (toy-)saucer image to the hangar.
     According to Irving and FT editor Bob Rickard, it was never meant as a hoax, since it
     was all plainly absurd and the caption read that "the picture has been enhanced by
     computer" (what Irving agrees to be "something of an understatement"). A note about
     the truth is to be published in the February-March issue of "Fortean Times".
 

     THE C.I.S.U. ON THE INTERNET

     Since December 1, 1995 the Italian Center for UFO Studies has been freely given 5
     Megabytes of space on the World Wide Web server of the City of Turin Public
     Telematic Service.

     You may visit CISU homepage at URL: http://www.arpnet.it/~ufo

     More than 50 Web-pages are already available, mostly designed by Maurizio Verga,
     and more are regularly being added or updated. The larger part of it is - of course - in
     Italian, but a section in English also exists and will gradually grow.

     ITALIAN C.U.N. AND THE AUTOPSY FILM

     The January-February issue of "Notiziario UFO" arrived in the newsstands all over
     Italy with a special bargain: the Italian edition of the controversial Ray Santilli's
     so-called Roswell alien alleged autopsy film, edited by Santilli's Italian representative
     Maurizio Baiata on behalf of CUN (Centro Ufologico Nazionale).

     As you may know, since May 1995 the CUN has been the only UFO organization in
     the world to openly promote the film authenticity.

     In the fourth issue of this new edition of CUN journal, "Notiziario UFO", which is sold
     in the newsstands in 30,000 copies, Santilli's affair once again features prominently as
     the cover story, with no less than five articles and 18 pages, notably M. Baiata claiming
     there were two distinct crashes in New Mexico in 1947 (so to fit the Roswell case
     with the unnamed cameraman' story) and presenting the very first stills from the
     so-called "first autopsy film" (still unpublished).
 

     CRISIS AT THE SAN MARINO UFO SYMPOSIUM

     The increasing polemics about the alien autopsy film seem to have caused the divorce
     between the Italian UFO organization CUN and San Marino local group CROVNI,
     joint organizers of the International Symposium on UFOs and Related Phenomena for
     the last three years. According to San Marino newspapers ("San Marino Italia", Jan. 5;
     "Corriere di informazione sammarinese", Jan. 7), the CROVNI (Centro Ricerche
     Oggetti Volanti Non Identificati) has come to a skeptical opinion about Santilli's
     footage, as opposed to the more "naive" acceptance of it by the CUN. As a
     consequence, the CROVNI was fired out and will no longer help hosting next edition
     of the congress, planned for May, 1996.

     ABOUT C.I.S.U.

     Since 1986, the Italian Center for UFO Studies (Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici,
     CISU) has been the largest and most active UFO organization in Italy. Since 1988 it's
     been the only Italian member of the International Committee on UFO Research
     (ICUR).

     The CISU is a no-profit association whose aims are:

          - to promote the scientific study of UFO phenomena in Italy;
          - to help circulate information about UFO phenomena and studies;
          - to coordinate national activities of data collecting and studying.

     The CISU is composed of two categories of members: as of December 31, 1995,
     there were 46 active members and 336 associates, plus 6 honorary members.

     The serving Council of Directors is formed by: Roberto Farabone, President; Gian
     Paolo Grassino, Secretary; Renzo Cabassi, Angelo Ferlicca, Paolo Fiorino, Giuseppe
     Stilo and Paolo Toselli. They were all confirmed by latest Annual General Meeting
     (Rome, November 19, 1995) as a signal of solidarity since they all (plus Edoardo
     Russo and Maurizio Verga) were promised a legal action by Ray Santilli's lawyers for
     breaking his alleged copyright on the "alien autopsy footage" by freely distributing stills
     from the film to the Italian press and making "libellous claims and comments" in the
     CISU press conference on June 24, 1995.

     The CISU keeps a busy publication schedule: its journal "UFO - Rivista di
     informazione ufologica" is a 40-pages quality magazine published twice per year, and in
     the last 10 years has been the only UFO publication available in a national network of
     bookstores and newsstands in Italy; members also receive "Notizie UFO", a quarterly
     12-pages newsletter detailing activities, information, news and communications; they
     can also subscribe to "Notiziario Archivio Stampa", a monthly 20-pages selection of
     newspaper clippings (since 1990 CISU has been subscribing to a newsclipping
     service). Active members are also sent a monthly 100-plus-pages "CISU Notizie"
     consisting of detailed activity reports from each of the 24 regional branches, and an
     aperiodical 20-pages "UFO Forum" devoted to discussions and debates. "Servizio
     Documentazione Estera", a 30-pages monthly selection of articles from foreign UFO
     journals is also distributed.