by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

This is the last of a three-part series of blogs covering the case of an Italian security guard (with the company Val Bisagno), Piero Fortunato Zanfretta, who reported a number of encounters with UFOs and their occupants.  After the first incident, he described in conscious recall being confronted by “an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall.” Under hypnosis the story came out that he was taken up into a craft where he was interrogated and examined by as many as ten creatures “about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead” with metal strips over their mouths. He said they told him they were from the “third galaxy,” wanted to talk to the people of Earth, and would return soon in greater numbers. Italian journalist Rino Di Stefano became interested in the case, stuck with it, and wrote a book about it titled The Zanfretta Case, first published in Italian in 1984 and then in English in 2014. The reader can refer to his website promoting the book for most of the information. What makes this case unique is that there is corroborating evidence in the form of possible landing traces, giant footprints, witness testimony from his co-workers, and observations made during the investigation by the Italian military police known there as the Carabinieri.

When we left off, Zanfretta had gone missing for the fourth time on December 2, 1979, while on patrol in an Austin Mini. His four-man Val Bisagno rescue team of two men each in two cars drove to the scene after spotting a UFO in the hills over Genoa. When they approached, two beams of light came down out of a large cloud, and both cars shut down. The men got out, and Lt. Cassiba shot at the beams, which seemed to have caused them to go out. One of the guards, Germano Zanardi, was reportedly so unnerved by the experience that he never recovered and shot himself in the head a few months later.

Zanfretta was hypnotically regressed after each encounter, twice on television, and the story that came out was that the creatures, known as the Dargos, intended to build a domed city on Earth in order to escape their doomed planet. At one point he described meeting their prince, Almoc. After his fourth encounter, he said they had tried to give him a glass sphere with a golden triangle in it intended for Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and he smashed it. He then managed to open a hatch and escape by jumping out of the craft, which was only around ten feet off the ground. He said that before his abduction, he had picked up a man with an egg-shaped head at a gas station. He said he was wearing a checkered suit, a metallic-looking shirt, and acted as an intermediary between him and the Dargos.

Zanfretta went missing again just after midnight on February 14, 1980, only this time, as described in the book, the car he was driving, a Fiat 127, had been prepared unbeknownst to him in order to track him and gather substantial evidence that there was something to his extraordinary claims. An engineer at the company, Nino Tagliavia, and a technician, Guiliano Buonamici, hid various items in the car, including a radio that would act as a homing beacon, cassette tapes and color photo plates to pick up any magnetic anomalies, and a thermometer that would record the highest temperature. Because Zanfretta was reporting that he and his various vehicles were being lifted up into the craft, they rigged cables that went from the wheel hubs to the body, that would only break if the car was lifted up.  According to Di Stefano, this was all supervised by the director of Val Bisagno, Gianfranco Tutti, who had a look on his face that indicated that “this was the last time he would try to understand the Zanfretta mystery.”

A rescue team that included Tutti and Di Stefano was hot on Zanfretta’s trail and found the car quickly in the mountains in the area of Torriglia. The driver’s side door was open, but Zanfretta was nowhere to be seen. After a few minutes of searching in the freezing cold, Zanfretta was found unconscious on the edge of a ravine clinging to a bush and on the verge of falling in.

On this occasion, Zanfretta was cold as he should have been, as opposed to hot as he had been on previous occasions, and as he was taken back to Val Bisagno headquarters, he warmed up and returned to full consciousness.

According to Di Stefano, the next day, he watched as Tagliavia and Buonamici checked the various items they had placed in the car and found that the thermometer had recorded a high temperature of 109.4º F. They also found that all four of the cables had been broken.

As usual, Zanfretta underwent hypnosis that night with Dr. Mauro Moretti with Di Stefano present. Contradicting the evidence of the snapped cables, when asked if the car had been lifted up into the air that night as before, he said, “No, it was on the ground.” He did, however, describe it as becoming hot when it was lit up by “a huge light overhead.”

According to him, he picked up the egg-headed man (he described not being able to move as the car stopped and the door opened by itself) and continued to the square in Torriglia with the car driving itself without headlights. There, he saw a bright, metallic, 30-meter-diameter object hovering 4-5 meters above the ground. He said the egg-headed man ran into it and he, Zanfretta, ran away. He said that as he was running, the object went into the valley “towards… where there is a house made of metal… inside that deep hole.”

Zanfretta brings up the possibility that the rescue team got there too quickly saying, “The cars could have waited to come up. They might have given me that object and the problem would be solved.” He added, “I’m sure they have a base there because they definitely always leave from there.”

It is during this session that Zanfretta suddenly appeared to be channeling Almoc, first speaking in a strange language and then switching to Italian to address Moretti directly starting with “Earthling! Speak!” Moretti asks if they will show themselves, and Zanfretta/Almoc replies, “Everything in due course.” After explaining that they can’t get Zanfretta to stop fearing them and that they know Moretti and the others want to help, Z/A says “in due course we will show ourselves. Ending transmission.”

Zanfretta was reportedly abducted five more times with the last occasion being on August 8, 1981. In more hypnosis sessions it came out that he had received the sphere and hidden it the mountains where he regularly checked up on it. He said he was to activate it to enable a landing, but it never happened. He said in his last session on April 24, 1992, that the Dargos were going to take it back.

In the first year of his reported experiences, Zanfretta’s hair went from black to grey and within a few years was completely white. He gained 14 kg and reported that his urine turned black immediately after and that he vomited for days after his abductions.  Val Bisagno gave up trying to understand what was happening to him, and he eventually lost his job and family and ended up living on a pension in Genoa. He remained a minor celebrity in Italy, and his story continues to intrigue.