Chapter Thirteen
Amicizia
Spanning at least forty years, this is the saga comprising a large group of people in countries such as Argentina, Austria, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Siberia, and Switzerland who were involved in an extensive alien liaison program. In Italy, those most deeply involved named the group Amicizia (pronounced ami-cheet-siya)—“friendship.” In Germany, France, and the former Soviet Union, it was known respectively as “Freundschaft,” “Amitié,” and “Дpyжбa.” The most extraordinary case I have ever investigated, it is at times outrageous, farcical, and ludicrous—though always compelling. I would not be including it here were I not convinced of its relevance to our assessment of aliens and their motives regarding Earth.
Preliminary contacts seem to have been initiated in Italy in April 1956. One of those first contacted was the late Professor Bruno Sammaciccia, a Catholic scholar who authored 160 books on religious matters. Holding degrees in psychology and psychiatry as well as many academic and theological awards, he also contributed extensively to a history of Amicizia, compiled by Professor Stefano Breccia and another major participant, Hans (surname withheld), though sadly both Bruno and Hans passed away prior to publication.
Stefano, who died prematurely in March 2012, was also deeply involved with the group, from 1962/3 to 1997, and many of his experiences were shared with colleagues and friends—in particular Giancarlo De Carlo, an accountant. One of the most remarkable men I have met, Stefano generously allowed me to quote from his book Mass Contacts, from my numerous interviews with him at his home in Italy, and from our regular communications. As he wrote in a foreword:
“All of us were moved by the deep morality and sincere humanity on the part of the aliens. These were people who simply could not imagine doing any evil to anyone, people who liked eating well, drinking, even smoking, who enjoyed playing the violin [in one case] and tennis, and driving luxurious cars and executive airplanes (in the 1970s, when very few people in Italy could own a personal plane)…. They lived most of the time in their huge underground bases, but some of them lived among us, inside our society, playing every kind of role in it. One was a university researcher, another one the manager of a rather important textile company in the center of Italy, a third one was a senior manager in one of the largest German telecommunications (TLC) companies, and so on….
“It was an explicit decision by the Amicizia people to keep everything concealed under the strictest secrecy, and there were very good reasons for that. Actually, once in a while something would emerge publicly, but always in a vague and uncertain way. Many European scholars were aware that something was happening … but nobody, outside our group, has ever had even the slightest idea of how big and how important it all was.1
“We had direct, face-to-face meetings with the Friends (also called W56), who are extraterrestrials coming both from planets in our own galaxy [and] from other galaxies,” a participant who prefers to remain anonymous told researcher Nikola Duper in 2008. “Here on Earth they reached the maximum number of two hundred, living inside underground and undersea bases, some of them along the Adriatic coast, at a depth of about twelve miles. The first, ‘historical’ base was located under the area of Ascoli Piceno, a small town in central Italy [in the mountainous Marche region].
“‘Friendship’ gathers together various extraterrestrial populations that are different from each other, both as regards physical characteristics [and] provenance (there are Friends from other universes and dimensions). However, all share a fundamental choice toward ‘Good.’ … The population whom we personally interacted with is composed of individuals (men and women, like us) who are physically very beautiful, some about three meters [9.84 feet] tall, while others are tiny…. What is important is what they represent, beyond the various typologies and endless ‘folkloristic’ singularities…. The Friends are not the only extraterrestrials who have come to the Earth. Individuals from various other populations are among us, because the Earth is a very particular planet inside the economy of this part of the Universe.”2
There is, reportedly, an ongoing conflict between these species regarding the future of our planet.
The humans involved—hand-picked by the aliens—were not cranks. Professor Breccia, for example, was a retired expert in artificial intelligence and computer sciences, and has given lectures on didactical methodologies at the British Telecom training center, and on fractal analysis at the University of Novosibirsk and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was also a qualified pilot. Amicizia, he confirmed, included a psychiatrist, two cardiologists, the respected aerospace journalist Bruno Ghibaudi, the distinguished diplomat Alberto Perego (who authored several pioneering books on UFOs), an archaeologist, some twenty engineers, several accountants, an expert in military logistics, bank employees, two members of the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization, five university professors, a Court of Assizes judge, the executive vice-president of one of the largest multi-national companies in the world, two future Nobel laureates, four generals, and a few politicians.3
Others included Gaspare De Lama, a well-known Italian painter, and Professor Paolo Di Girolamo, a distinguished cartoonist I had the pleasure of meeting in Rome, who gave me a copy of his book in which his experiences are recounted.4
The Early Italian Scene
According to Bruno Sammaciccia and his friends Giulio, an engineer, and Giancarlo, an accountant, a series of poltergeist-type phenomena, including “automatic writing” of elaborate instructions, preceded initial in-person meetings with the aliens, which happened in April 1956. The group had been directed via a map to the Rocca Pia castle (Fortezza Pia) overlooking Ascoli Piceno. Nothing happened on this occasion, although the group felt suffused with “euphoric sensations of well-being and health.” The following day, they drove to the top of the road leading to the castle. “All of a sudden we saw some spots of light moving in the [evening] air,” Bruno reports. “We heard a voice, coming from nowhere, a very calm and strong one: ‘Now, my friends, stay calm, because I am going to have one of us appear. Are you ready?’”
Giulio expressed concern that strangers might observe what was going on. “Be sure that while our friends are with you, nobody else will be allowed to intrude,” the voice explained. “If they do, we will divert them.” A man then emerged from behind the castle wall, followed by another. One of the men was very tall, the other very short. “We were just in front of the main entrance, and they came toward us, speaking our language perfectly,” reports Bruno. “As they approached, we saw that one of them was more than 2.5 meters [8.2 feet] tall, and the other about one meter [3.3 feet] tall. The latter had a high-pitched voice, as dwarfs often do, but his body was perfect and his voice that of a man of authority.”
With very few exceptions, the aliens did not use names. For reference purposes, Bruno and his friends ascribed names to these and others. The tall one in this case became “Sinas,” the short one “Sajù.”
“They both shook hands with us, very gently, [perhaps because] they were very strong. We felt at that moment a strong sense of love….”
The men remained seated, talking with the aliens on nearby steps—the tall one some steps down, the smaller one a few steps above—for over an hour and a half. “How many things they told us! That theirs was an important mission, that they had been here for many years, that he [Sinas] had been here three times, and that three or four centuries ago he had been in Central America, because in that area were bases operated by other aliens [perhaps the group featured in the previous chapter, who said they lived for up to four hundred years?], that there was a war, unknown to us. He said they usually keep to desolate areas where nobody could see them, so that they would not bother anybody, and at the same time they would not be bothered by anyone…. They were perfectly aware of our history, our religions, and our philosophies.”
“This Earth was made for the good, but the men who inhabit it are transforming everything into bad,” asserted Sinas.
“We are not here to conquer, we have nothing to conquer: our interests arise from the fact that your Earth lies within our stars, and so we are concerned with it. I do not live on a planet, but everywhere I happen to travel.
“This is a critical point in your history, a turning point in your technologies, but because of your childish enthusiasms you are forgetting your moral values … everything arises from morality, and everything is done because of it. For this reason, we had, and we are still having, many problems with your people in the Middle East, and you too are going to be in trouble with them in the near future.”
The meeting ended at 03:00. Two days later, another meeting took place on Colle Orlando, a small hill to the south of Pescara. The men had taken a transistor radio with them, via which the aliens were able to communicate by superimposing their voices over whatever was being broadcast. They also had the ability to make use of various gadgets with phenomenal qualities. One of these entered the ground in front of the men and disappeared. “That particular place had been transformed into a kind of facility for us,” explained Bruno. A subterranean base was built there so that when the men came to within thirty kilometers of it, they would be able to communicate with the aliens by telepathy. Other means to do the same—such as small rectangular metallic plates (similar in function to the one given to Richard Högland, described in Chapter 11) and other devices—were also provided. Months of further communications and meetings ensued.5
One night at the Ascoli Piceno castle site, Bruno and his friends, forewarned via the communication implements of an imminent contact—to include three of the craft and some alien newcomers—suddenly noticed that the sky seemed to change. In the distance, three tiny pinpricks of light approached. “The ground under our feet started to tremble, so strongly that Giancarlo was thrown off balance and fell down,” Bruno reports. “It lasted some fifteen minutes, during which Giulio took shelter inside the car and Giancarlo sat on the ground…. They were almost hysterical.
“All of a sudden, two of the lights grew larger and disappeared. We realized that they were the spaceships we had been waiting for, and that two of them had already entered the underground base.” The third spot of light just switched itself off. A few moments later, “Gallarate,” Sinas, and another alien appeared, together with an extremely tall one, calling himself “Dimpietro,” who they had also met before. The latter was over nine feet tall. (Stefano Breccia told me he once encountered him negotiating a corridor in Bruno’s house in Montesilvano—bent double!) Some others were even taller.
“We were happy being with them,” continued Bruno, “but at the same time felt a bit uneasy, because one could never tell what was going to happen when Dimpietro—a notorious practical joker—was around…. All six of us sat on the ground. Dimpietro took a big cigar out of a box. He threw the empty box away, admonishing us to pick it up before leaving. Then he broke the cigar into four parts, keeping one for himself and giving us the other pieces. Then he lit the cigar with a flame coming out of his forefinger, laughing at us!”
In the meantime, some other aliens walked past and disappeared behind the castle wall. Curious, Bruno began to follow them, but was stopped by Dimpietro. “Where do you suppose they are going?” he said. “They are entering our base.”
“But I can’t see them going in.”
“Well, we like to be a bit spectacular at times.”
“Does the door close after each one of them?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Then may I go and have a look?”
“You’re welcome to.”
At this point Dimpietro picked up Bruno with one arm and Giancarlo with the other! “When we got to the entrance, I saw an opening in the ground, like a vertical tunnel heading downward. I thought that the tunnel might have weakened the castle foundations, and, as if reading my thoughts, Dimpietro said: ‘Do you believe that we are such fools? We have taken care to strengthen the structures, so there is no risk.’”
Dimpietro entered the base and bade Bruno and his friends farewell, bending down in order to embrace them. “Please, let the world know that we have come here with a great love toward you. You speak about love, but you do not know what love is. It is the very basis of life itself.”6
Inside the Bases
In due course, Bruno and his friends were allowed to visit the base. Bruno and Giancarlo met at the appointed time in front of the castle and were told to wait. Giulio did not show up, having mistaken the date. They were told to go to the right side of the castle and to stop at a certain point in the pathway. “I started feeling the ground under my feet trembling,” Bruno reported. “I feared that maybe there was an empty room under us, and that the ground was going to collapse into it, because of our weight.” To the contrary, the ground itself opened, and another alien—“Meredir”—came out and told the group to proceed toward an empty area in the center of the hole through which they were about to descend. They were told to place their feet in certain areas where nothing was visible. “I did so,” said Bruno, “and felt as if some invisible step was preventing me from falling into the pit. Then this invisible floor started lowering into the vertical corridor….”
Their descent came to a stop inside a huge subway with crystal-like walls, filled with a soft light. No lights as such could be seen, and they learned that none of any kind was used. “This place is filled with a peculiar radiation that interacts with the energy of the photons,” explained their guide. The light was of a beautiful pale blue and the air very clear and scented. No shadows could be seen anywhere.7 However, Stefano—who has been inside a base on many occasions—disagrees. “First, the shadows were colored—not dark,” he told me. “And they were in different respective positions from the shadows cast by our sources of light. We have a main shadow, but their light comes from everywhere, so the shadows are distributed.”8
The group was met by Sinas and another man. “It was a pleasant feeling, walking with these three friends of ours, inside that huge structure,” Bruno writes. “I was feeling calm with a sense of well-being as I was breathing [their] air. They explained that the air was different from that available in our towns; it was full of negative ions, which were the cause of that sensation.” He was told to touch his hair, and found that it was stiff and brittle, as though frozen, a result, he was told, of his being “detoxicated.”
Via a viewing screen, the group was shown a room in which young boys appeared to be studying. Their height apparently varied from two to two and a half meters. “For us, they are boys,” said the guide. “One is fifteen, some are thirty, and another one is ninety-five years old [!]. Biological growth is slower than yours, but achievements are quicker.”
Many of the “boys” had short hair. “They showed a benevolent countenance,” Bruno continues. “Some had brown eyes, others very light-colored green/blue eyes. They were of different races, and I was told that there are actually many different people, but that in most cases only their [physical appearances] are different—not their biological functioning.”
The group was offered a pleasant drink, made from a mixture of fruits, which apparently had a detoxicating effect. After learning and observing many fascinating things, Bruno and his group left the base at three o’clock in the morning.9
No women were seen, though Bruno encountered them on other occasions. “I’ve seen at least six women inside their bases,” he wrote. “They were really beautiful, and you could feel a strong sense of femininity emanating from them. Giancarlo once fell in love with one of them….” Neither women nor men had a problem with nudity among themselves, though never among terrestrial guests.10
Stefano related to me how, during the early 1970s, the W56—“W” from two VVs for “double victory” and “56” for the year it started—informed him that they had built a base about 975 to 1300 feet in depth, directly beneath the ground-floor apartment he rented at that time in Bologna! “When they wanted me to come down,” he said, “they made a circle of light appear in the floor and the ground then opened up somehow and I was taken down as though in an elevator, with no visible means of support. Over a period of three to four months, I spent a lot of time at the base—at times sleeping there—having many discussions. In this particular base there were no women, though I think that was just coincidental.”11
Such is their technology that they are able to fabricate bases in a short space of time. “Our friends were able to generate what they called a ‘magnetic tress,’ i.e. a structure where the lines of force were strictly twisted around each other,” Stefano explains:
“Such a thing had the property of ‘opening’ matter, compressing it sideways, squashing it in on itself. Translucent, almost crystal, walls were the result, with [enormous] density, a Young’s modulus [a measure of the stiffness of material] equally high, and of unbelievable strength. In this way they were able to open the cavities that would become their bases, evidently without damaging the surrounding tectonic structures—on the contrary, probably strengthening them.
“Such a structure remained stable while the fields that had generated it were active: it was sufficient to switch off these fields, a finger over a switch, to revert at once to the status quo ante. In a similar way, they opened passages to access their bases when needed, closing them immediately when no longer in use. Only very rarely (very small bases just under the ground) were stable corridors used….”12
Stefano informed me that the major W56 base beneath Italy exceeded 186 miles in length and 62 miles in width, with a 980-foot-high ceiling. This huge base, he says, was not for living quarters but for the machinery essential for their operations.13
In April 1972, Bruno, Giancarlo, and two other friends, Assad and Gustav, were re-invited to a base under the beautiful mountain chain of the Monti Sibillini National Park in Umbria. On emerging, the men found that several days had passed, whereas they were certain not more than a day had elapsed. “Our friends then told me,” he explained, “that inside their base, gravity was twenty percent less than usual; therefore, one could move more easily [and] the heart beats with less strain.”14
Telepathic Induction
“To what extent were the aliens you encountered telepathic?” I asked Stefano.
“I know of up to 150 individuals claiming to be with Amicizia. I don’t think they were telepathic. They said that, to produce telepathy, they had to use specific devices that were able to induce telepathic capabilities in human brains using a kind of implant. I have seen one of these implants—known as an ‘ania’—and it is jet black, of a polyhedron shape. It looks like it’s ‘eating’ light. It generates a huge quantity of reflective light—much more than incidental light. In the case of the W56, this object was inserted under the skin immediately behind the ear, and yet it dissolves into thousands of very small biological robots that disperse in the body. So you couldn’t find anything if you looked with X-rays.
“Bruno had been implanted in this way—they asked for his permission before doing it—so he could receive telepathic messages. Once when we had invited him and his wife for lunch, and I had gone to pick them up at their home in a nearby village, during the trip back to my house Bruno said, ‘I see that your wife is preparing something with mushrooms. Please tell her that my wife can’t eat them.’”15
Financial Problems
On several occasions, the aliens asked Bruno to obtain literally tons of fruit and vegetables, and sometimes fish, for delivery to one of their bases. Bruno and his colleagues were told to hire trucks and drivers, ensuring that the drivers were never present when it came to collection time. The food was then “collected” by means of “tele-transportation” and beamed to their bases! The drivers, having been persuaded to join Bruno and his friends at nearby cafés, could never understand how such a huge amount of food could have been collected so quickly.
Payment to Bruno and others was sometimes by precious stones or—in one case—platinum ingots. On the latter occasion, at Bruno’s villa in Montesilvano, the ingots reportedly just fell from the open sky into the garden, which when collected filled ten boxes weighing about 150 kilograms. Luckily, Bruno was able to sell them to a wholesaler who didn’t inquire as to their origin.16
Bruno was asked by the aliens to build a large villa for them—under their guidance—on top of a high hill to the west of Montesilvano, beneath which they had a base. With three floors, it had many meeting rooms, large convention rooms, cubicles for individual study, and even a small observatory on the roof. They needed the property, they said, as a center of operations, to introduce new people to Amicizia and to develop some technical projects, and as a business enterprise.17
When the W56 saga ended, Bruno suffered great financial loss as a result. “I had to sell everything,” he explained, “two buildings belonging to my wife, a couple of agricultural sites, and above all, I had to sell the large villa I had built, and in so doing I made no more than a tenth of its value, because I had to sell everything in a hurry.”18
“W56 sometimes supplied Bruno with platinum and gold,” Stefano told me, “and—aware that the operation was costing us a lot of money—they once gave Giancarlo a device made by them which was capable of generating diamonds. But there were two problems. First, the device was absorbing a huge quantity of electricity from the cables surrounding the area—without any direct connection—so that people living in the area started receiving huge bills from the electricity company! The second problem was that, although the device was actually generating diamonds, they were in the shape of an ellipsoid 20 centimeters long and 10 centimeters wide! So nobody would believe they were real diamonds and they couldn’t be sold: it would be too dangerous to try, because of criminals and so on. So one night, Giancarlo and I took a boat, went out a couple of kilometers from the coast, and threw them into the sea! It was an example of the aliens’ inability to comprehend our situation.”19
What these aliens did provide, however—and in abundance—was a phenomenal amount of knowledge, inspiration, and, in many respects, protection for those involved with the Amicizia group. And it needs to be pointed out here that, on at least two occasions since 1956, they had prevented a nuclear war on Earth. “They did so by transmuting the fissionable metals inside the warheads into lighter substances, so that no nuclear reaction could take place,” Bruno was told.20
W56 Craft
The technology of the W56s was almost indistinguishable from magic. “Very seldom did they explain something,” writes Stefano in a more recent treatise—“Their Technology”—to be included in a second book on the Amicizia case.21 “Most of the time they made use of Maieutics [the Socratic mode of inquiry, serving to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness], where a concept is not blatantly exposed to pupils, but [discovered] by themselves.”
Stefano learned that W56 and other groups use many types of craft, from small “scouts” to huge motherships. The scouts are not transportation devices per se, but mainly mobile laboratories, and even weapons systems. Surprisingly, they are made mostly of pure iron, though certain parts are manufactured from various alloys. “There is a peculiar ‘field’ that connects all the pieces together,” Stefano maintains. “When this field is switched off, the pieces fall apart.” And the scouts are not stored in hangars. “Thanks to their technology, the W56s ask their machines and robots to build a new scout when one is needed.” Each time it is designed in accordance with its specific mission. “When the mission is over, the scout is simply dismantled. That’s why we see so many different types of craft: each one of them has been built having in mind the peculiar activity it had been designed for.
“Scouts are not even always meant to be manned devices: many are totally automatic in their operations. And scouts are not always flying saucers: they may vary from ‘aniae’ [see earlier], less than a millimeter long, to craft several kilometers long.” Some scouts are not material craft, per se, but “physical properties forced into a small amount of space”!
Stefano has ascertained that the propulsion systems vary “from pure aerodynamics to magneto-hydrodynamics to electrostatic or electrodynamic effects, to electromagnetic effects or to extremely complex sets of fields generating relativistic effects. These are what we call flying saucers or flying cigars. I do not know much about the latter…. Of course, there are also differently shaped objects, such as triangles, squares, cubes, spheres, and the like….
“Usually the power source is an internal one. In flying saucers it consists of three or more objects, similar to cigarettes in shape and dimensions, but much heavier. They are called mother cells and produce a high-frequency current through their extremities … it seems that the intensity of electrical current flowing through the poles is astonishing [and] one wonders how such a huge amount of current can flow through such small surfaces. What I do know is that it is always necessary to have something that absorbs the energy they generate, otherwise they could explode.
“A scout is never switched off, even in the rare cases when it is on stand-by. Thanks to their superior technology, no maintenance is required even in the long-lasting interstellar or even intergalactic craft that they use for their major ‘displacements.’ Re the latter, their propulsion system relies on greatly distorting the space-time geometry, requiring awesome amounts of energy that, in a kind of perpetual-motion machine, the W56s are able to extract from the distortion process itself … there is no practical limit to speed [except] the rapidity with which the internal computers are able to interact with the surrounding environment. That is the only practical limit, because operations depend heavily on it.”
“Scouts”
Of mostly circular (sometimes elliptical) planform, flying saucers have diameters ranging from about three to five hundred or more meters. “The ratio between the diameters of the outer rim and of the inner cabin depends on several factors, and may range from, say, 1.2 to 10 or even more,” explains Stefano in his treatise. “Also, the ratio between the outer diameter and height depends on several factors, and may range from, say, 0.05 to 3. So, we may have extremely ‘flat’ discs, or objects that we would not call ‘discs’ because their height is much more than their diameter. In some cases there is no central cabin … mostly [when no one] is inside.”
No fixed portholes or doors exist. When one is needed, it is simply “created,” Stefano asserts. The iron can be rendered transparent, thus it is possible to create a “porthole” at will. “It must be said that, most of the time, it makes no sense to look outside, because the outer disc prevents one from looking down. It can be rendered partially transparent, but that would interfere with the propulsion. A major problem, when flying low over ground, is that a scout encounters serious problems in acquiring information about its immediate environment; therefore, in such circumstances small devices are usually ejected that monitor the local situation and transmit the data back to a central computer….
“The control panel of a small scout is a rectangular area [which] is very small—about 50 centimeters wide and 35 centimeters high. It is a touch panel, and it only ever shows the information that is required and the commands available in that situation. That means that its contents are continually changing, both owing to a decision by the central computer or upon a request by the pilot. Commands are activated by pressing the touch panel.
“It is theoretically possible to drive ‘by thought,’ but rather cumbersome and therefore seldom applied. It is also possible to drive without the help of the central computer, but it is extremely difficult and occurs only when a new pilot is trained. Typical commands a pilot may want to enter are: climbing to a certain altitude, then deciding where he wants to go, either selecting from a list or entering the name of a place; or entering the name of an ‘anchor,’ then selecting the time required to reach the selected spot and eventually adding some details about how the flight should be effected….
“‘Anchors’ are to a certain extent similar to our ‘VORs’ [very high frequency omnidirectional radio range]22 used in general aviation, a kind of radio-homing device, although working on totally different principles. It is possible to create an anchor on a certain point, at a certain height, give it a name, and from that moment on it will be available to all scouts, because the local computer will transmit this information to a central computer that will make it available to other scouts, if required….
“There are some minor operational details which I have not included here, including allowing oneself to be recognized by the computer (not everyone is entitled to pilot a scout), managing environmental conditions, and the like. But, again, each operation consists of selecting an option from a list. For instance, for most scouts it is better not to land, but to hover about half a meter above the target, in order to avoid heavy exchanges of power. An actual landing is rather complicated, and is usually assigned to the computer.”
The craft are not pressurized like ours. “Because of its propulsion criteria,” Stefano explains, “a scout, even in space, is always surrounded by an envelope of atmosphere; therefore, if opening a ‘door’ while in space, the internal atmosphere would leak out at such a slow speed that it would take weeks to empty. If necessary, of course, it can be emptied within seconds.
“Just like inside the bases, the air itself is luminous: there is no concentrated light source. This generates peculiar effects on shadows that I have not quite understood….
“Light appears to be generated from nowhere,” as Stefano told me. And the flooring of a craft with which Stefano was familiar “appeared to be metallic, but was rather soft and looked like plastic.”23
Most amazingly, certain scouts of about nine meters in diameter can be compressed in some way to a diameter of some forty centimeters, with a corresponding reduction in their mass and inertia. Nicknamed “pocket scouts,” when reduced they can be kept and transported in a square rigid bag about sixty centimeters wide. “Having got to a rather wide clearing,” writes Stefano in Mass Contacts, “the small scout was taken out from its bag and put down with care. Then one had to get at least twenty meters away, if possible concealing oneself behind a tree or a wall.
“Acting on a switch inside the bag, the scout would at once get back to its original dimensions (with an obviously violent blast, pebbles shooting [around] like bullets followed by an inverse air displacement, a loud sound, and leaves flying around). Shortly, this quietened down and the scout was ready to be flown. When [the mission] was over, the inverse operation typically generated lower gradients of pressure, therefore was not so violent as the first one. In both instances, noticeable variations in the air temperature were felt.
“I have never understood the use of such devices: it would have been much easier to have a scout, on auto-pilot, following its owner at a great height, then have it land when necessary…. Probably there was a reason behind such complicated devices, but no satisfactory explanation was given.”24
“Bells”
According to Stefano, this was the common name—campane in Italian—given to flying-saucer scout craft. Much of what he has learned attests to the validity of a number of George Adamski’s disputed claims and provides valuable new scientific and technical data. “Although usually no two scouts are identical to each other,” Stefano reports in his treatise, “some general outlines may be described. The first is that Adamski’s bells look squatter than those of the W56s.” [See below.]
“The height-to-diameter ratio is around 0.6. This second image (below) refers to a typical W56 bell”:
“It may be seen that the proportions are slightly different: the height-to-diameter ratio is around 0.4; moreover, usually the mechanism to extend/retract the three spheres under the disc behaves in a different way: in the Adamski bell, the spheres go up and down vertically, parallel to the scout axis; in W56 devices, there is also a radial movement. [Normally, the spheres are retracted on landing.]”
Stefano adds that the main disc surface of the “bells” is made of cobalt/magnesium, while “the dome on the top of the tower is externally covered with insulating material: strangely enough, this material is again iron, in a very peculiar allotropic state [including two or more different physical forms of a chemical element],” and “the topmost sphere is made of graphite, crossed by an extremely strong electrical flux; therefore it typically becomes incandescent, with a red hue.
“What follows is but a very rough outline of the operating principles of a bell. I believe that most of them may be understandable, but in some cases our technology is not able to duplicate similar effects. I am summarizing my notes, because their content would be too technical for the general reader, and also because I believe that mankind is not yet ready to receive some of the concepts involved.” As Stefano explained to me:
“The three spheres under the main disc are hollow and filled with nitrogen at a very high pressure [via an internal radial magnetic field that forces nitrogen into a ‘doughy’ state, in order to increase its density]. This gas is taken out and pumped along the three rings at the base of the cabin. It circulates in the same direction on the first and third rings and in the opposite direction in the second ring. It is pushed by ultrasonic pumps and contributes to the maintenance of the electrostatic field around the craft.
“The rings on top of the cupola are made, alternately, of metal discs and isolating discs, perpendicular to the ‘torus’ structure, and it rotates in the same direction as the second ring. Then, under the disc itself, there are two more rings, one over the other—the highest one a bit smaller than the lower one—and the lower one rotates in the same direction as the second ring, and they are made of isolation materials. Then there is a central column. The main idea of the operation is that the topmost ring generates the ‘suspending’ operation, while the other rings generate electrostatic fields….
“The spheres must be polarized differently from one another: this may reflect on the direction of flight. In an actual landing, spheres are usually retracted: if this is not possible, their polarizations are equated to that of the outer disc. If this precaution is not taken, a really hard landing would take place, with no damage to the craft but probable injuries to its occupants.
“When taking off, some time must elapse before the craft’s gravity escapes the local one, because the change of polarization requires a big exchange of electrical charges. During this time, the craft floats almost at random, owing to the interaction between its polarization and the local electrical field. That is why Adamski reported that, after takeoff, he felt a push and acceleration. And the reason he got an electric shock [when he first approached a landed craft near Desert Center, California, on November 20, 1952] is that, with the rotating electronic field and the one electrostatically generated by the lower rings, the outer rim is ‘charged,’ owing to currents running around it. If the current is not steady, the magnetic field itself is not steady, and it generates a secondary field on the outer ring that becomes charged electrostatically…. We are not able to store such a large amount of electricity—but that was back in that period.”25
Ian Taylor, a well-informed student of the subject, related to me how in around 1976 he was shown two approximately ten- by eight-inch glossy black-and-white prints of “what at first looked like an illuminated lampshade that was out of focus. Both prints seemed the same but there were minor differences as I recall,” he said. “I asked [the source] what it was he was showing me, after which he turned over the prints to reveal what I gathered was an official USAF seal, in a blue ink, slightly faded but clearly legible. I have seen official military seals before and this looked pretty authentic. He asked me to examine the shots more closely….
“It soon began to dawn on me that I was actually looking at what appeared to be night-time shots of a shape that was almost identical to Adamski’s classic Scout, albeit seemingly slightly more compressed, but that could have been down to the printing processes in the darkroom or for whatever other reason. What I was looking at was the shape of the craft in its familiar outline as a white illumination made up of parallel, horizontally opposed bars of light of an almost neon-like intensity. It soon became apparent that what I was looking at was the magnetic energy field of excitation circumnavigating the underlying form, or something to that effect.
“I asked where he had gotten these images and he said they had been smuggled out of the USA a few years back by a colleague who had known people in the U.S. Air Force who had had access to certain classified material, and that he had been given the prints as something to own, but never to make public…. I have to admit that I was completely taken aback by the sheer clarity and definition contained in the shots. As I was well into photographic techniques and special effects in my work in the creative business, I had a suspicion these would have been copies taken from the original negatives rather than original prints, but it was difficult to say.”26 (See photo section.)
“Overalls”
For me, the most astonishing mode of alleged W56 transportation was a one-piece apparel, referred to as “overalls.” “Typically, the W56s used these overalls—not scouts—to move from one place to another,” Stefano told me. “The suit was a biological entity/device for supporting its occupant, from any point of view: nutrition, elimination of waste, and so on. Under the ten-centimeter-thick soles were two propulsive devices. From my point of view, they were rather elementary, as the propulsive system wasn’t so difficult to use. It generated two identical ‘pushes’ from your feet toward your head, or vice-versa.”27 In Mass Contacts, Stefano expounds:
“The overalls were biological entities, strictly personal, which acted as [both] defensive and transportation systems. They were to be worn over the naked body, protecting the occupant against practically any external danger.
“There was a whimsical system for managing inertia: the overall was able [incrementally] to adjust its inertia up to unbelievable levels…. The propulsion system was really rudimentary, based on two ‘pushes’ applied perpendicularly to the soles, and the only control system was a button on the belt which was able to modulate the intensity of the two pushes (identical to each other). Pushes could be both positive (upward) and negative (downward). The pilot’s skill lay in graduating the strength of pushes and in carefully orientating his feet….
“Needless to say, more than once, funny episodes took place; for instance, one morning in Munich, Germany, passers-by were astonished by the sight of a distinguished elderly gentleman who, upside down, was flying randomly at a height of a few meters, from time to time bumping into buildings in his path!
“The overall would tune itself to its owner’s identity, which it was able to recognize, not through DNA but thanks to a biological principle still unknown to our scientists. A different occupant would have been considered a potential enemy….”28
It is worth noting that, though relatively rare, sightings of “flying humanoids” have been reported in other countries. In an article published in 2007, researchers Ruben Uriarte and Steven Reichmuth describe a series of sightings in Mexico of what they categorize as “unidentified flying humanoids” (UFH). “A number of UFH sightings have been reported over the skies of Mexico since the year 2000,” they report:
“Mexican citizens equipped with home video cameras have recorded flying silent humanoids, often wearing an apparatus on their backs or around their waists. Sometimes they appear to be in a sitting or reclining position. They hover or move silently, regardless of wind direction, displaying definite flight control characteristics. They have been reported predominantly around Mexico City, notably over Cuernavaca, just southeast of the capital city. Sometimes they are reported to accelerate to 100 mph or more, but more often they are filmed hovering….”
Uriarte and Reichmuth checked the possibility that such sightings were related to people flying with the aid of “rocket belts” propelled by hydrogen peroxide. They consulted Juan Mañuel Lozano, CEO of Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana (TAM), which manufactures such belts. Lozano denied that TAM was responsible and said he was unaware of any other company in Mexico that made such rocket belts. On viewing video footage of some of the Mexican incidents supplied by Uriarte, Lozano—himself a pilot and parachutist—declared his bafflement:
“I don’t have an explanation for the ‘thing’ that is seen in the video. It is clear that it is some kind of human form, but this is not a parachutist, this is not a rocket belt or jet pack, and this is not a craft that is known around here … my rocket belt only flies for thirty seconds. No other rocket belt in the world can fly for more than thirty seconds.”
As Uriarte and Reichmuth confirm, the UFH objects were recorded on video flying for much longer than any human-designed rocket belt. “UFHs have been observed and videotaped flying effortlessly at well over 300 feet high [and] flew totally silently, as opposed to the 150 decibels produced by rocket belts,” they point out. “If alien in origin, are these some sort of flexible kinds of individual transport? What could these objects do that good old-fashioned flying discs cannot do as well?”29 How prescient. To the best of my knowledge, neither Uriarte nor Reichmuth were aware of the Amicizia saga. Mass Contacts was not published (in English, at least) until 2007. And they were certainly unaware of the following, which is published here for the first time.
Stefano claims that “overalls” are capable even of transporting an occupant to another planet—at least in our solar system—and related to me how one of his friends had once visited Mars, allegedly discovering that the temperature was less cold than, and the percentage of oxygen well above, that which is officially stated.
“Giants on the Earth”
To return to the W56 aliens, the gigantic Dimpietro had rented a small house owned by an elderly woman in the country near Forlimpopoli, at that time a small village some thirty kilometers north of Rimini. He liked to cook his own meals and, by way of relaxation at night, sometimes played his violin (which he had made himself) in the grounds surrounding the house! “Think how small the violin would be for a 3.5 meter-tall man!” remarked Bruno Sammaciccia.30 Indeed. As a violinist myself, I surmise that, given his proportionately larger hands, the instrument he made must have been larger than our full-size instruments—possibly the size of a viola. Dimpietro refused to be disturbed during such periods.
Bruno had been asked by Dimpietro to rent a large car for him and remove the front seat so he could sit directly on the floor. On one amusing occasion in 1957, Bruno invited Dimpietro to his flat in Milan. Before being introduced to Bruno’s wife, Dimpietro tactfully sat on the floor to avoid alarming her. “When this happened,” explained Bruno, “my wife had just come home after her shopping, found this incredible being seated on the floor of our kitchen, got frightened and ran into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. I had told her about our friends, but she had never met any of them. At the time, I was walking in the neighbourhood with my dog Dik, and deciding to return home, I looked for the caretaker to let me into the building, but he was nowhere to be seen. So I rang the bell at the intercom, and my wife Alessandra opened the door.
“As I entered my flat, Alessandra told me that there was ‘somebody’ in the kitchen; Dik had already gone there himself. When I entered the kitchen, I found Dimpietro seated on the floor and Dik sitting beside him. My wife, still terrified, [returned] to the bedroom. Dimpietro remained seated, without uttering a word. Then he got up, his head just touching the ceiling. ‘How will we talk to each other?’ I asked him, ‘with a megaphone?’ ‘That’s why I sat on the floor,’ he replied. ‘So sit down again,’ I said, which he did. ‘Your wife is terrified of me, but do I look as though I would terrify anyone?’ ‘It’s not that…. She knows you’re a man from another world, and she’s very upset.’”
Dimpietro asked for a cigarette. Bruno offered him one, but it was declined. “These are for children,” he complained. “Downstairs, you’ll find a car parked just in front of your building; here are the keys. Do not get upset when you see that there’s no driver’s seat, because I need to sit directly on the floor of the car. You’ll find some cigars inside the glove compartment.” Bruno found four cigar boxes, and returned with one of them.
“Call your wife in,” said Dimpietro. “We have to calm her down and convince her that I’m not aggressive.” Alessandra returned to the kitchen, still nervous. Hands shaking, she made some napoletana coffee, with Dimpietro ensuring she knew how to prepare it properly and to serve him without sugar in a larger cup than the others. Next he made himself a frittata (a kind of Italian omelette). “We offered him some bread,” said Bruno, “but he refused, because he said he wasn’t yet accustomed to our bread. Instead, he asked for some wine. In my kitchen was some white wine, and I knew that he drank only red, so I phoned a nearby grocer and in a few minutes we had a bottle of Corvo di Salaparuta [a fine Sicilian wine].”
“Would you allow me to drink directly from the bottle?” asked Dimpietro. “I’m used to doing it this way. If you like, I’ll pour some wine into a couple of glasses for you, and then I’ll drink from the bottle.” He drank the rest of the wine in three mouthfuls. Bruno asked if this could be harmful. “No,” came the reply, “you must understand that it is not the quantity that hurts, but the quality.”
After another smoke, it was time for Dimpietro to leave. “He knelt on the floor,” said Bruno, “embraced my wife with great delicacy (she was still a bit upset because of that unusual dinner), and told her: ‘Remember, I do not eat women, I only eat peppers, pasta, and some sweets at times….’ He kissed her on the forehead. It was a strange vision, I can assure you, looking at this extremely tall man, kneeling on the floor and trying to calm down my poor wife.
“It was three o’clock in the morning, and he had to drive the car, parked in the street. Luckily it was night, and nobody was around: of course, he couldn’t use the elevators, so Dimpietro, Dik and I went downstairs, with great care. He opened the car door, and as there was no driver’s seat he entered just as if going to bed, sat on the floor and finally forced his legs on both sides of the steering wheel. ‘Do you have any problem with the pedals?’ I asked him. ‘Not at all; if necessary, I can use my hands to operate them.’
“He started the engine and began to move. I asked him, ‘Do you know the way?’ ‘I know every street, even the alleys,’ he answered, and sped away.”31
What if Dimpietro had been stopped by the police? And surely individuals as tall as Dimpietro, “Mr. Kenio” (see photo section), and other colleagues would stick out in a crowd? Apparently not. Stefano related to me several instances where some of his friends had been shocked to see these particular aliens mingling in crowds—yet no one else even noticed them.
Regarding the height of Mr. Kenio, according to a study by Teresa Barbatelli of the photograph—based on estimated measurements of the nearby pine needles at the time and some railings in the background and other factors—he was about 3.07 meters (10 feet) tall.32 The original photo, taken circa 1976 by Bruno Sammaciccia at the large villa in Montesilvano built under instruction from the W56s, Stefano told me, belongs to a Swiss person who keeps it in a bank security vault.
Our attitude toward aliens is determined by preconceptions in assessing their appearance, origins, and motives. We balk at the idea of aliens as tall as three meters or more. But there have even been very tall Earthmen, the current tallest being Xi Shun of Inner Mongolia, at 2.36 meters (7 feet, 8.95 inches) in 2005.33 And if the Book of Genesis is to be believed, “There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them….”34 Is it possible that the giants were the same species as the W56s?
In 1959, Leon B. Visse, an expert on histones—proteins connected with cellular genetic material—was invited to a compound (almost certainly the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Here he was asked to perform an experiment on the histonic weight of some particular cells. An astonishingly low weight—far lower than human cells—was found. Visse then was escorted into a room where the corpses of two seven-foot-plus humanoids lay, evidently having been killed in an accident. They had high and broad foreheads and very long blond hair, Jean-Charles Fumoux relates. The eyes slanted upward, giving them an Asiatic look. The nose and mouth were small, the lips thin and perfectly delineated. “Despite slight differences in their facial appearances, the two humanoids looked like twins.”
The bodies had been preserved in formalin but remained perfectly white, apparently lacking the (melanin) granules which cause normal human beings to tan in strong sunlight. Their very light blue eyes looked no different from normal, reported Visse. The hands were human-like if slender, while their feet were absolutely flat, with small toes.35
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico, which specializes in High Science, has a visiting scholar program, especially in fields such as physics and the theoretical sciences. I have learned that in the 1960s, a visiting scholar attended meetings seemingly wearing nothing more than a white lab coat. He was nine feet tall, with very blond hair and blue eyes, and seemed very secretive. (The lab coat apparently wasn’t sufficient to cover his private parts!) While visiting, he lived at LANL under considerable security. “Everyone was told he was a Russian physicist and that explained his peculiarity and the security,” I learned, “but those few lab scientists that met him whispered between themselves that he was not even human…. One day the visiting scholar was simply gone.” And in 1988–89, what were described as “a bunch of Russians”—about nine feet tall with blond hair—had moved into a forty-unit apartment complex at the LANL. Whoever these guys were, it’s unlikely they originated from Russia.
In the autumn of 1999, a man and his wife hiking in New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest encountered a nine-foot-tall, extremely blond-haired man walking toward them—stark naked. “He seemed to float over the ground as he strode along and walked right past them, within a foot or so, with his head down, not saying a word. They turned in amazement, and after twenty or thirty feet he stopped and turned around to look at them. They took off up the trail, not looking back again.”36 In both these instances, the apparent lack of embarrassment at appearing either near- or stark-naked appears to be shared by the W56 aliens.
A Dayton, Ohio-based reporter related to me an intriguing case revealed to him by an officer serving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who admitted that while working at the Medical Center as a radiologist, evaluating X-ray scans of patients as part of his job, he came across some extraordinary abnormalities displayed in one particular scan of a patient’s spine. The officer was struck by its symmetry and flawlessness. “I mean that normal spines have all sorts of flaws, nodules, bends, and twists,” he explained. “This spine was absolutely perfect.” The officer tracked down its owner and learned that he held the rank of major, was over six feet tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with perfect proportions, a ramrod-straight posture, and he “looked to be taken from a page about the Aryan master race.”37 The reporter contacted me because he thought there might be a connection with the reference in my previous book to the U.S. Air Force Space Command list of “Non-Terrestrial Officers,” discovered by the well-known hacker Gary McKinnon.38
A Chilean Component
In 1999–2000, Chilean National TV produced two one-hour segments on the Amicizia case. Antonio Huneeus, Chile’s leading civilian UFO researcher (now living in America), has enlightened me regarding an Amicizia group of aliens who are said to have established a base on Friendship Island, off the country’s south coast. “I worked on that series as the journalistic producer for all their American segments, although I was not involved in the Chilean cases,” Antonio pointed out. “It was a very high quality and serious production. I do believe there was something to the case….
“The main witness who claims there was an alien base on the Friendship island was a well-known radio broadcaster (Oscar de la Fuente, I believe) who was terminally ill and claims he was miraculously healed in the base. He told his story in detail in the TV program.
“The producers of the show got the support of the Chilean Navy and searched for the island. They eventually located what they believed to be the island but didn’t find any traces of an alien base. There was also the allegation of a mysterious ship called Mytilus, which would transport people to the island and was not registered with the Navy as required by Chilean law. That part of southern Chile with literally hundreds of small islands would provide a perfect site for an alien base since it’s so remote.”39
Enter the CTRs—and UTIs
One of the many problems associated with—and to their credit acknowledged by—those involved with the W56 group is the alleged conflict between the W56s and a large group of aliens aiming to dominate Earth—the so-called “CTRs,” named after the Italian word contrari (“enemies”). In conversation with one of the W56s at the Zanarini coffeehouse in Bologna in 1967, Stefano was informed as follows:
“The CTRs are the result of an experiment [by W56] that has run out of control. They are robots, in the full meaning of this word, even if centuries ago they [began] biological reproduction. To you, at this point, it’s no longer possible to discriminate between a natural being and a biological robot … you would agree that a synthesized human body, with a conscience and a will imposed from outside upon a pre-existing amorphous structure, might be called a robot.”
The man went on to explain that he and his colleagues, however, were able to determine such a distinction. “We do not consider this situation as a war, because no war can exist between natural [and artificial] beings.”40 “The reason the CTRs are here,” Stefano told me, “is to study us because they understand that there is a difference between them and us. They were created—I don’t know where—and distributed in the universe. They want to understand how to cover the gap between themselves and us….”41
The CTRs—encountered by Stefano and his colleagues on a number of occasions—created divisions within Amicizia. On several occasions, for example, doppelgänger of some of the participants supposedly were “produced” to sow confusion and dissension among the group. Some—including Bruno Ghibaudi—even left the group, no longer able to cope with the situation. “Our colleagues were not able to adhere to the teachings of our friends, and our group started to disintegrate,” explained Bruno Sammaciccia. “The CTRs, little by little, were seizing the opportunity, altering documents, changing memories, even wiping out somebody’s memories … as easily as if they were showing a movie.”>42
Discrediting of participants—supposedly initiated by the CTRs—was rife. Owing to his wealth, apparently, Bruno Sammaciccia was once falsely accused of having swindled an elderly couple of money. The case came to court and Bruno was convicted. He appealed the sentence, however, and in December 2000 was proclaimed totally innocent of all charges.43
In November 1978, the whole central part of the Adriatic Sea erupted, as confirmed in numerous contemporary news reports (some of which are reproduced in the book). “It lasted a full couple of months,” Stefano reported. “Huge columns of water tens of meters high suddenly arose; unprecedented waves and strange lights were seen at night, and both civilian and military radars got unexplained echoes.” One fishing boat sank inexplicably, with the loss of two fishermen, though they had not died from drowning. “The results of the autopsies conducted on their bodies were never released, and fishing activity stopped almost completely. In the meantime, over land and sea, hundreds of UFOs and their occupants were seen by all kinds of people, from policemen to farmers.”44 What on earth was happening?
Far beneath the seabed along this stretch of the Adriatic lay one of the W56’s larger bases, at a depth of about twelve miles from the surface. Paolo Di Girolamo writes as follows: “The CTRs were able to enter and destroy most of the W56’s bases [with casualties on both sides], including the largest one, which stretched from Ortona to Rimini, and from the center of the Adriatic to the center of Italy … the W56s themselves had forecast: ‘You’ll see waters rising [and] boiling over the place where we have built our big base.’”45
Stefano was skeptical about the reasons for this scenario. “Officially, there had been a terrible battle between the CTRs and the W56s,” he told me. “The latter said they had been defeated and went away, promising that they would return at the beginning of the new century. That’s the official version. My opinion is that, on the contrary, it was false information in order to justify their interruption of the contact with Bruno and his group. Because, actually, they never went away….”46
Stefano related to me two experiences he had while flying in aircraft, the first of which occurred near L’Aquila on May 17, 1981 (entered in his pilot’s logbook, which I examined). “I was piloting a C-Falke-70 powered glider, registration I-IMAD, at an altitude of about a thousand meters above the ground, when a fast-flying disc, stone-colored, flew below my starboard wing, generating a great deal of turbulence. My starboard wing went up, the nose went up—and I was in an incipient spin. Probably for structural reasons, that aircraft could not do a spin. So I applied full power, full right rudder, pushed the stick forward, and the aircraft got back to normal. But all the way back to L’Aquila I continued to be in strong turbulence.”
Usually, UFOs do not affect the atmosphere in this way, therefore Stefano believes the craft was based on aerodynamic principles. However, there have been occasions when severe turbulence and other disturbing effects have been encountered by planes confronted with craft of non-aerodynamic shape, such as those reported in Ireland in 2004.47
Stefano’s other experience occurred in 1997—as a passenger. “At that time,” he told me, “I was working in Córdoba, Argentina, so typically was flying from Rome to Madrid, then Madrid to Buenos Aires, and from there to Córdoba. On that occasion in 1997, I was flying in a Boeing 747, which I knew to be an old plane. As managing director of my company, I was flying First Class. We were probably in the mid-Atlantic, when all of a sudden there was a sudden movement of the aircraft—not turbulence—as though something was wrong. At the time, I was listening to some classical music. Then ‘Sigis’—one of the aliens I had known—announced via the headphones, ‘Don’t worry. We have the situation under control.’
“When we landed at Buenos Aires the next morning, as we disembarked from the plane I noticed on the port wing that a panel—about 3 3 3 feet—was missing on the upper side. I guessed it was metal fatigue, but normally, had that been the case, all the other panels would have gone too—the corrupted airflow should have taken away the other panels, depriving the wing of lift. But it was just that one. That means they were looking after me. So, you see, they never went away….”48
To further confuse the issue, according to Bruno Sammaciccia there was yet another group of ETs operating during this period, which he called the “UTI.” “I don’t know what he meant with those initials,” Stefano writes in his treatise, “but UTI was a group in a way on a higher level than the W56s and CTRs, whose activities they were supervising, taking action when they believed that one of the two groups was going beyond certain limits. Once, the UTIs reproached the W56s for something they’d done, and Bruno was seen weeping because he couldn’t accept that his friends had been reprimanded.” According to Stefano, an Austrian general he knew was among those in regular contact with the UTIs.49
Physiognomy, Clothing, and Customs
“From a physiological point of view, the [W56s] are roughly identical to us,” Bruno learned:
“They breathe oxygen, though they need a slightly higher percentage than we do. Most of the oxides in our atmosphere are poisonous to them, [so] they take some substances that enable them to safely metabolize those oxides. Their blood is identical to ours, has the same color, only there are many more proteins…. The main difference consists in their liver, which changes its dimensions and functions according to the environment. Acting like a sponge, when its services are not required it atrophies to the size of a fist. When they live here on Earth, their liver is very active and works as a filter for the toxins they receive in our environment. Their legs and arms are very strong [and] their brain is somewhat larger than ours, but they maintain that this doesn’t necessarily imply that they are more intelligent than us.”
Most of the aliens with whom Bruno liaised had blond hair, and a few, black with a blueish tinge. Hair and eyelashes were thicker than ours, and some of the men sported stiff beards. “Their eyes are gray, blue, and some black with a blueish hue…. Their hands are slim, just like their bodies, with long fingers ending in nails that are some four or five millimeters longer than ours.”50
The W56 aliens do not use water to clean themselves. According to Bruno, they enter a kind of unit in which they are engulfed in “vibrations,” resulting in foam that exudes from their body, rendering them totally clean. “Their suits are living entities that adapt themselves to the body they cover.” “This is a strictly personal process,” Stefano points out; “one cannot wear the clothes of someone else.” Once a month, the suits are “purified” within a peculiar machine for a few minutes.51 Defecation apparently occurs only once a week.
They slept only two or three hours a night. Dimpietro—and probably others like him who claimed to have spent several centuries on Earth—slept for longer.52
Mating is the same as on Earth, though apparently they often use a form of artificial insemination and the child is born in a special device.53 (According to Stefano and others, they are totally compatible in this respect: some have even interbred with Earth humans.) Directly over their skin, a very tight overall was worn, a “second skin” intended to protect their body against adverse temperatures, while also eliminating bodily impurities and preventing toxins from reaching their skin, Bruno learned. Over this “skin” they wore a one-piece suit, tight at the neck, wrists, and ankles, ending with shoes that formed part of the suit, and soles some five centimeters thick. These suits were colored, usually in every hue of gray, green, red, and blue, sometimes white, with a rigid collar often bordered with pale orange on the neck. They seemed to attach importance to the color of their clothes: when making important decisions, for example, they would wear translucent, almost pearl-colored suits with “moving” colors (perhaps similar to “shot” silk?).54
No government, as such, exists. Neither do the W56s possess a formal civil code; as a highly developed people, they know instinctively how to behave. “Our formalities are unknown to them. They do not have lawyers, courts, or the like,” Bruno explains. “To them, doing evil is plain absurd: they cannot lie; they cannot hurt anybody, nor anything.”55 According to Stefano, however, in some circumstances killing can be justified. “One of the W56s once told me that it is not fundamentally evil to kill a man (within certain contexts),” he says.56
As for their religious attitudes, Bruno (the Catholic scholar) reports that they see “God” in everything, from the smallest insect to the cosmos. “Their religion is not as full of rituals as are ours: to them, it is just a deep feeling,” he writes.57 Stefano believes their creed is similar to that of classical yoga philosophy. I concur. Having read numerous books on these matters since my student days, I have always been particularly drawn to this philosophy.58 “Although respecting whatever creed of our planet,” wrote Stefano, “the W56s maintained that there is no need for rituals, worship, or asking for grace. God is within us….”59
The W56s speak a wide variety of our languages and are adept in numerous dialects. The man interviewed on tape by Stefano in Bologna, for example, was fluent in Chinese, English, German, Hindi, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Sanskrit.60
Regarding Sanskrit, Stefano gave me some splendid examples of references to “cosmic vehicles” and “space ships” in the Ŗgveda Samhitā, including the following:
“O twin-leaders, your objective is clear; you have thrown open the routes of space. The pilots of your space ship have harnessed engines for your onward journey, the engines that take you safely … without accidents. Both of you have been conveniently seated in your richly decorated three-shafted craft, going along a direct path through space.”61
Many of Stefano’s experiences and projects were shared with his friend Giancarlo, the accountant mentioned earlier. But the lengthy contacts took their toll. Eventually Stefano terminated his participation with the W56s, as it began to impact on his professional career. “You cannot live a quiet life when you are regularly meeting aliens!” he explained to me. “And after forty years I decided to quit.”62
In edition to the material cited in this summary, Mass Contacts features an interesting foreword by Roberto Pinotti, one of Europe’s leading investigators. Though not directly involved with the W56s, he became aware that something exotic was going on in 1969, while studying political science at the University of Florence. At the time he was also general secretary of Centro Ufologico Nazionale, a leading Italian group. He learned from his professor that an underground alien base existed near Pescara, information acquired from important and well-connected sources.63
In Mass Contacts, Stefano Breccia also includes a very interesting background history relating to various extraordinary individuals, including George Washington, who over the centuries seem to have been inspired by advanced beings from elsewhere. He also writes about some of the post-World War II contactees, such as George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Dan Fry, and George Hunt Williamson, and devotes about ninety pages to the so-called “Ummo” affair. The latter is a complex and sometimes seemingly ridiculous saga beginning in 1965, when hundreds of physicists, engineers, biologists, astronomers, and selected people all over the world interested in the subject (including Stefano) began receiving strange letters from these people, individually typed, in many different languages, though primarily in Spanish. The information and diagrams covered mostly scientific and technical aspects of their craft, plus aspects of their culture and language—and much else besides.
Like a number of other researchers, I remain skeptical about the “Ummites,” though I retain an open mind. Stefano shares my skepticism about many aspects. However, he describes personal experiences in Mass Contacts that tend to suggest that—like the W56s—something quite extraordinary was going on, which simply can’t be a hoax (by Earth humans, at least).
With regard to the Amicizia saga, Stefano wisely cautions us not to take everything at face value. He was concerned, for example, when the W56s requested some of their contacts (including himself) to bring them certain potentially harmful substances related to their technology. As Hans explains:
“They use a lot of mercury in most of their applications, so that Earthlings trying to [duplicate] their technology had to cope with this metal: horresco referens, a device based on a nitrogen plasma generator, with mercury pipes, that became solid thanks to a liquid air envelope … mercury is an expensive substance, not readily found in great quantities, moreover a toxic substance. We have also been working with asbestos and radioactive compounds such as radium, barium-strontium niobate and with hyper-voltage generators (beyond one mega-volt), so we were used to being careful.”64
“Who knows if there is anyone who actually [understands] the knowledge of what Amicizia has meant, in toto?” asks Stefano. “Who knows how many persons, all over Central Europe, are acquainted with it? … Too many have died during this period, even those foreign to it; too many people went mad, and too many have ruined their lives.”65
Recently, in delving through one of my files containing correspondence between George Adamski and his Swiss representative Louise “Lou” Zinsstag, by happenstance I chanced on an Amicizia connection. “I want you to know what a singular experience I had during a short visit to Italy,” Lou wrote to Adamski in July 1962. “A very good journalist named Bruno Ghibaudi wrote a whole series of articles in one paper, publishing all kinds of intriguing contact stories and also photos from other people. Among them were those of a young artist, Gaspare De Lama, from Milano, which were so interesting that I wrote to him. My Italian being rather poor, I asked a friend of mine, Curt Zäch, to accompany me to De Lama. We met him, his wife, and his mother. They are very sincere and trustworthy people; poor but of good breeding, well educated and hospitable…. De Lama tells an amazing story. He forbade me to write to anybody about it except you.
“His first question was regarding your pamphlet on the spaceships being useful in case of cosmic wars. He had heard this from Alberto Perego through a friend, but was not sure. When I confirmed it and said that [Adamski] took this seriously, he murmured: ‘I knew that Adamski is no fool….’
“He then proceeded to show us his photos. This man has been able to photograph saucers since February 1962, in seven series, one of them in color: ‘A friend of mine pilots them and sometimes lets me know when they’re coming and where I can take pictures. He is an Italian like me, called Franco. He works with people from another galaxy. These people have subterranean bases here on Earth….’
“I asked him why his space friends were here and why they hid under the Earth. ‘In the first place, they explained that they are kind of like military people and would have to hide everywhere. They are not here to make war on us, they came to fight—not with weapons—a bad race who came to this planet some time ago in order to force us to make war with each other….’
“He himself has not yet had any contact. But Franco gave him some letters written by space people. They look most intriguing [though] did not much resemble the ‘letter’ from Venus which you showed me here in Basle [see p. 113]. I was all the more astonished when De Lama added (almost with your own words): ‘You see, those signs are whole sentences. Such a letter may contain the contents of a whole book….’”
In Alien Base, I alluded to the testimony of Ghibaudi, citing a series of photographs he had taken of alien craft on the shores of the Adriatic coast in Pescara in April 1961, one of which shows a bizarre-looking craft with what appear to be “wings” and “fins” set at a non-aerodynamically high dihedral angle (see photo section). A respected science journalist, Ghibaudi was a familiar figure on Italian television and radio at the time, specializing mostly in aerospace matters. Later that year, he was introduced to several of the W56 aliens, with witnesses present. They explained that although nuclear weapons remained one of the principal reasons for their increased presence, there were other reasons he was forbidden from disclosing (the alleged conflict with the CTRs undoubtedly being one, I would assume).
Ghibaudi learned that the aliens’ reluctance to reveal themselves more openly was based not only on the danger that would ensue from public panic, but that their open appearance among Earth people would inevitably lead to negative comparisons.
“Do not let us forget,” he pointed out, “that between their science and ours there is a gap of thousands of years, and for this reason an ‘official’ mass descent of space beings from other planets would inevitably bring about comparisons between their worlds and ours [and] there are cosmic laws which prevent the more evolved races from interfering, beyond certain limits, in the evolution and development of the more backward races….”66