Italy.Cecconi G-91R · Treviso

On 18 June 1979, around 11:30 in the morning according to later accounts, Warrant Officer (Maresciallo) Giancarlo Cecconi, of the 14th Gruppo of the 2nd Stormo of the Italian Air Force, was returning to his base at Treviso-Sant'Angelo after a photo-reconnaissance mission when the tower asked him to contact the Istrana radar centre, which had detected an object over the airfield area. Cecconi was flying a Fiat G-91R reconnaissance aircraft with four VINTEN cameras (one forward, two lateral and one ventral), the same ones he had used on his mission, and he still had film left.

The official record from the time that is public today is minimal. The 1972–1990 sighting catalogue that the Aeronautica Militare published in 2023 devotes a single entry to the case: Treviso, 18/06/1979, "morning, not specified", shape "cylindrical", colour "black", speed and direction "not indicated", altitude "about 3,000 m", clear sky, reported by Aeronautica Militare personnel. Everything else comes from Cecconi's testimony, first gathered by ufologist Antonio Chiumiento of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale and published in Flying Saucer Review in 1988, and in interviews in 1994 and 1995. The most detailed reconstruction is Marco Orlandi's for the CISU's AIRCAT project, based on in-person interviews with Cecconi in September 1994 and a telephone conversation on 2 August 1995. According to it, Cecconi switched on all four cameras and flew past the object at about 300 knots, as close as 70 to 80 metres: he made seven or eight passes and collected 82 frames. When he began, the object was at about 7,000 feet (some 2,100 metres); it then climbed and descended in steps of about a thousand feet until it reached roughly 13,000 (some 3,900 metres). Relative to his passes it seemed practically motionless, but the Istrana radar centre told him it was in fact moving "on a definite course and at a definite speed", and the pilot had the impression that it turned so as never to show him its side. The Treviso tower, whose staff were following it through binoculars, radioed that a "bluish trail" was coming from the object, which he, although so close, did not see. He described it as a dull black "fuel tank", about 8 metres long and 2.5 or at most 3 in diameter, with a kind of whitish "cupoletta", more a fairing than a dome, on its slightly flattened top; other versions, such as the 1995 interview, give about five metres by one and a half. He insisted that it did not shake as the jet passed beside it and that it "was not plastic and did not look like an inflatable balloon". As he turned for another pass, Istrana told him the return had vanished from the screen between two sweeps, and a few seconds later the tower reported it could no longer see it. The passes, the climbs and the trail are therefore not late embellishments: they are in the account Cecconi himself gave his interviewers, with the trail attributed to the tower rather than to him.

The official explanation came in 1984 and should be quoted precisely. Deputy Giancarlo Abete filed a parliamentary question on 13 July 1984 (the date given by the Centro Ufologico Nazionale letter of 24 August that cites it; Orlandi's text says 10 July), and in its answer Defence stated that UFO data could be consulted through the minister's Cabinet office. On the strength of that answer, Chiumiento asked on 24 August for Cecconi's photos and for the ministry's opinion on the case, which the magazine Domenica del Corriere published in its 1 September issue. The ministry's reply, dated 2 November 1984, stated that the object had been photographed edge-on and "unequivocally" identified by the photo-interpretation staff as a cylindrical balloon made of black plastic bags. In April 1985 the weekly Epoca (Remo Guerrini, "UFO rapporto segreto") was allowed to see the Aeronautica dossier and published frames. On 17 February 1986, however, the Aeronautica's General Staff released an "Estratto degli avvistamenti degli oggetti volanti non identificati" covering March 1979 to April 1985, and in it the case was listed as "unidentified", despite the "unequivocal" identification of two years earlier. One of the photos, released in 1995 by the newspaper La Tribuna di Treviso, shows a dark cylinder with blunt ends hanging above the airfield runway.

The prosaic reading is serious, though less settled than the 1984 letter suggests. In 1979 "UFO solari" were sold in Italy: toy balloons shaped like a black plastic tube several metres long, filled with air, which rise when the sun warms them. Cecconi himself said that his first thought was that it was one of them, before he ruled it out. The cylindrical shape, the dull black colour, the apparent stillness relative to the jet's passes and a movement on a constant course and speed, like something drifting with the wind, fit that kind of balloon. Against it stand the judgement of an experienced pilot who had it 70 to 80 metres away, his insistence on the object's rigidity and the small white dome he described, and the fact that the original dossier and most of the frames have never been published. Orlandi's reconstruction adds concrete objections: the period "UFO Solar" measured about 3 metres by 70 centimetres and carried its name in large letters on its side, against the 8 by 3 metres and the absence of lettering Cecconi reported; a very thin plastic balloon hardly gives a radar return; the wake of a jet at 80 metres did not disturb it; and the thousand-foot climbs and descents up to 13,000 feet fit a drifting balloon less well. The 2023 catalogue entry does not mention the 1984 identification and classifies the event as O.V.N.I.; but the same label covers 201 of the catalogue's 208 events, so it means the archive holds no explanation, not that the Aeronautica has withdrawn the 1984 one; though the 1986 extract shows that its own record already treated it as unidentified back then.

It brings together military camera photography and an object seen at close range by a named pilot; the radar return is known only from what the pilot said in 1994 and 1995. What the published official record supports is little and also contradictory: one line in the Aeronautica catalogue (a black cylinder at about 3,000 metres, with no speed or direction), a 1984 ministerial identification as a plastic balloon and a 1986 General Staff extract that lists it as unidentified. What supports the anomalous version is the pilot's testimony, gathered in person by Orlandi, with seven or eight passes, climbs from 7,000 to about 13,000 feet and a radar giving him a definite course and speed, set against a photo that, seen today, looks very much like a black tube solar balloon.

Cecconi matters above all as a methodological test case. It shows how a concrete but terse official explanation, without publication of the photo-interpretation behind it, leaves room for doubt, especially when another document from the same administration lists the case as unidentified. It also illustrates a limit of official catalogues: the O.V.N.I. label in the Aeronautica archive is applied to almost everything, so it cannot be read as a verdict of anomaly. The open question is testable: if the Aeronautica released the 80 frames and the photo-interpretation report, the object's shape, seams and behaviour would confirm or rule out the balloon. Until then, the black plastic balloon hypothesis remains the leading one, but with a wide margin of uncertainty owing to the pilot's testimony, the radar and the 1986 classification.