Italy.Sassari · a teacher sees a blue-green sphere cross the sky

On the night of August 27, 1952, at 21:45, Professor Giovanni Battista Sias was walking and saying the rosary in the courtyard of the Sassari Brigade war-orphans institute, below the dormitory windows, at the hour when the bugle of the Gonzaga barracks played lights out. He told it himself in an article that the local paper Corriere dell'Isola published the next day. In his account the night was starry, moonless and still torrid, under a sky that had been clear for three months. His attention was caught by a small transparent cloud coming from the east, isolated in the middle of the sky; as he watched it, a sphere of astonishing brightness seemed to depart from the Milky Way. "I had the impression that it was very close to the earth", he wrote: it was slightly larger than the full moon, green-blue, silver like mother-of-pearl and with metallic streaks on its right side, and it moved at a dizzy speed from east to west, appearing suddenly "as if it came out of a thick shadow". It disappeared after a second, leaving a luminous line or ribbon one-seventh of its thickness; it reappeared whole, vanished again leaving the line, came back identical and finally disappeared toward the horizon. It all lasted three to five seconds.

Sias wrote that his first idea was an aerolite, but he set it aside because it seemed "evident" to him that the sphere shone with sunlight, like the Moon. On the motion, he reasoned that no human object could go so fast, even flying at 50 or 60 kilometers altitude, and that, if it came from space, from much higher up, its motion could be partly or wholly apparent, equal to the speed of the Earth in its orbit, about 30 kilometers per second. On the light, he inferred that it must have been hundreds or thousands of kilometers up, coming out of the Earth's cone of shadow, lit by a Sun that had set two and a half hours earlier, and he placed it about 45 degrees above the horizon, to the south. To dispel the doubt of an optical illusion he named two other witnesses: an orphan called Brau, who had not yet gone to bed and saw the sphere through the dormitory window, and a Mr. Piccolo, a guard at a firm, "Valmascheri" in the translation, about three kilometers in a straight line from Sassari. Neither has a statement of his own in the file: they exist only in Sias's text.

He then turned to an astronomer, Father Junkes, whom he presents as director of the Vatican observatory at Castel Gandolfo. Among the data he gave him, the apparition lasted three to five seconds "in South-West direction", not east to west as in the article: the witness himself gave two different headings, which is why the results come in pairs. According to the letter, after some days of study Junkes estimated the observers' position at 40° 45' north and 8° 33' east, placed the Sun at 21:45 at 27° 41' below the horizon, with an azimuth of 133° 36' counted from south through west, and calculated that the line of sight at 45 degrees left the Earth's shadow about 1,681 kilometers to the south or about 1,091 to the southwest. At those distances half a degree of apparent diameter would equal 14.67 or 9.25 kilometers, and Junkes concluded that the object could not be a terrestrial "flying saucer" lit by the Sun because it would be too big. In another letter he attributed the green, blue and silver colors to the quantity of iron and nickel that many astral bodies contain. Sias admits that none of the numerous hypotheses the astronomer and he advanced was entirely satisfactory, and presents his own as "quite reasonable": a discoid sphere alternately showing its face to the Sun, with a line two kilometers wide and an undulating motion.

Fifteen months later, on November 19, 1953, Sias sent all this to the United States embassy in Rome with some "personal remarks". He states that the cloud was a signal to his attention, that he does not dare say the sphere carried non-human beings, "but the heavenly intervention is too evident"; that its luminosity "cannot even be compared with the brightness of full moon in a clear night", with colors "that cannot be found on earth"; and that the privilege was not meant for him alone: the phenomenon happened at the war-orphans institute of the Sassari Brigade, the custodian of Trieste, which awaited its second liberation at the hands of the United States. There follows a eulogy of that country's destiny, with a quotation from the Aeneid, and a summary of "scientific data": that the sphere was not a human invention, "the secret, now disclosed, of the measuring system of such apparitions", and the aim of choosing a people as a guide to mankind under the guidance of God. He ends by offering the embassy's air office "the secret and the property" of his writing and asking to be granted, as a reward for the orphans' institute and the E.N.A.L.L.I., what he had requested in a letter to Ambassador "Clara Luce" (Clare Boothe Luce), referred to in a reply from Colonel Anthony Mony of July 3, 1953.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph A. Woida, acting air attaché in Rome, forwarded it in report IR-700-53 of December 15, 1953, with the source "Prof. G. B. Sias" and the evaluation "D-4". In his comments he says that he interviewed Sias and found him intelligent, pleasant and very eager to tell his story; that the professor was convinced that either the United States had made scientific strides unknown to the rest of the world, or the phenomenon was supernatural or had been set off by another government in Italy; and that he was a very intense individual who, while not exactly a fanatic, came very close to that title. The cover sheet puts the sighting on August 28, which is the date of the article, not of the night the article describes. It lists as an enclosure a sketch by the professor "of what he thought he saw", and the five-page PURSUE copy does not include it.

The copy of the report that reached the Air Technical Intelligence Center is in Project Blue Book, filed under that wrong date: together with other papers dated August 28, 1952, such as a B-29 crew's sighting off the Pacific coast, in a folder with no month date. That copy bears handwritten notes reading "28 Aug", the number "ATIC 161647" and "w/1 incl (A) ATISDIB 11 Feb 54", meaning that the sketch reached the center in February 1954; it has Sias's name blacked out in the translation and keeps the sketch, preceded by a sheet reading "This case includes one (1) large drawing": three hatched discs, joined by a vertical band, and a cloud at the edge of the paper. The folder holds no record card or conclusion for Sassari.

What Sias describes, a green-blue sphere brighter than the full moon that crosses the sky in three to five seconds, goes out and flares again leaving a luminous ribbon and disappears toward the horizon, is the usual description of a fireball, and he thought of it first himself. He set it aside on an inference, that the light was reflected sunlight, which runs against his own first impression that the object was "very close to the earth" and which nothing in the file tests; Junkes's calculation starts from that premise without testing it, takes for granted that the object was coming out of the Earth's shadow and works out how big it would be there. By our own calculation, if at those distances of 1,091 to 1,681 kilometers it had crossed 10 degrees of sky in four seconds, it would be moving at about 50 to 75 kilometers per second, faster than any body in Earth orbit. An interplanetary body could travel at that speed, so what matters is the combination: an object several kilometers across, lit more than a thousand kilometers away, crossing the sky in seconds and going out and reappearing. And 10 degrees is a minimum, because Sias lost it toward the horizon. A meteor about 100 kilometers up crosses that arc without difficulty. Junkes, for his part, attributed the colors to the iron and nickel of "astral bodies", the same metals found in many meteoroids, although he had in mind an object more than a thousand kilometers away.

Two calculations of our own check the data in the letter. Junkes's figures hold: at Sassari the Sun was about 27 degrees below the horizon at 21:45 Italian time and had set at about 19:10, some two and a half hours earlier, as Sias writes. The night, however, was not entirely moonless: a 43 % lit waxing moon stood about 2 degrees above the horizon in the southwest and set at about 22:00; that low, any building or the terrain hid it, and it does not explain an object that moved within seconds.

As evidence, the case rests on a single witness with a full name. The other two appear only in his account, the official report arrives fifteen months later and passes on in writing what the professor wanted to say, and the attaché rated it with a "D", a source not usually reliable, and a "4", doubtful information. At the same time, the document matters for how the system worked: an air attaché interviewed in person a civilian who was writing to the embassy, put on record his judgment of him and sent the sketch to the aerial phenomena section, which filed it under a wrong date and without a card, so it never received a conclusion.