Zanfretta Abductions, 1978 - 1981
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Beginning in December 1978, an Italian private security guard named Piero Fortunato Zanfretta had a series of bizarre experiences with tall, green giants that rank among the most fantastic stories of all UFO contactees. Important elements of Zanfretta’s account were confirmed by physical evidence and corroborating witnesses, and the unfolding drama was thoroughly documented in Italian media. Zanfretta’s dramatic story exemplifies many common features of UFO contact narratives, and serves as a vivid testament to their wholly “alien” nature.
The First Abduction
Fortunato Zanfretta was 26 and working as a security guard at a private security company, Val Bisagno, at the time of his first experience. On the night of December 6, 1978, he was making his usual rounds in the village of Marzano. Around 11:30 pm, Zanfretta pulled up to a private villa when his car suddenly stopped and lost all electrical function. He then noticed that the gate and villa door were wide open, and that there were four moving lights on the lawn. He drew his weapon and ran just inside the open door to the villa. Expecting to ambush a group of thieves, he received an unexpected push from behind.
Zanfretta spun around to see a monstrous being with wrinkly, green skin, triangular, yellow eyes, and three horns on each side of its head. Its mouth was covered in a metal strip. Flesh piled up around its neck like gills, its forehead was covered in red veins, and its fingers ended in long nails with rounded tips. Zanfretta claimed that it stood no less than 3 meters tall. Terrified, the guard sprinted across the lawn, then felt an intense light at his back and turned around to see a large, flat, triangular craft ascending from behind the villa. The object was covered in blindingly bright multi-coloured lights, and made a hissing noise as it rose. He later estimated it to be 30 m wide.
Two guards were dispatched to the scene, and found Zanfretta face down on the lawn. Though it was cold out, his clothes were warm and dry. Zanfretta was hysterical when he awoke, and had to be forcibly disarmed. In the spot where he’d been lying, there was a distinct semi-circular impression, 3 m in diameter, 15 cm thick, and pressed 3 cm deep.
The story reached the papers on December 8. Most dismissed it as a hoax, but Rino DiStefano, a journalist at the Corriere Mercantile, a Genoese paper, took a personal interest, and visited the site that afternoon. DiStefano confirmed the presence of the semi-circular indentation, and the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, found at least 52 witnesses to lights over Marzano that night. Another 2m semi-circular imprint appeared where one of these lights was seen.
The next day, DiStefano spoke with Zanfretta and interviewed all the other personnel involved. He then arranged to have Dr. Mauro Moretti, a well-esteemed hypnosis specialist, perform regressive hypnosis on Zanfretta. In the session, Zanfretta narrated details of the encounter that he could not consciously recall. The being commanded Zanfretta to come with him and placed a helmet over his head that he later claimed was used to translate the entities' speech. Zanfretta was then lifted up to a bright, warm room where he was interrogated and examined. The beings told him that they were from the “third galaxy” and that they’d return soon in greater numbers. After this, Zanfretta somehow escaped or was freed, then resumed his conscious recollection of running across the villa grounds.
The Second Abduction
Zanfretta was back on duty on the night of December 26, 1979 when the beings returned. Around 11:46, he was driving his car towards a tunnel near the village of Rossi when it became surrounded by a thick fog and began driving itself. He made a frantic call to the operations centre, lost reception, then called back in a calm, obedient tone, and said this his car had stopped itself before a great light he felt compelled to approach.
The rescue team found Zanfretta’s car on the side of the road with its headlights on. Zanfretta leapt out of a nearby ravine running for his life, and the guards had to wrestle him back to his senses. Again his clothes were warm and dry, despite the cold, rainy weather, and his head was extremely hot from the nose up. Zanfretta’s car was burning hot inside and out, particularly on the roof. Later, Zanfretta recalled an intense light beaming down from above. As the guards were driving away, their car died on the road, before starting up again 100 m ahead. Zanfretta said that “they” were still there, watching. Still, he remembered nothing about his encounter that night, and could not explain how six bullets went missing from his pistol. After searching the scene, the Carabinieri found huge footprints in the mud measuring 50 by 20 cm. On the side of the road, there was a semi-circle of uprooted vegetation 3 m in diameter, and long, treadless skid marks in the ground.
Zanfretta became a national celebrity, but also the subject of tremendous skepticism. To clear his name, Zanfretta agreed to a televised hypnosis session with Dr. Moretti. Under hypnosis, he recalled meeting one of the beings who took his gun and fired six oddly silent shots before Zanfretta was lifted up in a green beam of light. The guard then found himself in a room surrounded by dashboards and controls that looked much larger than the craft did from outside. There were 10 or more of the tall beings there, and one of them put a helmet on his head that shocked him when he resisted. They stripped his clothes, covered his eyes, and passed a cold object over his chest. They told him that they needed human beings as guinea pigs, and that they'd come back when he least expected it.
Zanfretta retold his story on Pentotal, a truth serum, under the guide of Dr. Marco Marchesan, expanding on the same narrative he’d told under hypnosis. He claimed that the beings’ "prince," who identified himself as Almoc, said that his people, the Dargos, had travelled 4000 light-years in order to make friends with humans and "see how they are made.” The Dargos were "destined to die," in a planetary explosion, and needed "a place to start over,” so they were going to build a domed city on Earth. They also warned of the dangers of atomic bombs. Almoc’s eyes contained a thousand forming colours that Zanfretta found difficult to look at.
The beings then introduced Zanfretta to a strange object that would soon become the focal point of their interactions: a clear, crystal-like sphere that contained a golden pyramid with lights at its corners and strange symbols on its surfaces. They told Zanfretta that this sphere acted like a kind of TV to show him how the aliens lived. After this, Zanfretta was beamed back down to Earth. The Dargos also claimed to have entered the villa at Marzano and taken some animals they thought were alive. The Carabinieri confirmed that the door to the villa was violently torn from the wall, and that two stuffed birds had been taken.
The Zanfretta story had gone international after an article DiStefano published on January 20, and his story on the Pentotal session did a lot to convince the world that the guard was being honest in his retellings. Zanfretta also did a number of psychiatric assessments which found no mental abnormalities, as well as another TV hypnosis with a doctor who concluded that the guard was sincere, if deluded.
The Last Abductions
On July 30, 1979, seven months after his last abduction, Zanfretta once again found himself lifted up in a beam of green light, this time from his new patrol route in the suburbs of Genoa. The rescue team responded immediately. They found his Vespa on top of a nearby mountain, and found Zanfretta two kilometres away running in complete darkness. There is only one narrow road to the mountain, and the guard there never saw Zanfretta pass by.
Under hypnosis with Dr. Marchesan, Zanfretta claimed that the beings told him that they would return one last time "when the great cold comes.” At this point, they would give him the sphere and have him pass it along to an American professor whose name the guard recalled sounded something like "Hainke." Marchesan asked if the beings had said "Hynek," and Zanfretta agreed. Hynek was the world's foremost ufologist at the time, although Zanfretta didn’t know him. Hynek received a full report on the case after visiting Genoa in 1984, but there is no indication that he ever obtained the sphere.
Zanfretta was abducted again on December 2, 1979. He stated under hypnosis that a strange, faceless man with an egg-shaped head approached him at a gas station. The man wore a checkered suit jacket over a silver turtleneck shirt, and acted as an intermediary between Zanfretta and the tall, green beings. Zanfretta was ushered into the car, which was then engulfed in a cloud that carried him up to another room with the tall, green beings inside. The room was massive and looked like a bustling city, and Zanfretta could see the Earth as a ball in space outside a window. Here Zanfretta was shown a number of large tubes containing a frog-like man, a caveman, and other humans suspended in a blue liquid. Almoc handed the sphere to Zanfretta, but the guard refused it and threw it back, smashing it on the ground, and the beings forced the helmet on his head.
Meanwhile, Zanfretta's rescue team spotted a brilliant disc in the sky outside of Marzano, and two cars of guards drove to the scene. Twice, both vehicles died and restarted at the exact same time as they approached. They saw two large beams of light shining out from an unnaturally dense cloud and onto the ground in front of them. One of the guards fired two rounds at the source of the light, and the beams went out a few minutes later. The tall green beings acknowledged to Zanfretta the shots fired from the ground, despite apparently being in space.
The beings showed Zanfretta a file of photos of everyone on Earth, imprinted with all their personal information. The beings claimed that all these people would eventually become subjects in their experiments, and that they’d return "in due time" with another sphere. The beings had told Zanfretta that they’d been in Spain the night before scaring people in the streets. On December 4, the Spanish press reported of a story of a man being chased through the streets by a UFO that same night. DiStefano found that farmers around Marzano had become almost desensitized to strange lights in the sky, and saw one that night as well.
On February 12, 1980, Zanfretta had his last widely-publicized abduction. Under hypnosis, he explained that he felt compelled to enter his car and drive around for a while, before picking up the egg-headed man on the side of the highway. A bright light shone down from above and the car braked by itself. The egg-headed man got out and entered the triangular craft hovering nearby before it flew into a nearby ravine to avoid the coming rescue team.
When rescue came, they found his car with the driver side door open. Zanfretta was lying passed out on the edge of the ravine, and even after waking, he was dazed and unresponsive. Monitoring equipment that Val Bisagno had installed on the car showed that the wheels had been lifted from the ground, and the thermometer had reached a maximum of 43 C. Magnetic tapes showed no sign of a magnetic field, and the photography equipment captured nothing unusual.
Zanfretta, Contactee
While giving Zanfretta time to rest under hypnosis in his February 15 session, Dr. Moretti and DiStefano suddenly heard the guard speaking an unknown language while apparently channeling another persona. When he did this, his face was uncharacteristically hard and stern, and his voice was strong. He said that the beings would come back soon to show themselves to all, but before that they would only talk to Zanfretta, their intermediary. The channeling then ended abruptly.
In different sessions, Zanfretta recalled vague memories of receiving the sphere in a box sometime in 1979, and hiding it in the mountains, where he regularly checked up on it. He claimed that the sphere discharged electrical shocks, and that it pulsated brilliant light when the box was opened. Once, he claimed it cut a wild hare clean in half.
Any further questions on the object or its whereabouts were stonewalled. Often, Zanfretta simply wouldn’t respond. Moretti said it was as if the guard had been counter-hypnotized and instructed to deny all requests for more information on the sphere. Sometimes, however, Zanfretta would deny questions in his channeled voice. The channeled persona claimed that the guard’s duty was to activate the sphere, which would allow the Dargos to land and make contact with 20 previously selected individuals. The landing never happened, however.
Zanfretta had five more abduction experiences up until August 8, 1981, but Val Bisagno gave up on trying to understand them, and DiStefano no longer published on them. The guard also went back for several more hypnosis sessions with Dr. Moretti, with the last one occurring on April 24, 1992, where he claimed the aliens had said they were going to take the sphere back after all.
Zanfretta’s life was deeply changed by his experiences. In a little over a year, Zanfretta’s dark, black hair had turned completely grey, and was fully white a few years later. He put on 14 kg in 1979, and a co-worker remarked that he seemed to age two decades in about five years. Zanfretta urinated a black liquid after every encounter, and he experienced daily vomiting for the first year of his experiences. He had a headache and heard a hissing sound up to four days before abductions. He felt he’d been given a heavy burden by his visitors, and eagerly awaited the completion of his duties, which never seemed to come.
Significance
The way that Zanfretta was targeted as a “chosen” intermediary in a series of entity encounters is reminiscent of religious narratives of contact with angels and marion apparitions. Zanfretta was informed of his role through the progressive revelation of information over many short encounters, even though very little information was revealed in each one. This is similar to the progressive revelation of the Fatima apparitions, or the lady of Lourdes, France, who made revelations to Bernadette Soubirous over 18 separate appearances. Contactees since the mid 1950s, widely ridiculed for their alleged contacts with higher beings, also claim to be visited repeatedly, and they’re often warned of the dangers of nuclear arms.
Though there’s evidence that Zanfretta’s experiences were at least partly “real” in a strictly physical sense, there are also elements of the story that seem to defy physics, logic, and common sense. Zanfretta reported that the inside of Dargos’ craft was much larger than the exterior of the ship would allow for, and it appeared to be in space, even when the other guards could see its lights from the ground. Many other abductees, including those abducted at Pascagoula in 1973, also said the interior of their captors’ craft was much larger than it was outside. Much of what the Dargos said was highly imprecise, and full of internal contradictions. The Dargos claimed to be from the “third galaxy,” an absurdly vague description, and Almoc contradicted himself in the different reasons he gave for visiting Earth. And none of them turned out to be true, as the Dargos apparently never built a city, never established contact, and never had Zanfretta prepare a landing.
The Dargos also changed their minds three times on the issue of the sphere, first claiming it should go to Hynek, then claiming it would be hidden until the landing, and finally deciding to take it back. It was first introduced as a kind of “TV,” and then as a device to prepare for a landing. And of course, only Zanfretta saw the beings, despite the fact that they repeatedly exclaimed their desire to make contact with humanity. The level of absurdity, and the fact that Zanfretta could recall nothing of his experiences in a normal, waking state, leads one to think the phenomenon was at least partly mental or psychic in nature, or that parts of it took place in some constructed, alternate reality or altered state of consciousness.
DiStefano published a book in 1984 recounting all of Zanfretta’s experiences that was updated and translated into English in 2014. He retired professionally but continues to write. Zanfretta has remained a minor celebrity in Italy and abroad, attending the World Congress of Ufology in Tuscon Arizona in 1991. As of 2017, he is still true to his story. He still believes that one day people will see that it’s true.
Sources:
Rino DiStefano. "The Zanfretta Case: Chronicle of an Incredible True Story." First International English Edition. CreateSpace Publishing, 2014.
This video contains photographs from DiStefano's book and website, and footage from two videos uploaded on DiStefano's YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afluy206hX8,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLUp-oE_Qnk.
This animation of the planetary explosion was taken from Xavier Martin's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49zTum_euM.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
UFO Case Review contains sound design with elements downloaded from Freesound.org. Typewriter_2rows.wav, Uploaded by Fatson under the Attribution License.
Beginning in December 1978, an Italian private security guard named Piero Fortunato Zanfretta had a series of bizarre experiences with tall, green giants that rank among the most fantastic stories of all UFO contactees. Important elements of Zanfretta’s account were confirmed by physical evidence and corroborating witnesses, and the unfolding drama was thoroughly documented in Italian media. Zanfretta’s dramatic story exemplifies many common features of UFO contact narratives, and serves as a vivid testament to their wholly “alien” nature.
The First Abduction
Fortunato Zanfretta was 26 and working as a security guard at a private security company, Val Bisagno, at the time of his first experience. On the night of December 6, 1978, he was making his usual rounds in the village of Marzano. Around 11:30 pm, Zanfretta pulled up to a private villa when his car suddenly stopped and lost all electrical function. He then noticed that the gate and villa door were wide open, and that there were four moving lights on the lawn. He drew his weapon and ran just inside the open door to the villa. Expecting to ambush a group of thieves, he received an unexpected push from behind.
Zanfretta spun around to see a monstrous being with wrinkly, green skin, triangular, yellow eyes, and three horns on each side of its head. Its mouth was covered in a metal strip. Flesh piled up around its neck like gills, its forehead was covered in red veins, and its fingers ended in long nails with rounded tips. Zanfretta claimed that it stood no less than 3 meters tall. Terrified, the guard sprinted across the lawn, then felt an intense light at his back and turned around to see a large, flat, triangular craft ascending from behind the villa. The object was covered in blindingly bright multi-coloured lights, and made a hissing noise as it rose. He later estimated it to be 30 m wide.
Two guards were dispatched to the scene, and found Zanfretta face down on the lawn. Though it was cold out, his clothes were warm and dry. Zanfretta was hysterical when he awoke, and had to be forcibly disarmed. In the spot where he’d been lying, there was a distinct semi-circular impression, 3 m in diameter, 15 cm thick, and pressed 3 cm deep.
The story reached the papers on December 8. Most dismissed it as a hoax, but Rino DiStefano, a journalist at the Corriere Mercantile, a Genoese paper, took a personal interest, and visited the site that afternoon. DiStefano confirmed the presence of the semi-circular indentation, and the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, found at least 52 witnesses to lights over Marzano that night. Another 2m semi-circular imprint appeared where one of these lights was seen.
The next day, DiStefano spoke with Zanfretta and interviewed all the other personnel involved. He then arranged to have Dr. Mauro Moretti, a well-esteemed hypnosis specialist, perform regressive hypnosis on Zanfretta. In the session, Zanfretta narrated details of the encounter that he could not consciously recall. The being commanded Zanfretta to come with him and placed a helmet over his head that he later claimed was used to translate the entities' speech. Zanfretta was then lifted up to a bright, warm room where he was interrogated and examined. The beings told him that they were from the “third galaxy” and that they’d return soon in greater numbers. After this, Zanfretta somehow escaped or was freed, then resumed his conscious recollection of running across the villa grounds.
The Second Abduction
Zanfretta was back on duty on the night of December 26, 1979 when the beings returned. Around 11:46, he was driving his car towards a tunnel near the village of Rossi when it became surrounded by a thick fog and began driving itself. He made a frantic call to the operations centre, lost reception, then called back in a calm, obedient tone, and said this his car had stopped itself before a great light he felt compelled to approach.
The rescue team found Zanfretta’s car on the side of the road with its headlights on. Zanfretta leapt out of a nearby ravine running for his life, and the guards had to wrestle him back to his senses. Again his clothes were warm and dry, despite the cold, rainy weather, and his head was extremely hot from the nose up. Zanfretta’s car was burning hot inside and out, particularly on the roof. Later, Zanfretta recalled an intense light beaming down from above. As the guards were driving away, their car died on the road, before starting up again 100 m ahead. Zanfretta said that “they” were still there, watching. Still, he remembered nothing about his encounter that night, and could not explain how six bullets went missing from his pistol. After searching the scene, the Carabinieri found huge footprints in the mud measuring 50 by 20 cm. On the side of the road, there was a semi-circle of uprooted vegetation 3 m in diameter, and long, treadless skid marks in the ground.
Zanfretta became a national celebrity, but also the subject of tremendous skepticism. To clear his name, Zanfretta agreed to a televised hypnosis session with Dr. Moretti. Under hypnosis, he recalled meeting one of the beings who took his gun and fired six oddly silent shots before Zanfretta was lifted up in a green beam of light. The guard then found himself in a room surrounded by dashboards and controls that looked much larger than the craft did from outside. There were 10 or more of the tall beings there, and one of them put a helmet on his head that shocked him when he resisted. They stripped his clothes, covered his eyes, and passed a cold object over his chest. They told him that they needed human beings as guinea pigs, and that they'd come back when he least expected it.
Zanfretta retold his story on Pentotal, a truth serum, under the guide of Dr. Marco Marchesan, expanding on the same narrative he’d told under hypnosis. He claimed that the beings’ "prince," who identified himself as Almoc, said that his people, the Dargos, had travelled 4000 light-years in order to make friends with humans and "see how they are made.” The Dargos were "destined to die," in a planetary explosion, and needed "a place to start over,” so they were going to build a domed city on Earth. They also warned of the dangers of atomic bombs. Almoc’s eyes contained a thousand forming colours that Zanfretta found difficult to look at.
The beings then introduced Zanfretta to a strange object that would soon become the focal point of their interactions: a clear, crystal-like sphere that contained a golden pyramid with lights at its corners and strange symbols on its surfaces. They told Zanfretta that this sphere acted like a kind of TV to show him how the aliens lived. After this, Zanfretta was beamed back down to Earth. The Dargos also claimed to have entered the villa at Marzano and taken some animals they thought were alive. The Carabinieri confirmed that the door to the villa was violently torn from the wall, and that two stuffed birds had been taken.
The Zanfretta story had gone international after an article DiStefano published on January 20, and his story on the Pentotal session did a lot to convince the world that the guard was being honest in his retellings. Zanfretta also did a number of psychiatric assessments which found no mental abnormalities, as well as another TV hypnosis with a doctor who concluded that the guard was sincere, if deluded.
The Last Abductions
On July 30, 1979, seven months after his last abduction, Zanfretta once again found himself lifted up in a beam of green light, this time from his new patrol route in the suburbs of Genoa. The rescue team responded immediately. They found his Vespa on top of a nearby mountain, and found Zanfretta two kilometres away running in complete darkness. There is only one narrow road to the mountain, and the guard there never saw Zanfretta pass by.
Under hypnosis with Dr. Marchesan, Zanfretta claimed that the beings told him that they would return one last time "when the great cold comes.” At this point, they would give him the sphere and have him pass it along to an American professor whose name the guard recalled sounded something like "Hainke." Marchesan asked if the beings had said "Hynek," and Zanfretta agreed. Hynek was the world's foremost ufologist at the time, although Zanfretta didn’t know him. Hynek received a full report on the case after visiting Genoa in 1984, but there is no indication that he ever obtained the sphere.
Zanfretta was abducted again on December 2, 1979. He stated under hypnosis that a strange, faceless man with an egg-shaped head approached him at a gas station. The man wore a checkered suit jacket over a silver turtleneck shirt, and acted as an intermediary between Zanfretta and the tall, green beings. Zanfretta was ushered into the car, which was then engulfed in a cloud that carried him up to another room with the tall, green beings inside. The room was massive and looked like a bustling city, and Zanfretta could see the Earth as a ball in space outside a window. Here Zanfretta was shown a number of large tubes containing a frog-like man, a caveman, and other humans suspended in a blue liquid. Almoc handed the sphere to Zanfretta, but the guard refused it and threw it back, smashing it on the ground, and the beings forced the helmet on his head.
Meanwhile, Zanfretta's rescue team spotted a brilliant disc in the sky outside of Marzano, and two cars of guards drove to the scene. Twice, both vehicles died and restarted at the exact same time as they approached. They saw two large beams of light shining out from an unnaturally dense cloud and onto the ground in front of them. One of the guards fired two rounds at the source of the light, and the beams went out a few minutes later. The tall green beings acknowledged to Zanfretta the shots fired from the ground, despite apparently being in space.
The beings showed Zanfretta a file of photos of everyone on Earth, imprinted with all their personal information. The beings claimed that all these people would eventually become subjects in their experiments, and that they’d return "in due time" with another sphere. The beings had told Zanfretta that they’d been in Spain the night before scaring people in the streets. On December 4, the Spanish press reported of a story of a man being chased through the streets by a UFO that same night. DiStefano found that farmers around Marzano had become almost desensitized to strange lights in the sky, and saw one that night as well.
On February 12, 1980, Zanfretta had his last widely-publicized abduction. Under hypnosis, he explained that he felt compelled to enter his car and drive around for a while, before picking up the egg-headed man on the side of the highway. A bright light shone down from above and the car braked by itself. The egg-headed man got out and entered the triangular craft hovering nearby before it flew into a nearby ravine to avoid the coming rescue team.
When rescue came, they found his car with the driver side door open. Zanfretta was lying passed out on the edge of the ravine, and even after waking, he was dazed and unresponsive. Monitoring equipment that Val Bisagno had installed on the car showed that the wheels had been lifted from the ground, and the thermometer had reached a maximum of 43 C. Magnetic tapes showed no sign of a magnetic field, and the photography equipment captured nothing unusual.
Zanfretta, Contactee
While giving Zanfretta time to rest under hypnosis in his February 15 session, Dr. Moretti and DiStefano suddenly heard the guard speaking an unknown language while apparently channeling another persona. When he did this, his face was uncharacteristically hard and stern, and his voice was strong. He said that the beings would come back soon to show themselves to all, but before that they would only talk to Zanfretta, their intermediary. The channeling then ended abruptly.
In different sessions, Zanfretta recalled vague memories of receiving the sphere in a box sometime in 1979, and hiding it in the mountains, where he regularly checked up on it. He claimed that the sphere discharged electrical shocks, and that it pulsated brilliant light when the box was opened. Once, he claimed it cut a wild hare clean in half.
Any further questions on the object or its whereabouts were stonewalled. Often, Zanfretta simply wouldn’t respond. Moretti said it was as if the guard had been counter-hypnotized and instructed to deny all requests for more information on the sphere. Sometimes, however, Zanfretta would deny questions in his channeled voice. The channeled persona claimed that the guard’s duty was to activate the sphere, which would allow the Dargos to land and make contact with 20 previously selected individuals. The landing never happened, however.
Zanfretta had five more abduction experiences up until August 8, 1981, but Val Bisagno gave up on trying to understand them, and DiStefano no longer published on them. The guard also went back for several more hypnosis sessions with Dr. Moretti, with the last one occurring on April 24, 1992, where he claimed the aliens had said they were going to take the sphere back after all.
Zanfretta’s life was deeply changed by his experiences. In a little over a year, Zanfretta’s dark, black hair had turned completely grey, and was fully white a few years later. He put on 14 kg in 1979, and a co-worker remarked that he seemed to age two decades in about five years. Zanfretta urinated a black liquid after every encounter, and he experienced daily vomiting for the first year of his experiences. He had a headache and heard a hissing sound up to four days before abductions. He felt he’d been given a heavy burden by his visitors, and eagerly awaited the completion of his duties, which never seemed to come.
Significance
The way that Zanfretta was targeted as a “chosen” intermediary in a series of entity encounters is reminiscent of religious narratives of contact with angels and marion apparitions. Zanfretta was informed of his role through the progressive revelation of information over many short encounters, even though very little information was revealed in each one. This is similar to the progressive revelation of the Fatima apparitions, or the lady of Lourdes, France, who made revelations to Bernadette Soubirous over 18 separate appearances. Contactees since the mid 1950s, widely ridiculed for their alleged contacts with higher beings, also claim to be visited repeatedly, and they’re often warned of the dangers of nuclear arms.
Though there’s evidence that Zanfretta’s experiences were at least partly “real” in a strictly physical sense, there are also elements of the story that seem to defy physics, logic, and common sense. Zanfretta reported that the inside of Dargos’ craft was much larger than the exterior of the ship would allow for, and it appeared to be in space, even when the other guards could see its lights from the ground. Many other abductees, including those abducted at Pascagoula in 1973, also said the interior of their captors’ craft was much larger than it was outside. Much of what the Dargos said was highly imprecise, and full of internal contradictions. The Dargos claimed to be from the “third galaxy,” an absurdly vague description, and Almoc contradicted himself in the different reasons he gave for visiting Earth. And none of them turned out to be true, as the Dargos apparently never built a city, never established contact, and never had Zanfretta prepare a landing.
The Dargos also changed their minds three times on the issue of the sphere, first claiming it should go to Hynek, then claiming it would be hidden until the landing, and finally deciding to take it back. It was first introduced as a kind of “TV,” and then as a device to prepare for a landing. And of course, only Zanfretta saw the beings, despite the fact that they repeatedly exclaimed their desire to make contact with humanity. The level of absurdity, and the fact that Zanfretta could recall nothing of his experiences in a normal, waking state, leads one to think the phenomenon was at least partly mental or psychic in nature, or that parts of it took place in some constructed, alternate reality or altered state of consciousness.
DiStefano published a book in 1984 recounting all of Zanfretta’s experiences that was updated and translated into English in 2014. He retired professionally but continues to write. Zanfretta has remained a minor celebrity in Italy and abroad, attending the World Congress of Ufology in Tuscon Arizona in 1991. As of 2017, he is still true to his story. He still believes that one day people will see that it’s true.
Sources:
Rino DiStefano. "The Zanfretta Case: Chronicle of an Incredible True Story." First International English Edition. CreateSpace Publishing, 2014.
This video contains photographs from DiStefano's book and website, and footage from two videos uploaded on DiStefano's YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afluy206hX8,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLUp-oE_Qnk.
This animation of the planetary explosion was taken from Xavier Martin's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49zTum_euM.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
UFO Case Review contains sound design with elements downloaded from Freesound.org. Typewriter_2rows.wav, Uploaded by Fatson under the Attribution License.
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