Mussolini's saucer
The account
A disc crashed in northern Italy, and the Fascist regime set up a secret office to study it.
What investigators found
The alleged documents surfaced anonymously in the 1990s and have never been proven authentic.
The story
According to this story, in 1933 a flying object crashed near Magenta, in Lombardy, and was recovered by Benito Mussolini's authorities. A secret group called Gabinete RS/33 was supposedly formed to study the craft under total secrecy. Years later, the wreckage allegedly ended up in American hands at the close of World War II.
The account came to light in the 1990s, when papers attributed to the Fascist government were mailed anonymously to Italian ufologists. The case returned to the headlines in 2023, after former American intelligence officer David Grusch mentioned an Italian recovery in interviews. To this day, no official archive has confirmed the episode, and historians consider the documents to be of dubious origin.