Tag Archives: Giuseppe Stilo

A Dark Red Sky: the Saucers Arrived (1947-1949)

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by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos

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“A Dark Red Sky” (Un cielo rosso scuro) is the literary title of Giuseppe Stilo‘s new book (UPIAR publications, 2017) devoted to the arrival of flying saucers over Italy and the world, in 1947-1949. A thorough and well-documented 414-page volume which, once more, places Stilo in an authoritative position in the study of the UFO phenomenon.

This book inquiries into the initial period of the phenomenon, but this requires to be seen in the perspective provided by the author’s entire opus. It all began with “Operazione Origini” (Operation Origins), a CISU project started in 1984 to retrieve press cuttings for the early years (1946-1954) on which he embarked in 1988. He has since continued to produce a history of UFO reports in Italy and in the rest of the world. The encyclopedic erudition of Stilo in ufology has not many parallels. His work documenting what had happened, when and where is overpowering. Reading what is already a veritable library of books by him, might save a newcomer dozens of years’ worth of investigation and documentation.

Therefore, I will hardly touch this one volume that, naturally, wanders by the Italian panorama in 1947 and the birth of the flying saucer phenomenon, the 1947-48 wave, the “phantom airplanes” of 1948-49, the growth of the ETH during 1949 and the impact of foreign reports in the Italian media. The book makes a quantitative analysis of cases known in the 1947-1949 period in Italy and reviews the international panorama of the flying disk prodigy.

Giuseppe Stilo’s new book is the latest item of an indispensable collection, comprising the previous ones published by UPIAR publishing house in Turin:
“Scrutate I cieli!” (Watch the Skies!), UPIAR, 2000. 424 pages to document the 1950 wave.
“Ultimatum alla Terra” (The Day the Earth Stood Still), UPIAR, 2002. This large volume of 536 pages deals entirely with the 1952 UFO wave.
“L’alba di una nuova era” (Dawn of a New Age), UPIAR, 2004. The 1946 ghost rockets phenomenon is examined in this 228-page book,
“Il quinto cavaliere dell’Apocalisse – Vol. 1” (The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse – Vol. 1), UPIAR, 2006. This first volume, a mammoth tome of 680 sheets, covers the large wave of 1954 from January to October.
“Il quinto cavaliere dell’Apocalisse, Vol. 2” UPIAR, 2016. The second tome with 504 pages is devoted to the months of November and December 1954.

“Cielo Insolito” No. 6 is out

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Issue No. 6 was just released of “Cielo Insolito” (Unusual Sky) the journal of UFO history edited by CISU members Giuseppe Stilo and Maurizio Verga.

This 44-pages new issue can be downloaded for free in PDF format, as well as back issues, and is containing five articles.

A long, well-documented essay by Maurizio Verga reports how widely there were many dozens of – more or less ridiculous – instances of flying saucers fallen to the ground, especially in the United States but also in other countries, in the very year of birth of “saucers”, 1947.

A study by the Spanish ufologist Luis R. Gonzalez explains how Spain moved from science fiction literature to the first direct and “real” testimonies of “Martians” apparitions, in the first half of XX Century.

Giuseppe Stilo is the author of three shorter articles:
– an unusual aerial phenomenon watched at Udine by a meteorologist and other learned people in 1923,
– the little known case of a contactee woman active in Trieste theosophical circles in the mid-50s,
– French writer Henri Pensa’s belief that some odd “meteors” might be considered luminous signals to the Earth by Mars inabitants, in the 1920s.

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[Top picture, one of the retrieved “flying saucers”, from The Knicker Bocker News, Albany, New York, 10 July 1947.
Bottom picture: a meeting of the Italian UFO History Group: Giuseppe Stilo is standing on the right, Maurizio Verga is sitting in front of him, on the left.]