Roberto Pinotti
PersonJournalistRoberto Pinotti
PersonJournalistRoberto Pinotti is an Italian journalist and founder of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale who in 2000 made public documents alleging a 1933 Fascist-era UFO recovery.
Roberto Pinotti is an Italian journalist and founder of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale who in 2000 made public documents alleging a 1933 Fascist-era UFO recovery.
Roberto Pinotti is an Italian journalist, author and UFO researcher, born in Venice in 1944. In the late 1960s he founded the Centro Ufologico Nazionale (CUN), Italy's best-known civilian UFO organization, and he has repeatedly served as its president and spokesman. Abroad he is known as the researcher who first presented the documents behind the alleged 1933 Magenta crash, a Fascist-era recovery story that returned to prominence during the American disclosure debate of the 2020s.
Pinotti studied political science at the Cesare Alfieri school of the University of Florence and graduated in 1972 with a thesis in sociology. He then served as a reserve officer in an Italian Army missile brigade. He has been a registered freelance journalist since 1975. According to his own biography, he worked in commercial roles at the Lancia–Fiat group and later as an executive of a Florence aerospace company while writing on aerospace subjects. The asteroid 12470 Pinotti, discovered in 1997, was named for him, and its citation describes him as a writer and amateur astronomer.
His books span five decades, from Visitatori dallo spazio (1973) and UFO: visitatori da altrove (Rizzoli, 1990) to titles in Mondadori's Oscar paperback series and the English-language UFO Contacts in Italy volumes. In UFO: il fattore contatto (2008) he wrote that periodic visits to Earth by extraterrestrial intelligences had been scientifically proven, a view far outside mainstream science. His biography says he coordinated annual international UFO symposia in San Marino from 1993, and since 2021 he has presided over the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research.
At a San Marino symposium in 2000, Pinotti made public papers that had reached Italian researchers from an anonymous source. The papers described a secret cabinet, RS/33, that Mussolini's government allegedly created to study a craft recovered in Lombardy in 1933. He developed the account with Alfredo Lissoni in Mussolini e gli UFO (2001) and returned to it in UFO Italia: da Mussolini al Pentagono (2024). No archive has independently confirmed the RS/33 papers, and even within Italian ufology the cabinet's existence is disputed. The story reached a new audience in 2023, when former intelligence officer David Grusch described a 1933 recovery in Italy that he said eventually came under American control.
Now in his eighties, Pinotti remains the case's principal Italian voice. A talk he gave for the Sol Foundation, released in December 2025, traced Italian UAP history from pre-war reports such as a 1936 sighting near Venice through the Magenta story and his own part in investigating it. In 2026 his account anchored a wave of online reassessments: some built on his timeline, and others argued that the documents establish far less than the crash narrative claims. After more than six decades of organizing, publishing and conference work, he remains the main figure through whom Italy's early UFO history, and the Magenta claim in particular, reached researchers outside Italy.
Part 12 of a series reassessing the documentary record behind the 1933 Magenta narrative. TL;DR Operation LUSTY brought captured aviation technology to Wright and Freeman Fields, giving later recovered-craft stories a convincing setting. The Magenta sources supply no transport record placing the alleged craft in “Hangar 18.” Building 18’s documented work was engine testing. At Freeman, buried parts helped inspire stories of buried airplanes. Rumors, fiction and Carr’s 1974 claims shaped the l...
Jason Samosa has been doing incredible work digging into the heart of the UFO Legacy Program for a bit now, and his recent video regarding the World Commerce Corporation, founded in August 1945 as we were dropping atomic bombs on Japan, really hit a chord. Two months ago, after his first video dropped about the WCC and its connections to the Maynard Consortium that Tom DeLonge and Philip Levenda have outlined in their Sekret Machines series, my research partner Michael Armentor and I took par...
Part 2 of a series reassessing the documentary record behind the 1933 Magenta narrative. TL;DR Tier B papers: anonymous mailings from 1996, unauthenticated, not shown forged. If authentic, the telegram suppresses news of an “aircraft of unknown nature and origin”; no crash, recovery, occupants, or U.S. transfer. Forensics covers one 1936 manuscript; Vergiate dates to 1937; the July 1933 “cover story” depicts lightning. Later testimony postdates the printed narrative and adds no custody record...
Roberto Pinotti on the 1933 Magenta, Italy UFO crash-retrieval as part of last year’s Ubiquity University European Disclosure Summit. The case was made famous by David Grusch with Ross Coulthart which lead to the historic July 26, 2023 hearing when the UAPDA was introduced into the 2024 NDAA.
Probed ingest of: 80 Years of UFO Crash Retrieval and Reverse Engineering: A Timeline
New Perspectives on the 1933 Magenta, Italy UFO crash-retrieval as highlighted by David Grusch in his initial interview with Ross Coulthart that highlighted Roberto Pinotti’s work into the incident going back to 1996 and his presentation at the CUN Conference in 2000 following his tests into the authenticity of those Mussolini telegrams of the Magenta UFO crash-retrieval https://medium.com/@EscapeVelocity1/new-perspectives-on-the-1933-magenta-italy-ufo-crash-retrieval-as-highlighted-by-david-...
New Perspectives on the 1933 Magenta, Italy UFO crash-retrieval as highlighted by David Grusch in his initial interview with Ross Coulthart that highlighted Roberto Pinotti’s work into the incident going back to 1996 and his presentation at the CUN Conference in 2000 following his tests into the authenticity of those Mussolini telegrams of the Magenta UFO crash-retrieval https://medium.com/@EscapeVelocity1/new-perspectives-on-the-1933-magenta-italy-ufo-crash-retrieval-as-highlighted-by-david-...
New Perspectives on the 1933 Magenta, Italy UFO crash-retrieval as highlighted by David Grusch in his initial interview with Ross Coulthart that highlighted Roberto Pinotti’s work into the incident going back to 1996 and his presentation at the CUN Conference in 2000 following his tests into the authenticity of those Mussolini telegrams of the Magenta UFO crash-retrieval https://medium.com/@EscapeVelocity1/new-perspectives-on-the-1933-magenta-italy-ufo-crash-retrieval-as-highlighted-by-david-...
I've been tracking the narrative around the 1933 Magenta, Italy crash-retrieval as first presented by Roberto Pinotti at the CUN Conference in 2000 and made much more well-known in the community when David Grusch first came forward in June 2023. My research partners Michael Armentor and Geoff Cruikshank did the grunt work before I linked up with them to help build out the timeline of what happened after two years ago, and since then we've been pushing hard for a documentary and books and more...
This case and other pre-war Italian reports are covered by Roberto Pinotti, one of Italy’s most established UFO researchers, author, journalist, and longtime president of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale. https://t.co/7llgt7SrlF
