Part 4 Earth - Alien Enterprise ... The Overlords ... Reluctant Guinea Pigs ... Amicizia

Earth - Alien Enterprise

by Timothy Good

Chapter Eleven 

THE OVERLORDS 

My study of the various types of alien encounters reported around the world includes a number of cases which initially I was tempted to reject on account of their absurdity. Yet subsequent reflection and comparison with other scarcely known cases reveal certain parallels that have caused me to change my mind. Sometimes, ludicrous, sinister, surreal—and even evil—elements feature in these cases. One such is that of Richard Höglund, a Swede whose encounters covered a lengthy period. First investigated by Ernst Linder, the case is barely known outside Sweden. What follows is taken largely from several reports provided for me by Håkan Blomqvist, 1,2 a leading researcher of contact cases, and from our many communications and discussions. He has written a book on the case in Swedish. 3 

Born in Stockholm in 1913, Höglund was a rock-blaster by profession. Though by all accounts a very down-to-earth man, he nonetheless had an uncanny ability to read people’s minds—a talent that might have some bearing on his experiences. The story begins on the afternoon of December 9, 1965, the day before he was due to undergo surgery to remove a small kidney stone. He felt a sudden urge to take a long walk with his dog on a frozen lake, Grindhultsjön, just outside Uddevalla (near Gothenburg), where he lived with his wife, Gunvor. 

As Höglund began walking on the lake, the dog began running in circles as though demented and had to be restrained with its leash. Suddenly, a whining sound came from above. Looking up, Höglund saw a saucer-shaped, translucent craft about five meters in diameter. “He could see figures moving inside,” reports Håkan. “The object came closer to the ground in a spiraling movement. It stopped before touching the ice, and a dark tube was lowered from under the object. This tube was seemingly made of a soft material since it moved in the wind. He felt a breeze of hot air with a distinct smell of hyacinth. His first thought was that this must be a Russian machine. But he soon changed his mind. 

“From the tube four entities floated down, as though they were in an invisible elevator, and walked up to him. They were three men and one woman. Other than for a translucent overall, they were naked. One of the men seemed old, while the others looked younger. They were of normal height, had very large, dark, somewhat slanted eyes and perfect teeth. Their skin had no blemishes and there was absolutely no hair on their bodies, not even genital hair. 

“Richard was especially fascinated by their ears, which were large and pointed. The ear opening in the head was very large, as on a cat: he thought he could almost see into their heads. The men seemed very strong, like wrestler types, with bull necks. They had a slight Oriental look about them. The entities were covered by the clear plastic overalls which looked like they were held out from the body by air pressure.” 

Höglund became confused, though not afraid. Through sign language and drawings in the snow, the entities started to communicate with him. They seemed fascinated by his hair, and he had to remove his cap several times as they laughed and pointed at him. When he tried to touch their overalls, however, they quickly retreated, as if they did not want him to do so. Using a small black package, they sprayed something like a gas on everything, including the dog, before they touched it. The dog evidently objected, as the “gas” had a strong smell of hyacinth. Höglund himself smelled of hyacinth for several days afterwards, causing his wife to wonder if he had already bought flowers for the coming Christmas. 

Communications in sign language continued for a while as Höglund tried to explain a number of earthly pursuits, such as hunting and dancing. The woman meanwhile played with the dog, which was out of character since it normally became aggressive toward strangers. All this time, the strangers appeared to be walking on an unseen layer, as their feet did not touch the ground. When the woman patted the dog, she too leaned her knee against this unseen layer. On their left wrists the entities wore a broad, black bracelet with a yellow button, which when touched seemed to alter the effect of gravity on the beings. 

The older man indicated that he knew about pygmies, by demonstrating how they hunted with bow and arrow. He also seemed to indicate that his people would come in “great armadas” in the future. After further communication, the older man returned to the craft and fetched an object the size of a cylinder or microphone, which he proceeded to run along Höglund’s back. At this, he felt a sensation of warmth, vibration, and sudden relief from the kidney pain that had troubled him for fifteen years. 

By now an hour had passed and it began to grow dark, at which point Höglund noticed that the craft was now surrounded by a blue phosphorescent light. The whole craft seemed to vibrate. Except for the dark cylinder underneath, it remained semi-transparent, consisting of two shells, the outer one rotating. Inside, the craft seemed Spartan: all that could be discerned were three shining “cylinders” standing on the floor. Terminating the communication, the entities entered the craft, which then took off at tremendous speed, changing color from blue to orange as it flew away. 

The following day, Höglund was X-rayed at Uddevalla hospital. Much to the bewilderment of a Dr. Hartman and his colleagues, no trace of the kidney stone could be found. Subsequently, Håkan told me, all the X-ray plates were checked by Dr. Karl Erik Svensson in Stockholm, who confirmed that no stone was visible on the plates, taken after the encounter. 

SECOND CONTACT 

On August 24, 1966, Höglund felt a strong impulse to visit another lake outside Uddevalla. The urge was so powerful that it felt as if someone else was driving the car (a sensation recounted by Carl Anderson). Arriving at the lake, he saw the same kind of craft hovering above the water, beside which a man seemed to be suspended in the air. Spotting a small rowboat nearby, Höglund climbed in and headed toward the craft. He recognized the man as the same with whom he communicated during the first encounter. This time, he could hear the man speak (presumably in Swedish), though his speech did not synchronize with his lip movements and seemed to originate from the craft slightly delayed. 

During this communication, Höglund learned that world peace was threatened because the USA and the USSR supposedly planned a war against China, and that he should go to the Bahamas to act as their contact man. He was given a metal plate with strange hieroglyphic-type symbols embossed thereon and instructed to wear it at all times. Höglund explained that such a mission was impossible; he was an uneducated man, did not speak English, and in any case had a wife at home. These objections were brushed aside, and Höglund felt obliged to comply with the order. Following the encounter, however, he buried the plate in woods near the lake and then returned home. 

Despite serious misgivings, Höglund and Gunvor went ahead with the plan. To finance their trip, they sold everything. On March 5, 1967, they flew via London to Nassau, thence to Little Exuma, a small island in the Bahamas where they had been told to go. Höglund did not bring the metal plate with him, however. During the flight, the couple noticed fourteen passengers dressed like priests, all similar in appearance, who supposedly disappeared in an unusual way on landing at Nassau. Apart from this incident, nothing unusual happened during the trip. The couple returned to Sweden. Ashamed to resettle in their home town, they bought a cheap house trailer south of Stockholm, where Höglund was able to find work once more as a rock-blaster. 

SURREALISTIC DEVELOPMENTS 

In ensuing months, Höglund became involved with Ifologiska sallskapet, a Stockholm-based UFO group which had become interested in his story. Among the members was a wealthy building contractor who offered to finance Höglund in the event he was ordered to the Bahamas again. He decided therefore to recover the metal plate. On the drive from Gothenburg, after picking up the plate, he stopped at a gas station, where an old man approached and asked him for a lift. Höglund consented, as he felt tired and thought it a good idea to have someone to talk with during the journey. The man was dressed in a black cape, boots, and a big slouch hat. 

After a while, the man asked Höglund if he recognized him. He replied in the negative, but suddenly it dawned on him that the man was one of those dressed as priests on the outbound flight to the Bahamas. The man introduced himself as “Father Ra Paz” (later contracted to Rapas), and said he worked for “the Overlords,” that is, the beings who had contacted Höglund on the two previous occasions. Rapas suggested a coffee break at a motel. He took off his hat but ordered nothing to drink. By now thoroughly confused, Höglund began to worry that the stranger might be an illusion, so when a boy passed their table, Höglund knocked the hat onto the floor. The boy, assuming himself responsible, picked up the hat and apologized. Father Rapas was no illusion. 

Nothing had happened in the Bahamas, Rapas explained, because Höglund had not taken the metal plate with him. He was told that he must return to the Bahamas, this time not forgetting the plate. 734.5 centimeters in size and about one centimeter thick, with a coarse back, the plate appeared to be made of an aluminum-type material, engraved with three rows of cryptic symbols. At times, the plate became so hot that Höglund kept it in asbestos. He also said that it gave him rashes (caused by the asbestos, perhaps?). 

After continuing the journey for a few more miles, Rapas suggested that he should take the wheel. Höglund pointed out that Rapas seemed rather elderly to drive—he guessed about seventy years old. “If you double that some ten times, you will be closer to the truth,” came the riposte. Exchanging seats, Rapas proceeded to drive the old Volvo as if it were a racing car. Höglund protested, explaining that the police might have speed traps. “Don’t worry,” said Rapas, “I can sense where they are.” Höglund fell asleep. When he awoke, the car was parked beside the road outside Sodertalje. There was no sign of Rapas, who had left a package of fruit on the seat. 

AN ALIEN BASE? 

The building contractor in the UFO group now agreed to finance Höglund’s second trip to the Bahamas, the money to be mailed via a school teacher in Nyköping by the name of Tryggwe Glantz. Höglund and his wife returned to the Bahamas around the New Year period of 1967–68, staying initially in Nassau. When nothing happened during the first two days, Höglund lost his temper and threw the metal plate on the floor, shouting that he wanted nothing more to do with the whole business. That evening, he claimed to have been visited by three humanoid beings of rather oriental appearance but distinctly different from those encountered in Sweden. They delivered a sharp warning to Höglund not to act like that again. 

On New Year’s Eve, acting on instructions supplied to him by Rapas, Höglund went to the harbor in Little Exuma Island and contacted an old black man called Joe, who owned a boat. A girl called Li was also aboard. “Höglund was told to lie down in the boat, presumably so he could not see where they went,” Håkan told me. “The boat was very fast.” They arrived at a small island where, through an opening in elevated terrain, they entered a secret base. At some point, Li, presumably one of the “space people,” demonstrated her ability to walk on the water outside the boat! Rapas, who had arrived before them, acted as a guide. 

In the base, Höglund met twenty-three different supposed representatives from various planets. “Some were giants, some were dwarves, and others hermaphrodites,” Håkan reports. “He was shown a three dimensional ‘film’ of human history from the birth of Christ. During this experience he collapsed three times and had to be revived by Rapas. He was also shown a collection of weapons from all ages and given the mission of starting a peace movement in Sweden, though told that he himself should not appear in public to promote it.” 

“THE NEW GENERATION” 

Back in Sweden, during a meeting of contactee-oriented enthusiasts in January 1968, a statement written by Father Rapas and dictated to Höglund (who did not attend) was read out. A new “international peace organization” should be started by the group, it began. With the approbation of the Overlords, the organization was to be named “The New Generation.” The statement contained so much drivel that it is a wonder anyone took it seriously. Among Rapas’s exhortations are the following: 

“Your catchwords shall be: Freedom from violence, from hunger; we are all brothers and sisters…. You who have supported [Richard] shall not be forgotten, you shall reap a hundredfold, but if someone hurts him or his devoted wife, I say, they shall be revenged sevenfold.” The group also received “Ra Paz’s Rules”—sixty-five “philosophical points”—one of which is more than enough to suffice here: “If there should be interplanetary people among you, which I believe is rather rare, don’t let them go to heaven but bring them down to Earth again and demand more work of them.” 

Most members of the group felt uneasy about Rapas, his threats, and the “New Generation” and their platitudes. The building contractor, for instance, had been asked to pay thousands of kronor without knowing what he was really supporting. And Höglund, thoroughly disillusioned, became reclusive. As a result, the group split up, though Tryggwe Glantz continued to act as spokesman. Interviewed by a Swedish newspaper in mid-1968, Glantz was quoted as saying that the now 600-member organization had been created by “the West Indian peacemaker Ra Paz” as “a worldwide peace movement in the spirit of Martin Luther King.” The article went on to mention the organization’s plans for a large meeting in the fall that year, to be attended by the singer Harry Belafonte; Ralph Abernathy, a leader of the American civil rights movement and assistant of Martin Luther King Jr.; and King’s wife Coretta. The meeting never happened. In the article, Rapas is referred to as a wealthy industrialist who, during his travels around the world, had seen so much misery that he decided to devote his wealth to charitable causes. 4 

BACK IN THE BAHAMAS 

The aliens encountered by Richard Höglund in the Bahamas were of human appearance, with “thin, pointed features, deeply tanned, with a somewhat Oriental look, long tapering fingers and dark eyes,” Håkan learned. “They all seemed perfect—not a blemish on their skin. He never saw the beings from the initial contacts in Sweden again….” 

During the New Year period of 1968–69, Höglund and his wife returned to the Bahamas. One night, he told Gunvor that she could meet one of his contacts at a discotheque in Nassau. Gunvor protested at visiting such a venue, but her husband insisted. They found a table on the second floor and Höglund began looking around for the man. He left the table and returned with a man dressed in an ill-fitting brown costume, Håkan learned from Gunvor: 

“The man just nodded his head in a short greeting to Gunvor. He was rather short, his skin had a peculiar suntan, and he had a slight Mediterranean or oriental look. The clothes were too large for his rather thin body. The man returned to his table. Richard explained that the man was one of ‘them.’ When Höglund and Gunvor started dancing, the man came up and watched them very closely. He looked straight into Gunvor’s eyes. There was a sort of hypnotic power in his eyes. ‘I will never forget those eyes,’ she said.” 

The man showed Höglund a photograph of his family and house, supposedly on another planet in our solar system, which Gunvor recalled her husband referring to as either Venus or Saturn—she couldn’t be sure which. 

During this and another trip to the Bahamas (there were three in all), Höglund met others like himself who acted as couriers for the “space people.” One was a Russian, another an African-American named Loftin Anderson, with whom he became good friends. Anderson, it transpired, was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. During 1968, Little Exuma was swarming with CIA agents, Håkan reveals. “Anderson had informed the CIA about the [alien] base. Later he was found dead with a bullet hole in his head. He had been killed for ‘treason.’” 

Several photographs were taken of Höglund in the Bahamas. The entities themselves, however, could not be photographed. “Instead, there was an illuminated square on the photo where one of them had been,” Håkan explains. “Höglund remembers one episode when he sat on a bench, talking to one of them. Suddenly a stranger walked by and Höglund felt very embarrassed as it appeared as though he was talking to himself. These people had the ability to disappear into thin air.” 

Another peculiar feature of the aliens was that they never seemed to sleep or eat, though they did drink —and even smoke. Also, Höglund never met any women among them. 

A coincidental element in this saga is the Mafia. “Lou Chesler was the front man in the Bahamas for the big Mafia boss Meyer Lansky,” Håkan told me. “Richard and his wife found an ad in a Swedish newspaper in the autumn of 1968 about work in the Bahamas. They applied, and as they had been there before they got the work through a Swedish man. Richard was to be butler and his wife housekeeper at the Chesler residence in Nassau. They worked there for a couple of weeks before being forced to leave because of new laws by the government. During those weeks Richard met the visitors several times.” 5 

Höglund was allowed the use of their cars and drove an unused but old model of a black Cadillac (like those reported in other cases involving the proverbial “men in black”). “The strange thing was that it couldn’t be crashed,” said Håkan. “It had a sort of magical ‘eye’ that steered it. When you learned the trick it was very easy, he claimed.” 

In a letter sent from the Bahamas in early 1969 to a friend in Sweden, Höglund wrote: “I cannot and am not allowed to disclose what we are doing here, but I can tell you this much: we are in a school here, and as you can understand, the teachers are interplanetary.” 6 

DISTURBING DEVELOPMENTS 

The building contractor having withdrawn his financial support, Höglund had to rely on his alien contacts for funding. “Obviously,” Håkan commented, “this group had unlimited economic resources. 

“One day a man from a car firm visited Höglund and gave him a new car. He said it was paid for and was to be delivered to him. Before the third trip to the Bahamas, Höglund contacted a friend who was to take care of his apartment, pay the rent, and care for the indoor plants. The payment for this service would be sent from the Bahamas, to a special bank account. Höglund paid just five kronor into the account before he and his wife left. On the very day that they went to the Bahamas, someone paid 1,000 kronor into this account. Every week it increased by a few hundred kronor, but the receipts never stated who had put the money there. No money ever arrived from the Bahamas. 

“When Höglund and his wife returned, they were very anxious as they thought they must owe their friend [who had looked after the apartment] a lot of money. When the friend explained that there was always money in the account, they first thought he had given it himself, but later they realized that some of their [‘space’] contacts must have made the payments.” 

Following the leak of information about the Bahamas base to the CIA, the aliens moved their base to an area outside Mexico City. Henceforth, Höglund’s foreign trips were to Mexico. He was often away from home for a month at a time. After the third and final trip to the Bahamas, Gunvor no longer accompanied her husband. In October 1968, during the Olympic Games in Mexico City, Höglund claimed to have been taken to the new base. He became very upset as he was not allowed to attend the Games! 

“I had the feeling he was afraid,” Höglund’s friend Dr. Karl Svensson revealed to Håkan. “He told me in general terms that he had been in Central America. I don’t think he really knew where he was….” 

Further contacts also took place in Sweden. Höglund’s wife always knew when a visit was forthcoming because her husband became restless and got up early. He claimed to have been taken on board spaceships during this period, but information on these contacts is scanty. “He took his car to a secret location south of Stockholm, where he was picked up by a craft,” Håkan told me, referring to the first trip. “He was blindfolded and had to lie down on the floor. The craft was very small—he couldn’t stand up.” After that first trip, he became nauseated, but later adjusted to these experiences. 

In the early 1970s, Höglund said that he had been operated on by his contacts, as Gunvor related to Håkan: 

“He had a lot of headaches before, and took pills. One day, when I was going to work, he said that someone is coming and something is going to happen. He didn’t always tell me when they were coming, but this time he told me not to come home too early from work. After that day he never had any headache. They did something to him and he said he would not have survived otherwise. It was some form of tumor, which was removed. I looked at his head but there was only a slight blemish. He was a bit pale and tired afterwards, and was told to rest a few days.” 7 

Höglund’s contacts reportedly continued until his death, from a heart attack, on October 23, 1977. He was sixty-four. 

ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS 

There is the possibility, of course, that Richard Höglund might simply have been insane, or been suffering from delusions engendered perhaps by the tumor that had been “operated” on. This might explain at least some of his claims, but not according to those closest to him, including his wife. Nonetheless, there are a number of alternative explanations for his seemingly fantastic and farcical assertions. First is a hypothesis that he might have been spying for a foreign power such as the USSR, using the “alien” element as a cover. 

Höglund was a Communist, Håkan told me. There was much Soviet infiltration of Sweden at that time, he notes, and Höglund had a friend who worked at the Swedish Navy base in Musko. He also had Soviet contacts. “Was he just a member of the Communist party, or an agent?” asks Håkan. After all, he had been asked by his “alien” contacts to obtain a map from that base. It is not known if he succeeded. But in any event, such a request, combined with his “translating” or decrypting some form of codes, raises suspicions, as does his trip to Mexico City in 1968 during the Olympic Games, when Soviet penetration and subversion were at a peak. 

“Höglund acted as a courier for his contacts,” Håkan emphasized. “He translated coded messages in the form of numbers. The codes disappeared in a few days (invisible ink?). He went to different places, like airports, to deliver envelopes with information for his contacts. Many of his activities sound like ordinary espionage. I believe the UFO story was a cover for probably Soviet espionage. His order to start a peace movement also indicates this.” 

What of the car given to Höglund in Sweden? In checking Soviet activity at the time of his contacts, I noted that the KGB (the national security agency of the USSR from 1954 to 1991) had an auto dealership in Sweden—the Materco Bil Ab—with offices in four cities, used as a cover for espionage activities. In 1971, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that police frequently followed Soviet “car salesmen” to “mobilization centers, radio stations, and other sensitive defense installations.” Pilots complained that radio transmissions emanating from the auto company, beamed to Soviet warships in the Baltic, disrupted their communications. 8 

Prior to the contacts, Höglund and his wife had seen an advertisement for land in the Bahamas, and he wanted to build a hotel there. Håkan wondered if the order to go to the Bahamas might have been a cover to persuade his wife to accompany him. The fact that one of Höglund’s financiers was a building contractor also raises suspicions in this connection, though that financier had withdrawn his support after the first Bahamas trip. 

There is also the question of Höglund’s psychic abilities. By all accounts, he was a gifted telepath, and in my opinion this might have been a reason for the contacts—whatever the nature of those contacts. Moreover, he had other paranormal abilities. “I thought, before, that there was no psychic component prior to the contacts,” Håkan said to me, “but his wife told me that he sometimes went off and talked in a strange tongue. Also, he wrote a strange story about nuns and monks in the Middle Ages during one of his previous incarnations. So, he was, after all, a mystic. That changes the whole picture….” Also, Höglund excelled at telling stories (not lies), according to some. 

Although Håkan believes the espionage hypothesis to be a possibility, he concedes nonetheless that there are aspects of Höglund’s story which are difficult if not impossible to explain exclusively in terms of Soviet espionage, a vested interest in the Bahamas, his psychic abilities, or his talent for telling stories. In June 1984 he interviewed Gunvor, then in her fifties. “Like her husband, she is very down-to-earth and practical,” he explains. “She confirmed almost all the details of the contacts.” 

When Gunvor first heard about her husband’s experience in 1965, she was stunned. “I believed him, though,” she told Håkan, “because Richard never lied to me. He was almost cynical, and believed neither in God nor the devil.” 

“If several of the people involved in the affair hadn’t been very close friends of mine, whom I have no reason to doubt, I guess I would never have started an investigation in the first place,” Håkan declared in 1984. “But there are just too many witnesses involved to dismiss the case.” Gunvor herself not only encountered one of the extraordinary beings in the Bahamas—which left her in a state of shock—but also with Richard at their apartment near Stockholm. She described these men as “beautiful, and tanned,” though, unlike the man in the Bahamas, “extremely well dressed.” 

NO WAY OUT 

Most of those who knew Höglund—including his wife—were reluctant initially to go on the record under their own names, out of what seems a genuine fear of his sinister contacts. Höglund himself was both afraid and mistrustful of them. “I’m not allowed to say anything,” he admitted to Håkan, during their one and only communication, by phone, in 1973. “People would be shocked if they knew of these things. I’ve already said too much.” Fourteen months before he died, he reiterated these concerns in a phone conversation with a friend of Håkan’s. “What I have gotten into is negative,” he lamented. “You become very isolated. I warn you against going deeper into this.” 

Asked why he did not simply stop working with the beings, Höglund explained that he “would go the same way as Loftin Anderson. There is a way in but no way out.” During the first few years of his contacts, he felt that he owed them some help in return for healing his kidney. Later, things got worse. “You don’t know what kind of a hell I’m into,” he remarked. In the event he could take it no longer at some point, he carried a suicide pill around with him. 

Höglund obtained very little information from his contacts. If he asked something, he said, they would return the next day after consulting with the Overlords. Nonetheless, the Russian friend of Höglund’s (mentioned earlier), who claimed contact with the same beings, said that Höglund seemed to know more about them than he did, after working for them for twenty years. 

“They are totally without feelings and can witness the most brutal torture,” Höglund once revealed to a friend. “It means nothing to them.” He felt like an animal in their company. In some ways, he said, they seemed stupid, and not even telepathic. They claimed to come from another planet and were here to prevent a third world war. But Höglund speculated that their real objective was to take us over from the inside—by infiltration. 

A DIFFERENT EVOLUTION 

Rather than emissaries from another planet or planets, is it perhaps more likely that the group involved with Höglund following his initial encounters in Sweden was of terrestrial, rather than extraterrestrial, origin? Also, there are parallels with reports of the notorious “men in black”—MIBs. In his initial appraisal of the case, Håkan cites John Keel, the well-known author and leading investigator of the MIB phenomenon. “On a number of occasions,” wrote Keel, “I actually saw the phantom Cadillacs as advertised, complete with sinister-looking Oriental-like passengers in black suits. On Long Island, following the directions given me in an anonymous phone call, I pursued one of these cars down a dead end road where it seemingly vanished into thin air….” 9 The black Cadillacs are not necessarily phantom, anyway, since Höglund had been lent one to drive in Nassau.

Howard Menger, an American who claimed to have acted as a liaison for the “space people” in the 1950s, and who is the subject of a chapter in my book Alien Base, was informed by his contacts: 

“My friend, this Earth is the battlefield of Armageddon, and the battle is for men’s minds and souls…. There is a very powerful group on this planet, which possesses tremendous knowledge of technology, psychology, and, most unfortunate of all, advanced brain therapy. They use people not only from this planet [but also] other people of your own planet, who live unobserved and undiscovered as yet, to dupe your peoples into a distorted concept of a truth which enveloped your planet thousands of years ago [in order] to attain their own ends.” 10 

It is difficult to know how much credence can be placed in all this, but it certainly resonates with Höglund’s experiences, and indeed those of others, such as the Amicizia group (Chapter 13). I spent a lot of time with Howard Menger, and though I am certain that some of his later claims were fantasized, I do believe he had genuine contacts with beings who, whatever their origin, were highly advanced, mentally and technologically—and capable of space travel. He told me that he grew skeptical of their professed “Venusian” or “Martian” origin, speculating that they may have been from Earth, the remnants of a highly advanced civilization, such as the mythical Atlantis, said to have existed thousands of years ago. 

“Most of this is myth, but suppose Atlantis was real?” Howard suggested. “The people might have gone under the ocean and have cities there. It’s very possible. UFOs have been seen going into the ocean, and coming out. It’s possible they don’t want us to know that they live here on this planet, that they would throw us off the track by telling us they come from Venus or Mars.” He thought it likely, however, that they had bases on those planets. 11 

Höglund claimed that Little Exuma Island in the Bahamas was “swarming” with CIA agents when the location of the alien base was leaked to the agency. Again, Menger has some pertinent points in this regard, relating to the MIB. “Around this great country of ours is a jungle, whether you know it or not,” he declared in 1967, “and there are specialized men who know how to deal on the same level with these people on the outside trying to get in and conquer us. That’s the only way we will ever survive, so don’t knock the CIA please.” 12 

The Overlords—the four beings encountered by Höglund during his initial encounters in Sweden—seema quite different, possibly truly alien, species, with their large slanted eyes, large pointed ears, and lack of hair. It is impossible to reconcile this description with the KGB hypothesis. Furthermore, there are a number of similarities in Höglund’s account that match some little-known reports by others; for example, Håkan reminded me that in the case of José Higgins, who encountered two strange, tall humanoids in Brazil in July 1947, the beings were covered in a kind of inflated, transparent suit, which enveloped them from head to foot. 13 Höglund’s humanoids, likewise, were covered by transparent coveralls which looked like they were held out from the body by air pressure. 

Regarding the beings who liaised with Höglund and others, I feel that Håkan Blomqvist’s original hypothesis remains valid. “My personal speculation,” he wrote in 1984, “is that these entities somehow belong to this Earth but are of a different evolution. In Theosophical literature there are frequent mentions of two other physical evolutions sharing this planet with us. They are possibly neither good nor evil but can be ‘used’ by those who know….” 14

Chapter Twelve 

RELUCTANT GUINEA PIGS 

It was the summer of 1968 in London’s West End. Leonard Mantle, a gardener for the City of Westminster, was busy spraying the roses in Soho Square when a stranger bade him “good morning.” In a busy public square, especially in summer, it was not unusual for tourists to stop by for a brief chat. 

“I looked up and saw a man there, very immaculate, with a dark gray suit and an about-town shirt,” Leonard told me, in one of two interviews at his home in 1978. “I thought I’d better just carry on. The next thing he says is, ‘Obviously you’re enjoying your work?’ To which I replied, ‘Well, yes, of course.’ And when you’re seeing people rushing to work, you just carry on doing what you’re doing.” 

“You’re not aware of time,” the stranger commented. “You seem to be more acutely aware of that than most people.” 

“Well, time is important,” replied Leonard, somewhat bemused. 

“That’s a very true statement,” replied the man. “But people’s concept of time is entirely different.” 

The stranger introduced himself as Iso Khan. Leonard inquired if he was on holiday. “Oh, no,” came the reply. “I’m just on a visit—sort of.” Asked if he traveled a great deal, Khan confirmed that indeed he did, adding that he had met people from all walks of life. 

“It would appear there hadn’t been any part of the world he hadn’t been to,” said Leonard. “At this point I excused myself, as it was my tea break, but suggested that he come back after I’d had my break. So I had my tea and came out of the hut, which is in a picturesque place in the middle of Soho Square. 

“And, naturally, I never thought he would be there. I’d watered the rose beds, so I thought I’d get the mower out and start mowing the grass. I went up and down a few times, then got back to the seat. And there he was, sitting on the same seat. ‘They’re quite nice straight lines you’ve made with that cutter,’ he said. I replied that I liked to see them straight as it makes the grass look good.” 

At one point in the conversation, Khan implied that he came from another world. 

“His knowledge of things was so overwhelming,” Leonard emphasized. “It seemed as though he knew everything pertaining to our world: its formation, the psychology, the arts, literature, culture—not only our cultures but cultures I’d never heard of. He seemed to be familiar with every aspect of our world. 

‘How could you possibly know what happened a hundred years ago unless you were there?’ I asked him.” 

“Well, it is a question of time,” he responded. “Your whole concept of time is a man-made thing. Time, according to you, is being born, living, and dying; getting up, working, and going to bed. That is your concept of time.”

Leonard pointed out that, from his personal experience, he however had always been aware that there is “another time—a time where you sort of step out of yourself.” 

“Yes, then you are going into time,” came Khan’s cryptic response, alluding briefly to a “sixth dimension,” which meant nothing to Leonard at the time. 

Another meeting took place the following day in Park Lane. “I had to go onto the central reservation, watering all the way down and picking up the Coca-Cola cans and various things that visitors had thrown all around Marble Arch by the fountains,” Leonard explained. Khan seemed determined to accompany him. Leonard’s superintendent, who was checking progress at the time, just glanced at Khan, assuming him to be a member of the public. “So, it wasn’t as though it was a hallucination and that he was invisible to anyone but myself,” Leonard impressed upon me. 

Khan alluded to our exponential developments in technology. “The tragedy of things here is that your technology has advanced too fast,” he pointed out. “You will not be able to contain it.” 

“Well, I know we’ve got the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb,” responded Leonard. 

“It’s not only that,” said Khan. “Your world is being destroyed without those things. You don’t need to have a worldwide war between two major powers to eliminate this world. That is entirely unnecessary…. The men who count know—they know they cannot contain what they have made,” adding that, at any given time, “a chain reaction could take place.” 

“He never alluded to pollution of rivers or seas, or oil or anything like that,” Leonard explained, “just that the rate of pollution in the environment was now so rapid that it was highly improbable we would last for more than five hundred years—even without any wars.” 

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS 

Leonard became so concerned by these encounters that he decided to inform Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, responsible for law enforcement within Greater London (excluding the City district). 

“I was fed up with the whole thing,” he told me. “So one evening I went on my bicycle to Scotland Yard, and there was a sergeant sitting there. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘do me a favor, could you possibly let me see someone high-up I could talk to?’ So he just looked at me and said, ‘Do yourself a favor—just go home.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m going.’ So I walked toward my bike, and I thought, no—so I went back. ‘Piss off!’ he said. 

“I must be sincerely honest about this. Iso Khan, wherever he comes from, whoever he may be, certainly hasn’t done me any favors—because I went to Epsom.” (The name of this town in the county of Surrey was often used as a euphemism at that time, owing to the notorious prevalence of its psychiatric hospitals.) Leonard’s general practitioner, Dr. Rydall, had recommended psychiatric evaluation. 

“I was there three days and they said I could go home for the weekend. They said I was emotionally upset and just needed rest.” He spent a total of six weeks in Epsom, returning home each weekend. “They didn’t keep me there, fortunately, but once you get that label stuck on you…. So what have I got to thank him for? I’m quite philosophical by nature and of a logical mind, but there are times when I thought, My God, this fellow has done me irreparable harm, in a way. I thought maybe it’s this obsession of mine about the time thing, or that it could all be illusory—hallucinations.” 

Len related to me one of several instances when he claims to have experienced a “time shift.” 

“A neighbor from my block of flats in Clapham was just coming out of Hannell’s grocery store, and I was standing outside. As he was walking, and before he got to the door, I was suddenly there and opening the door for him! And he started scratching his head, looked at me again and again. The same thing happened again in the afternoon when he was coming down in the lift. And he looked at me again in disbelief. If you’re behind someone and all of a sudden you’re in front of them, how can you explain it?” 

FURTHER MEETINGS 

The first of several further encounters with Iso Khan took place in the summer of the following year (1969), in Marble Arch, London. As usual, Khan was immaculately dressed, with what Leonard thought looked like a suit tailor-made in Savile Row, and handmade shoes. 

“You’re a fine one, you are,” began Leonard. “I had a breakdown last year. Will you tell me something: Why, of all people, did you pick on me?” 

“Oh, no,” replied Khan, smiling. “I haven’t only picked on you. There are three other people.” The other three apparently had been selected from another country or countries. 

“But why in this country then am I the only person? I’m cutting the grass, watering the roses, digging the flowerbeds—you know full well no one is going to believe me.” 

Kahn laughed. “It’s the obvious thing you do: pick the lowest common denominator. The lower down you are, the lower intellectually people think you are, and the less likely they are to believe you.” 

“That’s not very complimentary to me.” 

“It’s logical to follow. Who’s going to believe you? The only important point is that you are aware of time. And we know this.” 

“Come off it. How could you possibly know?” 

“We have an inbuilt register. If we walk near people, we can calculate the intelligence level of that person. You’re very intelligent, and you have six senses. We have nine….” 

“But why pick on me? Look what I’m doing—old trousers, great big boots, and messing around with mud—of all people, why me?” 

Kahn replied that he’d talked to other people and had met with a negative response. At one point during the several days of meetings that year, Leonard invited Khan to his home in Dolman Street, Clapham North, southwest London. 

“He was reluctant at first. And I said ‘Why don’t you? There’s nothing to stop you.’ And so he agreed.” 

Khan declined Mantle’s offer of food and drink. He behaved impeccably, and liked his host’s three cats, which he petted. But his telepathic ability was disturbing. “He knew what you were going to say before you opened your mouth,” Leonard explained to me. “It’s like being dissected brain-wise.” 

One of the many topics discussed was our space program. “A very primitive way of getting off the ground,” commented Khan. “There are far better ways of getting around.” 

“Give me an instance.” 

“Well, our spacecraft are relatively simple. Our technology is completely different from yours. We work with an electromagnetic field. The craft can either be disc-shaped or cylindrical. The principle, in effect, is that you have two magnets: one on the bottom and one on the top. Do you understand magnetism?” 

Len replied that he knew very little. 

“Well, if you have two magnets and you push them together, they repel each other,” Khan explained. 

“I know that well,” rejoined Len, “for the simple reason that I had a Black & White whiskey promotion toy involving two small magnetized dogs which pushed one from the other.” 

“Well, the principle is the same. There’s a magnet on the bottom and one on the top. And we have a cylindrical column which is a mercury barometer. A long thing comes down like that, and up, and it’s used when we enter barometric pressure.” (I presume on entering a planetary atmosphere.) Khan added that a “dimensional field” was also involved. 

In our last interview, Leonard expanded a little on the propulsion aspect, struggling to comprehend what he had been told. He referred to a “hydro-electric magnetic field,” and thought that “the top half of the cylinder-type central column was identical to the bottom half.” Takeoff was at a “terrific rate,” which occurred “when the top half hit the bottom half.” 

It should be borne in mind that Leonard had no scientific education and thus conceded that, although blessed with a good memory, he might easily have been mistaken regarding some of these explanations. It is equally worth pointing out that he was not a “ufologist,” thus unfamiliar with any of the numerous books on the subject: he hadn’t even bothered to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he assured me. 

Queried about his extraterrestrial origin, Khan said he came from a world very much like own, though lacking in pollution. His race was about 5,000 years ahead of ours. He claimed to be around 150 years old. 

“You know,” he added, “your people are under an illusion. You seem to think that people from other worlds have got all sorts of funny faces.” 

I asked Leonard for a detailed description of Khan. 

“He was debonair, slim, and about five feet eight. He had straight brown hair, immaculately well cut, and a sort of pointed, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and a very determined chin. His eyes were greenish: it wasn’t so much the color but their expression. They never darted about and were static—very calm. He didn’t seem to blink. His teeth were absolutely perfect—nothing irregular at all. If you saw him, you’d say: there’s a very smart, well-groomed business man—you wouldn’t say handsome. He had the look of a man who knows where he’s going.” 

Khan invited Len to examine one of his hands. “The pigmentation—it’s the same,” Len declared. 

“Not quite. Our pores are a little bit larger.” 

Khan was conversant with many of our languages. “In the acquisition of a language, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Chinese, Russian, or any other,” he explained: “to us, any forms of language or speech are relatively simple.” 

He spoke English “in an educated way,” said Leonard. “Only once did he ever make a mistake. Instead of saying ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said ‘I have not the meaning of your words.’ That was the only time ever that he said something that was not compatible with the ordinary way of speaking English. 

“He had a very reassuring type of smile—and a sense of humor. He also seemed compassionate about us, almost as if he felt sorry for us in a way. 

“Since he had been responsible for my breakdown, I told him that the least he could do was to prove to me that he was who he said he was. 

“I had a Dynatron record player,” Leonard continued. “I’ve always been passionately fond of music. I had an album of Nat King Cole numbers, and ‘Let There Be Love’ was playing.” 

”That’s quite nice,” Khan commented. “I’d like to hear that again.” 

“Yes, well, hang on….” 

“There’s no need for that,” rejoined Khan, making a slight gesture with his hand. 

“The pick-up arm lifted itself up and it moved back, which is impossible because the record should have finished first—it had one more track to go. So I said, ‘Well, do it again!’ Sure enough, it came back and started again. So then I took off all the other records, left this one on, and told him that he could stop any track he didn’t like. And sure enough he did—and he never touched the thing. And what’s more, it happened for several days after he’d left, witnessed by my wife. 

“It was absolutely incredible—you just don’t know what to think; you’re so nonplussed that you begin to doubt your senses. ‘There are probably people in a laboratory who would have the answer to this,’ I told him, ‘who could probably do it with an electronic beam. But if you say you really are from somewhere else, just do something that nobody on this Earth can do; say, fly up to the top of the house.’ 

“‘Well, how about this?’ he responded. 

“And without making any effort, he just sort of rose up to about two feet off the floor.” 

“‘How about that?’ said Khan. 

“Then he went right around my octagonal table at the same height!” 

Khan explained that his people had discovered inadvertently that they were able to do this about fifteen hundred years ago. While walking in a group, they suddenly noticed that they were taking more prolonged strides, followed by levitation just above the ground. (Advanced yogis are also reported to have achieved this ability.) 

Ironically, the demonstrations—convincing though they were—did nothing for Leonard’s equilibrium, resulting once again in his return to the psychiatric hospital for two weeks, unable as he was, yet again, to convince anyone of the reality of his experiences. 

Was Mantle mental? I do not believe so. Having spent quite a lot of time with him and his wife, I remain impressed by his total sincerity, by his erudition, and—incidentally—by his talent as a jazz pianist. 

The night of November 22, 1977, was very clear, with an almost full moon. Barbara Beavers was relaxing in her bedroom with yoga exercises in her Yucca Valley, California, apartment. Suddenly, through her westward-facing window, she noticed an erratically moving light describing various maneuvers. It then approached and appeared to hover over the apartment building, forcing Barbara to stoop at her window to continue observing it. 

The bedroom had become suffused with a blueish light, and even when she closed her eyes it felt as though a spotlight was shining on her face. The light in the sky then moved northward, so Barbara went to her living room window, which also faced west. 

“At this point,” writes Shawn Atlanti, the investigator who in 2002 kindly sent me this unpublished report, “she glanced at the clock on the north wall of the living room and noted that it read 11:45. She then ‘heard’ a voice which said: ‘Barbara, come to Desert Christ Park.’” 

Desert Christ Park, overlooking the high desert town of Yucca Valley, is dedicated to “Peace on Earth and the Brotherhood of Man,” featuring over forty statues and images portraying scenes of Christ’s life and teachings. The walk from Barbara’s apartment was slightly uphill, and it took her fifteen or twenty minutes over the mostly unpaved, sandy roads. “Reaching the parking area, she heard a sound like rushing wind, looked at the mesa to the north, and saw a glow which resolved itself into an almost transparent half-dome with translucent panes, four in number on the side that could be seen. 

“The upper portion of the vessel appeared to rotate clockwise, in the direction opposite to that of a disc on the underside. When the craft came to rest, hovering a few yards off the ground, the rotation ceased. The light from the upper portion was a soft electric blue-white: the underside had the same hue but was darker than the upper surface, from which it was separated by a rim-like projection that glowed like white heat. 

“The craft hovered about twenty feet over the witness, and an aqua blue beam was directed from the lower disc to the ground. Barbara was illuminated by a blinding light and the same voice that she had heard in her apartment spoke in an English accent: ‘Are you prepared for this visitation?’ Accompanied by a rosy flickering of the surface, a ramp then came down from the upper portion of the vehicle. A voice, sounding like an intercom, warned her not to stand under the ship or to touch its exterior. Ascending the ramp, she walked through an automatically opening door into an inner room.” 

Barbara was instructed to remove her clothes, place them in a “sanitizer” compartment (in common with the Dworshak brothers and others), and then to stand before a six-foot-high black screen. “She was told to put her hands at shoulder height and her forehead against the screen. The voice said, ‘Keep your eyes shut, and press the activator button.’ She had the sensation of being illuminated, until a tone stopped. This process was repeated in the reverse position, with hands on hips. 

“On instruction, she removed a suit from a locker. The material felt soft—like a liquid. She donned the suit, zipping it from wrist to elbow, ankle to knee, and from waist to shoulder. The suit had a wide belt, with metal bars, about three inches long, around the entire waist. Carrying a helmet, she walked into ‘central control,’ where she was met by four humanoids. 

“Two of these beings, a man and a woman, were quite human-looking and appeared to be identical. They both had light brown-blond hair, with flecks of gold throughout, in a ‘geometric’ cut. Their eyes were the color of topaz and their pupils had serrated edges. They had honey-color complexions. Both wore the same type of garment with some type of insignia (whose appearance Barbara could not recall). 

“The two other beings contrasted sharply—both with each other and the first pair. One was about four to four and a half feet tall, with well-defined pupils in slanting eyes. His head was disproportionately large for his body, his frame thin and gangling with long arms. His complexion was pale—almost translucent. He wore a white suit. 

“The fourth creature was quite tall, with ebony skin, full mouth, blue, slanted eyes, larger than those of the first two, and a Roman profile. His suit was black.” 

Their ages were indeterminate. Portraits of them, as shown in slides to the Yucca Valley UFO Club, depicted the “human” pair as well-endowed physically. 

“Since they spoke in a language unknown to Barbara,” Shawn’s report continues, “the woman came forward to serve as a translator. At this point, Barbara was moved to tears, but after recovering her composure was given information about the ship and its occupants. She was also given an arrowhead shaped device out of which the language of the occupants came out as English, having been translated by the main computer and relayed to the object held by Barbara. 

“Like everything in the ship, the ‘translator’ had a crystalline appearance and was said to be ‘photochromic glass.’ 1 By means of this device, Barbara was told that the ship had an outer and inner shell, with seven ‘pressure’ panels on the outside. These panels were plated with gold 1.25 hundredths of an inch thick. Between two gold layers was a layer of silicon. It was possible to see out clearly, but not in [as reported by the Dworshak boys]. The computer was made of pure rock quartz, 47% silica and 53% oxygen. 

“The ship had a central cylinder containing an all-crystal interior cylinder. Graphite fibers provided reinforcement at stress points. The fuel was carried in a lower portion in a sort of ‘cloud chamber’ and consisted of plasma and electromagnetism. The temperature of the central portion was 0.01° greater than absolute zero. The computer stated that plasma was the first state of matter in the universe. The vehicles produced their own external clouds. Their communications were by neutrinos that traveled faster than light. When the speed of the neutrino decreased to that of the speed of light, it ‘died’ and remained in a cloud until reactivated. 

“In their charts, communications, and central section, glass fibers were used to bend light, and with lasers to make holographic images, so that the crew could see outside the entire ship. 

“A disc about the size of a silver dollar, called a hologram disc, was put in a small panel with a viewer. This disc contained the contactee’s ‘life readout’ and voice-print. The voice-print was displayed on the oscilloscope screen on the small panel. On a large circular screen was displayed her form, with its ‘Kirlian’ aura. 2 She was told to look closely, and could observe the ‘chakras’ associated with various glands. ‘Certain humans emit low-frequency radiation,’ she was told, and was informed that when the vibrations and the mind were in exact accord, the individual’s psychic abilities were heightened.” 

Barbara was asked if she would agree to be a “coordinator, transmitter, and receiver.” Her mind, said the aliens, would be taught to receive signals in codes, color, pictures, emotions, music, and symbols. She replied that she could not and—like Leonard Mantle—asked why they did not make contact with someone more educated. They replied that it was “difficult to make contact because such people did not have time to meditate and attain the serenity to elevate their minds.” An undisclosed geographical factor was also said to be involved. 

“She was told that they were more or less innovators and hoped to make communications possible between our world and worlds older than ours which were more advanced, as well as with younger worlds. Some of the older worlds were becoming so mechanized technically that they desired interchange to gather as much as they could of nature.” A corollary here can be inferred in the case of Julio Fernández and his dog, who were abducted by tall humanoids in the province of Soria in Spain, in February 1978. They explained to Julio that they were seeking the “warm human qualities” which had atrophied in their race. “They didn’t have a Beethoven” was how Julio put it. 3 

Barbara was also informed by the aliens that they wanted a mixture of our people, such as astrophysicists and doctors, to visit their world. “She was then given ‘perception tests’ to determine her response to novel sights. One scene, in space, appeared as if the observer was moving through the stars. The stars forward were blue and green and formed oval bands of color. The stars to the side were yellow and went by like elongated streaks to disappear in back with a reddish color. She was then asked to count flashes of dots on a screen and to give the apparent degrees of the dots shown (in positions like the numerals of a clock). Other tests involved describing shapes. 

“Additional technological information revealed that the photochromic glass and films were five times lighter, but seven times stronger, than steel. Under pressure, the outer hull of the ship would weld back together if scratched. The hull acted as a heat conductor so that they could enter the clouds of Jupiter and Venus.” 

“You will be led,” Barbara was told. “You will know those to talk to and those not to. You will not find this a pleasant thing. Your mind can be trained, and will be.” Barbara replied that she would not do it. “We think you’ll change your mind,” came the reply. 

“The boarding procedure was then repeated in reverse,” Shawn relates. “The ramp let Barbara down and then retracted. The craft began to spin and took off slowly. She found that her watch had stopped and recalled that she had been warned to take all metal from her body. She then retraced her steps back home, where she asked the lady in the adjacent apartment, Evelyn Whitfield, what time it was, and was told 2:30 A.M. 

“Barbara reported that after the experience her teeth became sensitive, she needed new glasses, and that various electrical devices in her apartment appeared to have been affected. Her TV set needed degaussing; certain tapes no longer played properly—nothing would play soon after—and the refrigerator freezer stopped working….” 4 

Chapter Thirteen 

AMICIZIA 

Spanning at least forty years, this is the saga comprising a large group of people in countries such as Argentina, Austria, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Siberia, and Switzerland who were involved in an extensive alien liaison program. In Italy, those most deeply involved named the group Amicizia (pronounced ami-cheet-siya)—“friendship.” In Germany, France, and the former Soviet Union, it was known respectively as “Freundschaft,” “Amitié,” and “Дpyжбa.” The most extraordinary case I have ever investigated, it is at times outrageous, farcical, and ludicrous—though always compelling. I would not be including it here were I not convinced of its relevance to our assessment of aliens and their motives regarding Earth. 

Preliminary contacts seem to have been initiated in Italy in April 1956. One of those first contacted was the late Professor Bruno Sammaciccia, a Catholic scholar who authored 160 books on religious matters. Holding degrees in psychology and psychiatry as well as many academic and theological awards, he also contributed extensively to a history of Amicizia, compiled by Professor Stefano Breccia and another major participant, Hans (surname withheld), though sadly both Bruno and Hans passed away prior to publication. 

Stefano, who died prematurely in March 2012, was also deeply involved with the group, from 1962/3 to 1997, and many of his experiences were shared with colleagues and friends—in particular Giancarlo De Carlo, an accountant. One of the most remarkable men I have met, Stefano generously allowed me to quote from his book Mass Contacts, from my numerous interviews with him at his home in Italy, and from our regular communications. As he wrote in a foreword: 

“All of us were moved by the deep morality and sincere humanity on the part of the aliens. These were people who simply could not imagine doing any evil to anyone, people who liked eating well, drinking, even smoking, who enjoyed playing the violin [in one case] and tennis, and driving luxurious cars and executive airplanes (in the 1970s, when very few people in Italy could own a personal plane)…. They lived most of the time in their huge underground bases, but some of them lived among us, inside our society, playing every kind of role in it. One was a university researcher, another one the manager of a rather important textile company in the center of Italy, a third one was a senior manager in one of the largest German telecommunications (TLC) companies, and so on…. 

“It was an explicit decision by the Amicizia people to keep everything concealed under the strictest secrecy, and there were very good reasons for that. Actually, once in a while something would emerge publicly, but always in a vague and uncertain way. Many European scholars were aware that something was happening … but nobody, outside our group, has ever had even the slightest idea of how big and how important it all was. 1 

“We had direct, face-to-face meetings with the Friends (also called W56), who are extraterrestrials coming both from planets in our own galaxy [and] from other galaxies,” a participant who prefers to remain anonymous told researcher Nikola Duper in 2008. “Here on Earth they reached the maximum number of two hundred, living inside underground and undersea bases, some of them along the Adriatic coast, at a depth of about twelve miles. The first, ‘historical’ base was located under the area of Ascoli Piceno, a small town in central Italy [in the mountainous Marche region]. 

“‘Friendship’ gathers together various extraterrestrial populations that are different from each other, both as regards physical characteristics [and] provenance (there are Friends from other universes and dimensions). However, all share a fundamental choice toward ‘Good.’ … The population whom we personally interacted with is composed of individuals (men and women, like us) who are physically very beautiful, some about three meters [9.84 feet] tall, while others are tiny…. What is important is what they represent, beyond the various typologies and endless ‘folkloristic’ singularities…. The Friends are not the only extraterrestrials who have come to the Earth. Individuals from various other populations are among us, because the Earth is a very particular planet inside the economy of this part of the Universe.” 2 

There is, reportedly, an ongoing conflict between these species regarding the future of our planet. 

The humans involved—hand-picked by the aliens—were not cranks. Professor Breccia, for example, was a retired expert in artificial intelligence and computer sciences, and has given lectures on didactical methodologies at the British Telecom training center, and on fractal analysis at the University of Novosibirsk and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was also a qualified pilot. Amicizia, he confirmed, included a psychiatrist, two cardiologists, the respected aerospace journalist Bruno Ghibaudi, the distinguished diplomat Alberto Perego (who authored several pioneering books on UFOs), an archaeologist, some twenty engineers, several accountants, an expert in military logistics, bank employees, two members of the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization, five university professors, a Court of Assizes judge, the executive vice-president of one of the largest multi-national companies in the world, two future Nobel laureates, four generals, and a few politicians. 3 

Others included Gaspare De Lama, a well-known Italian painter, and Professor Paolo Di Girolamo, a distinguished cartoonist I had the pleasure of meeting in Rome, who gave me a copy of his book in which his experiences are recounted. 4 

THE EARLY ITALIAN SCENE 

According to Bruno Sammaciccia and his friends Giulio, an engineer, and Giancarlo, an accountant, a series of poltergeist-type phenomena, including “automatic writing” of elaborate instructions, preceded initial in-person meetings with the aliens, which happened in April 1956. The group had been directed via a map to the Rocca Pia castle (Fortezza Pia) overlooking Ascoli Piceno. Nothing happened on this occasion, although the group felt suffused with “euphoric sensations of well-being and health.” The following day, they drove to the top of the road leading to the castle. “All of a sudden we saw some spots of light moving in the [evening] air,” Bruno reports. “We heard a voice, coming from nowhere, a very calm and strong one: ‘Now, my friends, stay calm, because I am going to have one of us appear. Are you ready?’” 

Giulio expressed concern that strangers might observe what was going on. “Be sure that while our friends are with you, nobody else will be allowed to intrude,” the voice explained. “If they do, we will divert them.” A man then emerged from behind the castle wall, followed by another. One of the men was very tall, the other very short. “We were just in front of the main entrance, and they came toward us, speaking our language perfectly,” reports Bruno. “As they approached, we saw that one of them was more than 2.5 meters [8.2 feet] tall, and the other about one meter [3.3 feet] tall. The latter had a high-pitched voice, as dwarfs often do, but his body was perfect and his voice that of a man of authority.” 

With very few exceptions, the aliens did not use names. For reference purposes, Bruno and his friends ascribed names to these and others. The tall one in this case became “Sinas,” the short one “Sajù.” 

“They both shook hands with us, very gently, [perhaps because] they were very strong. We felt at that moment a strong sense of love….” 

The men remained seated, talking with the aliens on nearby steps—the tall one some steps down, the smaller one a few steps above—for over an hour and a half. “How many things they told us! That theirs was an important mission, that they had been here for many years, that he [Sinas] had been here three times, and that three or four centuries ago he had been in Central America, because in that area were bases operated by other aliens [perhaps the group featured in the previous chapter, who said they lived for up to four hundred years?], that there was a war, unknown to us. He said they usually keep to desolate areas where nobody could see them, so that they would not bother anybody, and at the same time they would not be bothered by anyone…. They were perfectly aware of our history, our religions, and our philosophies.” 

“This Earth was made for the good, but the men who inhabit it are transforming everything into bad,” asserted Sinas. “We are not here to conquer, we have nothing to conquer: our interests arise from the fact that your Earth lies within our stars, and so we are concerned with it. I do not live on a planet, but everywhere I happen to travel. 

“This is a critical point in your history, a turning point in your technologies, but because of your childish enthusiasms you are forgetting your moral values … everything arises from morality, and everything is done because of it. For this reason, we had, and we are still having, many problems with your people in the Middle East, and you too are going to be in trouble with them in the near future.” 

The meeting ended at 03:00. Two days later, another meeting took place on Colle Orlando, a small hill to the south of Pescara. The men had taken a transistor radio with them, via which the aliens were able to communicate by superimposing their voices over whatever was being broadcast. They also had the ability to make use of various gadgets with phenomenal qualities. One of these entered the ground in front of the men and disappeared. “That particular place had been transformed into a kind of facility for us,” explained Bruno. A subterranean base was built there so that when the men came to within thirty kilometers of it, they would be able to communicate with the aliens by telepathy. Other means to do the same—such as small rectangular metallic plates (similar in function to the one given to Richard Högland, described in Chapter 11) and other devices—were also provided. Months of further communications and meetings ensued. 5 

One night at the Ascoli Piceno castle site, Bruno and his friends, forewarned via the communication implements of an imminent contact—to include three of the craft and some alien newcomers—suddenly noticed that the sky seemed to change. In the distance, three tiny pinpricks of light approached. “The ground under our feet started to tremble, so strongly that Giancarlo was thrown off balance and fell down,” Bruno reports. “It lasted some fifteen minutes, during which Giulio took shelter inside the car and Giancarlo sat on the ground…. They were almost hysterical. 

“All of a sudden, two of the lights grew larger and disappeared. We realized that they were the spaceships we had been waiting for, and that two of them had already entered the underground base.” The third spot of light just switched itself off. A few moments later, “Gallarate,” Sinas, and another alien appeared, together with an extremely tall one, calling himself “Dimpietro,” who they had also met before. The latter was over nine feet tall. (Stefano Breccia told me he once encountered him negotiating a corridor in Bruno’s house in Montesilvano—bent double!) Some others were even taller. 

“We were happy being with them,” continued Bruno, “but at the same time felt a bit uneasy, because one could never tell what was going to happen when Dimpietro—a notorious practical joker—was around…. All six of us sat on the ground. Dimpietro took a big cigar out of a box. He threw the empty box away, admonishing us to pick it up before leaving. Then he broke the cigar into four parts, keeping one for himself and giving us the other pieces. Then he lit the cigar with a flame coming out of his forefinger, laughing at us!” 

In the meantime, some other aliens walked past and disappeared behind the castle wall. Curious, Bruno began to follow them, but was stopped by Dimpietro. “Where do you suppose they are going?” he said. 

“They are entering our base.” 

“But I can’t see them going in.” 

“Well, we like to be a bit spectacular at times.” 

“Does the door close after each one of them?” 

“No, it doesn’t.” 

“Then may I go and have a look?” 

“You’re welcome to.” 

At this point Dimpietro picked up Bruno with one arm and Giancarlo with the other! “When we got to the entrance, I saw an opening in the ground, like a vertical tunnel heading downward. I thought that the tunnel might have weakened the castle foundations, and, as if reading my thoughts, Dimpietro said: ‘Do you believe that we are such fools? We have taken care to strengthen the structures, so there is no risk.’” 

Dimpietro entered the base and bade Bruno and his friends farewell, bending down in order to embrace them. “Please, let the world know that we have come here with a great love toward you. You speak about love, but you do not know what love is. It is the very basis of life itself.” 6 

INSIDE THE BASES 

In due course, Bruno and his friends were allowed to visit the base. Bruno and Giancarlo met at the appointed time in front of the castle and were told to wait. Giulio did not show up, having mistaken the date. They were told to go to the right side of the castle and to stop at a certain point in the pathway. “I started feeling the ground under my feet trembling,” Bruno reported. “I feared that maybe there was an empty room under us, and that the ground was going to collapse into it, because of our weight.” To the contrary, the ground itself opened, and another alien—“Meredir”—came out and told the group to proceed toward an empty area in the center of the hole through which they were about to descend. They were told to place their feet in certain areas where nothing was visible. “I did so,” said Bruno, “and felt as if some invisible step was preventing me from falling into the pit. Then this invisible floor started lowering into the vertical corridor….” 

Their descent came to a stop inside a huge subway with crystal-like walls, filled with a soft light. No lights as such could be seen, and they learned that none of any kind was used. “This place is filled with a peculiar radiation that interacts with the energy of the photons,” explained their guide. The light was of a beautiful pale blue and the air very clear and scented. No shadows could be seen anywhere. 7 However, Stefano—who has been inside a base on many occasions—disagrees. “First, the shadows were colored—not dark,” he told me. “And they were in different respective positions from the shadows cast by our sources of light. We have a main shadow, but their light comes from everywhere, so the shadows are distributed.” 8 

The group was met by Sinas and another man. “It was a pleasant feeling, walking with these three friends of ours, inside that huge structure,” Bruno writes. “I was feeling calm with a sense of well-being as I was breathing [their] air. They explained that the air was different from that available in our towns; it was full of negative ions, which were the cause of that sensation.” He was told to touch his hair, and found that it was stiff and brittle, as though frozen, a result, he was told, of his being “detoxicated.” 

Via a viewing screen, the group was shown a room in which young boys appeared to be studying. Their height apparently varied from two to two and a half meters. “For us, they are boys,” said the guide. “One is fifteen, some are thirty, and another one is ninety-five years old [!]. Biological growth is slower than yours, but achievements are quicker.” 

Many of the “boys” had short hair. “They showed a benevolent countenance,” Bruno continues. “Some had brown eyes, others very light-colored green/blue eyes. They were of different races, and I was told that there are actually many different people, but that in most cases only their [physical appearances] are different—not their biological functioning.” 

The group was offered a pleasant drink, made from a mixture of fruits, which apparently had a detoxicating effect. After learning and observing many fascinating things, Bruno and his group left the base at three o’clock in the morning. 9 

No women were seen, though Bruno encountered them on other occasions. “I’ve seen at least six women inside their bases,” he wrote. “They were really beautiful, and you could feel a strong sense of femininity emanating from them. Giancarlo once fell in love with one of them….” Neither women nor men had a problem with nudity among themselves, though never among terrestrial guests. 10 

Stefano related to me how, during the early 1970s, the W56—“W” from two VVs for “double victory” and “56” for the year it started—informed him that they had built a base about 975 to 1300 feet in depth, directly beneath the ground-floor apartment he rented at that time in Bologna! “When they wanted me to come down,” he said, “they made a circle of light appear in the floor and the ground then opened up somehow and I was taken down as though in an elevator, with no visible means of support. Over a period of three to four months, I spent a lot of time at the base—at times sleeping there—having many discussions. In this particular base there were no women, though I think that was just coincidental.” 11 

Such is their technology that they are able to fabricate bases in a short space of time. “Our friends were able to generate what they called a ‘magnetic tress,’ i.e. a structure where the lines of force were strictly twisted around each other,” Stefano explains: 

“Such a thing had the property of ‘opening’ matter, compressing it sideways, squashing it in on itself. Translucent, almost crystal, walls were the result, with [enormous] density, a Young’s modulus [a measure of the stiffness of material] equally high, and of unbelievable strength. In this way they were able to open the cavities that would become their bases, evidently without damaging the surrounding tectonic structures —on the contrary, probably strengthening them. 

“Such a structure remained stable while the fields that had generated it were active: it was sufficient to switch off these fields, a finger over a switch, to revert at once to the status quo ante. In a similar way, they opened passages to access their bases when needed, closing them immediately when no longer in use. Only very rarely (very small bases just under the ground) were stable corridors used….” 12 

Stefano informed me that the major W56 base beneath Italy exceeded 186 miles in length and 62 miles in width, with a 980-foot-high ceiling. This huge base, he says, was not for living quarters but for the machinery essential for their operations. 13 

In April 1972, Bruno, Giancarlo, and two other friends, Assad and Gustav, were re-invited to a base under the beautiful mountain chain of the Monti Sibillini National Park in Umbria. On emerging, the men found that several days had passed, whereas they were certain not more than a day had elapsed. “Our friends then told me,” he explained, “that inside their base, gravity was twenty percent less than usual; therefore, one could move more easily [and] the heart beats with less strain.” 14 

TELEPATHIC INDUCTION 

“To what extent were the aliens you encountered telepathic?” I asked Stefano. 

“I know of up to 150 individuals claiming to be with Amicizia. I don’t think they were telepathic. They said that, to produce telepathy, they had to use specific devices that were able to induce telepathic capabilities in human brains using a kind of implant. I have seen one of these implants—known as an ‘ania’—and it is jet black, of a polyhedron shape. It looks like it’s ‘eating’ light. It generates a huge quantity of reflective light—much more than incidental light. In the case of the W56, this object was inserted under the skin immediately behind the ear, and yet it dissolves into thousands of very small biological robots that disperse in the body. So you couldn’t find anything if you looked with X-rays. 

“Bruno had been implanted in this way—they asked for his permission before doing it—so he could receive telepathic messages. Once when we had invited him and his wife for lunch, and I had gone to pick them up at their home in a nearby village, during the trip back to my house Bruno said, ‘I see that your wife is preparing something with mushrooms. Please tell her that my wife can’t eat them.’” 15 

FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

On several occasions, the aliens asked Bruno to obtain literally tons of fruit and vegetables, and sometimes fish, for delivery to one of their bases. Bruno and his colleagues were told to hire trucks and drivers, ensuring that the drivers were never present when it came to collection time. The food was then “collected” by means of “tele-transportation” and beamed to their bases! The drivers, having been persuaded to join Bruno and his friends at nearby cafés, could never understand how such a huge amount of food could have been collected so quickly. 

Payment to Bruno and others was sometimes by precious stones or—in one case—platinum ingots. On the latter occasion, at Bruno’s villa in Montesilvano, the ingots reportedly just fell from the open sky into the garden, which when collected filled ten boxes weighing about 150 kilograms. Luckily, Bruno was able to sell them to a wholesaler who didn’t inquire as to their origin. 16 

Bruno was asked by the aliens to build a large villa for them—under their guidance—on top of a high hill to the west of Montesilvano, beneath which they had a base. With three floors, it had many meeting rooms, large convention rooms, cubicles for individual study, and even a small observatory on the roof. They needed the property, they said, as a center of operations, to introduce new people to Amicizia and to develop some technical projects, and as a business enterprise. 17 

When the W56 saga ended, Bruno suffered great financial loss as a result. “I had to sell everything,” he explained, “two buildings belonging to my wife, a couple of agricultural sites, and above all, I had to sell the large villa I had built, and in so doing I made no more than a tenth of its value, because I had to sell everything in a hurry.” 18 

“W56 sometimes supplied Bruno with platinum and gold,” Stefano told me, “and—aware that the operation was costing us a lot of money—they once gave Giancarlo a device made by them which was capable of generating diamonds. But there were two problems. First, the device was absorbing a huge quantity of electricity from the cables surrounding the area—without any direct connection—so that people living in the area started receiving huge bills from the electricity company! The second problem was that, although the device was actually generating diamonds, they were in the shape of an ellipsoid 20 centimeters long and 10 centimeters wide! So nobody would believe they were real diamonds and they couldn’t be sold: it would be too dangerous to try, because of criminals and so on. So one night, Giancarlo and I took a boat, went out a couple of kilometers from the coast, and threw them into the sea! It was an example of the aliens’ inability to comprehend our situation.” 19 

What these aliens did provide, however—and in abundance—was a phenomenal amount of knowledge, inspiration, and, in many respects, protection for those involved with the Amicizia group. And it needs to be pointed out here that, on at least two occasions since 1956, they had prevented a nuclear war on Earth. “They did so by transmuting the fissionable metals inside the warheads into lighter substances, so that no nuclear reaction could take place,” Bruno was told. 20 

W56 CRAFT 

The technology of the W56s was almost indistinguishable from magic. “Very seldom did they explain something,” writes Stefano in a more recent treatise—“Their Technology”—to be included in a second book on the Amicizia case. 21 “Most of the time they made use of Maieutics [the Socratic mode of inquiry, serving to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness], where a concept is not blatantly exposed to pupils, but [discovered] by themselves.” 

Stefano learned that W56 and other groups use many types of craft, from small “scouts” to huge motherships. The scouts are not transportation devices per se, but mainly mobile laboratories, and even weapons systems. Surprisingly, they are made mostly of pure iron, though certain parts are manufactured from various alloys. “There is a peculiar ‘field’ that connects all the pieces together,” Stefano maintains. “When this field is switched off, the pieces fall apart.” And the scouts are not stored in hangars. “Thanks to their technology, the W56s ask their machines and robots to build a new scout when one is needed.” Each time it is designed in accordance with its specific mission. “When the mission is over, the scout is simply dismantled. That’s why we see so many different types of craft: each one of them has been built having in mind the peculiar activity it had been designed for. 

“Scouts are not even always meant to be manned devices: many are totally automatic in their operations. And scouts are not always flying saucers: they may vary from ‘aniae’ [see earlier], less than a millimeter long, to craft several kilometers long.” Some scouts are not material craft, per se, but “physical properties forced into a small amount of space”! 

Stefano has ascertained that the propulsion systems vary “from pure aerodynamics to magnetohydrodynamics to electrostatic or electrodynamic effects, to electromagnetic effects or to extremely complex sets of fields generating relativistic effects. These are what we call flying saucers or flying cigars. I do not know much about the latter…. Of course, there are also differently shaped objects, such as triangles, squares, cubes, spheres, and the like…. 

“Usually the power source is an internal one. In flying saucers it consists of three or more objects, similar to cigarettes in shape and dimensions, but much heavier. They are called mother cells and produce a high-frequency current through their extremities … it seems that the intensity of electrical current flowing through the poles is astonishing [and] one wonders how such a huge amount of current can flow through such small surfaces. What I do know is that it is always necessary to have something that absorbs the energy they generate, otherwise they could explode. 

“A scout is never switched off, even in the rare cases when it is on stand-by. Thanks to their superior technology, no maintenance is required even in the long-lasting interstellar or even intergalactic craft that they use for their major ‘displacements.’ Re the latter, their propulsion system relies on greatly distorting the space-time geometry, requiring awesome amounts of energy that, in a kind of perpetual-motion machine, the W56s are able to extract from the distortion process itself … there is no practical limit to speed [except] the rapidity with which the internal computers are able to interact with the surrounding environment. That is the only practical limit, because operations depend heavily on it.” 

“SCOUTS” 

Of mostly circular (sometimes elliptical) planform, flying saucers have diameters ranging from about three to five hundred or more meters. “The ratio between the diameters of the outer rim and of the inner cabin depends on several factors, and may range from, say, 1.2 to 10 or even more,” explains Stefano in his treatise. “Also, the ratio between the outer diameter and height depends on several factors, and may range from, say, 0.05 to 3. So, we may have extremely ‘flat’ discs, or objects that we would not call ‘discs’ because their height is much more than their diameter. In some cases there is no central cabin …mostly [when no one] is inside.” 

No fixed portholes or doors exist. When one is needed, it is simply “created,” Stefano asserts. The iron can be rendered transparent, thus it is possible to create a “porthole” at will. “It must be said that, most of the time, it makes no sense to look outside, because the outer disc prevents one from looking down. It can be rendered partially transparent, but that would interfere with the propulsion. A major problem, when flying low over ground, is that a scout encounters serious problems in acquiring information about its immediate environment; therefore, in such circumstances small devices are usually ejected that monitor the local situation and transmit the data back to a central computer…. 

“The control panel of a small scout is a rectangular area [which] is very small—about 50 centimeters wide and 35 centimeters high. It is a touch panel, and it only ever shows the information that is required and the commands available in that situation. That means that its contents are continually changing, both owing to a decision by the central computer or upon a request by the pilot. Commands are activated by pressing the touch panel. 

“It is theoretically possible to drive ‘by thought,’ but rather cumbersome and therefore seldom applied. It is also possible to drive without the help of the central computer, but it is extremely difficult and occurs only when a new pilot is trained. Typical commands a pilot may want to enter are: climbing to a certain altitude, then deciding where he wants to go, either selecting from a list or entering the name of a place; or entering the name of an ‘anchor,’ then selecting the time required to reach the selected spot and eventually adding some details about how the flight should be effected…. 

“‘Anchors’ are to a certain extent similar to our ‘VORs’ [very high frequency omnidirectional radio range] 22 used in general aviation, a kind of radio-homing device, although working on totally different principles. It is possible to create an anchor on a certain point, at a certain height, give it a name, and from that moment on it will be available to all scouts, because the local computer will transmit this information to a central computer that will make it available to other scouts, if required…. 

“There are some minor operational details which I have not included here, including allowing oneself to be recognized by the computer (not everyone is entitled to pilot a scout), managing environmental conditions, and the like. But, again, each operation consists of selecting an option from a list. For instance, for most scouts it is better not to land, but to hover about half a meter above the target, in order to avoid heavy exchanges of power. An actual landing is rather complicated, and is usually assigned to the computer.” 

The craft are not pressurized like ours. “Because of its propulsion criteria,” Stefano explains, “a scout, even in space, is always surrounded by an envelope of atmosphere; therefore, if opening a ‘door’ while in space, the internal atmosphere would leak out at such a slow speed that it would take weeks to empty. If necessary, of course, it can be emptied within seconds. 

“Just like inside the bases, the air itself is luminous: there is no concentrated light source. This generates peculiar effects on shadows that I have not quite understood…. 

“Light appears to be generated from nowhere,” as Stefano told me. And the flooring of a craft with which Stefano was familiar “appeared to be metallic, but was rather soft and looked like plastic.” 23 

Most amazingly, certain scouts of about nine meters in diameter can be compressed in some way to a diameter of some forty centimeters, with a corresponding reduction in their mass and inertia. Nicknamed “pocket scouts,” when reduced they can be kept and transported in a square rigid bag about sixty centimeters wide. “Having got to a rather wide clearing,” writes Stefano in Mass Contacts, “the small scout was taken out from its bag and put down with care. Then one had to get at least twenty meters away, if possible concealing oneself behind a tree or a wall. 

“Acting on a switch inside the bag, the scout would at once get back to its original dimensions (with an obviously violent blast, pebbles shooting [around] like bullets followed by an inverse air displacement, a loud sound, and leaves flying around). Shortly, this quietened down and the scout was ready to be flown. When [the mission] was over, the inverse operation typically generated lower gradients of pressure, therefore was not so violent as the first one. In both instances, noticeable variations in the air temperature were felt. 

“I have never understood the use of such devices: it would have been much easier to have a scout, on auto-pilot, following its owner at a great height, then have it land when necessary…. Probably there was a reason behind such complicated devices, but no satisfactory explanation was given.” 24 

“BELLS” 

According to Stefano, this was the common name—campane in Italian—given to flying-saucer scout craft. Much of what he has learned attests to the validity of a number of George Adamski’s disputed claims and provides valuable new scientific and technical data. “Although usually no two scouts are identical to each other,” Stefano reports in his treatise, “some general outlines may be described. The first is that Adamski’s bells look squatter than those of the W56s.” [See below.]

“It may be seen that the proportions are slightly different: the height-to-diameter ratio is around 0.4; moreover, usually the mechanism to extend/retract the three spheres under the disc behaves in a different way: in the Adamski bell, the spheres go up and down vertically, parallel to the scout axis; in W56 devices, there is also a radial movement. [Normally, the spheres are retracted on landing.]” 

Stefano adds that the main disc surface of the “bells” is made of cobalt/magnesium, while “the dome on the top of the tower is externally covered with insulating material: strangely enough, this material is again iron, in a very peculiar allotropic state [including two or more different physical forms of a chemical element],” and “the topmost sphere is made of graphite, crossed by an extremely strong electrical flux; therefore it typically becomes incandescent, with a red hue. 

“What follows is but a very rough outline of the operating principles of a bell. I believe that most of them may be understandable, but in some cases our technology is not able to duplicate similar effects. I am summarizing my notes, because their content would be too technical for the general reader, and also because I believe that mankind is not yet ready to receive some of the concepts involved.” As Stefano explained to me: 

“The three spheres under the main disc are hollow and filled with nitrogen at a very high pressure [via an internal radial magnetic field that forces nitrogen into a ‘doughy’ state, in order to increase its density]. This gas is taken out and pumped along the three rings at the base of the cabin. It circulates in the same direction on the first and third rings and in the opposite direction in the second ring. It is pushed by ultrasonic pumps and contributes to the maintenance of the electrostatic field around the craft. 

“The rings on top of the cupola are made, alternately, of metal discs and isolating discs, perpendicular to the ‘torus’ structure, and it rotates in the same direction as the second ring. Then, under the disc itself, there are two more rings, one over the other—the highest one a bit smaller than the lower one—and the lower one rotates in the same direction as the second ring, and they are made of isolation materials. Then there is a central column. The main idea of the operation is that the topmost ring generates the ‘suspending’ operation, while the other rings generate electrostatic fields…. 

“The spheres must be polarized differently from one another: this may reflect on the direction of flight. In an actual landing, spheres are usually retracted: if this is not possible, their polarizations are equated to that of the outer disc. If this precaution is not taken, a really hard landing would take place, with no damage to the craft but probable injuries to its occupants. 

“When taking off, some time must elapse before the craft’s gravity escapes the local one, because the change of polarization requires a big exchange of electrical charges. During this time, the craft floats almost at random, owing to the interaction between its polarization and the local electrical field. That is why Adamski reported that, after takeoff, he felt a push and acceleration. And the reason he got an electric shock [when he first approached a landed craft near Desert Center, California, on November 20, 1952] is that, with the rotating electronic field and the one electrostatically generated by the lower rings, the outer rim is ‘charged,’ owing to currents running around it. If the current is not steady, the magnetic field itself is not steady, and it generates a secondary field on the outer ring that becomes charged electrostatically…. We are not able to store such a large amount of electricity—but that was back in that period.” 25 

Ian Taylor, a well-informed student of the subject, related to me how in around 1976 he was shown two approximately ten- by eight-inch glossy black-and-white prints of “what at first looked like an illuminated lampshade that was out of focus. Both prints seemed the same but there were minor differences as I recall,” he said. “I asked [the source] what it was he was showing me, after which he turned over the prints to reveal what I gathered was an official USAF seal, in a blue ink, slightly faded but clearly legible. I have seen official military seals before and this looked pretty authentic. He asked me to examine the shots more closely…. 

“It soon began to dawn on me that I was actually looking at what appeared to be night-time shots of a shape that was almost identical to Adamski’s classic Scout, albeit seemingly slightly more compressed, but that could have been down to the printing processes in the darkroom or for whatever other reason. What I was looking at was the shape of the craft in its familiar outline as a white illumination made up of parallel, horizontally opposed bars of light of an almost neon-like intensity. It soon became apparent that what I was looking at was the magnetic energy field of excitation circumnavigating the underlying form, or something to that effect. 

“I asked where he had gotten these images and he said they had been smuggled out of the USA a few years back by a colleague who had known people in the U.S. Air Force who had had access to certain classified material, and that he had been given the prints as something to own, but never to make public…. I have to admit that I was completely taken aback by the sheer clarity and definition contained in the shots. As I was well into photographic techniques and special effects in my work in the creative business, I had a suspicion these would have been copies taken from the original negatives rather than original prints, but it was difficult to say.” 26 (See photo section.) 

“OVERALLS” 

For me, the most astonishing mode of alleged W56 transportation was a one-piece apparel, referred to as “overalls.” “Typically, the W56s used these overalls—not scouts—to move from one place to another,” Stefano told me. “The suit was a biological entity/device for supporting its occupant, from any point of view: nutrition, elimination of waste, and so on. Under the ten-centimeter-thick soles were two propulsive devices. From my point of view, they were rather elementary, as the propulsive system wasn’t so difficult to use. It generated two identical ‘pushes’ from your feet toward your head, or vice-versa.” 27 In Mass Contacts, Stefano expounds: 

“The overalls were biological entities, strictly personal, which acted as [both] defensive and transportation systems. They were to be worn over the naked body, protecting the occupant against practically any external danger. 

“There was a whimsical system for managing inertia: the overall was able [incrementally] to adjust its inertia up to unbelievable levels…. The propulsion system was really rudimentary, based on two ‘pushes’ applied perpendicularly to the soles, and the only control system was a button on the belt which was able to modulate the intensity of the two pushes (identical to each other). Pushes could be both positive (upward) and negative (downward). The pilot’s skill lay in graduating the strength of pushes and in carefully orientating his feet…. 

“Needless to say, more than once, funny episodes took place; for instance, one morning in Munich, Germany, passers-by were astonished by the sight of a distinguished elderly gentleman who, upside down, was flying randomly at a height of a few meters, from time to time bumping into buildings in his path! 

“The overall would tune itself to its owner’s identity, which it was able to recognize, not through DNA but thanks to a biological principle still unknown to our scientists. A different occupant would have been considered a potential enemy….” 28 

It is worth noting that, though relatively rare, sightings of “flying humanoids” have been reported in other countries. In an article published in 2007, researchers Ruben Uriarte and Steven Reichmuth describe a series of sightings in Mexico of what they categorize as “unidentified flying humanoids” (UFH). “A number of UFH sightings have been reported over the skies of Mexico since the year 2000,” they report: 

“Mexican citizens equipped with home video cameras have recorded flying silent humanoids, often wearing an apparatus on their backs or around their waists. Sometimes they appear to be in a sitting or reclining position. They hover or move silently, regardless of wind direction, displaying definite flight control characteristics. They have been reported predominantly around Mexico City, notably over Cuernavaca, just southeast of the capital city. Sometimes they are reported to accelerate to 100 mph or more, but more often they are filmed hovering….” 

Uriarte and Reichmuth checked the possibility that such sightings were related to people flying with the aid of “rocket belts” propelled by hydrogen peroxide. They consulted Juan Mañuel Lozano, CEO of Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana (TAM), which manufactures such belts. Lozano denied that TAM was responsible and said he was unaware of any other company in Mexico that made such rocket belts. On viewing video footage of some of the Mexican incidents supplied by Uriarte, Lozano—himself a pilot and parachutist—declared his bafflement: 

“I don’t have an explanation for the ‘thing’ that is seen in the video. It is clear that it is some kind of human form, but this is not a parachutist, this is not a rocket belt or jet pack, and this is not a craft that is known around here … my rocket belt only flies for thirty seconds. No other rocket belt in the world can fly for more than thirty seconds.” 

As Uriarte and Reichmuth confirm, the UFH objects were recorded on video flying for much longer than any human-designed rocket belt. “UFHs have been observed and videotaped flying effortlessly at well over 300 feet high [and] flew totally silently, as opposed to the 150 decibels produced by rocket belts,” they point out. “If alien in origin, are these some sort of flexible kinds of individual transport? What could these objects do that good old-fashioned flying discs cannot do as well?” 29 How prescient. To the best of my knowledge, neither Uriarte nor Reichmuth were aware of the Amicizia saga. Mass Contacts was not published (in English, at least) until 2007. And they were certainly unaware of the following, which is published here for the first time. 

Stefano claims that “overalls” are capable even of transporting an occupant to another planet—at least in our solar system—and related to me how one of his friends had once visited Mars, allegedly discovering that the temperature was less cold than, and the percentage of oxygen well above, that which is officially stated. 

“GIANTS ON THE EARTH” 

To return to the W56 aliens, the gigantic Dimpietro had rented a small house owned by an elderly woman in the country near Forlimpopoli, at that time a small village some thirty kilometers north of Rimini. He liked to cook his own meals and, by way of relaxation at night, sometimes played his violin (which he had made himself) in the grounds surrounding the house! “Think how small the violin would be for a 3.5 meter-tall man!” remarked Bruno Sammaciccia. 30 Indeed. As a violinist myself, I surmise that, given his proportionately larger hands, the instrument he made must have been larger than our full-size instruments —possibly the size of a viola. Dimpietro refused to be disturbed during such periods. 

Bruno had been asked by Dimpietro to rent a large car for him and remove the front seat so he could sit directly on the floor. On one amusing occasion in 1957, Bruno invited Dimpietro to his flat in Milan. Before being introduced to Bruno’s wife, Dimpietro tactfully sat on the floor to avoid alarming her. “When this happened,” explained Bruno, “my wife had just come home after her shopping, found this incredible being seated on the floor of our kitchen, got frightened and ran into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. I had told her about our friends, but she had never met any of them. At the time, I was walking in the neighbourhood with my dog Dik, and deciding to return home, I looked for the caretaker to let me into the building, but he was nowhere to be seen. So I rang the bell at the intercom, and my wife Alessandra opened the door. 

“As I entered my flat, Alessandra told me that there was ‘somebody’ in the kitchen; Dik had already gone there himself. When I entered the kitchen, I found Dimpietro seated on the floor and Dik sitting beside him. My wife, still terrified, [returned] to the bedroom. Dimpietro remained seated, without uttering a word. Then he got up, his head just touching the ceiling. ‘How will we talk to each other?’ I asked him, ‘with a megaphone?’ ‘That’s why I sat on the floor,’ he replied. ‘So sit down again,’ I said, which he did. ‘Your wife is terrified of me, but do I look as though I would terrify anyone?’ ‘It’s not that…. She knows you’re a man from another world, and she’s very upset.’” 

Dimpietro asked for a cigarette. Bruno offered him one, but it was declined. “These are for children,” he complained. “Downstairs, you’ll find a car parked just in front of your building; here are the keys. Do not get upset when you see that there’s no driver’s seat, because I need to sit directly on the floor of the car. You’ll find some cigars inside the glove compartment.” Bruno found four cigar boxes, and returned with one of them. 

“Call your wife in,” said Dimpietro. “We have to calm her down and convince her that I’m not aggressive.” Alessandra returned to the kitchen, still nervous. Hands shaking, she made some napoletana coffee, with Dimpietro ensuring she knew how to prepare it properly and to serve him without sugar in a larger cup than the others. Next he made himself a frittata (a kind of Italian omelette). “We offered him some bread,” said Bruno, “but he refused, because he said he wasn’t yet accustomed to our bread. Instead, he asked for some wine. In my kitchen was some white wine, and I knew that he drank only red, so I phoned a nearby grocer and in a few minutes we had a bottle of Corvo di Salaparuta [a fine Sicilian wine].” 

“Would you allow me to drink directly from the bottle?” asked Dimpietro. “I’m used to doing it this way. If you like, I’ll pour some wine into a couple of glasses for you, and then I’ll drink from the bottle.” He drank the rest of the wine in three mouthfuls. Bruno asked if this could be harmful. “No,” came the reply, “you must understand that it is not the quantity that hurts, but the quality.” 

After another smoke, it was time for Dimpietro to leave. “He knelt on the floor,” said Bruno, “embraced my wife with great delicacy (she was still a bit upset because of that unusual dinner), and told her: ‘Remember, I do not eat women, I only eat peppers, pasta, and some sweets at times….’ He kissed her on the forehead. It was a strange vision, I can assure you, looking at this extremely tall man, kneeling on the floor and trying to calm down my poor wife. 

“It was three o’clock in the morning, and he had to drive the car, parked in the street. Luckily it was night, and nobody was around: of course, he couldn’t use the elevators, so Dimpietro, Dik and I went downstairs, with great care. He opened the car door, and as there was no driver’s seat he entered just as if going to bed, sat on the floor and finally forced his legs on both sides of the steering wheel. ‘Do you have any problem with the pedals?’ I asked him. ‘Not at all; if necessary, I can use my hands to operate them.’ 

“He started the engine and began to move. I asked him, ‘Do you know the way?’ ‘I know every street, even the alleys,’ he answered, and sped away.” 31 

What if Dimpietro had been stopped by the police? And surely individuals as tall as Dimpietro, “Mr. Kenio” (see photo section), and other colleagues would stick out in a crowd? Apparently not. Stefano related to me several instances where some of his friends had been shocked to see these particular aliens mingling in crowds—yet no one else even noticed them. 

Regarding the height of Mr. Kenio, according to a study by Teresa Barbatelli of the photograph—based on estimated measurements of the nearby pine needles at the time and some railings in the background and other factors—he was about 3.07 meters (10 feet) tall. 32 The original photo, taken circa 1976 by Bruno Sammaciccia at the large villa in Montesilvano built under instruction from the W56s, Stefano told me, belongs to a Swiss person who keeps it in a bank security vault. 

Our attitude toward aliens is determined by preconceptions in assessing their appearance, origins, and motives. We balk at the idea of aliens as tall as three meters or more. But there have even been very tall Earthmen, the current tallest being Xi Shun of Inner Mongolia, at 2.36 meters (7 feet, 8.95 inches) in 2005. 33 And if the Book of Genesis is to be believed, “There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them….” 34 Is it possible that the giants were the same species as the W56s? 

In 1959, Leon B. Visse, an expert on histones—proteins connected with cellular genetic material—was invited to a compound (almost certainly the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Here he was asked to perform an experiment on the histonic weight of some particular cells. An astonishingly low weight—far lower than human cells—was found. Visse then was escorted into a room where the corpses of two seven-foot-plus humanoids lay, evidently having been killed in an accident. They had high and broad foreheads and very long blond hair, Jean-Charles Fumoux relates. The eyes slanted upward, giving them an Asiatic look. The nose and mouth were small, the lips thin and perfectly delineated. “Despite slight differences in their facial appearances, the two humanoids looked like twins.” 

The bodies had been preserved in formalin but remained perfectly white, apparently lacking the (melanin) granules which cause normal human beings to tan in strong sunlight. Their very light blue eyes looked no different from normal, reported Visse. The hands were human-like if slender, while their feet were absolutely flat, with small toes. 35 

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico, which specializes in High Science, has a visiting scholar program, especially in fields such as physics and the theoretical sciences. I have learned that in the 1960s, a visiting scholar attended meetings seemingly wearing nothing more than a white lab coat. He was nine feet tall, with very blond hair and blue eyes, and seemed very secretive. (The lab coat apparently wasn’t sufficient to cover his private parts!) While visiting, he lived at LANL under considerable security. “Everyone was told he was a Russian physicist and that explained his peculiarity and the security,” I learned, “but those few lab scientists that met him whispered between themselves that he was not even human…. One day the visiting scholar was simply gone.” And in 1988–89, what were described as “a bunch of Russians”—about nine feet tall with blond hair—had moved into a forty-unit apartment complex at the LANL. Whoever these guys were, it’s unlikely they originated from Russia. 

In the autumn of 1999, a man and his wife hiking in New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest encountered a nine-foot-tall, extremely blond-haired man walking toward them—stark naked. “He seemed to float over the ground as he strode along and walked right past them, within a foot or so, with his head down, not saying a word. They turned in amazement, and after twenty or thirty feet he stopped and turned around to look at them. They took off up the trail, not looking back again.” 36 In both these instances, the apparent lack of embarrassment at appearing either near- or stark-naked appears to be shared by the W56 aliens. 

A Dayton, Ohio-based reporter related to me an intriguing case revealed to him by an officer serving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who admitted that while working at the Medical Center as a radiologist, evaluating X-ray scans of patients as part of his job, he came across some extraordinary abnormalities displayed in one particular scan of a patient’s spine. The officer was struck by its symmetry and flawlessness. “I mean that normal spines have all sorts of flaws, nodules, bends, and twists,” he explained. “This spine was absolutely perfect.” The officer tracked down its owner and learned that he held the rank of major, was over six feet tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with perfect proportions, a ramrod-straight posture, and he “looked to be taken from a page about the Aryan master race.” 37 The reporter contacted me because he thought there might be a connection with the reference in my previous book to the U.S. Air Force Space Command list of “Non-Terrestrial Officers,” discovered by the well known hacker Gary McKinnon. 38 

A CHILEAN COMPONENT 

In 1999–2000, Chilean National TV produced two one-hour segments on the Amicizia case. Antonio Huneeus, Chile’s leading civilian UFO researcher (now living in America), has enlightened me regarding an Amicizia group of aliens who are said to have established a base on Friendship Island, off the country’s south coast. “I worked on that series as the journalistic producer for all their American segments, although I was not involved in the Chilean cases,” Antonio pointed out. “It was a very high quality and serious production. I do believe there was something to the case…. 

“The main witness who claims there was an alien base on the Friendship island was a well-known radio broadcaster (Oscar de la Fuente, I believe) who was terminally ill and claims he was miraculously healed in the base. He told his story in detail in the TV program. 

“The producers of the show got the support of the Chilean Navy and searched for the island. They eventually located what they believed to be the island but didn’t find any traces of an alien base. There was also the allegation of a mysterious ship called Mytilus, which would transport people to the island and was not registered with the Navy as required by Chilean law. That part of southern Chile with literally hundreds of small islands would provide a perfect site for an alien base since it’s so remote.” 39 

 ENTER THE CTRS— AND UTIS 

One of the many problems associated with—and to their credit acknowledged by—those involved with the W56 group is the alleged conflict between the W56s and a large group of aliens aiming to dominate Earth—the so-called “CTRs,” named after the Italian word contrari (“enemies”). In conversation with one of the W56s at the Zanarini coffeehouse in Bologna in 1967, Stefano was informed as follows: 

“The CTRs are the result of an experiment [by W56] that has run out of control. They are robots, in the full meaning of this word, even if centuries ago they [began] biological reproduction. To you, at this point, it’s no longer possible to discriminate between a natural being and a biological robot … you would agree that a synthesized human body, with a conscience and a will imposed from outside upon a pre-existing amorphous structure, might be called a robot.” 

The man went on to explain that he and his colleagues, however, were able to determine such a distinction. “We do not consider this situation as a war, because no war can exist between natural [and artificial] beings.” 40 “The reason the CTRs are here,” Stefano told me, “is to study us because they understand that there is a difference between them and us. They were created—I don’t know where—and distributed in the universe. They want to understand how to cover the gap between themselves and us….” 41 

The CTRs—encountered by Stefano and his colleagues on a number of occasions—created divisions within Amicizia. On several occasions, for example, doppelgänger of some of the participants supposedly were “produced” to sow confusion and dissension among the group. Some—including Bruno Ghibaudi—even left the group, no longer able to cope with the situation. “Our colleagues were not able to adhere to the teachings of our friends, and our group started to disintegrate,” explained Bruno Sammaciccia. “The CTRs, little by little, were seizing the opportunity, altering documents, changing memories, even wiping out somebody’s memories … as easily as if they were showing a movie.” 42 

Discrediting of participants—supposedly initiated by the CTRs—was rife. Owing to his wealth, apparently, Bruno Sammaciccia was once falsely accused of having swindled an elderly couple of money. The case came to court and Bruno was convicted. He appealed the sentence, however, and in December 2000 was proclaimed totally innocent of all charges. 43 

In November 1978, the whole central part of the Adriatic Sea erupted, as confirmed in numerous contemporary news reports (some of which are reproduced in the book). “It lasted a full couple of months,” Stefano reported. “Huge columns of water tens of meters high suddenly arose; unprecedented waves and strange lights were seen at night, and both civilian and military radars got unexplained echoes.” One fishing boat sank inexplicably, with the loss of two fishermen, though they had not died from drowning. “The results of the autopsies conducted on their bodies were never released, and fishing activity stopped almost completely. In the meantime, over land and sea, hundreds of UFOs and their occupants were seen by all kinds of people, from policemen to farmers.” 44 What on earth was happening? 

Far beneath the seabed along this stretch of the Adriatic lay one of the W56’s larger bases, at a depth of about twelve miles from the surface. Paolo Di Girolamo writes as follows: “The CTRs were able to enter and destroy most of the W56’s bases [with casualties on both sides], including the largest one, which stretched from Ortona to Rimini, and from the center of the Adriatic to the center of Italy … the W56s themselves had forecast: ‘You’ll see waters rising [and] boiling over the place where we have built our big base.’” 45 

Stefano was skeptical about the reasons for this scenario. “Officially, there had been a terrible battle between the CTRs and the W56s,” he told me. “The latter said they had been defeated and went away, promising that they would return at the beginning of the new century. That’s the official version. My opinion is that, on the contrary, it was false information in order to justify their interruption of the contact with Bruno and his group. Because, actually, they never went away….” 46 

Stefano related to me two experiences he had while flying in aircraft, the first of which occurred near L’Aquila on May 17, 1981 (entered in his pilot’s logbook, which I examined). “I was piloting a C-Falke70 powered glider, registration I-IMAD, at an altitude of about a thousand meters above the ground, when a fast-flying disc, stone-colored, flew below my starboard wing, generating a great deal of turbulence. My starboard wing went up, the nose went up—and I was in an incipient spin. Probably for structural reasons, that aircraft could not do a spin. So I applied full power, full right rudder, pushed the stick forward, and the aircraft got back to normal. But all the way back to L’Aquila I continued to be in strong turbulence.” 

Usually, UFOs do not affect the atmosphere in this way, therefore Stefano believes the craft was based on aerodynamic principles. However, there have been occasions when severe turbulence and other disturbing effects have been encountered by planes confronted with craft of non-aerodynamic shape, such as those reported in Ireland in 2004. 47 

Stefano’s other experience occurred in 1997—as a passenger. “At that time,” he told me, “I was working in Córdoba, Argentina, so typically was flying from Rome to Madrid, then Madrid to Buenos Aires, and from there to Córdoba. On that occasion in 1997, I was flying in a Boeing 747, which I knew to be an old plane. As managing director of my company, I was flying First Class. We were probably in the mid-Atlantic, when all of a sudden there was a sudden movement of the aircraft—not turbulence—as though something was wrong. At the time, I was listening to some classical music. Then ‘Sigis’—one of the aliens I had known—announced via the headphones, ‘Don’t worry. We have the situation under control.’ 

“When we landed at Buenos Aires the next morning, as we disembarked from the plane I noticed on the port wing that a panel—about 3 X 3 feet—was missing on the upper side. I guessed it was metal fatigue, but normally, had that been the case, all the other panels would have gone too—the corrupted airflow should have taken away the other panels, depriving the wing of lift. But it was just that one. That means they were looking after me. So, you see, they never went away….” 48 

To further confuse the issue, according to Bruno Sammaciccia there was yet another group of ETs operating during this period, which he called the “UTI.” “I don’t know what he meant with those initials,” Stefano writes in his treatise, “but UTI was a group in a way on a higher level than the W56s and CTRs, whose activities they were supervising, taking action when they believed that one of the two groups was going beyond certain limits. Once, the UTIs reproached the W56s for something they’d done, and Bruno was seen weeping because he couldn’t accept that his friends had been reprimanded.” According to Stefano, an Austrian general he knew was among those in regular contact with the UTIs. 49 

PHYSIOGNOMY,CLOTHING,AND CUSTOMS 

“From a physiological point of view, the [W56s] are roughly identical to us,” Bruno learned: 

“They breathe oxygen, though they need a slightly higher percentage than we do. Most of the oxides in our atmosphere are poisonous to them, [so] they take some substances that enable them to safely metabolize those oxides. Their blood is identical to ours, has the same color, only there are many more proteins…. The main difference consists in their liver, which changes its dimensions and functions according to the environment. Acting like a sponge, when its services are not required it atrophies to the size of a fist. When they live here on Earth, their liver is very active and works as a filter for the toxins they receive in our environment. Their legs and arms are very strong [and] their brain is somewhat larger than ours, but they maintain that this doesn’t necessarily imply that they are more intelligent than us.” 

Most of the aliens with whom Bruno liaised had blond hair, and a few, black with a blueish tinge. Hair and eyelashes were thicker than ours, and some of the men sported stiff beards. “Their eyes are gray, blue, and some black with a blueish hue…. Their hands are slim, just like their bodies, with long fingers ending in nails that are some four or five millimeters longer than ours.” 50 

The W56 aliens do not use water to clean themselves. According to Bruno, they enter a kind of unit in which they are engulfed in “vibrations,” resulting in foam that exudes from their body, rendering them totally clean. “Their suits are living entities that adapt themselves to the body they cover.” “This is a strictly personal process,” Stefano points out; “one cannot wear the clothes of someone else.” Once a month, the suits are “purified” within a peculiar machine for a few minutes. 51 Defecation apparently occurs only once a week. 

They slept only two or three hours a night. Dimpietro—and probably others like him who claimed to have spent several centuries on Earth—slept for longer. 52 

Mating is the same as on Earth, though apparently they often use a form of artificial insemination and the child is born in a special device. 53 (According to Stefano and others, they are totally compatible in this respect: some have even interbred with Earth humans.) Directly over their skin, a very tight overall was worn, a “second skin” intended to protect their body against adverse temperatures, while also eliminating bodily impurities and preventing toxins from reaching their skin, Bruno learned. Over this “skin” they wore a one-piece suit, tight at the neck, wrists, and ankles, ending with shoes that formed part of the suit, and soles some five centimeters thick. These suits were colored, usually in every hue of gray, green, red, and blue, sometimes white, with a rigid collar often bordered with pale orange on the neck. They seemed to attach importance to the color of their clothes: when making important decisions, for example, they would wear translucent, almost pearl-colored suits with “moving” colors (perhaps similar to “shot” silk?). 54 

No government, as such, exists. Neither do the W56s possess a formal civil code; as a highly developed people, they know instinctively how to behave. “Our formalities are unknown to them. They do not have lawyers, courts, or the like,” Bruno explains. “To them, doing evil is plain absurd: they cannot lie; they cannot hurt anybody, nor anything.” 55 According to Stefano, however, in some circumstances killing can be justified. “One of the W56s once told me that it is not fundamentally evil to kill a man (within certain contexts),” he says. 56 

As for their religious attitudes, Bruno (the Catholic scholar) reports that they see “God” in everything, from the smallest insect to the cosmos. “Their religion is not as full of rituals as are ours: to them, it is just a deep feeling,” he writes. 57 Stefano believes their creed is similar to that of classical yoga philosophy. I concur. Having read numerous books on these matters since my student days, I have always been particularly drawn to this philosophy. 58 “Although respecting whatever creed of our planet,” wrote Stefano, “the W56s maintained that there is no need for rituals, worship, or asking for grace. God is within us….” 59 

The W56s speak a wide variety of our languages and are adept in numerous dialects. The man interviewed on tape by Stefano in Bologna, for example, was fluent in Chinese, English, German, Hindi, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Sanskrit. 60 

Regarding Sanskrit, Stefano gave me some splendid examples of references to “cosmic vehicles” and “space ships” in the rigveda Samhita , including the following: 

“O twin-leaders, your objective is clear; you have thrown open the routes of space. The pilots of your space ship have harnessed engines for your onward journey, the engines that take you safely … without accidents. Both of you have been conveniently seated in your richly decorated three-shafted craft, going along a direct path through space.” 61 

Many of Stefano’s experiences and projects were shared with his friend Giancarlo, the accountant mentioned earlier. But the lengthy contacts took their toll. Eventually Stefano terminated his participation with the W56s, as it began to impact on his professional career. “You cannot live a quiet life when you are regularly meeting aliens!” he explained to me. “And after forty years I decided to quit.” 62 

In edition to the material cited in this summary, Mass Contacts features an interesting foreword by Roberto Pinotti, one of Europe’s leading investigators. Though not directly involved with the W56s, he became aware that something exotic was going on in 1969, while studying political science at the University of Florence. At the time he was also general secretary of Centro Ufologico Nazionale, a leading Italian group. He learned from his professor that an underground alien base existed near Pescara, information acquired from important and well-connected sources. 63 

In Mass Contacts, Stefano Breccia also includes a very interesting background history relating to various extraordinary individuals, including George Washington, who over the centuries seem to have been inspired by advanced beings from elsewhere. He also writes about some of the post-World War II contactees, such as George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Dan Fry, and George Hunt Williamson, and devotes about ninety pages to the so-called “Ummo” affair. The latter is a complex and sometimes seemingly ridiculous saga beginning in 1965, when hundreds of physicists, engineers, biologists, astronomers, and selected people all over the world interested in the subject (including Stefano) began receiving strange letters from these people, individually typed, in many different languages, though primarily in Spanish. The information and diagrams covered mostly scientific and technical aspects of their craft, plus aspects of their culture and language—and much else besides. 

Like a number of other researchers, I remain skeptical about the “Ummites,” though I retain an open mind. Stefano shares my skepticism about many aspects. However, he describes personal experiences in Mass Contacts that tend to suggest that—like the W56s—something quite extraordinary was going on, which simply can’t be a hoax (by Earth humans, at least). 

With regard to the Amicizia saga, Stefano wisely cautions us not to take everything at face value. He was concerned, for example, when the W56s requested some of their contacts (including himself) to bring them certain potentially harmful substances related to their technology. As Hans explains: 

“They use a lot of mercury in most of their applications, so that Earthlings trying to [duplicate] their technology had to cope with this metal: horresco referens, a device based on a nitrogen plasma generator, with mercury pipes, that became solid thanks to a liquid air envelope … mercury is an expensive substance, not readily found in great quantities, moreover a toxic substance. We have also been working with asbestos and radioactive compounds such as radium, barium-strontium niobate and with hyper-voltage generators (beyond one mega-volt), so we were used to being careful.” 64 

“Who knows if there is anyone who actually [understands] the knowledge of what Amicizia has meant, in toto?” asks Stefano. “Who knows how many persons, all over Central Europe, are acquainted with it? … Too many have died during this period, even those foreign to it; too many people went mad, and too many have ruined their lives.” 65 

Recently, in delving through one of my files containing correspondence between George Adamski and his Swiss representative Louise “Lou” Zinsstag, by happenstance I chanced on an Amicizia connection. “I want you to know what a singular experience I had during a short visit to Italy,” Lou wrote to Adamski in July 1962. “A very good journalist named Bruno Ghibaudi wrote a whole series of articles in one paper, publishing all kinds of intriguing contact stories and also photos from other people. Among them were those of a young artist, Gaspare De Lama, from Milano, which were so interesting that I wrote to him. My Italian being rather poor, I asked a friend of mine, Curt Zäch, to accompany me to De Lama. We met him, his wife, and his mother. They are very sincere and trustworthy people; poor but of good breeding, well educated and hospitable…. De Lama tells an amazing story. He forbade me to write to anybody about it except you. 

“His first question was regarding your pamphlet on the spaceships being useful in case of cosmic wars. He had heard this from Alberto Perego through a friend, but was not sure. When I confirmed it and said that [Adamski] took this seriously, he murmured: ‘I knew that Adamski is no fool….’ 

“He then proceeded to show us his photos. This man has been able to photograph saucers since February 1962, in seven series, one of them in color: ‘A friend of mine pilots them and sometimes lets me know when they’re coming and where I can take pictures. He is an Italian like me, called Franco. He works with people from another galaxy. These people have subterranean bases here on Earth….’ 

“I asked him why his space friends were here and why they hid under the Earth. ‘In the first place, they explained that they are kind of like military people and would have to hide everywhere. They are not here to make war on us, they came to fight—not with weapons—a bad race who came to this planet some time ago in order to force us to make war with each other….’ 

“He himself has not yet had any contact. But Franco gave him some letters written by space people. They look most intriguing [though] did not much resemble the ‘letter’ from Venus which you showed me here in Basle [see p. 113]. I was all the more astonished when De Lama added (almost with your own words): ‘You see, those signs are whole sentences. Such a letter may contain the contents of a whole book….’” 

In Alien Base, I alluded to the testimony of Ghibaudi, citing a series of photographs he had taken of alien craft on the shores of the Adriatic coast in Pescara in April 1961, one of which shows a bizarre looking craft with what appear to be “wings” and “fins” set at a non-aerodynamically high dihedral angle (see photo section). A respected science journalist, Ghibaudi was a familiar figure on Italian television and radio at the time, specializing mostly in aerospace matters. Later that year, he was introduced to several of the W56 aliens, with witnesses present. They explained that although nuclear weapons remained one of the principal reasons for their increased presence, there were other reasons he was forbidden from disclosing (the alleged conflict with the CTRs undoubtedly being one, I would assume). 

Ghibaudi learned that the aliens’ reluctance to reveal themselves more openly was based not only on the danger that would ensue from public panic, but that their open appearance among Earth people would inevitably lead to negative comparisons. 

“Do not let us forget,” he pointed out, “that between their science and ours there is a gap of thousands of years, and for this reason an ‘official’ mass descent of space beings from other planets would inevitably bring about comparisons between their worlds and ours [and] there are cosmic laws which prevent the more evolved races from interfering, beyond certain limits, in the evolution and development of the more backward races….” 66

NEXT-166S

ALTERNATIVE SPACECRAFT

NOTES

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/earth-alien-enterprise.pdf

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