The Zanfretta Case

About the Author

Rino Di Stefano is a career Genoese journalist, born 1949, who studied political science at the University of Genoa before earning a journalism degree from Broward College in Florida. He joined Corriere Mercantile as a crime reporter in 1978 — the same year the Zanfretta case broke — and became a professional journalist in 1980, later joining Il Giornale (the paper founded by Indro Montanelli) in 1982, where he served as deputy chief editor in Genoa until retiring in 2007. He has published roughly eight books across his career, including a collection of Sandro Pertini's letters and a 2022 investigation into physicist Ettore Majorana's disappearance, and won the Premio Nazionale Cronache del Mistero (2014) and the Centro Ufologico Nazionale's Premio Giornalistico J. Allen Hynek specifically for his Zanfretta reporting.

The book itself has a genuinely tangled publication history worth stating plainly. Di Stefano first published a book-length account in 1984, Luci nella notte: UFO, il caso Zanfretta (Alkaest, Genoa) — the same year RAI 3 broadcast its own two-part dramatized investigation of the case. In 1997 he published a retitled, expanded edition, Il caso Zanfretta: la vera storia di un incredibile fatto di cronaca (De Ferrari, Genoa), the title under which the book has been reprinted through at least six editions since. The English translation reviewed here, published in December 2014, carries a foreword from American UFO researcher Wendelle C. Stevens — a detail this article treats with the caution it warrants (see Critical Reception, below) rather than passing over quietly.

Historical Context & Origins

The book's reporting is inseparable from Di Stefano's own role in the case's earliest days: this site's own case file documents that he personally organized the December 23, 1978 regressive-hypnosis session conducted by Dr. Mauro Moretti, during which Zanfretta, under hypnosis, first named the entities he described as "Dargos." That direct, hands-on involvement is both the book's greatest asset as a primary record and a reason to read its more dramatic claims with the same care this article applies throughout: Di Stefano was not a neutral outside chronicler arriving after the fact, but an active participant shaping how the case's earliest testimony was elicited and recorded.

The case's other central pillar — the Carabinieri investigation led by Brigadiere Antonio Nucchi, which collected 52 corroborating witness statements before a Genoa magistrate archived the file in January 1980 for "mancanza di estremi di reato" (lack of criminal elements, a procedural dismissal rather than a scientific verdict) — runs alongside Di Stefano's own reporting throughout the book, per its publisher description and the case file's own extensive sourcing on Nucchi's file. Nucchi himself resurfaced decades later, appearing alongside Zanfretta on the 2007 television program Il Bivio to state publicly, on camera, that he had personally witnessed a UFO during the original investigation and had been advised by superiors to stay silent about it — a striking late addition to the record that this site's case file documents independently of Di Stefano's book.

The case also sits inside a broader national pattern this book does not attempt to survey but that gives it useful context: 1978 was an unusually active year for Italian UFO reports generally, prompting the Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici (CISU) to hold a dedicated retrospective conference in 2018, coordinated by historian Edoardo Russo, specifically examining the year's wave of sightings and the Torriglia case's place within it.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

Per its own publisher description and the case file's independently sourced timeline, the book's central case is cumulative rather than singular: not one report but eleven, spanning 1978 to 1981, corroborated at various points by Carabinieri documentation, a subsequent sodium-pentothal interview conducted in Milan by Prof. Marco Marchesan that reproduced Zanfretta's account without material variation, and observations from psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti, who watched a televised hypnosis session and judged Zanfretta sincere while stressing the real difficulty of separating subjective conviction from objective fact in what he witnessed.

Di Stefano's book presents this accumulated record as building a case for genuine anomaly rather than fabrication or simple misperception, on the strength of Zanfretta's consistency across multiple independent elicitation methods (spontaneous statements, hypnosis, sodium pentothal) and the sheer number of secondary witnesses the Carabinieri investigation gathered. This article's own case file treats that consistency as a genuinely notable feature of the record while also documenting, independently, the specific skeptical rebuttals aimed at each of its supporting pillars — addressed next.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own Zanfretta Incident case file documents the full record in far greater depth than this book review needs to repeat: the initial December 6–7, 1978 encounter, the 52-witness Carabinieri report, the hypnosis and sodium-pentothal sessions, and the skeptical rebuttals addressing the case's physical evidence, including the widely cited explanation that ground indentations attributed to a landed craft may have been ordinary puddles, and a separate account attributing similar marks to a horse-tethering stake. Readers wanting the complete, evenly weighted record, including material this book's own author had a direct hand in producing, should consult that case file directly.

What is specific to this book is its status as an inside account: Di Stefano did not arrive to investigate a cold case but shaped its earliest documented moments, giving the book a level of direct access no later researcher, and no other single source, can match — alongside the corresponding caution that a chronicler this involved in producing testimony is not positioned to evaluate it with full independence.

Critical Reception & Controversies

As of this article's research (August 2026), no dedicated English-language trade or skeptical-press review of this specific translation could be found, consistent with its status as a self-published, CreateSpace-distributed edition rather than a traditionally reviewed release. The book's standing within Italian ufology is stronger and better documented: Di Stefano won the Centro Ufologico Nazionale's Premio Giornalistico J. Allen Hynek and the Premio Nazionale Cronache del Mistero specifically for this reporting, both real, named recognitions from identifiable Italian bodies.

One detail requires direct, unambiguous disclosure rather than a passing mention: the English edition's foreword is written by Wendelle C. Stevens (1923–2010), a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and prolific UFO author who was, by a wide margin, best known for promoting Swiss contactee Billy Meier's "Pleiadian" photographs — material Meier's case is widely regarded within ufology, including by researcher Jacques Vallée, as one of the field's most notorious photographic hoaxes. Independently of that professional association, court records confirm Stevens pleaded guilty in 1983 in Tucson, Arizona to multiple counts of child molestation and related charges and served roughly seven years in prison; he maintained the prosecution was politically motivated, a claim this article found asserted only by Stevens himself and his supporters, not corroborated by any independent source. None of this reflects on Di Stefano's own reporting or on the Zanfretta case's underlying facts, which this site's case file evaluates entirely on their own separately sourced record — but a foreword writer's documented history is exactly the kind of detail this site's editorial standards require surfacing plainly rather than omitting.

Influence & Legacy

The book's clearest legacy is longevity: a first edition in 1984, a retitled and expanded edition in 1997 that has itself been reprinted through at least six further editions, and an English translation in 2014 that carries the case beyond Italy's borders for the first time in book form. Few UFO cases anywhere have a single chronicler this continuously engaged across five decades, from organizing the original hypnosis sessions in December 1978 to discussing the case on podcasts as recently as 2024.

Set alongside this site's own case file, which draws on the Carabinieri file, the skeptical rebuttals, and independent Italian-press coverage in addition to Di Stefano's own reporting, this book is best read as the case's primary journalistic spine — indispensable for its direct access, and correspondingly best balanced against independent sourcing on the points where its author's own involvement in producing the testimony is itself part of what needs to be weighed.

The Book

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