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17: Advancing European UAP research
108 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, I speak with Edoardo Russo, a founding member of the Italian Center for UFO Studies (CISU) and a prominent figure in European UFO research. We explore the history and mission of CISU, uncovering how the organisation has contributed to UFO research in Italy and across Europe.
The discussion also highlights the role of UFO databases in tracking sightings and delves into a significant event at the European Parliament, which brought UAP to the political forefront. Additionally, Mr. Russo shares insights into UFO data from Italy, including a fascinating case involving military fighter jets.
Overall, this episode provides a comprehensive look at the key developments and ongoing efforts in European UFO research.
Organisations mentioned in this episode:
Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici (CISU): https://www.cisu.org/
UAP Check: https://www.uapcheck.com/
Edoardo Russo’s profile on CISU: https://www.cisu.org/edoardo-russo/
Get in touch with the show
Twitter/X: @EuropeanUFOs
Instagram: europeanufos
Facebook: European UFOs
Email: [email protected]
Support the podcast to keep it ad-free: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/europeanufos
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction & Support
00:00:14
Speaker
and welcome to European UFOs. My name is Sebastian, and if you liked this episode, then please leave a review on your chosen platform. Any sharing and liking you do makes a huge difference to the algorithm and is very much appreciated. Also, if you want to support me in keeping the show ad free for listeners, then please go to BuyMeACoffee.com. Therefore, less than the price of a coffee, you can really make a difference. The link to BuyMeACoffee.com is in the description.
Introducing Eduardo Rosso
00:00:44
Speaker
In today's episode, I'm speaking with Eduardo Rosso, a key figure in European UFO research and a founding member of the Italian Center for UFO Studies, that is CHISU. We delve into the fascinating history and mission of CHISU, exploring how the organization shapes UFO research in Italy and beyond.
CHISU's Role in UFO Research
00:01:05
Speaker
Our discussion also touches on the importance of UFO databases in tracking and studying sightings across Europe, as well as the significant event at the European Parliament in March this year, which brought much needed attention to UAP on a broader political stage.
Rosso's Journey in UFO Research
00:01:22
Speaker
Moreover, Mr Rousseau shares his insights on the nature of UFO data in Italy, highlighting a particularly intriguing case study involving a UFO and military fighter jets.
00:01:35
Speaker
Hello, Mr. Rosso. Great to have you on the podcast today. How are you doing? Brian, thank you for inviting me so we can have some talk about our subject. Yes, so certainly much appreciated. Mr. Rosso, you are a notable figure not only in Italian ufology, but on a European scale. So how did you personally get interested in UFOs and what motivated you to pursue this topic?
Critical Thinking in UFO Studies
00:02:07
Speaker
It's a very sad story because it's an old story. I began my interest in the subject when I was 14. Since now, I am 65. That means that I spent a lot of my life chasing UFOs, let's say so. And when I was younger, I was a true believer in just everything I read books, magazines,
00:02:35
Speaker
But I was lucky enough to join a local group that was the oldest existing group in my country and was publishing a journal article called Clipeus. And I found a sort of Pygmalion raising me and teaching me some more critical an approach so that the very soon I realized that not all that glitters are UFOs and the a lot of critical thinking should be applied ah to the topic and what is published about it and that's how I passed from a true believer approach to what is a more scientifically oriented one that is
00:03:31
Speaker
still my approach now and my opinion is that this subject can be studied following the scientific method even if there are people who think it cannot ah and there are even more people that think they are following a scientific approach but are not doing science And the ah second important issue is that the we have to apply a very prudent approach instead of all the published hype that is usually surrounding our subject as a sort of framework, or reasoning framework.
Identifying UFO Sightings
00:04:16
Speaker
ah Let's say that we have two sides of the same coin
00:04:21
Speaker
One side is the phenomenon. People that tell they saw something they could not understand and recognize identified. And we now know that more than 90% of what is seen and reported as UFOs in a large sense,
00:04:44
Speaker
are, in reality, identifiable, not by the witnesses, but by some competent examination. Not even so difficult a competence, even if with a very cursory examination of what is seen, you can arrive to identify as UFOs, identified flying objects, ah As I was saying more than 90% of the reported sightings. And these are no longer UFOs in the strict sense. We are left with a very very low percentage of unexplained reports, which does not mean that they are unexplainable. But at the same time, in my opinion, after all these years, we still have not found a sure interpretation.
Psychological Aspects of UFO Sightings
00:05:32
Speaker
The fact that that so large a percentage of sightings are identifiable does not mean that this is not an interesting part of the subject. In my opinion, it is even more interesting to understand why this is happening. It's not just that offering people an answer to the questions because even now, more than in the past, ah Most witnesses are not so interested in having a real answer. They prefer to believe in what they already have ah concluded about their own sightings. So I am very respectful of so of witnesses and their opinions and not insisting on anybody. The more so since witnesses are a tool, are raw material and so we need them.
00:06:32
Speaker
But as I was saying, there are two sides in the coin. The other side is what we have been long been calling the UFO mix, even if ah the expression of mythology is a non-technical definition.
UFOs and Public Mythology
00:06:45
Speaker
But this means the set of ideas of iconography or images of opinions about the subject.
00:06:56
Speaker
And we know for sure that the the two sides are interconnected. We cannot say that the first one one generated the second one or the second one generated the first. There are researchers who are of either opinion and the debate is open as you know.
Cultural Influence on UFO Perception
00:07:15
Speaker
But what we know is that there is a feedback effect that we may be sure that even the proverbial housewife in the country now no for a long time after Steven Spielberg's closing concerts of the third kind movie ah Each country knows that when UFOs arrive, the dogs are barking, the TV set is not working fine. So what we called the virgin weakness that was still a reality in the 70s when I began is now no longer existing. So many people are already having an idea, the concept of UFO
00:08:03
Speaker
has they even been charged semantically. It's no longer a neutral name as it was meant to be when the United States Air Force decided that flying sources was too much qualifying, interpreting the name. And so they prefer the new neutral name as unidentified flying out. And so much now UFO or the equivalent acronyms in different languages is now meaning extraterrestrial vehicles in the mind of nearly everybody, ah to the point that now a new acronym is being searched and found that that has changed the meaning in the last few years, so it was an identified or unexplained IRL phenomena, then for some silly reason
00:08:53
Speaker
it's become a sort of oxymor and at the same time redundancy like of and I identified a normalose phenomena that we might discuss upon but as Shakespeare said what's in a name that would be a very long issue but a urfo is the The topic is very emotionally charged because of the reason. It is touching some heavy cords in our minds in this 20th century, now 21st century, let's say, post-war imaginary. And it is an important thing to study in itself.
70s Italy UFO Culture
00:09:39
Speaker
If we are talking about the physical sciences, if we are talking about the human sciences,
00:09:46
Speaker
We are talking about the life sciences. There is always something that may be of interest. Sometimes I use a metaphor saying that UFOs are like and a Rorschach inkblot test, that psychological test where you are shown an inkblot and ask it what do you see in it. Well,
00:10:09
Speaker
But what we say that we see is telling us more about ourselves than about the blood in itself. And the UFOs are offering an opportunity to say something to us, even if I cannot say, I cannot deny, I cannot claim that there is a genuine physical external phenomenon behind. And if it was not there, it would be as interesting, if not even more interesting than just that the let's say simple concept of an extraterrestrial ah flying saucer coming from outer space that is the typical little green man imaginary. Now no longer green, they became grays. Everything is changing and nothing is changing at all.
00:10:58
Speaker
Yes, thanks a lot. And I totally agree that a um scientific approach that also draws on different areas of science, be it from the social sciences, humanities, but also natural sciences, is the right way to approach this complex phenomenon. And um indeed, we might learn something about ourselves, about the human condition, as it were, by studying and UFOs or UAPs, as they are now called.
00:11:28
Speaker
and So you've been around the block with UFOs, so to speak. e um You've studied this for a very long time. What was the scene in Italy like when you got seriously invested into this?
Minority Theories on UFOs
00:11:42
Speaker
I already mentioned that there are certain currents in ufology that considered it more on a kind of mythological level, on perhaps a spiritual level. So what was the landscape like when you entered it?
00:11:58
Speaker
When I began reading about these topics there was the largest part of those who were ah interested in the subject and it was a very strange period because in the early 70s we were having an explosion of a teenager UFO Buff groups, literally hundreds all over Italy. It was a trendy subject. We had a lot of and magazines in the news and about mysteries and not just UFOs and so on. So the largest part of all these people, both the real researchers, students, and this generation of UFO Buffs were simply sure
00:12:46
Speaker
that there were extraterrestrial visitors of one kind or another. There were some discussions, are they good or evil? A classical question. And there was a a minority of people that were more a along what was called the Paraphysical Theory.
00:13:08
Speaker
It is not something, someone arriving from outer space, but somebody, something that has been existing on our planet since a long time ah and living with us in some other dimensions or something like that. And that this was a minority, but it was something that fascinated me at the time. And in my personal experience,
00:13:33
Speaker
It was like a Trojan horse ah in order to discuss, to context, the the simple ETH, external terrestrial hypothesis, on the first degree. And the it took a long and complex series of questions about the structure and the server structure and what about the Soviet structure working, even if there were no structure behind
Media Hype and Continuous Interest
00:14:03
Speaker
it. And so even if the UFOs have gone, there was an American researcher, Keaton Randall, that once advanced the hypothesis that the UFOs and extraterrestrials had visited Earth. And up to a given year, 1973, when he was young, they were real aliens abducting people and so on. But after that, there were no more
00:14:25
Speaker
visitors and the phenomenon or better the myth was going on by itself. It's a fascinating idea, even if it's not an economical hypothesis in the outcome sense, but that tells us something about the fact that there are people realizing that even if there were no unexplainable sightings, there will still be sightings and reports and stories and that this won't go away. I'm not persuaded that the UFO team is finished as some authors have written and you know in the last let's say seven years
00:15:06
Speaker
ah We have seen the contrary that the new wave of ah interest, of media hype, of revelations, of the conspiracy theories have erupted as usual from the other side of the Atlantic, arrived up to us. And here we are again with the merry-go-round discussing about ah these or that issue, some very interesting thing. What is most interesting is that this new wave of interest has brought an unprecedented quantity of ah scientists, academicians and researchers from the university that entered this ah subject more than any time before.
00:15:53
Speaker
even if with some naivety, even if ah most of them are just restarting from scratch, repeating the same errors that we did the in the past, reinventing the wheel sometime. And so I think that it is a duty, a moral duty of us old timers to try to lend a hand, try to give some indications about what we have been able to learn in the last 75 years. So to concentrate some resources on the most promising issues, not just dispersing ourselves in following the false traits or in the worst the hypothesis, and I am along this pessimistic
00:16:42
Speaker
line when all this will be finished because the waiver will be over sooner or later and a lot of these people will remain deluded and will lose their interest. as Well, let's hope that some will remain with us as it has been in the past and we will have some new blood from scientific oriented people lending a hand in ah in a better way than it was in these last decades.
CHISU's Mission & Volunteer Work
00:17:09
Speaker
Yes, it's very interesting and true what you said that there is a notable interest amongst the established scientists to deal with this topic more and more. I think there's still some resistance, but um just this year was actually on two conferences organized by scientists for scientists dealing with this issue and yeah sometimes you feel as though they want to reinvent the wheel but um on other occasions you also have noticed that the fresh perspective on this topic is is quite useful it certainly got me thinking in different ways about about this issue so that that was quite interesting.
00:17:55
Speaker
and So you are um in the managerial board of and the CHISO organization, which um stands for the Italian Center for the Study of UFOs. um What is the mission of this organization?
00:18:19
Speaker
This organization is an association, so it is made by volunteers who spend their time bunny and in studying, collecting data and so on. It came from ah a previously existing organization because Italians are known for litigating among others and so dividing, re-dividing and so on. And the it it was an is that and it is meaning to ah coordinate activities and but promote the scientific study of vehicles. We do not have the presumption to be able to do scientific study.
00:19:04
Speaker
But we are keeping the flame or the flag up so that ah all the collected data are not lost ah and so on in our country. So coordinating and promoting, collecting, ah collecting means both citing reports.
Cataloging UFO Sightings
00:19:24
Speaker
We have long been collecting data from Italian witnesses and investigating sightings and analyzing those data, archiving them, creating catalogs that may be regional catalogues automatic catalogs catalogs. For example, the pilot sightings or the USO, the unidentified submerged objects or the vehicle interference reports, whatever you may see, what whatever specific subtype of reports,
00:20:01
Speaker
has got its own catalog or specialized student. The association in this moment is made of two levels of people. The first, the basic level is virtually anybody that is interested in keeping in contact and telling, aid I am a collaborator, but cannot speak for the group. but While there is a second level that is the full members, it's only 60 people as of now. So a few dozens that are qualitatively, may I presume, a for activity seriousness, engagements and so on. And and so nominated by the board by the Council of Directors and the 60 people are the
00:20:57
Speaker
In a circle, let's say so and it is a stable group. Most of them have been. In the organization and in your photo for decades.
00:21:08
Speaker
while the external circle is coming and going. So new people are coming then realizing that it is not what they were looking for and so on. We have had more than 1,000 people coming and going in these last ah few decades because this group was formed about 40 years ago, in the end of 1995.
00:21:35
Speaker
And are you centrally organized in Italy or are there different branches like for instance with Mufon?
CHISU's Archives and Continuity
00:21:44
Speaker
There are local branches or local representatives according to the number of people where there is more than one. In the same town they usually work together and we have a place, a central
00:22:02
Speaker
how to order, let's call it so, where we keep a the our large archives. We have not been having the largest existing UFO archive in Europe. ah If we don't consider the very specific situation of Sweden, because you know the largest existing archive in the world are stored in our shopping in Sweden. But if you don't consider that, we have a rather large place. It's more than 150 square meters full of paper, books, ah investigation reports, periodicals and whatever. And this has been like that for a long time because the local group ah in my town, Torino,
00:22:49
Speaker
ah is the oldest existing group. It was originally from 1949, not as Chizu, of course, a but has been regularly meeting since 1979. Each week ah we have a regular meeting working or discussing. And that this has been good for ah keeping a continuity in data collection, in that organization, and whatever is needed for a non-organization, because when we say association, that means our spare time. And while it was easier when we were young students, ah when you had got families to work and other engagements, it become more difficult. But some of the people that are still the organizers in the national organization are the same ones
00:23:45
Speaker
that have been doing that since the beginning. So it means it's not just something of a passion for a short time, but a very heavy engagement in the good and in the bad side. but We are not normal people, we are somewhat full of that.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yes, I think you need, well, I think being serious about ufology is ah to be considered more like a marathon as opposed to being on a sprint, so I completely ah understand.
00:24:20
Speaker
I see you just mentioned the archive. um How do you get data into the archive is that through field investigators who then um collect data and put them into the archive or is there a way to report those sightings of your website or through field investigators.
Methods of Data Collection
00:24:44
Speaker
Because of such a long history.
00:24:46
Speaker
for different experiences of so many people, we are literally trying to do everything. That is, we have witnesses ah directly communicating their own sightings on our website, on questionnaire forms to be filled, even if I have long been contrary to this kind of data collection because any questionnaire form is forcing testing there There is a lot of literature about that we haven't been discussing about it in the 17 days. I wrote the first edition of our investigation manually in 1984. And it was written that never use questionnaires because we need to go collect an open description without asking questions. So, well, it's not always possible to do that. The best way is an investigation. Go.
00:25:41
Speaker
talk directly with the people, with the witnesses, may better would be on the place, making measurements and photos on place and so on. And we still have field investigations and field investigators doing that work, even if it's not always worthy. It's not for single lights in the sky. Even if it is good to start, even investigating lights in the sky,
00:26:08
Speaker
once a young man came to us telling, I'm here because I want to investigate abduction reports. And I told him before going to investigate an abduction, you have to be able to investigate a simpler case. So please, let's begin with some light in the sky and then see if you are able. so on and But we are not just ah using direct testimonies that we collect in either way. We are still, and we have always been chasing every single news item, be it from newspapers or specialized periodicals or other groups' the documentation. And in the last 30 years, let's say, yes, 30 years,
00:26:57
Speaker
the internet has become an important tool.
Internet's Role in UFO Reporting
00:27:00
Speaker
We now are deluged by social groups made of witnesses, like a sort of self-help group. They are no longer interested in telling their experiences to the newspaper, or to but it is a a self-publication, be it on Facebook, on any other social network. So we are forced to try to monitor All this, and not all of us are happy about it because some say it's a dispersion of resources. But you know we have long been knowing that the what we collected was just as small, a very small part of the total number of sightings. And the the discussion in literature has long been, what are we losing? For example, in 1975, in his book, Invisible College, Jacqueline
00:27:55
Speaker
a former astronomer and an informatician, formerly French, then American, one of the fathers of the scientific up approach in the project at the high group, made and i main hypothesis that the more strange the experience was, the less probable it was that it came to us. And so his idea was that the most important experiences were the part we were losing.
00:28:20
Speaker
We didn't know if it was true, it was an hypothesis. We were sure that we were only getting very few testimonies. Opinion polls, for example, in my car, we can say the same all over Europe as far as we have been collecting, say that there was about 6.5% of the other population thinking they have some UFOs. In Italy, it was about 3 million and a half witnesses.
00:28:49
Speaker
But even if we had a very large, we are having a very large collection of reports, let's say 33, 34,000 reports, that was meaning 1%. So we were not having the top of the iceberg. We were only scratching the surface of the iceberg. And we were wondering, what are we losing? The best, the worst. ah ah Are we sampling correctly what is being seen?
00:29:19
Speaker
When we had the possibility to be reached directly by the witnesses, you go on look Google saying, I saw a UFO and you find us because we had a very good positioning in in any search tool. Well, we have been getting many, many reports orders of brightness bigger than that and we realized that we were now getting a worse noise signal to noise ratio. So probably the largest part of what was not reported were the less important sightings, the distant lights in the sky. This is something that we
00:30:06
Speaker
have been realizing more recently, let's say in the last 10 years or so. And so but it's not so dramatic the fact that we are losing experience. But for example, you mentioned the mutual useful network, the MUFON, the American MUFON. I am a local ah representative MUFON. So I get the reports arriving from my country to MUFON. And I can say that they are different.
00:30:34
Speaker
believe that it will be different from those that are arriving to us. It is like witnesses are choosing who to report their experiences. There are many more abduction reports coming from Italy to Mofon than to Chizu. Even if there is a language barrier, it's strange that an Italian is going on an American website, filling an English language form instead of looking for an Italian group. So there must be some motivation for that. I am just reporting some things we are still discussing and reasoning about.
00:31:17
Speaker
It may be a wrong and interpretation. Very interesting. and I mean, collecting data for a very difficult phenomenon is is certainly a challenge. um How do you go about, because you've been instrumental in instructing what is the largest database in Europe, as as you said, and if we ignore the one in in in Sweden, the archive there.
00:31:41
Speaker
um How did you go about constructing it? Is it digitized completely? And what what was the process of doing this? I did not understand the question. and and So how did you construct the UFO database that you use in Chizu? Is that a digital database? No, our archives are essentially physical archives. We are still talking about paper.
00:32:10
Speaker
even investigation reports ah that are now written on computers, are text. We've got a lot more pictures, photographs than in the past, but the digital photography and the fact that each one of us is now going around and wandering with a photo camera in in our pockets, in our cell phone, has not brought us ah better evidence than in the past, ah but we've got a new kind of digital artifacts and errors and the like. But the largest part of our archives are physical, analogic paper archives. When we are talking about databases, we should be more precise. We have long been cataloging, creating lists. There have been several attempts to build what could properly be called databases.
Standardizing UFO Databases
00:33:05
Speaker
But for example,
00:33:06
Speaker
there exists no real database, I would like to say, in the world, because it's not just an Italian ah problem. we ah discussing We have been discussing in the last few months ah about a better standardization of data collection and the creation of databases, because the existing ones, even the largest one,
00:33:36
Speaker
especially the largest ones, are very simple in the structure, while those that are very well structured are very little as of dimension. And it's a very uneasy fact to agree upon. Instead of just discussing on a national level something that we have been doing for a long time because I first began creating
00:34:05
Speaker
a very sketchy database in Italian reports database in 1991. And we have been having several attempts, ah all of them remaining more or less incomplete. And now We are even realizing that maybe it's no longer necessary, that it would be easier and better to have all this analogical information collected in digital format in a simple text structure and have some large language models or yeah artificial intelligence tools to go looking, searching, finding, and sometimes hallucinating
00:34:51
Speaker
results and we are having some experiments about it but at the same time we are trying now to build let's call it a European index of UFO reports because ah what is not so well understood or perceived is that we are always having more sighting reports in the old continent than in the America, let's say North America, because it's a standard stereotype. Even if just because we are we have got a larger population in Europe, the problem of our continent is that we are very fragmented in ah about 45 countries speaking different languages and not so easily complicating with each other. But our first indications are that the
00:35:46
Speaker
The simple total of the collected sightings by the national UF organizations in Europe is larger than any American database. Even just the summing the already existing collections. ah And you continue to discover new things. There is one is a new international initiative that was started last year that is called UAP Check.
00:36:14
Speaker
And it has forced some people to meet together more intensely than in the past. And in just ah one year of communications, we found two examples of what I was studying. We discovered the existence of a group in Czechia, the western part of the former Czechoslovakia, that has been collecting reports from the public for 30 years.
00:36:41
Speaker
They have been collecting several thousand reports, doing the same work that we have always done, trying and finding an explanation for the largest part, ah having a small residual unexplained report and so on. After 50 years, these projects are decided to stop the activities because it was useless in their eyes. They were just getting reports, explaining the largest part and didn't know what to do. After we met and exchanged our experiences, the Czech group decided to start again because they said, we are not alone. We found that, and it was only the piece, still the language barrier, their large database
00:37:24
Speaker
several thousand reports is in their language. So it's difficult for any but it was difficult for anybody but them to understand. Now even the automatic translators ah theformaticic tools can allow us to have a look at it. At the same time, we had always been wondering about Greece. How was it possible that there were so few reports in international databases about Greece? Well, you know, Greece has not always its own language.
00:37:54
Speaker
they always They also have some alphabet. It's difficult to grasp. But in the Italian group, the there come a Greek university professor that just left Greece, got to the United States, then come back to Italy they to teach. And we were when we were young, 1977, 1978, he was my correspondent in Athens.
00:38:24
Speaker
we We knew each other. So when we are gray and old now, we found ourselves gay. And it has been instrumental in reconnecting us with the Greek researchers. And we discovered that there are groups, that there are as many as 12,000 reports already collected and now entered into an English language catalog. And we knew nothing about it. Of course, the Greek were knowing the Greek reports, just like the Italians were knowing the Italian records. But the German or the French people were happily living ah without without this knowledge. Are they useless? Are they interesting things? I don't know. Nobody knows. But one of the
00:39:12
Speaker
presently followed. Goals is to put all this European mass of data together and see. For example, we discover you were mentioning the the Europe Parliament meeting, for example. You may know that behind the all this, there was a very small group of Dutch people from the Netherlands. UAP coalition was formed two years ago.
00:39:42
Speaker
in order to create ah something workable, creating a channel for communication of sightings by professionals, pilots, policemen, because there was what is now called the stigma about our topic. And they they are new buys, they are arriving now at the topic, but they were and speechless in discovering that pilots were not telling their stories because they were fearing a negative cause sequences. And so they began very good activity in their own country in the Netherlands and on a European level, the more so since one of the directors has been a European consultant for a long time. So he knew how to move.
00:40:33
Speaker
Well, one of the issues that we are working on with them is the air safety issue. I'm not so persuaded that there is an air safety problem with UFOs, but it is a very good subject because it is one of the competence of the European Union. While the military side defense suspects are national aspects and are not not yet the European level and so each Ministry of Defense, each army is very private to their data. Air safety is something that is on a larger scale.
00:41:09
Speaker
well promise with yeah can can Can I just ask you before we get into the European european Parliament event, I'm fascinated by the idea of compiling a pan-European database on UFO sightings.
Pan-European UFO Index Efforts
00:41:25
Speaker
and Is there any organization that is and particularly involved in this in europe so for instance is cheese in the lead here or is it. shes not chi is not in the lead We have got our own database but there are some there are there existing senior. Examples everywhere in other that was doctor sleeping.
00:41:50
Speaker
was the Spanish national database. I should say Iberian, because it's also comprising authorities and underran reports. And it was activated in 2011 by a collective that was called, it was around the journal Quadernos Leophogia, then called Anomalia. And it was ah an individual ah researcher from Pablo Gonzalez that it started it.
00:42:16
Speaker
by merging the existing databases, the regional ones, the pilot ones, the landing, the variant landing catalogs, existing in that country, in those countries. And he built this one that is called Hooko, Catalogo Unificado de Casos Orvni. And he has been working on that for more than 10 years. And it was a sleeping project now because it was completed. But a few months ago, it was started again.
00:42:46
Speaker
If you have a look on the Euro, UFO, Net, YouTube channel, you will find a presentation that the ah Pablo gave us in July explaining the work and so on. And it was reactivated. So there exist several national databases. There is one in the United Kingdom. There is one in Eurasia, Norway. There is one in Denmark. there is There are two very large ones in Germany. There is one in Switzerland.
00:43:15
Speaker
Nearly every ah European country has been having a more or less complete and more or less large one. And the project is the first step is to put them all together in order to have not a real database, a preliminary index just to know in what a date, in what place something was reported, and pre preferably what kind of thing. It was like a close encounter. There was physical evidence of north. When we left this one as a first step, we would go on. There are large projects that are not Italian. It's a European project to work together. yeah There exists
00:43:58
Speaker
a European network of researchers that have been existing since 2001, and one it is called a Euro UFO Net. And it's comprising about 100 people. It was not ah of organization. It was a network of active people, scientifically oriented people only, so not the the exopolitics ah gang or ah the those that are waiting for the Space Brothers or things like that.
00:44:28
Speaker
And they have been doing a lot of things on a very low level, but keeping a a very strict connection with a lot of people, I can say that these 100 people have been working for 20 years together. There are people coming, going, of course, but it's going from, I should not say Russia to Portugal and from Scandinavia to to Greece.
00:44:56
Speaker
And this is disease yeah environment I was talking about when we were talking about the database. It was not a priority. Some of these organizations are not thinking that it is a priority. But since there is a project, ah usually when someone in the group has a project, the others are following and helping. So I am confident that we will arrive to have a first step completed by the end of this year with a very, very, very first unscathed list. That would be a first step to go on because the projects are more large than this. let's That's amazing. i mean it would be
00:45:43
Speaker
first index of UFO sightings across Europe. That's that's excellent work. and and so Is there a task force within this UFO EuroNet you mentioned? Has there a team that's been put together to to do this? or ah does it work Yes, it's been informed by the working group.
00:46:05
Speaker
of comprising at least the one person for each country, at least one of those that are doing this kind of activity, because not everyone is interested in this. but If there is someone interested in sociological issues, may be uninterested in data collection, but normally there is at least a one person in each country, at least one organization with at least one person that is charged with the this task. And so we simply put together all those that are sharing this activity. There are some informations that are not the ones that are doing the local activity, but they are the technicians that have to ah give us the proper tools and suggestions of what to do and what not to do, let's say so.
00:47:01
Speaker
So yes, there is a working group but now. It's more within the UAP Check initiative than in Europe, that there is an overlapping. It's not a closed shop. Anybody coming up and saying, hey,
00:47:16
Speaker
I am having a database, ah even dead databases. One of my activities because I am charged of networking because one of the few things that I can do for good is that since I've been in the topic for a long time, I know a lot of people because we have been exchanging publications meeting and so on. and so whatever If you ask me who is doing this kind of activity around, I can give you the references of who is doing it. Are you interested in neurophysiological effects, ah physical effects on witnesses? I can tell you who in each country has been working on this, what publications have been
00:48:04
Speaker
made available, and so on. And so this is ah the thing that we have been extending to the past database. We have been chasing old databases that are no longer existing. For example, we recovered about half a dozen branch databases that are no longer existing.
00:48:29
Speaker
updated because the man that was doing that is no longer active or so on. But if possible, we are recovering the data. There is a French researcher, Jerome Bo, that has long been thinking and telling about this is occupation, preoccupation has always been of not losing informatics data, because it's silly.
00:48:54
Speaker
eight in i so Unfortunately, I could the name cases of very famous data collections that went lost. For stupid reasons, for something that was kept very large database of closing counters of the third kind, Humanoid Reports, that was a kept by a French university professor,
00:49:15
Speaker
It was on an Amstrad very old computer. When it changed to other systems, he did not save it. He is no longer interested in such, but nobody has kept or has got and kept a copy of this database. Another one that was kept ah by a small group of technicians and engineers that were working in the
00:49:41
Speaker
It was an atomic energy European working plant. There was a small UFO group there in the 70s and 80s. They created a database of reports about a specific year, 1977, for statistical reasons. They built a mixed database of French reports, of Italian reports, comparing them and so on.
00:50:09
Speaker
And it is not no longer available in digital format for technical reasons, but we got the listings, the paper, complete the printouts. So we were able to ah use an OCR and rebuilding the the original database.
00:50:28
Speaker
And now, hopefully, not to lose it again, made several copies, distributed copies, and so on. And this is just one or two examples of several activities that are being followed. You know, there are some large international databases, the most famous one was originally created by Jacqueline.
00:50:49
Speaker
A very long time ago for testing an hypothesis that was orthoteny, the idea that the UFOs were moving along a straight lines. And it was helpful to demonstrate that it was not not like that falsifying the hypothesis. It was a very first scientific study. Then he donated his database to the Colorado University study group that we are calling a conon rap of the Committee.
00:51:18
Speaker
It was taken by a psychologist, David Saunders, who was renamed the UFOcat. Saunders enlarged it. Then he donated it ah to the Center for Repostatist. It was created by J.L. Anainek and became the central archive of Kufos. And it is now still being updated by another researcher, is Don Johnson. He is now living in Thailand, isn't a big and it is the largest database.
00:51:48
Speaker
several other claiming to be large databases in the world are just stealing and using the UFO cutter data and you can realize this when you look at the data inside and they are not even often not crediting the original database and it is the largest existing one even if it is badly lacking if you have a look at Spanish reports or German rap or Greek reports in Ufocata you can see that there are very very few. So I cannot imagine how many reports are already existing in the hands of our community but not shared and this is one of the things that we should work on.
00:52:36
Speaker
Yes, so I think it's ah it's a really fascinating initiative um you just outlined there with the index of UFO sightings in in Europe. It's something I hadn't heard about and I'm very um excited that and someone is taking up this this huge project and actually um doing it. And um so you you mentioned probably towards the end of the year there will be an update on this. um We gave us a deadline because if you don't give ah you when it is a large but the problem is that the same group of researchers and organizations gave themselves a few other a similar or different aims and sometime you have you are a you're running behind several
00:53:34
Speaker
targets designed So there was a necessity for an important article to be published in the peer review journal in the USA. And we were asked to help create a knowledge base of scientific articles. That was one of the goals that we were working in a different working group.
00:53:55
Speaker
And so in within a few months, ah we were forced to set aside the other things and concentrate on this that now is already available as a double searchable database online of all the university cases and dissertations about the subject and over a scientific journal articles about your force it's a difficult issue to understand what is the scientific journal let's say peer-reviewed journals with an imperfector not less than a given amount because you can find just everything about journalists are just you pay and they publish you know the topic so it's difficult for example two examples journal of scientific exploration is it a scientific journal
00:54:45
Speaker
In the mainstream community, it's not thought at least. We are thinking it is, for example, but it's not acceptable to some or in Germany, such as for an animalistic.
00:54:56
Speaker
Is it a scientific journal or not? Yes and no. and Physiology aplantarum, that is a typical one that published a long time ago an article showing the crop circles were explained and then refused to publish articles rebooting that result. It's a very hard issue, but ah a large collection of several hundreds scientific journal articles were published.
00:55:23
Speaker
And we would like to compare this collection with another one that was built from scratch by a young American professor in the University of Florida that last year published an article, Gretchen Saltman. And she she did a completely different thing. She used some specific search motors.
00:55:45
Speaker
asking for keywords and got 2,000 results. Then she filtered out the errors, the applications, the property and selected the collection of about 200.
00:56:00
Speaker
ah using some very specific work. So she missed the something, she included something. And she created an article with statistical study of what was published in what kind ah of scientific fields, for example, how many were in humanities, how many in physical sciences. But we still have not compared that. we We first had to create our own database, and then we can offer something in exchange, let's say so.
00:56:28
Speaker
Sure. So data collection and analysis is only ah one part of all the things you do. and You're also active in raising public awareness and also political awareness of the UAP issue. And um there was a significant event um in March this year at the European Parliament.
Political Awareness & UAP
00:56:51
Speaker
Could you give us an overview of your involvement and what the overall mission of that event was?
00:56:59
Speaker
where my role was very small, I was playing the part of an extra, an extra with making it a part of the talk, the the activity was ah instigated and really coordinated for more than a year by a new group, a new Dutch group, the European coalition.
00:57:21
Speaker
They had been working behind the scenes and contacting several politicians, both in their country and in the European Parliament, because some of them had some specific competence in that. And they were able to offer some of their members, for example, a pilot that has been a witness themselves. And so they could knock on some doors and finally found at least at least though one that the was a European member of the parliament from Portugal, Francisco Guerrero. He accepted to take this in his hand because it was something in his courts. He has never been interested before in the subject, but he saw how to
00:58:07
Speaker
a make it enter in his reference structure or what he was interested in as a green member of the parliament and so he did literally all that would be done spoken intervention if in plenary assembly interrogations to the commission and So on he he did as many as five or six different things, some of them got a media coverage, and in the end before finishing his parliamentary experience because he was not standing for re-election, so he had nothing to lose, let's say so.
00:58:48
Speaker
He had a meeting European Parliament organized meant for ah parliamentary members, ah officers, ah agencies, and the the idea was ah of having ah some testimonies. There were for testimony One was by the Dutch pilot I was talking about. Another one was another pilot by remote connection because he was one of the American people that had gone testimony in front of the House of the Representatives subcommittee last year. There was somebody from the UAP coalition giving a general presentation of the topic.
00:59:36
Speaker
There was a Swedish astronomer, a scientist, a woman that talked about the possibility of studying UFOs in a scientific way. And they needed somebody who gave a short synthetic overview, historical overview of what had happened as of events or studies in Europe. And that was the small part that I was asked to do. So we prepared and discussed what to tell, not just to tell in this moment and to have it recorded and spread on the Internet, but remaining on the records. That's the real meaning. It was an event. There were papers that formed a file, a dossier.
01:00:22
Speaker
that is remaining for a future implementation. So that was a the real meaning of the meeting, not just having the media telling, hey, it happened, it happened in the parliament and so on. No, but creating a precedent that will remain on file. And they are still working on the ah following steps because you know we got new elections and a new parliament ah the new commissions, committees were now formed and so on, and it was not an arrival point, but a starting point for new activities.
01:01:01
Speaker
And um do you, ah to make a guess, what sort of um changes on a political level would you anticipate following this meeting? Do you think um it will take some time for politicians to realize that is this is an important issue? Or do you think we've now reached the point where there's a certain momentum behind this and things will keep on going?
Political Impact of UFO Discussions
01:01:30
Speaker
If I have to say what I really think, it's a pessimistic viewpoint. So I will not tell, because I promise to lend a hand. And even if I am pessimistic, I will help and will do whatever I can to help those that are optimistic. I already had a very small part in a previous attempt, because the when the large Belgian wave of flying triangles hit that country,
01:02:00
Speaker
In the end of 1989 and the first months of 1990, there was a member of the European Parliament, a Belgian member of the European Parliament that instigated ah a proposal of creating a European agency for collecting UFO data. The Science Committee charged an Italian scientist a physician a physics professor to Luretge, he was very skeptical about UFOs. He began a survey of existing organizations like the Japan, it was not called Japan at the time, it was sep in France. the It's a part of the National Space Center in Toulouse, the French NASA. And he asked all the the national air forces in Europe
01:02:54
Speaker
he went collecting information. And since he was from my very same town, and we had the common acquaintances, hire some exchanges, send some data, we have been having report relations with him even after that for a long time. And so it was a very good initiative, he had a very good idea, because there were some British members of the parliament, they cried the scandal because the money from the British contributors were spent on fairy tales and so on. And it was not that he suggested that the French study group, the Japan, may be given a European status and so be
01:03:42
Speaker
enlarging its collection. ah Something happened because the French Kness did not agree on that, you know, the French, they will never leave their own things out of their own country. And the committee the research, technology and energy subcommittee approved Disproposition with unanimity with unanimity, but it was never taken in the planarization in the last planarization and then once again the legislature finished ah and nothing was ever read about it was 1993 1994 in 94 there were new elections to the regal was not reelected did not stand for election and it was a dead story so
01:04:34
Speaker
It's history repeating as always, always different, always similar. And I'm not so sure that we are now to the edge of a new revelation era. But it's because of my age, of my long involvement, of my age of cynicism.
01:04:55
Speaker
And I don't want to block more positive approaches. As I said, I'm still working on this in my small part. But I'm not sure that it will ever get not here, not even in the USA. It's very interesting what's happening on the other side of the big pond. But even if they started with the military, then the politicians arrived. So the parliamentary.
01:05:24
Speaker
And then the scientists jumped on the bandwagon. When we saw that NASA, the nasza National administration umratic the Space Administration, ah created the task force for a metastarly apocalypse, I said, oh, they smelt dollar ideas. And so they said, if there is a need, we are here.
01:05:46
Speaker
But that's fine. That's very good. We had not been hoping ah in such good developments in the last decades. So what? That's fine. But I'm afraid that the it will come and go. We had even better times, for example, when we had a session, a whole session in 1978. I was young.
01:06:10
Speaker
but I remember the enthusiasm that we had about it. It was born and it was dead after just a little time. You may say that the large world conspiracy won and there are dark forces from the dark, the deep state in the USA also battling against, I don't think so. I don't believe that, but our subject, our topic is most interesting for some in this ah not so interesting for the largest part. We can try and get the the interest, the involvement of some political issues maybe not giving us so high goals but the smaller ones like the Dutch people
01:07:03
Speaker
are doing is the best way.
Framing UFOs as Practical Issues
01:07:06
Speaker
Let's create a a safe room for collecting testimonies of profession. That's fine. Let's ask ah for the classification of military data that might be good, not for us, you follow this, but for some scientific researchers that might analyze that. Let's try the air safety side. There was a recent psychological study of um effects of sightings, the starlink, light rays on flying pilots that were worried and risked the some Hermes reactions. ah undu me um mr So how might we teach them that there are strange things in the sky and how to properly collect them? These are small
01:07:57
Speaker
Yeah i would absolutely agree i think there's a time and a place ah for all topics in in ufology but when i was asked to remember that politicians by default are very busy probably not very much interested in this topic at all and just have other things on their plate so.
01:08:16
Speaker
Going in with topics that they can relate to like air safety and so on and that actually matters to their constituents is is in my opinion the right approach and um more difficult topics like um alien abductions and so on if you even want to call them that.
01:08:36
Speaker
They're also important, but they have to come at a very, very much later point in time, um if at all. so So thank you for this overview. and You've been very generous with your time. So just by by way of concluding, I would like to ask you um two questions because you're the absolute expert and in Italian um UFO studies. So is there any case in Italy that you think um It's not very well known internationally, but it's super interesting.
01:09:12
Speaker
If you are everywhere there are an Italy of course, ah there are rap reports that have not gone out. Even if not so breakfast or so glamorous. I'll give you an example, a stupid example that I followed first time.
01:09:29
Speaker
A few years ago, we are talking about 2018. So it's six years ago. ah At around, let's say 10 o'clock in the afternoon, a whole valley in the mountains was shaken by a sort of loud bang It was more long than just a bang. It was a roaring noise, glasses were trembling, the ground was trembling, people sort of half quick. And this was heard and felt by thousands of people. Most of them ran out. And a few hundreds of people, not many, but let's say at least 100 people, were able to see one or two
01:10:23
Speaker
fighters' planes, military planes flying low in the valley, something that had never happened before, especially in the night, but not even in the day, that were going from down to the higher part of the valley.
01:10:39
Speaker
and making this roaring noise. and Among those many people who saw one or two planes according to the place, because it's a very strange valley with some smaller mountains in inside, so not everybody could see properly all sides, there were at least, ah but let's say, a few dozen people that told they had seen something before the planes arrived.
01:11:08
Speaker
When they first heard the sound, some people saw a low slow white ball of light that was moving in the same direction, coming from down to the higher part of the valley, but not running silently. And then it stopped above the trees on the crest of the mountain, up to the point when the planes arrived, and then the ball went away.
01:11:37
Speaker
And it was like the planes were following slide very strange but and this This created quite an uproar on the media, on the police. ah There were some parliamentary people that asked good questions to the Ministry of Defense. There was a judge that opened an inquiry for public alert.
01:12:05
Speaker
questions were asked both to the Air Force press officers and later to the Ministry. And what is strange is that several different answers were given, but it was never about the ball of light. It was only about the planes. There was no plane There was only one plane in very high altitude. No, there were two planes and one at the e and malfunction that caused the roar and so on. And it is all written in the papers to the judge, to the police, to the parliament. But it was never found, never discovered, never revealed what happened really. What was the light? Were they chasing the light?
01:12:56
Speaker
There were even some very silly hypotheses, for example, the French acrobatic petrol that was passing, coming back to France and lost their way, or ah a drone, an experimental drone, flown away, escaped from control, and they were running to shape that, you know, citation virus with a better plane following drone.
01:13:27
Speaker
losing control to just descend vertically and slow. There are a lot of things. But this is an interesting event that involves the military, about the politicians, about a lot of people, and that is left without any explanation. Very, very, very interesting. Thanks for sharing this with me. Where in Italy did this happen? It was in June 2018.
01:13:55
Speaker
thousand and eighty The town, did it happen near somewhere so geographically where in Italy was this? Yes, it's a a small valley in the the place where the largest part of the people were is called Corio. Corio cannabis. It's a province of Torino.
01:14:18
Speaker
Great, thanks. And my final question is, um do you have you noticed in your years of study at UAP in Italy, is there anything different with the phenomenon in Italy compared to other countries or are there or or are there similarities? you Have you noticed any major differences from other countries?
01:14:48
Speaker
No, there are no national specificities as we are talking about present days and for example Europe. You may see differences when you go to different cultures. If you have a look at African reports, I was recently involved in an exhibition which was held in Paris about the UAP in Africa and so collected some documentation for them. Or if you go to India or Indonesia or even China, for example, there are some specific differences because they are in the minds and in the eyes of the people that are seeing things, reporting things or collecting testimonies.
01:15:35
Speaker
But ah it's more in the, it's nothing what is is seen in itself, it's more in how it is described. It would be a longer issue to discuss, ah but as of Western culture now,
01:15:53
Speaker
It's ah reasonably coherent in itself. We still see some differences, for example, with the some South American reports that we are not getting here. as While when we were talking about the 1960s or even early 1970s report, there seemed to be more national differences. Now it's no longer like that.
01:16:22
Speaker
Very, very interesting. Thank you so much, Mr. Rosso. I will put all the links ah to Joepi Czech and Gizo in the description of this episode. And um yeah, it was a great pleasure having you on today. Keep up the good work.