The Security Guard Abducted 11 Times Near Genoa | Real UFO Case

The radio operator heard a voice come through at 12:15 in the morning. It was broken, excited, repeating the same words. Then it said, in Italian, no, they are not men. Then the line went dead. The voice belonged to Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, a 26-year-old security guard calling from a darkened garde

Chapters:
0:00 The Radio Goes Silent
1:43 The Engine Cuts Out
3:30 My God, Are They Ugly
5:05 Fifty-Two Witnesses
6:20 What the Hypnosis Produced
8:10 A Case Goes National
10:09 The Hypnosis Problem
11:42 📣 Like & subscribe

Written and narrated by Theo Penrose.

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The radio operator heard a voice come through at 12:15 in the morning. It was broken, excited, repeating the same words. Then it said, in Italian, no, they are not men. Then the line went dead. The voice belonged to Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, a 26-year-old security guard calling from a darkened garden above Genoa.

He had been sent to check an empty country mansion. The incident had begun around 11:30 that night, in December 1978. When colleagues reached him at 1:15 in the morning, Zanfretta was lying in front of the mansion. Gianfranco Tutti, director of the Institute of Vigilance Val Bisagno, would later say he believed Zanfretta was an honest man.

Something had happened in that garden. The question was what. Three weeks later, after a second incident on another cold night, officers would once again be standing over Zanfretta and reaching for answers that the record did not supply. It was the night of 6 December 1978, at around half past eleven.

The mansion was called Casa Nostra. It stood in the small hamlet of Marzano, in the municipality of Torriglia, in the Province of Genoa, and no one lived there. No car should have been in its drive, and no light should have been moving in its garden. For a night guard, it should have been a two minute check.

It was not. According to journalist Rino Di Stefano, as Zanfretta approached the mansion his Fiat 126 stopped dead. Engine, lights, radio: all failed at once. He stepped out onto the cold road. In the garden of the uninhabited house he could see four unusual lights moving. The property belonged to a local dentist, Dr.

Ettore Righi. It was not supposed to be occupied. Nothing in the garden was supposed to be moving. Yet there the lights were. Zanfretta drew his gun and flashlight and entered through the open gate, believing thieves were on the property. Then, Di Stefano reported, a large flat triangular form, blinding in its brilliance, ascended from behind the house with a hissing sound.

Zanfretta reported feeling intense heat. What happened in the moments that followed he could not account for in his waking state. Under hypnosis he would later describe being lifted from the garden and taken up into the craft. But that account would only emerge weeks later. In his own account, Zanfretta said he saw a red, oval object inside the property, more than ten metres across.

Then something came at him from behind. Di Stefano recorded his words: an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall. Weeks later, under hypnosis, he would describe the beings in more detail: mottled green skin, yellow triangular eyes, pointed ears, clawed hands and feet, and a face covered in deep wrinkles. That call was received by Carlo Toccalino, the radio operator on duty that night at the Genoa operations centre.

His testimony filled in what the broken transmission contained. Di Stefano reported that Toccalino recalled Zanfretta's voice as excited and disconnected, repeatedly saying 'My God, are they ugly. ' Then came the words now on record: 'No, non sono uomini, non sono uomini. ' No, they are not men, they are not men.

That was the last transmission. After that the line went dead and contact was lost entirely. Toccalino alerted Lt. Giovanni Cassiba, chief of the security service. Colleagues Walter Lauria and Raimondo Mascia drove out to Marzano. At 1:15 in the morning they found Zanfretta lying in front of the mansion.

When they reached him, he jumped up with his gun and flashlight ready, and did not appear to recognise them. It had been an hour since the last words on the radio. The gate through which Zanfretta had entered was found closed as usual when his colleagues arrived. When he calmed down he could not account for the missing time.

He remembered the garden, the lights, and then nothing. That gap, closed gate, missing hour, would become one of the most discussed aspects of the entire case. Di Stefano noted it carefully. So did Brigadier Nucchi, once the Carabinieri took the file the following day. The event was reported to the Carabinieri around noon the following day by the owner of the security company.

Brigadier Antonio Nucchi of the Torriglia station led the inquiry. He collected accounts from 52 people across the municipalities of Torriglia and Propata who reported seeing a large bright object in the sky that same night. Nucchi said publicly he had every confidence in Zanfretta's testimony, adding that only something exceptional could have frightened a man he had known for years. It was journalist Rino Di Stefano who proposed hypnosis to help Zanfretta recover the missing memory.

On 23 December 1978, just seventeen days after the incident, the first session was conducted by Mauro Moretti, a psychotherapist and member of the Italian Association of Medical Hypnosis, in the presence of journalists and ufologists. Under hypnosis Zanfretta described being taken inside a craft and subjected to painful experiments. In that same 23 December session, he also described the beings themselves in terms that were specific enough to be written down and quoted directly. Under hypnosis Zanfretta described the beings in precise terms.

Green, with triangular yellow eyes, big thorns, mouths that looked made of iron, red veins on their heads, and arms with fingernails, with round things. He said they used a luminous device to translate what they were saying, because they did not speak Italian. He said, according to Di Stefano, that they would return in larger numbers. The session was recorded and the transcript was kept as part of the official documentation of the case.

Less than four weeks after the original incident, on the night of 27 December 1978, Zanfretta vanished again. A frantic radio call reported that his car had stopped. He was found just over an hour later near a mountain road, in a state of deep shock. Officers who reached him testified that his clothes were dry and his body was particularly warm, despite rain and low temperatures, the same warmth that had been remarked upon after the first incident.

What appeared to be large footprints were noticed near the spot where he lay. Following the second incident a neurologist examined Zanfretta. On 31 January 1979 that doctor issued a certificate stating no alterations in his thinking, no psychosensory disturbances, and no treatment was required. The security company responded in a more practical way.

They moved Zanfretta to a different area of the province and replaced his patrol car with a Vespa scooter. Some critics later noted that relocating a witness rather than suspending him raised questions of its own. Within weeks, the story had left the hills above Genoa. By early January 1979, Zanfretta had appeared on Portobello, a national television programme watched across Italy.

And it did not end there. On 30 July 1979 he reported a third incident: he was found about two kilometres from his motorcycle, running disoriented through the darkness. A fourth followed on 2 December 1979. Four separate nights, now on the record, and each one harder to explain away.

Zanfretta later said he had been taken eleven times between 1978 and 1981. In the early 1980s, the Genoa police commissioner revoked his gun licence because of the strange events. Without it he could not work as a security guard, and he lost his job. The guard whose word a Carabinieri brigadier had trusted could no longer do the work he had been trusted with.

Eleven reported incidents, a career ended, and still no answer. The alien name used in later hypnosis sessions, 'Dargos', closely resembles 'Hydargos', the antagonist of Grendizer, a Japanese animated series hugely popular on Italian television in 1978. The physical descriptions Zanfretta gave under hypnosis recalled creatures from the comic book series Zagor, widely read across Italy at the time. Sceptics also found that the circle of crushed grass corresponded to where the mansion owners kept their horse tied up, and that Zanfretta's warm clothing was compatible with remaining in the car.

Those were the sceptics' arguments. But the hypnosis sessions themselves came under scrutiny of a different kind. The hypnosis sessions themselves were questioned. Critics noted that questions were discussed with Zanfretta while he was already in a hypnotic state, and that the use of Pentothal during sessions was disputed.

Moretti stated the subject had no familiarity with science fiction, but sceptics countered that science fiction filled Italian television screens and advertising throughout the late 1970s. The large impressions found after the second incident were said to be consistent with puddles. Nothing was settled. After the four incidents on the record, the Carabinieri of Torriglia reached no official conclusion and left the file without a definitive finding.

Di Stefano, who had followed the case from the first night, published a full account that treated Zanfretta as a credible witness, while admitting the case was unresolved. CUN, the Italian National UFO Centre, also took an interest. Not one of them could close it. Go back to that first call, at a quarter past twelve.

A 26 year old guard, alone in a dark garden above Genoa, with his gun in one hand and his torch in the other, telling the man on the radio: no, they are not men. Decades later, no one has settled what he saw that night: something in the sky, something in his mind, or something else entirely. So what do you think happened to him?