Monsters of the Deep / UFO Encounters in Italy

About the show

Researcher of all things weird and mysterious, Nick Redfern, joined George Knapp in the first half to discuss unexplained monsters of the deep. Redfern used the example of the discovery of the coelacanth, a fish long thought extinct and only known from the fossil record, discovered alive in the Indian Ocean in 1938 (which he called "a shock to zoology") to illustrate his idea that many unknown and presumably extinct animals may still exist and await discovery. Redfern said that the UK's National Archives actually contains official reports of what appears to be sea serpents filed by the Royal Navy throughout the 19th century. He recalled a dramatic account from 1848 of a captain of a British ship called the Daedalus, who observed, along with his crew, an apparent life and death struggle where a "large serpent-type animal was seen coiled around a huge sperm whale."

Redfern continued with accounts of the famed Loch Ness Monster, and its history. First reported about 1500 years ago, the supposed creature has been photographed, tracked on sonar, and even been the object of attempted exorcisms. Although some believe that the animal may be a surviving dinosaur, Redfern offered that it "may be something supernatural rather than flesh and blood." He also recalled that in 1997, the US Navy detected anomalous underwater audio that sounded like some sort of massive living thing-- they called it the "Bloop" sound. Redfern said "the government may have stumbled onto something not too different than [legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's apocalyptic creature named] Cthulhu."

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There are at least 1,000 close encounters of the second and third kind and abduction cases in Italy, showing the frequent, intelligent, and alien nature of UFO phenomena in that country. Renowned UFO researcher, Dr. Roberto Pinotti, appeared in the second half to discuss the history of UFO sightings in Italy and what the Italian government knows. Pinotti entered the Italian military in the 1960s at age 27. When discharged a few years later, he was asked to write a report on UFOs for his superior officers, and it was actually published in an official Army journal. Since 1979, when UFO investigation was assigned to the Italian Air Force, Pinotti said that they have officially logged about 500 cases. In contrast, he said that his organization now has "more than 13,000 cases" that they have investigated.

Pinotti described a 1963 case when the Italian President's car was approached closely by a UFO, which looked like an "English WWI helmet with portholes." An official report was created and later sent to the Pentagon in the US, which did not respond. He also revealed that in 1996, his group came into possession of UFO files from the Mussolini era, which they considered genuine after four years of forensic document research. One described an apparent 1933 UFO crash in which debris and even bodies were recovered. Pinotti said that the materials and "corpses of the pilots" were later taken to the United States by the Allied forces after WWII. He also discussed a statement from one of the directors of the Vatican astronomical observatory that, if aliens were ever found to be real, we could consider the "extraterrestrials [as] are our brothers."