Posted by “Mamma mia, quanto è brutto! Non sono uomini, non sono uomini!” (“Good God, it’s so ugly! They’re not men, they’re not men!”)
Those were the words Pier Fortunato Zanfretta’s colleagues heard over the radio shortly before midnight on 6 December 1978. Then the line went dead.
This is Italy’s best-known and best-documented alien abduction case. Zanfretta is retired today, but while working as a night watchman he claims to have had 11 close encounters of the third and fourth kind with reptilian-looking aliens. According to him, these beings, called Dargos and almost 3 metres tall, come from a dying planet in the “third galaxy”, Titania, and are assessing Earth as a planet to move to in the future.
Between 1978 and 1981 Genoese night watchman Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, born in 1952, said he had been abducted 11 times by reptilian aliens, the Dargos. The Carabinieri collected 52 accounts of strange lights in the sky, but the inquiry was closed in 1980. Sceptics found natural explanations for the alleged evidence, and the regressive hypnosis used to reconstruct the abductions is considered unreliable.
Who is Pier Fortunato Zanfretta
Zanfretta was born in Nova Milanese on 28 December 1952. He has said in interviews that he grew up in the world of the circus before moving to Genoa with his family. In 1978 he was 26 and worked as a security guard for the Istituto di vigilanza Val Bisagno in Genoa. A down-to-earth night job that also meant dealing with real thieves and criminals.
The night of the close encounter
On the evening of 6 December 1978 Zanfretta was on his usual patrol in Marzano, a hamlet of Torriglia, in the mountains behind Genoa. At around 11:30 pm, he says, he noticed four strange lights in the garden of a villa called “Casa Nostra”, owned by a dentist. The gate and front door were wide open. Thinking of burglars, he decided to intervene.
Going in through the back, he saw a red, oval object more than ten metres wide. He radioed the control room, where Carlo Toccalino was on duty. Then, turning around, he found himself facing beings three metres tall, with skin that looked fatty or like a rumpled suit, yellow triangular eyes and clawed feet. When Toccalino asked whether he was being attacked by someone, Zanfretta answered with the now-famous phrase. Then nothing more.
His colleagues Walter Lauria and Raimondo Mascia went looking for him and found him about an hour later, in shock, confused and feverish. They said his body was very hot despite the cold that night. When he came round, he said he had been terrified by “monstrous-looking extraterrestrials”.
The first investigations
The next day the owner of the security firm alerted the Carabinieri. In the villa’s garden they recorded a semicircular imprint where the grass had been flattened. Brigadier Antonio Nucchi collected 52 accounts of strange events between Torriglia and Propata: many people said they had seen a large luminous object in the sky that night. In the reports sent to the Interior Ministry, the reliability of the witnesses was described as “good”.
On 3 January 1979 Nucchi sent his “Information report on the sighting of unidentified flying objects and humanoids by Zanfretta Fortunato” to the Genoa magistrates’ court. On 11 January 1980 the judge closed the case for “lack of any offence”. Years later, in 2007, Nucchi revealed on television that he had himself witnessed a sighting and had been “advised” by his superiors to keep quiet.
Regressive hypnosis
Meanwhile the story had made every newspaper, and Zanfretta was even invited onto the TV show Portobello, hosted by Enzo Tortora. Journalist Rino Di Stefano, the first to take an interest in the case, suggested putting him under regressive hypnosis. The session took place on 23 December 1978, conducted by psychotherapist Mauro Moretti in front of journalists and ufologists.
Under hypnosis Zanfretta said he had been taken aboard the spacecraft, into a brightly lit room, and subjected to painful examinations. And he added a description of the aliens that still sends shivers down the spine:
They are green, with triangular yellow eyes, with big thorns, they have green flesh and their skin is full of wrinkles as if they were old. Their mouths look like they’re made of iron, they have red veins on their heads, pointed ears and arms with fingernails… They come from the third galaxy.
Moretti and psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti maintained that Zanfretta was speaking in good faith. Their colleague Marco Marchesan pointed out, however, that this did not mean the account was true. Even Italy’s National UFO Centre (CUN) wrote that the hypnosis had been hopelessly contaminated by an investigator’s intervention during the session.
Who are the Dargos?
According to Zanfretta, the Dargos are a highly advanced alien race from Titania. They are about three metres tall, with green, wrinkled skin, yellow triangular eyes and large spikes on their heads. They supposedly told him their planet is dying and that they are considering Earth as a new home. This, in his view, explains the repeated abductions and examinations.
The other encounters
On the night of 27 December 1978 Zanfretta vanished again, after a frantic radio call in which he said his car had stopped. The search was hampered by fog and rain. He was found just over an hour later near a mountain road, not far from his Fiat 127, still in shock. The officers said his clothes were dry and his body warm despite the rain. Near the spot what looked like large footprints were noticed. On 31 January 1979 a neurologist examined him and certified that he showed no alterations of thought or psychosensory disturbances.
After the second episode the security firm moved him to another area and gave him a Vespa instead of the car. On 30 July 1979 he disappeared a third time and was found a couple of kilometres from the scooter, running disoriented in the dark. On the night of 2–3 December 1979 his patrol car was found empty, again near Torriglia. That time a strange cloud with two lights inside was seen: Carabinieri lieutenant Cassiba said he fired a few shots at it and the cloud vanished. Shortly afterwards Zanfretta reappeared near the car.
During another alleged encounter, in Corso Europa in Genoa, residents reported a local blackout. In all, between 1978 and 1981, there were said to be eleven episodes.
The sphere and the golden tetrahedron
One of the strangest aspects of this story is the gift the aliens supposedly gave him: a transparent sphere containing a golden tetrahedron that rotates suspended inside it. According to Zanfretta, the sphere was originally meant for the American ufologist J. Allen Hynek. He says he hid it somewhere only he knows, and that it is deadly to any living creature that tries to approach: a hare that happened by was supposedly struck dead. He himself feels compelled to visit it at least twice a month, without knowing why.
The sphere’s existence has never been proven. Zanfretta’s photos show only five points of light, and in 2007 the digital images he brought on TV turned out to be completely dark. In 2008 he said that 11 of 12 inscriptions beneath the sphere had lit up one after another, and that since August that year he had been unable to reach the hiding place.
The sceptics’ explanations
Sceptics have rarely doubted Zanfretta’s good faith, nor considered him ill. They have, however, harshly criticised how the case was handled. Regressive hypnosis is regarded by the scientific community as an unreliable method, because it can easily create false memories, and in those sessions it was used without any precautions: questions, for example, were discussed while Zanfretta was already hypnotised. The use of Pentothal was also criticised.
Then there is a detail that will ring a bell for anyone who was a child in Italy back then. The name Dargos is strikingly similar to Hydargos, the villain of Grendizer (known in Italy as Goldrake), the cartoon that was hugely popular there in 1978. And the description of the aliens recalls one of the monsters from the comic Zagor. Moretti replied that Zanfretta knew nothing of science fiction, but in the late 1970s it was hard to avoid, between television and advertising.
The physical evidence also has simple explanations. The circle of flattened grass matched the spot where the villa’s owners tied up their horse during the day. The warmth of his clothes was consistent with someone who had stayed in the car for a while. The giant footprints from the second episode were simple puddles. And the other witnesses’ sightings have never been reliably verified. The CUN itself has stated several times that it does not consider Zanfretta’s account reliable.
The price of fame
Fame was a double-edged sword for Zanfretta. In the early 1980s the Genoa police revoked his gun licence, and without it he could no longer work as a security guard. He says he never earned anything from his story and was mocked for years: “Strangers call me at home at all hours to make fun of me. I don’t know what it was I saw, but I saw it. I am not a liar.” Even on Portobello he felt ridiculed by Tortora.
In 1984 Rino Di Stefano published his book on the case, now in its sixth edition and translated into English in 2014, and that same year Italian channel RaiTre made it into a two-part docudrama, UFO a Genova? Gli incontri ravvicinati di Piero Zanfretta, by Bruno Ferracciolo. Zanfretta appeared on the Maurizio Costanzo Show in 2002, on Enrico Ruggeri’s Il bivio in 2007 and on Mistero in 2012. In 2004 he played himself in the sci-fi film InvaXön – Alieni in Liguria by Massimo Morini of the band Buio Pesto, which imagines an invasion of Liguria by the Dargos.
And the story still fascinates. In 2024 it was told in two episodes of the podcast Non aprite quella podcast by J-Ax, Pedar and Matteo Lenardon, and in April 2025 the Genoese punk band Ratbones released the single “Piero Zanfretta”, with the man himself appearing in the video. The case has also inspired a stage play, Loro – Storia vera del più famoso rapimento alieno in Italia (“They – The True Story of the Most Famous Alien Abduction in Italy”).
What did Zanfretta really see that December night? We may never know. But, as he says, he saw something.
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