Posted by - What it is: an alleged case of contact with extraterrestrials in Italy, from 1956 to 1978.
- Where: mainly around Pescara and Abruzzo, but also Milan, Bologna, Ascoli Piceno and elsewhere.
- The main figures: Bruno Sammaciccia, Gaspare De Lama, Bruno Ghibaudi, Stefano Breccia and Alberto Perego.
- The “friends”: human-looking beings who called themselves Akrij; the group was known as W56.
- How it came out: through Stefano Breccia’s book “Contattismi di massa”, published in 2007.
The Amicizia case began in 1956 but only came to light in 2007, thanks to a book that one of the participants, Bruno Sammaciccia, asked for in his will.
The book describes how in 1956 a group of extraterrestrials, human in appearance and living in underground alien bases in Italy, made contact with human beings. The group grew to more than a hundred people, including engineers, scientists, military officers, teachers, journalists and artists, prominent figures some of whom kept swearing that those events really happened.
The story of the Amicizia case
According to Sammaciccia, a psychologist and writer on religious subjects, in spring 1956 an acquaintance gave him a parchment with a map of the Fortezza Pia in Ascoli Piceno. Thinking it was a treasure map, he went there several times with two friends, Giancarlo De Carlo and Giulio De Crescenzo.
In April 1956, during one of these visits, two individuals claiming to be extraterrestrials supposedly appeared out of a glowing mist, speaking perfect Italian.
They are human in shape, but one, Saju, is less than a metre tall and the other, Sinas, about two and a half metres. At first the three friends are sceptical, but they are taken to an underground base where they meet other aliens.
The beings said they belonged to a people called the Akrij and had a network of underground and undersea bases in Italy and around the world. The largest supposedly stretched from Pescara to Rimini, 300 kilometres long and 20 kilometres deep, half under land and half under the Adriatic, with houses, schools and even weather inside it.
Once convinced they were facing real extraterrestrials, Sammaciccia and his friends decided to help them and simply called them “the Friends”. The group took the name W56, meaning “Long live ’56”, after the year of the first meeting.
Some of the favours the aliens asked for were fruit, food and water, which the three friends delivered by sending lorries full of the requested goods to an agreed place.
While the driver was distracted, the extraterrestrials took the load by “dematerialising” it.
On average there were about two lorries a month, to various bases in different regions of Italy.
The featured image supposedly shows one of the giant aliens: according to the accounts some Akrij were almost six metres tall. Too bad that, with no point of reference, it could be a photo of any person of any height.
The photos and the witnesses
The best-known witness was the Milanese painter and musician Gaspare De Lama, who died in 2024 and joined the group around 1960. After the book came out he was one of the few to talk publicly about his experience, which as late as 2018 he described as “true, totally real and physical”.
According to De Lama, the Friends told the group when and where one of their craft would appear, so it could be photographed. His photos taken in Milan were published as early as 1962 by the Domenica del Corriere, in an article by journalist Bruno Ghibaudi, although at the time nobody knew about the group. De Lama also shot 8 mm footage in the countryside of Trenno, then on the outskirts of Milan.
In 2009 Rai 2 devoted a documentary to the case on the programme Voyager.
Revelations
The extraterrestrials revealed that Earth is one of the mother planets, that is, planets that produce life.
According to the witnesses they also said that over the millennia six advanced civilisations have followed one another on Earth, one of them with more advanced space flight knowledge than ours.
The aliens also said that love, like hate, is a source of energy, that everything is energy, including man himself, and that their ships and technology ran on energy.
Unfortunately in 1978 they were attacked by their enemies, the Contrari (“the Opposed”), who craved only technological development and not moral growth. The W56 were defeated and had to leave Earth, saying they would return when humanity was ready to receive them.
The year of the battle, 1978, coincides with a wave of UFO sightings in central Italy and over the Adriatic. All coincidences?
Honestly, this story leaves me puzzled for several reasons:
- Is it possible that the lorry drivers never noticed that their entire load had been stolen?
- Is it possible that there were no reports, given that these “thefts” went on for more than 20 years?
- And why have we never found any remains of any of the six advanced civilisations?
For anyone who wants to read the book anyway, it is called “Contattismi di massa” by Stefano Breccia.
Below I leave a video in which you can supposedly hear the voice of one of the aliens.
🦋 Emadion lives through its readers. If this story kept you up at night, buy me a coffee: it helps me bring you the next nightmare.
☕ Support Emadion on Ko-fi