Summary
One of the biggest UAP sightings in Italian history took place during a soccer match in Tuscany in front of 10,000 people at Stadio Artemio Franchi in 1954. As soccer club Fiorentina played its rivals, a disturbance in the sky halted the game. A large, oblong-shaped object hovered over the stadium and stopped in the sky above the playing surface of the stadium. Silvery filaments allegedly descended from the UAP, and the sky lit up with mysterious glowing and random flashes. This took place for an hour and a half.
Sighting
"I remember everything from A to Z,” Italian soccer player Ardico Magnini told BBC. "It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter. We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked."
Another witness, fan Gigi Boni, said the UAP was shaped more like a cigar.
La Nazione's (the Florence newspaper) ran a headline that read: “Glass fibers fall on Tuscan cities after globes and flying saucers pass.”
"In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking about UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real,"Italian soccer player and witness Romolo Tuci said to the BBC.
Witnesses described the material falling from the sky as cotton, wool, or cobwebs.
"It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this 'angel hair'," said president of Italy's National UFO Centre Roberto Pinotti.
He claimed to have witnessed this strange substance covering the roofs of Florence as a 10-year old.
"The only problem is after a short period of time it disintegrates. I remember, in broad daylight, seeing the roofs of the houses in Florence covered in this white substance for one hour and, like snow, it just evaporated.”
Journalist Giorgio Batini for La Nazione recalled seeing "shiny balls" moving fast towards the dome of the Cathedral. He claimed to have gathered several samples by rolling them up on a matchstick, and took them to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. The lab was led by respected scientist Prof Giovanni Canneri. The lab took his samples, as well as other samples they had received, and subjected them to spectrographic analysis. The lab concluded that it contained elements boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium, and that it was not radioactive. The material was destroyed in the process.
Spider silk is a protein with an organic compound that has nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen and oxygen . The elements reportedly found in the samples Batini and others brought to the university lab for study, did not match the organic description of spider silk.
Sightings continued in Tuscany after. According to eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming north of Florence.
Legacy
Italy’s leading skeptic organization CICAP’s investigation found that the Italian air force was carrying out exercises on that day. They were using chaff, which is a radar countermeasure that involves dropping flares from aircraft. Others suggested the web-like material was from migrating spiders that traveled by wind. Pinotti claims this hypothesis is “pure nonsense.”
David Bowie’s band “the Spiders from Mars” were allegedly named after the incident. Bowie would later play a concert at this same venue.
