File / italy-1978
The Italian Wave of 1978
The event after which Italy gave its air force a formal UAP mandate
An intensified wave of reports led to an administrative decision: the Aeronautica Militare was formally tasked with collecting and investigating UAP reports. Italy has therefore had an unbroken state documentary record from 1978 to the present.
Official position
The Aeronautica Militare maintains a register and publishes investigation outcomes, including for contemporary cases.
Alternative hypotheses
- The typical composition of a wave: satellites, re-entries, aircraft, balloons and Venus, amplified by media attention.
Why this is in the database despite unremarkable sightings
It is not about the 1978 sightings themselves. It is about the institutional precedent.
Italy is one of very few states that not only collected reports but assigned the task to a named institution and never revoked it. As a result there exists an unbroken, uniformly maintained register spanning nearly half a century — a resource comparable in quality to France’s GEIPAN and almost entirely ignored by the English-language literature on the subject.
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