Notizie UFO / UFO Notizie

History

Notizie UFO is the bi-monthly member-circulation bulletin of the Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici, the academic-tradition Italian UFO research body founded in Turin in the mid-1980s. The bulletin functions as the internal-correspondence companion to the Centro's public-facing semi-annual journal UFO - Rivista di Informazione Ufologica. Where the semi-annual carries CISU's case investigations, scientific commentary, and translated international material to a general Italian readership, the bulletin carries the internal organisational reporting: convegno announcements, regional representative network changes, press archive updates, and the working agenda of the Centro across each two-month cycle.

The bulletin has been edited from issue one by Gian Paolo Grassino from Casella Postale 82, 10100 Torino. The CISU Segreteria address and the Grassino editorial responsibility have remained constant across the entire publication run. The bulletin's principal function across its first fifteen years was to maintain coordination across CISU's regional representative network in Piemonte, Emilia Romagna, Lazio, Campania, Umbria, and the Marche.

1985 to 1987: Founding and the 40th UFO Anniversary

The earliest issue in the archive, No 11 of 1986, sits well into the publication's founding period. The numbering implies a 1985 launch, with the bulletin running on a roughly bi-monthly cadence through the first eighteen months. The July 1986 issue (No 14) describes the ordinary summer increase in Italian sighting reports, the kind of seasonal observation that frames CISU's response cadence to the wider Italian UAP question.

By mid-1987 the bulletin's lead editorial concern is the planning of the 1947-1987 fortieth UFO anniversary commemoration. Issue No 18 of May 1987 announces the CISU programme of national events organised across multiple regions. Issue No 19 of July 1987 follows up with reports on the National UFO Information Week and the international congress that CISU hosted. The fortieth-anniversary cycle was the first occasion on which CISU mounted a coordinated national press and public-engagement programme, and the bulletin's coverage records the operational logistics across the spring and summer.

1991 to 1995: The Belgian Wave Period and the Fifth National Congress

Issue No 36 of December 1991 reports on the CISU Fifth National Congress, held in Rome on 23 November 1991, immediately following the publication of UFO Rivista's Belgian wave special. The Congress brought together CISU's regional representatives and external contributors including the SOBEPS investigators whose Belgian wave field reports had been translated for the Italian readership. The bulletin's coverage notes the operational coordination with the broader European civilian-research tradition that CISU had been building through the late 1980s.

Issue No 37 of March 1992 carries the CISU year-end editorial reflecting on a comparatively quiet 1991 in terms of Italian sighting volume, alongside the observation that press archive intake had doubled, that television coverage of the question had increased, and that the first commercial Italian-market UFO video cassettes had been released. The shift from a primarily local field-investigation focus to a national media-engagement role is documented in the bulletin's editorial pages across this period.

Issue No 48 of April 1995 records CISU's mid-1990s research and investigation phase, with reference to a growing roster of contributors and the qualitative improvements in regional investigation reporting. The same issue carries the reporting on the increased CISU presence in Italian media and the Centro's continued role as the principal Italian point of reference for the question.

1996 to 1998: Pre-Anniversary and the Publications Reorganisation

Issue No 53 of November 1996 records the CISU annual assembly held in Rome, which the editorial frames as an unusually significant convocation. The assembly addressed the contradictions of mid-1990s ufology, particularly the post-1995 "alien autopsy" media cycle that had brought sensational claims into mainstream Italian television. CISU's editorial position, reaffirmed at the assembly, was a return to ground-truth case investigation as the proper foundation of the Centro's work, in distinction from the speculative claims circulating in the wider Italian press. The November 1996 issue looks forward to the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold sighting in June 1997.

1999 onwards: The Internet Era

Issue No 59 of January 1999 records the second anniversary of UFOITALIA, the first Italian-language internet UFO discussion circular, founded by CISU on 9 September 1996 and moderated by Maurizio Verga. UFOITALIA was the first Italian-language electronic UFO discussion forum and predated most equivalent national-language discussion lists across continental Europe. The bulletin's coverage of UFOITALIA's growth and editorial moderation provides the documentary record of CISU's adaptation to internet-era civilian research, including the Centro's published e-mail address cisu@ufo.it and website www.ufo.it from 1998 onwards.