UFO - Rivista di Informazione Ufologica

History

UFO - Rivista di Informazione Ufologica is the principal periodical of the Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici, the academic-tradition Italian UFO research body founded in Turin in the mid-1980s as a merger of several earlier regional study groups. The Centro operates from offices at Via Briccarello 6, Turin, in the same district that historically hosted Italy's scientific publishing tradition. The journal has been edited from issue one by Giovanni Settimo as Direttore responsabile, with Edoardo Russo coordinating the redaction team alongside Gian Paolo Grassino and Paolo Toselli. The publication is produced through the Cooperativa Studi e Iniziative UPIAR s.r.l., a workers' cooperative publishing house at Corso Vittorio Emanuele 108, Turin.

The journal's editorial position is distinct from most of the European UFO press of the late twentieth century. Where French and German publications of the same period often divided sharply between extraterrestrial-hypothesis advocacy and dismissive sceptical framing, CISU has consistently maintained what its editorial board calls a "third way" between the two poles. The result is a publication that engages seriously with both unexplained cases and the institutional and sociological contexts in which they emerge, while drawing firm methodological lines against the sectarian and contactee traditions.

1991 to 1996: The Belgian Wave and the Methodology Debate

The earliest issue in the archive, N. 9 of January 1991, sets the journal's tone for the following decade. The cover headline is "Avvistamenti UFO in Belgio" and the issue carries the full Italian-language translation of the Belgian air force official report on the 1989 to 1990 SOBEPS-investigated wave, alongside Settimo's editorial on the increasingly common Italian press habit of conflating ufological research groups with religious sects. The editorial cites the February 1990 ISPES report commissioned by Panorama on "Sette esoteriche e religioni emergenti in Italia" by anthropologist Cecilia Gatto Trocchi of the Università di Perugia, which had listed 366 ufological groups within the "esoteric and pseudo-religious" category, an editorial misclassification CISU spent the following years publicly contesting.

N. 15 of January 1995 carries Renaud Marhic's editorial manifesto from the French SOS OVNI organisation, translated and reprinted with explicit CISU editorial endorsement. The Marhic position, that civilian ufology requires a methodology distinct from both naive extraterrestrial-hypothesis advocacy and dismissive socio-psychological reductionism, became the CISU editorial line through the latter half of the 1990s.

1997 to 2000: Caselle, Heaven's Gate, and the Toselli Methodology Editorial

N. 19 of January-June 1997 features the Caselle 1973 radar-visual case at the eponymous Turin airport, a primary CISU field investigation drawn from the Italian Air Force Servizio Informazioni Operative e Situazione files. The same issue carries Pierre Lagrange and Matteo Leone's "Pronto ET, siamo in ascolto" on the institutional relationship between the SETI scientific community and the civilian UFO research tradition, drawing on Lagrange's sociology-of-science background.

N. 20 of July-December 1997 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold sighting with a cover quoting Arnold's "rimbalzavano come piatti sull'acqua" formulation. The same issue carried the journal's coverage of the Heaven's Gate suicides of 26 March 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe, California, treating the Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles case as a sociological data point on the contactee-to-cult pathway rather than as a ufological event proper.

N. 22 of December 1999 carries Paolo Toselli's "L'importanza del Non Identificato" methodology editorial, the most extensive single statement of CISU's editorial position on UFO/IFO classification, case-analysis procedure, and the role of the "Unknown" residual category in serious civilian research. The editorial functions as a methodological foundation document, comparable to Allen Hendry's earlier work at CUFOS or the Aimé Michel orthoteny papers in France.

2000s onwards: The PreUfoCat Project

N. 39 carries the journal's coverage of the publication of Pietro Torre's Strane luci nella storia d'Italia, the first edition of the CISU PreUfoCat national catalogue of pre-1900 anomalous aerial phenomena observations from Italian sources. The PreUfoCat contains 952 numbered cases across a 2,700-year span from Antica Roma through the nineteenth century, organised across six chapters covering the ancient and early medieval period (700 BC to AD 1000), the late medieval period (1000 to 1500), the Renaissance (1500 to 1600), the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment (1700 to 1800) and the nineteenth century.