Just by looking at the birth dates of the small group of founding members and those who soon joined to create CISU, it is clear that most of us were part of what could be called the “boomers ufology” made of those who were born between the late 1950s and early 1960s, which got involved in the subject at a very young age during the 1970s.
The 1970s were a revolutionary decade for ufology, bringing about a fundamental change in the way the phenomenon was viewed and studied.
Those were the years that saw the emergence of what has been defined as ‘scientific ufology’, first in the United States and then in Europe, because it began to look at the scientific approach as the only possible way to study a new phenomenon that, for many, seemingly did not seem to fit into the canons of science.
In 1972, astronomer Joseph Allen Hynek published his seminal book “The UFO Experience – A Scientific Inquiry”, in which he presented his classification of UFO sightings and, from the title itself, explained the direction he wanted to take ufology.
A few years earlier, another astronomer, Jacques Vallée, proposed his paraphysical hypothesis while also creating the first databases and computer analyses of the data.
The decade ended with two historic moments: in 1977, the first official scientific UFO study group in Europe was founded in France (GEPAN, still active today), and in 1978, Hynek and Vallée presented the UFO subject to the UN Assembly.
What happened was a significant change: we moved from the early days of ufology, which aimed to ‘prove’ that flying saucers existed and were essentially extraterrestrial visitors, to the realization that we were dealing with something more complex, a ‘UFO phenomenon’ which, like everything else around us, could and should be studied using scientific methods. Those who had previously been enthusiasts (or outright “propagandists”) began to become researchers.
WHAT ABOUT ITALY?
In our country, the situation was a little different.
The 1970s were characterized by a widespread interest in the unusual and the mysterious in all its forms, including ufology, which was the most “modern” and current topic compared to other more classic themes (esotericism, parapsychology, spiritualism, etc.). This is what Fabio Camilletti’s book Italia lunare (Lunad Italy) calls ‘occulture’, whose most significant mouthpiece was the monthly magazine Il Giornale dei Misteri (Journal of Mysteries), in short GdM, which began publication in 1971.
This type of interest was combined with the desire to get together, to form groups and associations, which characterized the post-1968 years across the whole society, from politics to social commitment to associations of all kinds.
This led to the creation of hundreds of groups and subgroups which, under the influence of a model promoted by Il Giornale dei Misteri, sprang up all over Italy and set about collecting sightings, holding conferences, sky-watching, and a thousand other activities, carried out in a very participatory but often naive manner and without adequate methodological foundations.
In the mid-1970s, there were about 600 groups listed in the pages of GdM that claimed to deal with ufology either exclusively or in part, and they had the good fortune to be active during a decade of continuous growth in UFO sightings, both as of the number of reports and as of the strangeness and credibility of the reports. It is no coincidence that the decade ended with a boom in sightings in 1978, which in Italy is also remembered as the ‘year of the humanoids’ due to the many cases of close encounters of the third kind.
In the face of this youthful hyper-activism, the pre-existing national associations seemed to be somewhat absent. The Florence Ufology Section (SUF) had its network of local representatives drawn from the GdM groups but never structured itself as a true national organization.
On the other hand, the National UFO Center (Centro Ufologico Nazionale, CUN), founded in 1965 with the cumbersome name of “National Center for the Study of Alleged Extraterrestrial Phenomena”, represented the old phase of ufology and seemed uninterested in the new trends coming from overseas. In order to keep up with the times, the CUN had managed to bring in some of the ideas that had emerged from local youth groups, but it remained distant from the world of those new enthusiasts, yet was not offering the organization (archives, network of investigators, structured initiatives) that were the calling card of other American and European associations.
INTO THE NATIONAL CENTER
In this scenario, the push that came from below, from the young people (us, at the time) who saw the need for radical changes that would capitalize on their enthusiasm, led initially (between 1977 and 1978) to the establishment of Regional UFO Federations (FUR) as a means of collaboration and coordination between the various groups.
At the end of 1978, at the height of that year’s exceptional wave, the CUN managed for the first time to bring a monthly magazine entirely dedicated to ufology into newsstands, and this served as a catalyst for many things. The young people of the FURs saw the possibility of bringing their vitality to a CUN that seemed at that moment capable of opening up and renewing itself.
So it was that we joined the national center with the intention of changing it, of making it an Association with a capital ‘A’, of using its structure to carry out in a coordinated manner the investigation and study activities that until then had not been adequately implemented.
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In the photo above: meeting of the CUN sections in Florence, September 15, 1979: Roberto Pinotti, Roberto Farabone, Renzo Cabassi, Antonio Chiumiento, Corrado Malanga, Paolo Mercuri, and Gian Paolo Grassino can be recognized.
In the photo above: Edoardo Russo, Umberto Telarico, Gianfranco Neri, and Paolo Toselli at Pinotti’s home (1979)
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The years from 1979 to 1985 were therefore a very lively period, which saw the activation of many initiatives that had previously been dormant or completely absent.
The central archives of the CUN, the “UFO Data Bank”, which at the time consisted of two sad shelves housed in a corridor in the office of the then president, were reactivated and given new impetus. Thanks also to the fact that the Turin group, taxing itself, had rented a small office, in a short time the archive began to take shape and generate activity, information gathering, and research around it.
A project was launched to collect case studies on a regional basis, an internal newsletter was revitalized, and, more generally, the vitality we wanted to bring stimulated many new and old initiatives, including the “Manual of UFO Field Investigation Methodology” which, based on similar foreign initiatives, provided an essential basis for the structured collection of sighting reports.
But the number of new activities and initiatives by this new generation is very long: you can see an illustrated summary by clicking here.
Unfortunately, however, there remained profound differences of vision with the old leadership group which, partly due to very personalistic agendas that are still evident today, ended up giving priority to different objectives and undermining the spirit of renewal that had been the basis of our entry into the CUN.
After months of bitter conflict, at the end of 1985 thirtyfour members of the CUN decided that there was no longer any room for good ufology within the old association and decided to create a new one, with a more modern and efficient approach, which would give space to the many initiatives that we had been cultivating and implementing for years.
[go back to the main article: “40 Years of CISU in Italy“]
