The Canneto di Caronia Fires and the Burnt Imprint

Canneto is a small frazione of Caronia, in the Metropolitan City of Messina, Sicily. It lies on state highway 113, between Marina di Caronia and Santo Stefano di Camastra. In 2010 it had 154 residents. The Pezzino family and their relatives lived on Via Mare, near the sea.

23 December 2003. At the home of Antonino Pezzino, an insurance salesman, something went wrong. One account says a television exploded. Another says the fuse box went up in flames and the curtains burned. Between January and March 2004 there were 92 reported fires. They hit air conditioners, fridges, washing machines, mattresses with people asleep on them, and even unplugged lamps and cables. Pezzino told Reuters he watched an air conditioner "burst into flames and burn down in 30 seconds." Phones rang with no signal. Compasses went haywire.

On 9 February 2004 two houses on Via Mare burned. Mayor Pedro Spinnato evacuated the street. "We're working in the dark," he said. "We don't have a single lead." The utility ENEL cut the power. The fires reportedly continued.

The regional Civil Protection department then formed an interinstitutional study group led by the geologist Francesco Venerando Mantegna. The military, the Navy, CNR, INGV and a NASA representative took part. Mantegna said the group logged over 400 anomalies and testimonies. Among them were lights over the sea, moving in formation from sea to land. Objects in the sky that disappeared with great speed. Burn marks on plants, aligned in a straight path from sea through town to mountains.

Then there was the helicopter. A Civil Protection Sikorsky was flying a survey over the lower Tyrrhenian when it suddenly lost power and made an emergency landing. Three of its four rotor blades were damaged at the same distance from the hub. There were no biological traces. According to Mantegna, a photograph taken from the ground showed "a small dark object in the helicopter's tail, at a distance of several hundred meters."

In a field near Caronia there was a rectangular imprint, 40 m long and 15 m wide. Only the Ampelodesmos shrubs had burned. The burns on their roots matched the scorching on the village's electrical wires.

October 2007. L'Espresso and the British press published the group's interim report. It blamed "high power electro magnetic emissions which were not man made and reached a power of between 12 and 15 gigawatts." The press presented the burnt imprints as a possible UFO landing. Mantegna chose his words carefully. "We are not saying that little green men from Mars started the fires," he said, "but that unnatural forces capable of creating a large amount of electromagnetic energy were responsible." He gave two possibilities: extraterrestrial involvement, or "testing of top secret weapons by an unknown power." His group did not attribute the imprint to a landing.

In 2008 the prosecutor at Mistretta archived the case as arson. In July 2014 the fires returned, with 48 blazes in 18 hours. Carabinieri under Capt. Giuseppe D'Aveni hid cameras around the village and recorded about 40 incidents. On 5 March 2015 Giuseppe Pezzino, Nino's son, was arrested. Investigators said the motive was disaster compensation. On 25 March 2022 the court in Patti convicted father and son at first instance. Giuseppe was sentenced to six years and Antonino to one year and six months. Back in 2004, Massimo Polidoro of CICAP had pointed out that the fires happened "only when there are people present."

Today Canneto offers mystery tourism walks. In 2019 Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation retold the helicopter story as a UFO encounter. No source ever tied the blades, the imprint or the lights to the arson case. In 2023 Mantegna still said Canneto "was probably involved by external experimental activities whose origin was not discovered."