The Cennina Landing: Rosa Lotti Dainelli and the Two Small Beings

Autumn 1954. Italy was in the middle of a great wave of sightings. On 27 October, there had been a sighting over the Florence stadium during a football match.

Rosa Lotti, married name Dainelli, was 40. A contadina, a farm worker, with four children and little schooling. She had heard of flying saucers "only two or three times." The evening before, the subject had come up at home.

1 November 1954. All Saints' Day. About 6:30 in the morning. Rosa walked a country path from the La Collina farmhouse, between Capannole and Cennina, a hamlet of Bucine near Arezzo. She was barefoot, carrying her best shoes and stockings and carnations for the altar of the Madonna Pellegrina.

In a clearing stood something like two bells joined at their base. About two metres tall. Opaque brown, as if covered in leather. Two porthole windows and a closed glass hatch. Inside, two small round seats, like children's chairs.

Two beings stepped toward her, about a metre tall and with adult proportions. Grey one-piece suits, short grey capes, helmets that looked like leather. Broad, short teeth made them seem always to be smiling. They spoke in what sounded like Chinese: "liu, lai, loi, lau, loi, lai, liu." In the English translation of her words: "It would have taken two of those things to make a man, but they were very fine looking, even though rather old."

One took her carnations and a stocking. She protested, and the older one gave back some flowers but kept five. They wrapped them in the stocking and threw the bundle through the hatch. Then one pointed a smooth brown cylinder at her, as if taking a photograph. Rosa ran while they stood watching her go.

That morning, about 24 people reported strange lights in the sky. Stonemason Romualdo Berti saw a "luminous rocket" rising from the woods. Florist Andrea Livi and his son Vittorio saw a "reddish cone-shaped" object. Two boys minding pigs, Ampelio and Marcello Torzini, said they saw Rosa talking with little men. About 30 minutes after the encounter, a hole about 10 cm across and 15 cm deep was found and confirmed by a Carabinieri officer.

Nobody investigated properly at the time. The first real inquiry came in 1972, led by Siro Menicucci of Prato. Sergio Conti published "The Cennina Landing of 1954" in Flying Saucer Review, with notes by Gordon Creighton, who called the corroboration "well nigh irrefutable." Roberto Pinotti, founder of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale, studied the case in 1977. In January 1993, Rosa confirmed her account, now adding burn marks around the hole and a smell of "overheated brakes."

A few days after the encounter, an anonymous postcard posted in Rome reached Il Giornale del Mattino, claiming its writer had staged a hoax on Rosa. The writer was never identified. A rumour of a photographer's prank was checked in the 1980s and "completely denied." The boys contradicted themselves under questioning. Researchers at ufo.it found hallucination hard to prove, but judged a firm interpretation "not easy … nor reasonably possible."

On 14 November 1954, La Domenica del Corriere put the scene on its cover, painted by Walter Molino. Jacques Vallée listed the case in Passport to Magonia. It remains a classic Italian close encounter. Locals joked that the beings spoke "Bu-cinese." Rosa turned down large sums to travel to the United States, and her grandchild remembers her "by the stove, telling me the story of the sighting."