Mihal Grameno and the Shining Object over Çerçiz Topulli's Camp

Spring 1907. In Sofia, Mihal Grameno and Çerçiz Topulli founded a guerrilla band to fight Ottoman rule in Albania. That April they landed at Vlorë, having come from Brindisi. Grameno was a journalist and writer from Korçë, born in 1871. He would later be honoured as "Hero i Popullit", People's Hero.

The band moved from village to village around Gjirokastër. On 25 February 1908 it killed the Gjirokastër binbashi. On 18 March 1908 five of its men fought the battle of Mashkullorë. Then came the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908.

One night. 1907, or perhaps 1908. The fighters had set up a limer, a hideout, literally a den, on the top of a high mountain pasture. Grameno wrote it in the first person: "One night, while the fighters of Çerçiz were stationed at the top of a high mountain, a shiny object flew in front of us, stood suspended in the air for several minutes, and then disappeared."

That is the whole account. A shining object arrived in front of the camp. It hung still in the air. Minutes passed. Then it was gone. Grameno gave no shape, no size, no colour and no sound. He did not say how it left.

The passage is tied to Grameno's book Kryengritja shqiptare, published in 1925 as fighting memoirs about Çerçiz Topulli's band. Some articles call the source his diary of 1907. Another says the diary covered 1908 and 1909. No separate manuscript has been shown, and no article gives a page number. The University of Ioannina holds a digitized first edition. The passage has still not been checked against it.

There is no other witness statement. The mountain is never named. No Ottoman, Albanian or foreign file is known. The man telling the story was a rebel at war with the state that ruled the ground he stood on.

The earliest online version found is a Syri.net article of 11 January 2016, framed around an FBI report that alien ships had landed in Albania. A wave of reposts followed in October 2016 through Telegrafi, Koha Jonë, Mapo and others. Koha Jonë ran it again on 3 May 2021. Vision Times carried it to English readers on 9 July 2026. Every version reuses the same single sentence.

Commentators in the Albanian press and at Vision Times argue that it cannot have been an aeroplane, since aircraft were barely in use in 1907. Nor a meteor or a comet, they say, because those do not hang in the air. No one has accused Grameno of inventing it, and no published source has offered a conventional answer. A bright planet such as Venus rising over a ridge, ball lightning in mountain air or a fire on a facing slope all remain possible. But the book appeared some 17 years after that night. Without a date and a place, none of these ideas can be tested.

The story now heads Albania's list of UFO reports. After it come Vlorë in 1933, a MiG-19 meeting a glittering sphere over Mount Tomorr in the 1960s, and a bright object over Kallamishtëz in January 1963, close to the band's old ground. All of it starts with one sentence from a guerrilla's memoir. The rest of that night's story may still be waiting in the pages of the 1925 book.