The Roskovec landing and burn marks

Roskovec is a small town in Fier County, in southern Albania, not far from Fier on the national road towards Berat. The country has a long record of strange skies, from the diary of Mihal Grameno to the MiG-19s scrambled from Kuçova in the Mount Tomorr incident. Top Channel would later call Roskovec the most sensational case of them all.

4 May 2006. Around 19:00. The day was clear. Children were playing on an asphalt road, and a woman was cooking in her yard nearby. Then the area darkened. A mist appeared, as though rain were about to fall. A strong and cold wind followed, and the branches of the trees were said to bend down. Dust rose. A cloud formed in the clear weather.

Mario Çela was 10, and he is said to have hidden under a cart at the side of the road. He described the object as "an oval, disclike shape… a gray coloration, as well as a thin blue line." It came from the northwest. It stayed on the ground for about 4 to 5 seconds. Then it lifted off, rotated, and left the way it came. Most of the effects stopped once it had gone. Three people were counted as eyewitnesses. Another resident, Sherife Kola, never saw the object, only what it did around her.

The object left three double-banded black circles in the asphalt. Residents said the marks were still hot a day later. Rose petals laid on them burned. A local photographer, Alim Çepele, photographed the circles, and Top Channel published one of his images in 2014.

For Mario, the evening did not end there. One account says he was in shock and would not leave the house for three months. Çepele later said it was six months, and that the boy did not sleep. As an adult, he reportedly refuses to talk about it.

In September 2023 Çepele appeared on Euronews Albania and retold the boy's account, this time giving his age as about 11. In this version the object was grey with a blue line, pyramid-shaped and rounded underneath. It gave off flames from below. It rotated on itself and created fog. Another account, credited to residents, described two spheres with a cone on top, white-gray in colour. The illusionist and UFO commentator Nadir Murra went further and claimed that a UFO crashed in Roskovec. No witness account says so.

There is no record of any police, military or scientific inquiry. No soil or asphalt samples were taken, and there is no radar data. No one has published a conventional explanation, and no one has accused the witnesses or the photographer of making it up.

The accounts that remain were recorded years apart, most of them second-hand through Çepele. They describe the shape three different ways. The earliest text found online dates from 2010. The wind and the sudden dark are the most consistent part of every telling.

Roskovec keeps coming back to Albanian screens. Top Channel covered it in 2013 and 2014, a photographer interview followed in 2022, and in 2023 the Euronews Albania segment spread across the Albanian press. In 2014 Top Channel reported that the town as a whole believed it had been visited. The boy who saw it from under the cart has stayed silent.