Turin-Caselle Airport Radar-Visual Sighting

Late 1973 was a restless season in the skies around Turin, with reports from the Susa Valley and Mount Musinè. Friday, 30 November, was clear and cold. Around 0 °C.

Turin-Caselle Airport had radar problems of its own. Its precision GCA radar had been out of service for four months. The search radar gave direction only. No reliable altitude.

Shortly before 7:00 p.m., something shone to the west-southwest. Captain Giovanni Mezzalami, bringing Alitalia DC-9 AZ325 in from Paris, saw "a very strong, brilliant white-blue light" about 15 to 20 degrees above the horizon. Captain Franco Tracquilio, on AZ043 from Rome, saw a luminous globe of intense brightness. It seemed to move vertically, at its brightest when it reached a peak of height. "I see a shining thing... four miles away. I dare not approach."

The tower controllers reported both a visual and a radar contact. At 19:15 the Caselle radar put the target 9 miles away at bearing 235°. Col. Franco Rustichelli, commander of the military airfield, called it "something solid, lit up, like a plane."

Riccardo Marano, 28, was landing a private Piper Navajo. The tower sent him after the light. He saw a bright white sphere above his own altitude. On RAI television he described "an extremely luminous body", its brightness varying as if controlled by a rheostat.

He closed in for 7 to 8 minutes at just under 400 km/h. The object made off, "flying in irregular fashion", with sudden vast jumps to and fro. He gave up before he ran out of fuel. Edoardo Russo later calculated that the Piper would not have travelled more than 45 to 50 km, arriving above Asti.

Caselle asked the military radar centre at Mortara, about 85 km east, to confirm the echo. Mortara could not. Then, between 19:57 and 20:52, it logged at least 12 tracks over Piedmont and Liguria. They appeared, vanished and reappeared in other positions. Lyon radar control also picked up some tracks over France. At 20:39 Mortara warned of a track 4 NM from the airport. Caselle staff saw an intensely bright object directly overhead.

There was no direct investigation at the time, and no formal witness interviews. The press filled the gap with over 100 articles, Mach 4 speeds and a fighter scramble that the military later denied. In the early 1990s Paolo Fiorino of CISU found nearly all the known witnesses. His dossier ran past 200 pages. His conclusion: at present it is not possible to give any complete answer. NICAP lists the case in its radar directory, citing Richard Hall's *The UFO Evidence, Vol. II*.

French ufologist Michel Monnerie, working from press reports, said the light was Venus, unusually bright that evening. He blamed the radar returns on instrument faults or operator error. Russo's sky data put Venus at azimuth 225° at 19:30, 6° up. Igino Gatti proposed atmospheric refraction in 1977. Others suggested autokinetic illusion, ball lightning, a French weather balloon or a spy drone. Critics pointed to the missing GCA radar, and to Mortara's tracks starting about 40 minutes after the main visual sightings. The Mortara report was later declassified. The globe over Caselle still has no complete answer.