The Villa Santina Encounter: L. R. Johannis and the Red Disc of Raveo

Summer 1947. Kenneth Arnold had made his report about seven weeks earlier. In Friuli lived Luigi Rapuzzi, a Futurist painter and former partisan who wrote as L. R. Johannis. He later said the Italian press had not yet covered flying saucers when his own encounter happened.

14 August 1947. About nine in the morning. Johannis was walking beside a dried-up stream on the lower slopes of Col Gentile, in the Chiarsò valley near Raveo and Villa Santina. He carried a pick.

He came out of the clumps of fir trees. No more than 50 metres away, wedged into a mountain crevice, lay a large red lenticular object about 10 metres wide. It had a low central cupola with no openings. Its surface seemed to be made of varnished metal. It carried a telescopic antenna.

Then he saw the figures. There were two of them, each under a metre tall, in dark blue translucent overalls with red belts. Their skin was earthy green. Their eyes were enormous, round and protruding, with a vertical pupil. Their slit mouths "opened and closed like that of a fish". Each green hand had eight fingers. "They were panting like dogs."

Johannis waved his pick towards the object and shouted. One of the creatures put his right hand to his belt. From the centre came a smoke like ray. It gave him a violent electric shock and knocked him to the ground. For a couple of minutes he could not move.

The beings walked back and re-entered the disc. It rose out of the ravine in a vertical position, dragging stones behind it, and came within 4 to 5 metres of him. It hovered, tilted, grew smaller and vanished. A shock wave threw dust in his eyes. His thermos flask was shattered and its metal case was missing. His pick was gone.

Johannis published the account in Clypeus in May 1964. Charles Bowen reprinted it in The Humanoids, a Flying Saucer Review special, in 1966. Gordon Creighton wrote it up in 1967 and compared the red-belted beings to those in the Antônio Villas Boas case. Jacques Vallée included it in Passport to Magonia. NICAP later added it to its report on the 1947 wave. English retellings turned the pick into a painter's easel.

In 2007 Maurizio Verga traced the earliest known version. It was an appendix Rapuzzi wrote for his own unpublished Italian translation of Flying Saucers Have Landed, in 1955. Several of its features echoed stories from autumn 1954. Verga judged it a hoax to impress American UFO buffs. Reviewing the book, Peter Rogerson recalled that Johannis was "a well known science fiction writer".

Other questions remain. There was only one witness. There are no photographs, no radar data and no official inquiry. Sources give the date as July or August. Johannis emigrated to the United States in 1947 and moved in the circles of Ray Palmer and George Adamski. He later claimed more sightings and an abduction. His defenders at Flying Saucer Review said a trained artist's eye captures detail quickly.

Johannis is said to be among the first in Italy to draw little green men, and his own sketches of the two beings survive. In 2024 Lucia Burello published L'uomo degli Ufo, a novel based on his life. It sets the encounter on a farewell walk before he left for America. Memory or fiction, the red disc of Raveo endures as one of the strangest close encounter stories of 1947.