MOUNT MUSINE'S UFO SIGHTINGS

In these months of "coronavirus crisis" there has been the first official confirmation by US military authorities of the existence of the UFO (Unidentified flying Objects): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/navy-confirms-videos-did-capture-ufo-sightings-it-calls-them-n1056201. It seems that it has been chosen the period of time when all the world attention was concentrated on the terrible pandemia and so this UFO news was going to be quickly forgotten by the mass media.

Original "letter" about the 1960 UFO sighting in mount Musine

But what strikes me most is that a few researchers argue that the Coronavirus can be "linked" to the UFO problem, because the pandemia hits the most powerful countries in the world (from the US to the main western European nations and to China), while the third world is practically untouched. India, Latin America and Black Africa, they argue, are being mostly spared by the terrible disease.....why?..... The answer for these researchers is that they think that this is a way to "weaken" the only countries that could "fight" a possible invasion by extraterrestrials, that is going to happen soon (please read this Italian website about many UFOs approaching our planet: http://www.centroufologicomediterraneo.it/wp/enormi-flotte-di-ufo-entrano-nellatmosfera-terrestre-la-nasa-registra-levento-in-diretta-tv-dalla-iss/). And they add that this is the beginning of the end of the "human" world, as prophecies show in their apocalypses writings (for some of them the 2000 year 'finis mundi' -predicted by Nostradamus et al- has been confused with the "similar number" 2020....and so it is going to happen now the end of the world...).

Sincerely, I don't think this is possible: it makes me even laugh! In my opinion, this proves that the human mind can create every stupidity.

Anyway, something seems to be "real" in all these UFO problems, with so many questions related. As I wrote in April 2017 (https://researchomnia.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-truth-about-ufo-in-1933-italy.html ), in northern Italy there have been historically many sightings in the Piedmont/Lombardy region. And a place seems to be continuously linked to the UFO: mount Musine, in the Alps near Torino.

Mount Musine

The mountain is 1.150 meters high, overlooking the "Val di Susa" and characterized by a supposedly "sterile" belt, in which nothing grows, midway up. Also, optical anomalies have been recorded in the Musiné area, resulting in strangely distorted photographs, double shadows and similar oddities (on the northeastern slopes of Mount Musinè several "magnesite" quarries were active between 1875 and the Second World War) . 
It has also been said that at the foot of the Musiné there would be a "shadow cone", that is, an interference zone that obscures any radio transmission. Even private planes that fly over the place are disturbed in their radio broadcasts. These problems cease the moment you move away from the mountain.

History

Originally called "Mons Asinarius" (Donkey's Mountain) by the Romans, Mount Musiné was always considered ominous by the locals. From the earlier times, strange lights have been seen by night and sudden fires have scarred the sides of the mountain.

One of the best documented cases was witnessed by many in 966 AD , while on the opposite side of the Susa valley, on Mount Pirchiriano, the newly built S. Michael monastery and shrine was being visited by Bishop Amizone. Lights (described as "planks and globes made of fire") were seen by the monks during the night; they started on the Musiné mountain, then rose in the sky and started circling around the new building (please read detailed information in the Italian website:http://www.marianotomatis.it/index.php?special=musine&doc=musine04 ) .

Similar events are documented since the IV century AD, and have been ascribed often to "angels". The most famous legendary event is that related to the battle that in 312 AD saw the future emperor Constantine clash with the troops of his rival Maxentius.

On that occasion (but it is not historically ascertained) Constantine the Great would have had the well-known vision of a cross in the clouds with the writing "in hoc signo vinces", that would have led him to impose the Christian religion in the Roman empire. According to "ufologists", the cross was a "huge cigar" UFO with wings!

In memory of that battle, In 1901 a 15 m high cross was built on the top of the mountain using reinforced concrete. 

The top of the mountain with the concrete cross

Indeed both the CISU (Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici) and the CUN (Centro Ufologico Nazionale), plus lots of "independents", are keeping an eye on the mountain. Many cases of UFO sightings have been reported and documented in the area in the last 50 years. According to this people, the "sterile belt" could be caused by radiations leaks from some UFO engines. 

Also, the mountain is said to be riddled with galleries, possibly of volcanic origin and later artificially enlarged, to be used as a UFO base. Indeed when Mussolini’s fascist government recovered a crashed UFO in Lombardy in 1933, it was suggested by some members of the above UFO centers-groups that space aliens had a secret base under Monte Musinè (but I totally disagree with them, even because it is not geologically proved that there was a volcano in the area). 

Furthermore,there are countless testimonies of sightings of unidentified flying objects, both nocturnal and diurnal, in the last two centuries. Numerous witnesses also recall the apparitions on the top of flaming spherical globes. There are tales of strange lights sighted in the sky, attributed by "ufologists" to alien visitors. This has led to believe that the mountain is a destination for extraterrestrials: samples of scorched earth would witness the passage of spaceships spotted by some local farmers.

Recent UFO sightings


One of the most interesting UFO sightings in the Mount Musine is that of an object observed on the evening of July 12, 1960 in the locality called Mati, while passing slowly on the mountain illuminating the top (see the "letter" at the beginning of this article). On December 8, 1978, on the other hand, some young people who had climbed specifically to the Musinè to see some mysterious lights, observed a strong light source in the trees. Traces of one of the boys were lost for an hour and, once found, he said he had been wrapped in a mysterious light and had glimpsed humanoid figures. In detail: his mate, with the help of some passers-by, searched for him and after a while found his friend in a state of shock and with a noticeable scald on one leg. After regaining consciousness the young man reported having seen an elongated vehicle and that some strangely shaped beings descended from it, touching and efting him: 3-4 men with "melon" heads had appeared, silhouetted silently in the light; the man felt paralyzed and was able to feel only lights and sounds, also feeling touched and pushed higher from ground. Both the young hikers suffered from conjunctivitis for some time.

Five years before the incident with the two hikers, on 2^nd December 1973, the crew and passengers of an Italian commercial airliner witnessed strange glowing orbs seemingly traversing the skies over the top of Mount Musine. When later details emerged from witnesses, it appeared that the orbs had a definite disc-shape structure to them.

Furthermore, the Italian Air Force sent  jets to the region, whose pilots did also see the bizarre craft. They didn’t, however, manage to intercept it, with the strange object simply disappearing each time they would approach. According to newspaper reports at the time, hundreds of people on the ground also witnessed the bizarre events unfold. For further information of other sightings in that decade, please go to the website (in Italian): http://www.merlino.org/ufo-nw73.htm


Sensational episodes got the media attention on march 1996 when two hikers saw – or at least claimed to see – a bright object with a circular shape and a yellow-green color, fluttering in the sky for more than a quarter of an hour. The object – always according to the statements of the two spectators- had two large cups transparent through which could be seen moving apparently humanoid shapes. The location of the sighting was, in fact, the Monte Musinè.

On march 10, 2005 Luca Avenati -a Torino citizen- saw a red globe moving from Mount Musine toward Avigliana (in the outskirts of Torino) around 9 pm; when it was 300 meters over this locality the globe remained without movement for 5 minutes while all the lights in the area suffered a full blackout (La Stampa newspaper, march 26/2005).

On July 18, 2008 Claudio Neve -a news reporter- wrote that a father in Gassino Torinese (near Val di Susa) took a photo in the morning of his two sons playing in the garden of his house. When developed the photo, it showed behind the kids an UFO (in the direction of nearby Mount Musine), as can be seen in the above image of a section of the photo.

On October 2019 a drone was able to make a video showing an UFO flying at 1400 km/h in a place called Nichelino, not far away from mount Musine. Please see the videos in this Italian website: http://www.centroufologicomediterraneo.it/wp/ufo-velocissimo-circa-1400-kmh-sfreccia-davanti-ad-un-drone-nichelino-nei-pressi-di-torino/

DANTE AND THE ITALIAN "VENEZIA GIULIA"

There are some interesting studies on the Italian character of the "Venezia Giulia" (called sometimes "Iulian March" in English) according to Dante Alighieri. In fact we all know that Dante -the "father" of the Italian language- defined the eastern borders of Italy in the fourteenth century with this famous phrase in his 'Divina Commedia': "Carnaro ch’ Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna" (Carnaro that Italy closes and its borders bathes; free translation: the gulf of Carnaro in eastern Istria is the limit of Italy). And the southern borders of the Venezia Giulia region are defined by the Istria peninsula & the Carnaro (called also Quarnero) south of the city of Fiume (now officially called Rijeka, but only since 1918).

Map showing in dark green the areas actually populated by "Ladini" (called Ladins in English). In light green are those where the Ladins lived in the early Middle Ages, like the 'Venezia Giulia' east of Udine. 

Indeed officially the Kingdom of Italy's "Compartment of Venezia Giulia and Zara" (which in 1939 included 128 municipalities on a surface of 8,953 sq km and with a population of 977,000 inhabitants: data from the Atlante De Agostini Calendar, 1940) included Istria and the area north of Trieste and Fiume up to the mount Tricorno (called Triglav in Slovenian) in the Iulian Alps. In this "compartment" the southern half (the Istrian peninsula) of the 'Venezia Giulia' could have been divided from the northern half  (the Iulian Alps) by an imaginary line between Muggia (near Trieste) and Abbazia (near Fiume): after WW1 in Istria nearly 3/4 of the population was romance speaking, while in the northern half the slav presence was huge and the neolatins were concentrated in the coast and in the big coastal cities. The following map showed the ethnic percentages in this region in 1939:

Historically we all know that this region is at the center of an area that is the "point of contact" of the 3 main ethnic groups in Europe: the Neolatins, the Slavs and the Germans.....and so it is a place of many rivalries, fights and wars through the centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire.
In fact, the Ladins - at least until the early fourteenth century when Dante visited the area- were a considerable percentage of the population in the region around the Julian Alps and were probably the majority in the area that successively became Italian after World War 1.
Moreover, the region was fully Romanized during the Roman empire but the Slovenians (who are now the majority of the population in the 'Venezia Giulia') appeared - together with their allies/masters: the Avars - around the beginning of the seventh century in the area of the Roman Emona (a city today called Ljubljana). And since then - according to the few religious registers and writings of the time - all traces of the Romance populations that inhabited the city and its surrounding area in the centuries of the Roman Empire have disappeared. Subsequently the Slavs -after the "Black Plague" which enormously decimated in 1350 the autochthonous neo-Latin population of Venezia Giulia, especially around Postumia and Idria- gradually replaced/assimilated during the Renaissance most of the "Ladins" still living in the Julian Alps to the west of Emona.

Emona was the most eastern of the Italian cities of Roman Italy and everything suggests that the indigenous neolatin population was massacred (and in a small part forced to flee). So far, everything was related to the sad events of the barbarian invasions of those centuries: between wars and consequent related epidemics (such as the famous "Justinian Plague"), the population of the Alpine area was halved in a few decades (and there are even scholars who claim it fell to less than one quarter of the original total!).

This advance of the Slovenians, who were enemies of the Christians in those dark centuries, is deduced from the records of the "Metropolitan Church of Aquileia" on the decline and disappearance of its ancient dioceses (Emona, Celeia, Poetovio, Aguntum, Teurnia, Virunum, Scarabantia) in the current Central and Eastern Slovenia (read the interesting essay written in Slovenian or with a google translator

"Slovenian history: From prehistoric cultures to late Middle Ages" of Peter Stih (http://www.sistory.si/publikacije/pdf/zgodovina/Stih-Slovenska_zgodovina_od_prazgodovinskih_kultur_do_konca_srednjega_veka.pdf ).

This Slovenian invasion did not stop in the Emona area - located in present-day central Slovenia - but continued (although to a lesser extent, which fortunately allowed the Romance populations to survive) towards north-eastern Italy, occupying over the centuries successive territories which will be called "Venezia Giulia" and "Eastern Friuli". Only in Istria they were stopped, as has been historically documented in the famous "Placito del Risano" of 804 AD. In fact there are testimonies of neolatin presences up to the year 1100 AD in the area of Postumia (actual ​​Postojna), Idria and the upper Isonzo river. In a nutshell, after the Charlemagne decades this Slovenian wave stopped around Mount Tricorno (called "Triglav" in Slovenian): in the east practically everything was Slovenian, but in the west it was only partially. The remains of this first Slovenian "push" can be found in the remaining Slavic populations of the Natisone area in eastern Friuli, where many words of their "Resian dialect" are Romance, testifying to the presence among them of many Romans since their arrival in the seventh/eighth century (and not massacred and suddenly "disappeared" as in the Emona area).

1930 Map of Italian Venezia Giulia, when it had been "redeemed" by Italian irredentists following WW1 victory (note that Carnaro is written "Quarnero")

The famous linguist Bartoli stated that the neolatin peoples (today called "Ladini") were the majority of the population of 'Venezia Giulia' until the year 1100 AD, when the Republic of Venice began to expand in the area. Obviously these calculations are not precise. In fact no one can say with total certainty whether in that year the Ladins were or not the majority in what became the Italian Venezia Giulia in the twentieth century, but certainly they were present in very large numbers. And this contrasts in an impacting way with the current absence of Romance populations north-east of Gorizia! Dante -when was in exile- visited the region at the beginning of the XIV century, but we are not sure about where he went and in which cities he spent some time. For sure we have that he received the inspiration to write the first verses of his masterpiece -the Divina Commedia- from the Postumia caves on the Julian Alps. Indeed, in northern Venezia Giulia, the small city of Tolmino was also known for having probably hosted Dante at the beginning of the XIV century, when the Italian poet visited the eastern borders of Italy and the Postumia caves (from which he drew inspiration for his "Gates of Inferno") . Dante himself on that occasion personally affirmed the Italian character of the Istria-Julian region, according to historian Francesco Lamendola. In fact in Tolmino and Postumia he found many inhabitants who spoke an "archaic Italian", similar to that of Udine, while in Istria he noted that the local dialect was similar to the one spoken in Venice. Lamendola also wrote (in his Italian essay http://www.accademianuovaitalia.it/index.php/storia-e-cultura-delle-venezie/la-patria-del-friuli/2476-dante-e-la-venezia-giulia) that :

"...At the extreme north-east of Italy's peninsula/region there was the largest of the states, if we improperly we want to call them, of northern Italy: the "Patriarcato di Aquileia" ('Patriarchate of Aquileia'), created by Henry IV in 1077 to keep the control of the pass of the Eastern Alps with Ghibelline princes-bishops loyal to him and his successors. Friuli, which had been the seat of an important Lombard duchy and which had, with Berengario I, one of the first kings of Italy (in 888 AD; while in 915 he had even managed to gird the imperial crown) had a feudal Germanic class and, after the disastrous incursions of the Hungarians, it was partly repopulated by some Slavic colonists. At the time of Dante, that is between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Italian ethnic element was slowly regaining the upper hand, after an eclipse lasting two or three centuries; while Udine had become, de facto if not de jure, the new capital of the patriarchs (after Aquileia and Cividale), a city that then knew, also thanks to the influx of Lombard and above all Tuscan merchants, an extraordinary economic and demographic expansion, attested among other things, from a famous novel by Boccaccio....the Patriacato constituted a remarkable entity: it ranged from the Livenza river (north of the Venice lagoon) to the Isonzo area and beyond; it included Cadore, Carnia, parts of Istria including Pola (lost in 1331 in favor of Venice) and -at least until 1295- Trieste itself (which in 1368 made an act of dedication to the Habsburgs to escape the inevitable Venetian conquest ).....The Croats, who had arrived in Istria not before the VI-VII century (after Illyrians, Romans, Ostrogoths, Ávars, Byzantines) never interrupted the continuity between the Italians of western Istria with those of Fiume & the Dalmatian islands of Cherso, Veglia and Lussino (where to this day older people still speak a Venetian dialect); and this is also an undeniable fact.....To the east of the patriarchate, the 'Contea di Gorizia' was nominally under the control of the patriarch...….This was the Patriarchate of Aquileia in the early 1300s, at the time, that is, of the exile of Dante Alighieri. A kind of world apart, very different from the other lordships of northern Italy; a world that is only partly Italian, dominated by German feudal lords, by patriarchs who were also German for a long time (especially during the Ghibelline period)...a world characterized by political aspects, including advanced ones, but inexorably undermined by a structural weakness: the extreme juridical-social backwardness of its peasant plebs, still largely reduced to the poor condition of serfs....It is possible that Dante..traveled in person to these places and listened with his own ears to that rustic accent (the ladin-friulan dialect) that had to hit him so much..."

The Patriarcato di Aquileia was completely conquered by the Republic of Venice in 1420, nearly one century after Dante visited it. But we are not sure where he went in this Patriarcate: many historians wrote that he was in Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola, Tolmino and Postumia. However the city where we have the best sure evidence of a Dante's presence is Parenzo (in western Istria). The following is a translation of what Lamendola wrote about this presence of Dante in Parenzo: "...We have a written record of Dante, in Parenzo, dated, as we will see, in October 1308...…...Between the end of the 1200s and the beginning of the 1300s we have a substantial documentation about the presence of Tuscans, especially merchants and bankers, in the Istrian communities on the west coast: from Capodistria, to Isola, to Parenzo, to Pola (as they were numerous, in the same period, in the Patriarchate of Aquileia), giving a significant boost to the city's economic development. A certain number of these had to be made up of political exiles, such as Dante, and not only "white" (pro-emperor) but also "black" (pro-pope), given that in their communes of origin the situation of the two parties was constantly fluctuating.Often the common misfortune induced these exiles to put aside their ideological differences and to establish friendly relations, as Dante himself had done with the poet Cino da Pistoia, who was a Black man disbanded from his city for political reasons. Among the many evidence, particularly interesting for us, is that of a Tuscan Dante, whose presence is attested to Parenzo in a judicial document which bears the date of 4 October 1308.....This is a procedural sentence issued by the mayor of Parenzo, Andrea Michiel, against a certain Matteo di Giovanni Cortese, for illegal fishing in the waters of the bishopric; sentence that ordered the accused to pay a fine of one hundred dollars of small Venetian money. It was pronounced under the new Loggia del Comune; says the document, "presentibus dominis Dante tuscano habitatore Parentii" and an Antonio Peio, a remarkable personage who appears in numerous writings of Parenzo as a notary..........

Historical map of Friuli and Venezia Giulia in the Renaissance. There is to the east of Gorizia and Vipacco ("Vipao") the name "Piuca", the river of Postumia and its caves visited by Dante. It should be noted that after the "Black Plague" of 1350, the area remained depopulated so there are no villages on the map around Piuca (only "Scenasechie", the current Senosecchia): in fact, until Dante's time, the majority of the population around Postumia was "Romance" speaking, but the Plague decimated the region which was repopulated with many Slovenians (who became the area vast majority in the following centuries)

The question spontaneously arises if the "Dante tuscano" is precisely the poet Dante Alighieri. Well, there are several elements that would make you answer in the affirmative, and all of them agree with each other. First, the name Dante, which is a diminutive of Durante, was not very common in those days; second, in the Istrian documents of 1200 the adjective tuscanus undoubtedly indicated the Florentine origin; third, the term 'habitator' designated those who had only a temporary residence, and was used in contrast to 'civis', which qualified those who enjoyed full citizenship; fourth, the appellative dominus was reserved for people of noble or distinct origin (and Dante fell into both categories); fifth, the fact that the name of Dante is placed before that of Antonio Peio, a local notary and "big shot", means that he was a character worthy of the utmost respect...At this point, let's try to make a reasoning by exclusion, and ask ourselves if it is credible that a whole series of significant coincidences is purely accidental: that there was another Dante in Parenzo, in the same years in which the Alighieri was exiled and wandered in disparate places in northern Italy; that this other Dante was, like the Alighieri, Florentine; that he resided in the Istrian municipality only temporarily, and therefore was, like the poet, far from his homeland; that he was like him noble and of considerable social status, or both; that he was worthy, as the Alighieri would have been, to appear on the ruling of the mayor before an eminent citizen, he who was not a citizen. It should be concluded, it seems to us, that this second Dante should have been almost a duplicate of the first, a sort of product of parallel universes!....Such are the arguments with which the distinguished Istrian historian Camillo De Franceschi (Parenzo, 1868 - Trieste, 1953) believes he can confidently affirm that the Tuscan Dante and the Alighieri are the same person, arguments he presented in a trilogy dedicated to the presence of Dante in Istria. And just as convinced has been, in more recent years, another Dante scholar, Francesco Semi, in turn supporter of a thesis already advanced by Vidossich....."

Modern photo of the Postumia Caves, considered by many scholars to be the inspiration for the "Gate of Inferno" in Dante's Divine Comedy

Furthermore we have to pinpoint that Parenzo, the capital of venetian western Istria in the XIV century, is located not far away from the Postumia Caves. And if Dante lived temporarily in Parenzo, it is extremely probable that he went to visit (only 50 miles away!)  these famous caves, from where -according to many scholars- he got the inspiration to write the first verses of his "Divina Commedia" (when entering inside the 'Inferno'). Finally we have to remember that there it is another written document about the presence of Dante in Tolmino & Postumia, done by Jacopo da Valvasone  in the first half of the XVII century. But it is not well accepted by some scholars.

However the Dante's decription of the mount "Tambernicchi" near the Postumia caves, called now Monte Pomario (in Slovenian: Javornik), is extremely precise and could have been done so well only if he had seen it personally, according to Cesare Marchi in his famous book "Dante in esilio".