Why UAP in 1933 Italy isn't as bonkers as it sounds
And recommendations for onward study
[This article is free of any AI content]
Like many who opted to pay attention to it about two weeks ago, I was quite surprised by the profile in a little-known (to me anyway) publication called TheDebrief of a former intelligence person, David Grusch. I actually avoided the story as it popped up in my feed, because I was unfamiliar with TheDebrief. However I do follow the YouTube show Breaking Points. Its host Saagar Enjeti, whose coverage I admire on other topics and who I know follows the UAP beat, imbued credibility on the piece by highlighting that the author was the same as that behind the NYTimes piece in 2017, as well as followup pieces in that publication.
So for those of us unfamiliar enough with the subject to be able to critically analyze a priori and draw our own inferences on what channels and individuals can and can’t be trusted (I’ll call this ‘lazy trust-building’ for now), we have a credibility chain here:
NYT → Kean → TheDebrief → Grusch → NewsNation
(I’ve also watched NewsNation in the past on other topics and found its coverage wasn’t manifestly objectionable).
So then I start paying attention to topical takes by Eric Weinstein on analyzing folklore accounts aloofly, and an offhand reference retweeted by YCombinators’ Paul Graham
So I’m paying rapt attention by this point. I managed to find & watch the entire NewsNation interview, which was nothing short of shocking. (If you can find the full version of it online, power to you, but in any case they provide the statements here that are relevant to this article. They took down the uninterrupted full interview).
But I continue searching around, ascertaining.
I see a press conference organized by a Mr. Greer, which while compelling in its own right, apparently, Greer is often dismissed by those in the UFO / UAP community. But the most concerning elements of the eyewitness accounts he convened, regarding non-oversight, were the ones that happened to agree with some of the most disturbing of Grusch’s revelations. I continue watching other videos that seem to be in at least neutral esteem by the same community (at least I haven’t seen critiques). On scanning recent Google News articles on UAP, and reading TheDebrief further, the nuclear angle comes to light via credible sources - - from the men working in missile silos when sightings and malfunctions occurred. Their names are Robert Salas and David Schindele. I recommend at least skimming these if you haven’t come across them already:
2021 - YouTube link - Salas-Schindele convened event
2010 - YouTube link - Salas-Hastings convened event
(CNN was evidently recording this one)
I’m looking at the missile silo operators, led by Salas and Schindele (no one has disputed their bonafides, and I feel no inclination to either). These individuals were part of the business-end of the Cold War stick. They were psychologically profiled to be the coldest folks who would know when it was time to turn that key and when it wasn’t time to. They’ve gone on to have careers that make me feel inadequate. They‘ve been instructed not to talk, and they are talking. I don’t know how not to feel moved by that.
David Schindele (Left) and Robert Salas (Right) in 2021.
So now I’m happy to apply faculties to consider these several sources together collectively & critically. Things get interesting from here.
Where I’m coming from
Personally, I’m coming from a background of participating in unrelated technically-routed controversial debates, especially with the common thread that any government - US very much notwithstanding - does not always operate transparently. So I needed little convincing that parts of the government were behaving in an unanswerable way to oversight. Until now I have no history of participating in the UAP debate.
I’m a technical person by way of formal 4-year university engineering training, and subject to which, I am a tech generalist. I’ve participated before actively in debates based on crowdsourced analysis on controversial topics. I don’t tend to provide original source material nor do I generally provide expert analysis of such material firsthand. Rather my M.O. is generally to vet and cheerlead those sources, producers of analysis, & journalism outlets that pass my vetting. Today however I provide some modicum of analysis and feel sufficient hubris to provide additional synthesis of analysis. Think of me as your average armchair aviation-classicalphysics-technology yahoo with an aging bachelor’s of engineering degree providing a veneer of backup to it. So when you read this and are deciding whether you should make something of it, don’t. Rather ask your physicist friends to vet this for you instead.
And (like so many) I have also worked briefly in the US defense sector, so I am familiar with how things can start to feel ‘spooky’ at a cultural-operational level.
Allowing myself to indulge in analysis
I’m intrigued that the UAP may show distinct interest in nuclear technology. But first I have to consider several possible biases that could be in play here.
Ascertainment Bias?
Nuclear reactors, military and otherwise, are highly secure installations. They are monitored carefully through various means. So when someone makes a connection between UFO/UAP and nuclear technology, I have to consider ascertainment bias from the outset. Put simply, UAP sightings could be happening with equal coverage everywhere, but because nuclear sites (civil & military reactors, missile silos, warhead storage) are so carefully monitored, we only hear reports from nuclear sites.
[update 24-Jun-23 - Turns out some excellent analysis work was undertaken by (Porrit e al. 2023). just earlier this year. https://zenodo.org/record/7295958 It specifically controls for ascertainb in assessing UAP-nuclear interest. tl;dr - yes there is interest. There’s also a great interview of one of the authors covering it from a couple days ago on The Debrief. ]
Confirmation Bias?
In parallel, I have to consider that the nuclear-UFO connection is charge led by a Dr. Robert Hastings, an individual who I have no background on, but, as with any intriguing hypothesis, I have to consider whether this person could have laid out a hypothesis and wrapped themselves in a confirmation bubble around it. Here is a link to the record for his book on the topic. Although it is hosted on the website of the International Atomic Energy Agency, I imagine their hosting does not imply endorsement.
[update 24-Jun-23 - see ascertainment bias note re. (Porrit et al 2023) above]
Going ahead and Diving in
Letting these potential sources of bias go unresolved for now, I allow myself to dive further in.
The missile defense officers’, Saras and Schindley, testimonies demonstrate at least some interest on the part of the UAPs in the United States’ nuclear defense capabilities. But per Grusch,
crashed/abandoned UAP craft have been recovered
this recovery activity has been going on for most of a century
the US has been competing with other countries to gain an upper hand in reverse-engineering or others incorporating such recovered technology for its interests.
The most well-known if disputed report of a crash recovery is 1947 Roswell. Grusch’s revelations in general lend credence to that event having taken place, that too in a UAP context. Therefore, when I hear the Saras / Schindley-convened reports of US missile defense officers from the 1960’s I have to wonder whether the craft they are reporting are NHI-occupied, or perhaps human-occupied based our own reverse-engineered craft based on earlier experience from 1947. In the 1960’s era of the Cold War, paranoia runs high, Cold War doctrinaires ruled the roost, and initiatives of debatable wisdom can be commissioned in the name of national security
It’s in that context that I consider the possibility that the deactivation of missiles in their silos is commissioned by whatever internal government initiative is associated with the 1947 Roswell recovery. This could be in the context of a ‘penetration test’ - assessing how hardened US missile defense systems are to such an attack, or to verify the capability of such a technology to be likely capable of knocking out an adversary’s missile defense systems. This possibility could account for the seeming interest in nuclear capability on the part of UAPs.
Unfortunately, even if this pen-test scenario might possibly be correct for the 1960’s, the pen-test scenario doesn’t hold up as we reach further back in time. Hastings published an interview of a pilot, Bud Clem, reporting a sighting of UAP from January 1945 over Hanford, WA. This is more than two years before Roswell, so we have no indication, even rumored, that reverse-engineering of recovered craft was possible by this point. (Again the relative significance of this sighting is subject to possible confirmation bias on the part of Hastings’ information gathering activity, but the fact is, reports of UFOs are scant prior to 1947, notably also in Washington state. So the fact that the airman’s 1945 report is in Hanford, WA merits due attention).
Hanford was the site of plutonium production for the Manhattan Project. Along with Oak Ridge, Argonne, and of course Los Alamos and its nearby sister laboratories, these hallowed sites rightly provide the grist for the storied lore of the US’ wartime technical prowess. Clem’s report asserts the UAP sighting took place between Jan 29th and Feb 15th. It’s a matter of independent public record that Hanford’s earliest burst of plutonium production was in January 1945, on completion of which it was shipped to Los Alamos. (21 Jun update: And Oak Ridge wound down their plutonium production to low research-level throughputs in Jan 1945).
Plutonium production (the Hanford site’s assigned role), is quite different from uranium production. In context of the Manhattan Project, uranium production requires enrichment, a largely mechanical and chemical process of concentrating naturally occurring U235 from the more prevalent U238. Plutonium production from the aforementioned U238 requires neutron bombardment and beta decay of intermediary species, while emitting neutrinos as a by-product. We could call it “neutrino-loud”. Hold onto that thought.
Also per Grusch, a UAP crashed in Magenta, Italy in 1933. When so much UAP lore has focused on Roswell in 1947, this revelation of Mussolini’s 1933 Italy really sounded like it came out of left field.
Right up until we restrict consideration of UAPs to their purported nuclear technology interest. Ask any physicist you know: In context of the history of nuclear technology development, the Italy of 1933 is not out of left field at all.
Enrico Fermi - 1933-34 in Rome
I enlist ChatGPT4’s help uniquely for summarizing Fermi’s oft-cited contributions to the field of nuclear physics here:
Enrico Fermi, the renowned Italian physicist, accomplished significant breakthroughs in the understanding of nuclear physics in Rome during 1933-34. His most impactful work during this time was centered on induced radioactivity, where he demonstrated that when bombarded with neutrons, certain elements could be transmuted into new, radioactive isotopes. Fermi and his team methodically and systematically bombarded nearly all elements in the periodic table with neutrons, producing an array of new radioactive elements in the process. He surmised that these nuclear transformations were the result of the neutron’s interaction with the atomic nucleus. Notably, his work would provide the fundamental groundwork for the later development of nuclear fission and the creation of the atomic bomb. Fermi’s crucial contributions to the field earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 confirming his pivotal role in advancing our understanding of nuclear physics.
You can also read about his contributions during this time on wikipedia here and here. In fact, it was Fermi himself who proposed that a subatomic particle called the neutrino is emitted during the beta decay process that his work was then explaining.
There are different flavors (physicists’ terminology, not mine) of neutrino, and different energy levels. But when you compare with research progress on the neutron, where we went from zero-to-bomb in less than 15 years, the neutrino is still in many ways a mysterious particle that physicists are only steadily getting to the bottom of even today.
Let’s talk neutrinos
Neutrinos are emitted during many nuclear reactions. Some of those nuclear reactions are from nature, and some are artificially produced. They are the subject of ongoing scientific study, but they already have a valuable application standing right before them: nonproliferation.
Neutrinos are both useful and challenging for nonproliferation because most of them pass through matter without disturbing it. This means that with the right detector, you can stand removed from the source of neutrino emission, and still detect them.
If you can reliably detect and characterize neutrinos and distinguish them from the background of naturally occurring neutrinos, you can remotely monitor the fission undergone inside an adversary’s nuclear reactor. In practice however, accomplishing this feat is exceedingly difficult. It can be said that today in 2023 we are still at the bleeding edge of neutrino detection. There is the 1-km^3 ICECube installation in Antarctica for astrophysical neutrino observation, and there are cargo-contained-sized detectors that only reliably detect reactor neutrinos when placed right next to the reactor in question limiting their strategic usefulness.
(By the way, many nuclear reactions also produce gamma rays. But gamma rays are less useful for nonproliferation monitoring because they don’t pass through as much matter as neutrinos do. They are also harmful, so unlike with neutrinos, reactor design criteria, such as at Hanover, WA, require shielding gamma rays limiting their detectability. Update 30 Jun: I’ve been sorting through with an expert on the UAP-nuclear connection. I’ve independently decided that gamma ray sensing applies to the most relevant cases as hand as neutrino sensing does. Gamma rays are also emitted from decay events.).
Here is a simulated map published in Nature of what the world looks like if viewed by a hypothetical ideal neutrino sensor. The discreet dark spots highlight nuclear reactors, where other neutrino sources are natural.
Framed in a different light, what you’re looking at is a nonproliferation-obsessed UAP’s view of the Earth.
Why would a UAP want to look for artificially-emitted neutrinos? Well they certainly represent a technosignature, in the SETI sense. They represent when a civilization is reaching an inflection point in its technological progress. But more relevant to implications from the eyewitness accounts, they indicate that a civilization is about to embark on developing technologies that are capable of destroying themselves.
Forensic sleuthing of scientists’ work - - whence neutrinos?
So we know Fermi & his team did experiments in 1934 characterizing beta decay, which necessarily produced neutrino emissions that were possibly detectable by UAP. But Grusch reports that the UAP crash was in 1933 . How to treat that complication?
From “Enrico Fermi and the Discovery of Neutron-Induced Radioactivity, we know what was happening in 1932. It would be putting it mildly to say that Italy of the early 1930s was light on scientific research equipment & supplies. But the Via Panisperna boys were resourceful. Fermi’s colleague Trabacchi oversaw the supply of radium that had been imported into Italy from freshly provident radium mines in Belgian Congo. Another colleague of Fermi’s, named Rasetti, isolated polonium from radium, obtained from Trabacchi, to be used for neutron research locally and sent it abroad to peer laboratories. All in 1932.
So strong its activity was, that Rasetti could also send some polonium to other laboratories..., where polonium might be used in neutron researches.
(…)
Now, a clear cut moment can be pointed out, when the experimental activity in Rome definitely turned to actual nuclear researches: it was at the end of 1933, when, having a large amount of radium salts been providentially obtained, and having Trabacchi allowed Rasetti to use it, Rasetti prepared strong polonium supplies from it, to be used in nuclear researches.
Fermi used a radon-beryllium neutron source (the radon emits an alpha particle to a beryllium atom, which emits a neutron, which can go on to create unstable isotopes from other atomic nuclei it hits in experimental target material, producing neutrinos as they decay. Rasetti isolated polonium, effectively making alpha emitters more available from a limited supply of radium. Other elements can be used to emit the neutron in place of beryllium, such as fluorine, lithium, and boron. Yet the source isotopes themselves are also going to beta-decay whether they are being experimented on or not, and that decay will also produce neutrinos.
While I can’t speak to which ‘flavor’ or which energy level of neutrinos the UAPs are looking out for, in Italy they certainly don’t seem to be lack for choice.
Magenta, Milan, and the transit of radium & polonium
So what does this have to do with Magenta? Well first, Magenta is a suburb of the large city of Milan, an Italian industrial & commercial center. If we’re talking on the distance scale of ill-fated UAP flights, we should at least be talking at the metropolitan scale and not any specific suburb. In my online searches yesterday, I could find no relevant record of experiments, researchers, or mailed radioactive material to Milan, (while I could find these for other Italian cities at that time). The only thing Milan represents is a pathway through which mail and parcels would travel from Italy to northern / western Europe. There are other pathways of course, Milan is not a sina qua non waystation for mail for any direction. But it’s one of only a few waystations available for different destinations, and it’s possible it serves as a sorting or customs hub where material would sit for some time.
A physicist today might scoff at the tiny amount of neutrino signal being emitted by these scrounged-together sources. But at the time, these were among the most potent artificial sources of neutrino emission in the world. If an observing UAP had a good model of the Earth’s natural neutrino emission, then these concentrations of neutrino emission migrating along European railroad routes could stick out. (Update 20-June airmail was also well developed by this time).
On “neutrino-loud” production
(This section is a 21-June-23 update) - Remember what I mentioned about holding onto that ‘neutrino-loud’ thought? Well in Jan 1945, the Hanford WA production facility was not only producing enormous amounts of neutrinos - - it was producing more neutrinos than any other human activity in history up to that point. (Oak Ridge was winding down humanity’s previous high water mark of neutrino production the very same month). In my telling, Hanford’s neutrino volume is essentially catnip for our technosignature-fixated UAP.
[That said I do need to concede one reconsideration here - according to Grusch, the allies got their hands on the recovered craft in 1944 or 1945. It is therefore within the realm of possibility that the UAP over Hanford WA, was our own test flight of the rehabilitated craft itself. As the people that the US military would have assigned to comprehend the craft would have been the US’ best and brightest - - i.e. the Manhattan Project ‘brain trust’— then Manhattan Project sites such as Hanford would have been fair game to test fly in, especially since the security context already would have offered full latitude to do things like censor observation logs. I had written off the possibility of even the MP’s smartest people of having reverse-engineered during 1944, but I neglected that the craft may have remained sufficiently intact through its crash that Italian engineers over a decade, followed by the MP brain trust over up to a year, might have managed to rehabilitate & pilot the craft by Jan 1945. without even knowing how it worked. The plausibility of that would neutralize the ‘UAP-nuclear-interest’ prior, and we’d have to consider the Magenta, Italy report - nuclear connection independent of that prior ) ]
Ascertainment bias cuts both ways
It’s worth keeping in mind that ascertainment bias cuts both ways. An account of a UAP crash in Italy in 1932 doesn’t mean there weren’t UAP observing at other sites of interest contemporaneously. If one crashed while monitoring the de-facto trafficking of polonium or radium through Milan, there were probably many that didn't that were accomplishing similar purposes elsewhere. (Update 20-June - I expand on this in a followup article)
Testable hypothesis
To refute or provide support to the above, scientific historians should be able to determine
Substances
when and to where did Rasetti send polonium samples? Did any of these pass through Milan?
the spatiotemporal provenance of the radium supplied to Fermi for his radon-beryllium source experiments.
Was there any geographic passage of an artificial neutrino-emitting source through Milan?
If so, can we get more detail from Grouch on whether the Magenta crash coincides with the passage of artificial neutrino-emitting sources through Milan?
Recommendation for next steps:
If UAP were in fact neutrino-observing the Via Panisperan boys’ work, it stands to reason they were monitoring other contemporary sources of the then-nascent artificial neutrino emission. I recommend scientific historians look back at the work of their peers like Joliot-Curie, Meitner, and Chadwick to determine if
whether their work was neutrino-emitting;
whether there were any UAP sighting reports in contemporary with any neutrino-emitting work they were undertaking.
Addendum: It’s worth noting that I’m almost certainly not the first person to associate the Via Panisperna boys with detection by UAP. Grusch studied physics, for example.
Special request to physicists
It would be nice for similar analyses to this if there were published a chart describing the neutrino energy spectrum & flavor type from different types of nuclear reactions.
Taking the missile silo officers’ testimonies at face value, it would seem we should be striving (and funding) neutrino-sensing technologies in earnest. Maybe it’s just a transient technosignature, like making fire, but it seems like there may be a deep technological vein worth mining there.
Update 20-June-23
I’ve posted this followup article as a “Part 2” to the current article. It generalizes the conjecture which yields a nibble of evidence (of very much debatable value) as a result:
Update 30-June-23
I’ve recognized an error I made in referring to Robert Salas; earlier I confounded the letters in referring to him as Rasas. I regret the error.