The Monte Musinè hiker encounter

Monte Musinè is a small, roughly pyramid-shaped rocky mountain at the mouth of the Val di Susa, the mountain closest to Turin. A 15 metre concrete cross has stood on its summit since 1901. Long before 1978 it was called the "mountain of mystery". Tradition says Constantine saw a flaming cross here before the Battle of Turin in 312. Peter Kolosimo read its rock engravings as star maps.

In the valley towns, people said lights appeared every night among the rocky crevices. Italy was deep in the UFO wave of 1978, about 2,000 sightings that year. Only days before, near Genoa, a security guard had reported an abduction in what became the Zanfretta case.

8 December 1978 was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a public holiday. That evening a group of young people went up the lower slopes near Milanere, a hamlet at the foot of the southwest slope between Almese and Caselette. They wanted to see the lights for themselves. They split into search parties.

Two of them noticed a glow behind some rocks. One went to look. He thought his friends were playing a joke on him. The glow grew brighter until he had to close his eyes. A few minutes later, darkness returned, but he had vanished.

His companion searched, helped by passers-by. More than an hour later the young man was found about 150 metres from where he had disappeared. He was half conscious, injured, trembling and terrified, with his hair and eyebrows singed. He spoke of an extremely intense light, "through which I saw shadows moving." The shadows had human features, but, confused and afraid, he would say no more.

That is the version Francesco Fornari reported in La Stampa on 17 December 1978. Later retellings turned it into a full close encounter. They described a blinding white light above the trees that rose into the sky, and a pear-shaped craft that grew larger. Four beings with melon-shaped heads allegedly touched him, paralysed him and lifted him off the ground, while another later detail described a burn on his leg that left a scar. Both young men are said to have suffered conjunctivitis for some time, and neither has ever been named.

The Turin ufologists of the Clypeus group found that the location was the key. Residents said neo-fascist groups were using the Val di Susa for military training at the time. In 1973 an elderly woman had met two men coming down from the summit in shiny grey-green suits and motorcycle-style helmets. In late 1982 the leader of an armed right-wing group was arrested for turning a building at Milanere into "a sort of bunker with a firing range".

Mariano Tomatis suggests such groups could explain the strange lights, human shadows and scars. It remains an interpretation, unproven for this night. CISU, meanwhile, found that its case catalogue showed no higher number of sightings in the area.

The legend held. The encounter made Musinè Italy's UFO mountain, the "Roswell of Piedmont". UFO-themed graffiti now appears on its rocks, and the mountain of mystery keeps its name.