Monte Sona (Mount Etna) landing with tall and small beings

1978 was the year Italy looked up. Il Tascabile later counted 2,345 Italian cases that year, including undated ones, against 406 in the whole USA. The Aeronautica Militare logged 69 sightings, still a record. Most came late in the year. But July alone had 163.

On the south flank of Mount Etna, between 1,100 and 1,500 metres, rise dozens of old flank cones. One is Monte Sona, a complex of two large cones beside the road from Nicolosi to Rifugio Sapienza. For the followers of contactee Eugenio Siragusa, it was sacred ground. They called it "the Sinai of the encounters."

4 July 1978. About 22:30. Four servicemen were off duty. Accounts place them at the Navy Air Base at Catania. A later article calls them soldiers from Sigonella.

They were Attilio Di Salvatore of the Italian Air Force, Franco Padellero and Maurizio Esposito of the Navy, and Antonino Di Pietro. In their spare time they felt urged to climb the mountain. Richard Hall later wrote of "a compulsion to ascend the slopes of Mt. Etna."

There they saw three bright red lights in the sky, pulsating and hovering. One came down and landed about three hundred meters away, hidden behind a slope. The witnesses went to the spot. Waiting there was a domed disc about 12 meters in diameter, with red and yellow body lights. Its dome glowed yellow.

Accounts differ on who stood beside it. Hall described two tall, golden-haired beings in white robes, and three or four small figures in helmets and "space suits." Maurizio Verga, citing Flying Saucer Review, called the tall pair human-looking, "of Nordic type." Other versions speak of five or six large blond beings, or six tall and "beautiful" entities, and one catalogue describes shorter, large-headed beings who made hand gestures toward the group. Some versions say the witnesses were paralysed while the craft was there.

Then came the detail that defines the story. A car passed on the road, and the light of the object turned off. When the car was out of sight, it turned on again. The witnesses then drove away. How the object left, nobody recorded.

According to Verga, the Carabinieri later interviewed the witnesses. No report has surfaced. The first certain record is Hall's article "Italian UFO Wave of 1978" in the MUFON Journal, November 1980, built on data from Edoardo Russo, Massimo Greco and Maurizio Verga. Hall wrote that the four "seemed to be responsible people." He also wrote that they "had been exposed to the lectures of a notorious local 'contactee'."

In his URECAT catalogue, Patrick Gross rates the case a "probable UFO-cult invention." He ties it to Siragusa, who was arrested on 24 Nov 1978, released a year later and cleared in 1982. Gross reads the dimming light as a built-in answer to motorists who saw nothing. He notes that most retellings leave out Hall's remark about the contactee. There are no photographs, no drawings and no traces, and the original source remains unknown.

The story travelled through Spencer's The UFO Encyclopedia, Haines's Project Delta and a string of online catalogues. In 2024 Salvatore Foresta of CISU recalled four people who saw lights on the ground and some entities, "on Etna near Monte Sona." The mountain is still sacred to some. What stood on its slope that July night has never been settled.