The Taormina "Twin Disc" Photograph (Giuseppe Grasso), Sicily, 1954

Autumn 1954. Europe was in the grip of a flying saucer wave. In Italy it had already reached a football stadium. On 27 October, at the Stadio Artemio Franchi in Florence, about 10,000 spectators looked up, and "angel hair" drifted down. That same month, stratospheric balloons launched from Milan set off saucer reports over France.

The skies were full. The coast of Sicily was next.

19 November 1954. Around noon. The Ionian shore below Taormina.

Two discs came down. Their manoeuvres, the local paper wrote, were watched from every town along the coast. Then they parted. One fell into the sea about two kilometres offshore, and fishermen near Sant'Alessio hauled it in. The other drifted inland toward Graniti. Its trail was lost.

The next morning the Catania daily Giornale dell'Isola ran the story by reporter Angelo Caruso. The headline: "Brivido a mezzogiorno". A midday shiver. Beneath it: "Un Disco volante ammara a Taormina". A flying disc splashes down.

With the story came a picture. Four men stand at a railing, heads tilted back. Above them hang two disc-shaped objects. The photographer was Giuseppe Grasso, from Giardini. He insisted the objects stayed motionless for several minutes.

On 30 November, United Press Newspictures sent the image around the world. Look magazine named Grasso as its author. In Texas, The Austin American printed it on 11 December under the headline "Cups Next?". The day before, Ansel Talbert of the New York Herald Tribune in Paris reported that examination of the photo and negative showed no double exposure or tricks.

In 1963, Donald Menzel and Lyle G. Boyd took the picture apart in The World of Flying Saucers. "A widely publicized photograph supposedly taken at Taormina, Sicily, in 1954 shows four men standing on a bridge and apparently gazing at two UFOs soaring overhead." Their case rested on the light. The men and the railing cast hard shadows in strong sun. The discs showed only faint shading. Later writers added that the onlookers seem to be looking where the objects are not. To Menzel and Boyd, the discs resembled the inverted covers of teapots or sugar bowls.

Decades later, researchers from CISU, the Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici, went looking for the original story. They found it on microfilm in Catania. Then they found the people.

Caruso told them Grasso had brought him the photos, and he had never checked them. The objects, he said, were two sounding balloons, later recovered. No air force jet had been involved. Salvatore Ragonese, who ran a local photo agency, was blunter. The image was "effettivamente elaborata da Giuseppe Grasso", "un fotomontaggio realizzato per corredare la notizia di uno dei tanti avvistamenti". A photomontage, made to go with the news of a sighting. Grasso, he said, was good at strange photos.

The picture was traced to Piazza Roma in Giardini, not Taormina at all. Grasso died around 1980. His archive was lost. The FOTOCAT catalogue now files the case simply: Fake.

The Taormina case is two stories in one. Along the coast that noon, people really did watch something drift down from the sky, and one of them really was fished from the sea. Weather balloons, most likely. The famous photograph came afterwards, built to illustrate their account. The witnesses saw something. The picture showed something else.