Turin Four Red Lights: The RAF Lancaster Sighting

The night of November 28 to 29, 1942. RAF Bomber Command sent a raid against the Fiat works at Turin. CICAP puts the force at 228 aircraft, though other counts differ. It was a hard night. On the same raid, Flt Sgt Rawdon Middleton of 149 Squadron won a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Among the bombers was Lancaster "J" of No. 61 Squadron, flying out of RAF Syerston. Its captain was W/O R. Lever.

22:40, and the bombs were gone. The Lancaster was 10 to 15 miles south-west of Turin, at 11,000 feet, heading north-west. Then the crew saw something coming the other way, moving south-east at their height or slightly below. A long body, with four pairs of red lights spaced at equal distances along it. The crew judged it 200 to 300 feet in length, with a width of a fifth or a sixth of that.

"These lights did not appear in any way like exhaust flames; no trace was seen." The object kept a level course. They estimated its speed at 500 mph.

By 22:45 the Lancaster had climbed to 14,000 feet and was approaching the Alps. There it was again. Now it was moving west-south-west up an Alpine valley, below the peaks. Then the lights appeared to go out, and the object disappeared from view.

The report is plain: the object "was seen by the entire crew." It was written at Syerston on December 2, 1942, and stamped SECRET. Lever added that he had seen a similar object about three months earlier, north of Amsterdam. Air Vice-Marshal Alec Coryton, commanding No. 5 Group, forwarded it to Bomber Command headquarters with a note: "The crew refuses to be shaken in their story in the face of the usual banter and ridicule."

A Military Intelligence report followed on December 14. The papers are now held at The National Archives at Kew. No official conclusion has ever surfaced.

Decades later, after declassification, the case found a wider audience. Clarke and Roberts popularised it in Out of the Shadows in 2002. They found no prosaic explanation that fit, and called it one of the most unusual wartime UFO mysteries on file. Graeme Rendall, writing in The Debrief in 2022, ruled out a German airship and German aircraft. His verdict: "Whatever was operating over northern Italy that night remains a complete mystery."

The sceptics see it differently. Sofia Lincos and Giuseppe Stilo of CICAP suggested in 2023 that it was possibly "another plane misinterpreted by the crew," while admitting there was "too little information for identification." Patrick Gross of ACUFO pushes back. No known aircraft, he argues, carried four pairs of evenly spaced red lights.

Turin is often called one of the earliest European foo fighters reports, and CICAP calls it the first Italian case backed by a military report. Yet the record has blurred: Wikipedia lists a large object with four red lights over Turin in March, citing Keith Chester. No source supports a March 1942 sighting. It appears to be a garbled retelling of the November report, with four lights instead of four pairs and the wrong month. Chester's book does include a March 1943 case of red lights over Naples, which may have muddied the trail.