Italian Air Force UFO Office

The Italian Air Force UFO Office is the public name for the Aeronautica Militare's official OVNI reporting function, now handled by the Reparto Generale Sicurezza (RGS) of the Stato Maggiore Aeronautica.¹² OVNI is the Italian official term for Oggetti Volanti Non Identificati, or unidentified flying objects.¹³

  Origin and Mandate

After Italy's 1978 wave of unidentified-object reports, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti designated the Aeronautica Militare as the institutional body responsible for collecting, verifying and monitoring OVNI reports.¹ The Air Staff organization page identifies RGS as the office deputed to collect, verify and monitor reports of OVNI sightings, while its wider security mission covers information collection, analysis and evaluation for Air Force security and protection of secrets.²

The official OVNI page states that the activity exists to support flight safety and national security.¹ After checks are completed, the Air Force publishes episodes in the public Avvistamenti section and classifies an event as OVNI when no technical or natural justification can be identified.¹

  Reporting Channel

The reporting pathway is deliberately civilian-accessible: a witness completes the Aeronautica Militare OVNI form and delivers it to the nearest Carabinieri station, which forwards it to the Stato Maggiore Aeronautica, Reparto Generale Sicurezza.¹³ The form asks for time, location, weather, observer position, object movement, altitude, distance, luminosity, shape, drawings, photographs, film or other supporting material.³

This channel lets the Air Force open a technical inquiry to identify correlations with human activity, natural phenomena, known flight activity or other competent national bodies when needed.¹ In a 2015 public presentation, Colonel Arturo Cattel of the RGS security office described the process as registration of citizen reports received through Carabinieri stations in order to correlate the information with known events.⁴

  Publication Record

The current OVNI page links annual public sighting files from 2001 onward, plus archive files for 1991-2000 and 1972-1990.¹ The historical 1972-1990 archive contains records from Air Force personnel, airline crews and private citizens, including early entries later catalogued as OVNI after archival review.⁵

Recent files show how the public record is written: entries list locality, date, time, shape, color, estimated speed, direction, altitude, weather and whether the report came from private citizens or Air Force personnel.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰ The 2024 public file includes four catalogued OVNI events, including one report from Aeronautica Militare personnel at Pomezia on 26 November 2024.⁸ The 2023 file includes three public entries, with the Torricella in Sabina report on 14 May 2023 catalogued as OVNI after no correlation with known flight activity or other known phenomena emerged.⁹

  Investigative Posture

The office's published language is cautious and administrative rather than speculative: it asks whether a report can be correlated with known flight activity, radiosondes, human activity, natural phenomena or other known causes.¹⁷⁸⁹¹⁰ The 2025 file illustrates that posture by noting possible correlations with visible Starlink satellite passages for all three listed reports, rather than treating every unusual observation as unexplained.⁷

RGS has also framed its OVNI material as available to technical-scientific agencies and authorities for possible study and deeper analysis.⁴ The result is a rare public military reporting channel that combines citizen intake, Carabinieri forwarding, Air Force security review and ongoing annual publication of unresolved or investigated cases.¹³⁴

  References

  References

1. Aeronautica Militare - "OVNI" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/ovni/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. Aeronautica Militare - "Stato Maggiore Aeronautica" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/home/noi-siamo-l-am/organizzazione/lo-sma/ ↩ ↩²

3. Stato Maggiore Aeronautica Militare - "Modulo di segnalazione O.V.N.I." https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ModuloUFO.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Aeronautica Militare - "L' A.M. partecipa al meeting sugli OVNI" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/news/l-a-m-partecipa-al-meeting-sugli-ovni/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Aeronautica Militare - "Archivio OVNI periodo 1972-1990" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Archivio_OVNI_periodo1972-1990.pdf ↩ ↩²

6. Aeronautica Militare - "Avvistamenti nel periodo 1972-1990" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/INT.Dperiodo1972-1990.pdf ↩

7. Aeronautica Militare - "Avvistamenti 2025" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/AVVISTAMENTI-2025.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Aeronautica Militare - "OVNI Avvistamenti 2024" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/OVNI_AVVISTAMENTI_022024.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. Aeronautica Militare - "Avvistamenti OVNI 2023" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/AVVISTAMENTI_OVNI_LAST-2023-1.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. Aeronautica Militare - "Intercalare segnalazioni 2022" https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/INTERCALARE-SEGNALAZIONI-2022_-DICEMBRE.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³