Over the past few days I fell down a rabbit hole while watching free UFO documentaries on Tubi. One documentary I watched was The Urzi Case: A UFO Mystery in the Skies of Italy.
Ten years ago I wrote a blog post titled UFO Sightings: Who Not to Trust. Three untrustworthy groups I mentioned were “people who have communicated with aliens several times”, “people who have filmed UFOs on multiple occasions”, and “any UFO footage that comes out of Mexico.” Antonio Urzi falls into the first two categories, and almost everyone else involved falls into the third. Most of the “researchers” who promoted and independently verified these sightings are from Mexico and are directly related to known hoaxed videos. At a minimum, Urzi faces an uphill battle in convincing skeptics his videos are authentic.
According to Urzi, alien beings (who have been communicating with him since he was a child) tell him when and where they will appear. Typically, the “where” is the small section of sky viewable from the window of Urzi’s loft apartment. What are the odds? When the UFOs arrive (and they have, hundreds if not thousands of times), Urzi is always standing by with his camcorder ready to capture shaky footage of their visit. Despite being visited by and communicating with aliens, Urzi has yet to invest in a tripod.
In the film, Urzi demonstrates where he captures the majority of his footage, which is through a large window in the roof of his loft. Long before amateur videographers were using digital tricky to fake UFO footage, the simplest way to make something look “far away and large” was to place a small model close to the lens.
One of the earliest (and best) examples of this technique came from Rex Heflin’s UFO photographs, taken in 1965. While sitting inside his vehicle, city employee Heflin (often described as “a known prankster”) captured what appeared to be a strange craft flying across the sky. Often times the photos appear cropped, showing only the UFO and the ground below with the van’s mirror and cab removed. (One of the tricks to determining how far away something is in a photograph is to compare the contour of the object to other objects in the photo.) Ufologists have been arguing over the authenticity of Heflin’s photos since the day they were taken, with many government and independent researchers vouching for them. Most Google searches of the Rex Heflin photos will return the very scientific-looking “Reanalysis of the 1965 Heflin UFO Photos” document, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2000. In the 40-page PDF, researchers conclude that the incident was not a hoax and that the photos appear to have captured a large unidentified flying object.
But click on enough links and you’ll get to this page, which shows how, if Heflin’s pictures are placed side by side, one can create something of a 3D model. By doing this, it becomes extremely obvious that the object is not “big and far away,” but “small and pretty close.” While some people accused Heflin of tossing a straw hat into the air and photographing it, stereographic analysis shows that the object is much smaller than that. In fact, one report estimates the object to be about the size of a metal wheel from a model train. Add to the mix that Heflin was into model trains, and the most likely explanation emerges.
Anyway, back to Urzi’s UFOs.
Antonio Urzi has captured hundreds and hundreds of UFOs on film, all of which look a lot like buttons sitting on top of a sheet of glass. According to the internet Urzi is a “fashion designer” — the type of guy who would have access to lots of buttons. All Urzi would have to do is place one of the buttons on top of the glass and shoot video of it while wiggling the camera around, which makes the background appear to move and, whether intentional or not, keeps the object out of focus. If you would like to recreate this affect and your car has a sunroof, place a watch battery or some other small, round, metal object on top of the glass and then use your phone to shoot some video from the inside of your car. You’ll be surprised how convincing the results are.
While this should be an open and shut (window) case, the filmmakers parade a series of investigators and researchers in front of the camera, swearing that the footage has not been faked. Three of these experts — Pier Giorgio Caria, Giorgio Bongiovanni, and Jaime Maussan — are not strangers. Maussan is most succinct in his analysis, stating he looked at the footage, believed the witness was telling the truth, and could not find any signs of a hoax.
A quick search of “Jaime Maussan” turns up this page — Jaime Maussan and his Frauds — which lists 33 separate hoaxes he has been involved in. Not the best character witness for your documentary, in my opinion. Leading researcher Giorgio Bongiovanni, who says “I reckon the footage is real” in the film, claims to suffer from stigmata and has written about the connection between Jesus, aliens, and crop circles. These are the same group of clowns that have verified all the UFO footage coming out of Mexico — and in some cases, were involved in making them.
The documentary also mentions a Japanese team of investigators who travelled to Italy to study Urzi’s footage. You would think that a guy who is contacted 3-5 times a week by aliens who fly their spacecraft across the universe and hover specifically in the airspace outside Urzi’s loft for the sole purpose of allowing themselves to be filmed would have this happen at least one time when one of these investigators was around… but no. Urzi’s unique bond with the aliens, like Uri Geller and so many other grifters, only seems to happen when nobody else is around.
The Mexican investigators praise Urzi as “the next George Adamski or Billy Meier,” which, ironically, they meant as a compliment. George Adamski was a goofball who claimed to have met “a pair of Nordic space alien brothers from Venus” who took him for rides in their UFO and later attended an interplanetary conference on Saturn. Billy Meier, probably most famous for his UFO that appeared on Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster from the television show The X-Files, is the founder of a religion titled “Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies” and routinely communicates with aliens from the star cluster Pleiades, who once took him back in time so he could meet Jesus. Oh, and he also claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus. Come to think of it, maybe comparing Urzi to Adamski and Meier isn’t an accident after all.
If there’s one seemingly sane voice in all of this, it’s Jim Dilettoso, a technical genius who uses computers to digitally verify their authenticity. Dilettoso, who says he “collaborated with NASA,” used his pseudo-scientific techniques to analyze the “electronic fingerprints” of Urzi’s videos and states there is no evidence of trickery, emphasizing that that the contours of the craft “reveal that it’s a large object, not a small object.”
The first online article I found about Dilettoso opens with a scene in which he’s playing a piano duette with Giorgio Bongiovanni — the stigmata guy. And this is where it all comes together — or, depending on your point of view, falls apart. All of these guys know one another. The computer guy. The reporter guy. The investigator guy. Even the guy who thinks he’s Jesus. The article mentions an incident in which Dilettoso (the computer guy) analyzed pictures taken by Meier (the religion/time traveller) which he claimed were of two alien women (“Asket” and “Nera”). Dilettoso claimed that his super-powerful computer showed (among other things) that the women’s earlobes were elongated, proving they were not human. It was later revealed that Meier had simply taken a photograph of his television; the “aliens” were of two women performing on the Dean Martin Show.
(The article linked above spends thousands of words systematically debunking Dilettoso’s methods of computer analysis.)
One of the first things we learned in Journalism 101 is that when doing research it’s always a good idea to “follow the money.” It’s unfortunate that every single person involved in investigating these types of cases stands to benefit from them financially. Whether it’s from selling their stories or being paid for their “investigating”, everyone involved in the Urzi case — and to be frank, all of these modern cases — are doing so for profit rather than any type of actual scientific research. Not once in The Urzi Case: A UFO Mystery in the Skies of Italy does anyone hint or suggest that there’s any possibility that the footage could have been faked, which is ridiculous as any 10-year-old looking at the evidence could figure out how they were made. Instead, for 60 minutes, charlatans and fraudulent investigators pat one another on the back and nod in agreement that the footage must be real, knowing that they’ll all walk away with more speaking engagements, more articles, and more documentary deals. By the time Urzi is either caught red-handed or confesses, everyone else involved will already have moved on to the next investigation, assuring that this time, they’ve discovered the real deal.
I have to chuckle. . Back in the 1970’s a book came out by Erik Von Daniken, called “Chariot of the Gods” which asserted that humans were too stupid to have ever built the Pyramids, the Mayan’s could not have made astronomical calculations without help, the great wall of china HAD to have been built by. . . some unknown band of marauding space travelers seeding the earth with knowledge and unbuildable greats to baffle humanity in the years ahead.
Cool when I was in 6th grade, but over the years, doubts crept in. . and it was revealed that Von Daniken had misrepresented much of his material, as well as faked some as well. This discovery coming in early highschool!
The audacity! However, it caused me to be skeptical to this day.
But this article is just a critique and a skeptic look into the Usiz case. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything