Cennina — Rosa Lotti and the two little men, 1 November 1954

OVERVIEW

The 'Lotti case' or 'Cennina case' is one of the best-known close encounters of the autumn 1954 wave in Italy. Rosa Lotti Dainelli, a 40-year-old farm woman, married with four children, lived at the 'La Collina' farm in an isolated spot between Capannole and Cennina, a hamlet of Bucine in the province of Arezzo. She was regarded as mentally stable and reliable, from a humble family with little schooling, and 'had heard of flying saucers only two or three times'.

HISTORY

On the morning of 1 November 1954 she set off along a country path to the church of Cennina for the All Saints' Mass, wearing her new dress and carrying her good shoes, her stockings and a bunch of carnations for the pilgrim Madonna. In a clearing about 20 m away she saw a pointed, spindle-shaped object stuck vertically in the ground. Two beings came out of the bushes, human-like but only a metre tall, in tight grey suits with shiny buttons, short capes, and leather-like helmets with two little discs over the ears. They took her flowers and a stocking and put them in the craft; they seemed friendly, and spoke a language like Chinese ('liu, lai, loi, lau, loi, lai, liu'). When she protested they gave back part of the flowers, keeping five, tied the rest with the stocking, and one pointed a brown cylindrical instrument at her 'as if taking photographs'. Frightened, she walked off into the woods and was not followed. The Carabinieri found a hole where the object's tip had apparently been driven into the ground.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The Tuscan papers Il Giornale del Mattino and La Nazione reported, between 2 and 5 November, 24 witnesses to 'daytime discs' that morning: a hunter from San Leolino saw a luminous body descend toward the clearing; the florist Andrea Livi and his son saw a red, glowing conical object about two metres long rise from Ambra trailing bluish smoke; the bricklayer Romualdo Berti saw a 'luminous rocket' rise vertically from the Ambra woods; the mechanic Marcello Pistocchi saw a spherical object lighting the ground like day. A six-year-old, Ampelio Torzini, later wrote in a school essay that he and his nine-year-old brother had watched the encounter while herding pigs; the article says it is unclear whether the boys can be counted as reliable eyewitnesses. The first inquiry was made only in 1972, eighteen years later.

VISITING

The pin marks the hamlet of Cennina; the encounter was on the country path between Capannole and Cennina.