“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ― Marie Curie

"The Baptism of Christ," 1710, Aert de Gelder (from: Wikimedia)

“[…] At 14.30 on 27 October 1954 in the writing of the newspaper came the call for an engineering student, Alfredo Jacopozzi that held the view, along with others, several discs flying in the sky of Florence. At one stretch between the object and the dome of the cathedral there was another ‘white balloon,’ faster than an airplane, then another ‘disc’ and another still. Six objects left their strange passage of the 'flakes' white like ‘cotton-like.’ Then came the most glaring whose memory is still fresh in the minds of many witnesses who see the phenomenon.
     The substance was quick to disintegrate if held in the hand. Alfrede Jacopozzi, a student, was the only one who managed to pick up a few threads of it and sealed them in a hermetic test tube. Jacopozzi then handed the tube to Professor Giovanni Canneri, a director of the Chemical Analysis Institute under the University of Florence. Professor Danilo Cozzi, a colleague of Prof. Canneri’s, carried out a series of tests of the mysteries find. “It’s a fibrous material, which is highly resistant to tension and torsion. Once subjected to heat action, the material grows dark and evaporates, leaving transparent sediment that melts away. The sediment was found to contain boron, silicon, and magnesium. Hypothetically speaking, the substance may be some kind of ‘boron-silicon glass,’ said Prof. Cozzi.”

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“[James] McGaha, who never met a UFO he couldn’t explain, said his first take on the case was that the Italians had actually been startled by a daytime meteor. But then he began to focus on another bizarre phenomenon involving the autumn migration of young web-spinning spiders. […]
     But for those who actually pay attention to inconvenient details, strap on your hip-waders. This is the same guy who dispensed with the meticulously researched 2008 Stephenville UFO incident — reconstructed through federal radar records — as the work of agenda-driven conspiracy freaks cherry-picking skin-paint pingback patterns. Their agenda, for as-yet-unexplained reasons, was apparently to obfuscate a military flare-dropping exercise over rural Texas back in January 08. Never mind that the eyewitnesses were evidently so stupid they couldn’t tell the difference between a solid, aircraft carrier-sized UFO cruising slowly over their town and F-16s with afterburners. Never mind how the radar data confirmed the direction in which these stupid eyewitnesses claimed the UFO was flying. Never mind that the USAF, which refused to release its own radar results and initially denied it had planes in the air that night, was forced to admit these stupid eyewitnesses actually got it right about seeing its F-16s in the sky that evening. Never mind that McGaha never produced any military confirmation of his flare-drop pronouncement. Never mind that McGaha’s single eyewitness to his flare-drop pronouncement is unnamed.”
— Billy Cox, De Void
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