In the winter of 1978, a 26-year-old private security guard from Genoa, Italy, claimed to have had an experience that would set off one of the most enduring and controversial series of alien encounter cases in European history. Over the course of more than two years, Zanfretta reported a series of bizarre abductions involving tall, green-skinned beings, a strange glowing sphere, and repeated messages from what he believed to be extraterrestrial intelligences. Unlike many contactee stories, his claims were not only widely covered in Italian media, but also investigated by journalists, doctors, and military police — yielding evidence that still…