THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP & ENTITY ENCOUNTER REPORT

1954: The Gricignano di Aversa, Italy Disappearance — Giovanni Aquilante

A hundred-year-old farmer left home for work one morning and simply didn’t come back — not that day, not the next, through two full days his family spent combing the countryside and two nights of steady rain. He returned on his own, hungry and dazed but entirely dry, unable to answer a single question his wife and sons asked him. When he finally found words, they described being lifted skyward by two beings who could apparently choose to be small or enormous at will, and a promise, delivered before they set him down beside his own house, that they’d be back for him.

Date: December 8, 1954 (disappearance); returned the morning of December 10, 1954

Sighting Time: Early morning (both disappearance and return)

Day/Night: Morning

Location: Gricignano di Aversa, Caserta, Italy (near the village railroad bridge)

Urban or Rural: Rural

No. of Entity(‘s): 2

Entity Type: Humanoid, of variable apparent size

Entity Description: Wore suits described as having “colors like the rainbow”; capable of appearing extendable, shifting in apparent form between “dwarves” and “giants”; separately, two entities glimpsed by Aquilante’s family near the house had phosphorescent eyes

Hynek Classification: CE-IV (Close Encounter, Fourth Kind — abduction with extended, unaccounted-for missing time)

Duration: Approximately 48 hours of missing time

No. of Object(s): Not specified; Aquilante described continuous flight rather than a stationary craft

Description of the Object(s): Not Applicable — no craft was described; the entities themselves carried Aquilante by the hands

Shape/Size/Color of Object(s): Not Applicable

Distance to Object(s): Not Applicable

Height & Speed: Aquilante reported continuing to fly through the sky for an extended, unspecified period before being set down near his own home

Number of Witnesses: 1 direct (Giovanni Aquilante, 100); separately, two of his sons (including Andrea) and another relative independently encountered two phosphorescent-eyed figures near the family home during the search period

Special Features/Characteristics: Aquilante departed for work near the village railroad bridge and did not return; over the following two days, his family searched the surrounding area without success; on the evening of the second day, two of his sons and a relative, returning from the search, encountered two odd figures with phosphorescent eyes hiding behind a low wall near their home; the men froze in fear, and by the time one son (Andrea) recovered enough to run toward the figures, they had vanished; Aquilante himself returned home the following morning, in shock, hungry, but not tired, and initially unable to respond to his family’s questions; despite two days of rain during his absence, his clothing, including his shoes, was found to be completely dry; he later recounted to a relative that two “dwarves” had emerged from behind a bush near the railroad bridge, taken him by the hands, and lifted him into the sky; the beings appeared able to shift between “dwarf” and “giant” forms; Aquilante had no memory of how the intervening 48 hours had been spent, only of continuing to fly, before the beings returned him to a spot beside his own house and told him they would come back for him; according to his son Paolo, Aquilante suffered significant lasting effects, remaining in a near-constant confused state with speech difficulties, and living in ongoing fear that the beings would return to take him again

Case Status: Unresolved — a single primary witness account combined with an independently reported (though separate) family sighting of unusual figures, and a physically anomalous detail (completely dry clothing after two days of rain) that resists ordinary explanation

Source: Paolo Fiorino, UFO Universe, Oct/Nov 1991

Summary/Description: On the morning of December 8, 1954, 100-year-old farmer Giovanni Aquilante of Gricignano di Aversa, Caserta, Italy, left home for work near the village railroad bridge and did not return. His family searched for him over the following two days. On the evening of the second day, two of his sons and a relative encountered two figures with phosphorescent eyes hiding behind a wall near the family home, who vanished before they could be approached. Aquilante himself returned home the next morning, dazed, hungry, and initially unresponsive; despite two days of rain during his absence, his clothing and shoes were completely dry. He later described being approached near the railroad bridge by two “dwarves” who took him by the hands and carried him skyward, appearing at times to shift into “giants.” He had no memory of the intervening 48 hours beyond continuing to fly, before being set down beside his own house and told the beings would return for him. According to his son Paolo, Aquilante suffered lasting psychological effects, remaining confused, having difficulty speaking, and living in ongoing fear of the beings’ return.

Related Cases: None known

Detailed Report

Giovanni Aquilante was a hundred years old and still working his own land near Gricignano di Aversa, in Italy’s Caserta province, when he set out for the day on December 8, 1954, passing near the village’s railroad bridge on his way. He never arrived wherever he was headed, and he didn’t come home that evening either.

His family searched. A full day passed, then a second, with no sign of him anywhere in the surrounding countryside — countryside that had been steadily soaked by rain across those same two days. On the evening of that second day, two of Aquilante’s sons and another relative were making their way back home, having found nothing again, when something stopped them cold near their own house: two figures, oddly shaped, hiding just beyond a low wall, their eyes glowing with a phosphorescent light. All three men froze, utterly petrified. It took several long seconds before one of the sons, Andrea, managed to break the paralysis and run toward the wall. By the time he reached it, both figures had vanished without a trace.

The next morning, at around six o’clock, Giovanni Aquilante simply walked home. He was in shock — hungry, clearly disoriented, but not showing any of the exhaustion two missing days might have produced. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the flood of questions from his wife and sons. And there was something else, something that made no sense against the two rainy days he’d been missing: his clothing was completely dry. Even his shoes.

It was hours later that Aquilante finally found enough words to tell a relative what had happened, as best he could piece it together. That first morning, passing the railroad bridge, two “dwarves” had suddenly appeared from behind a bush. Both wore suits he described as having colors like a rainbow. Before he could react, they had each taken one of his hands and lifted him bodily into the sky. What struck him most, in the retelling, was that the two beings didn’t stay one size — they seemed to alternate, at will, between the small “dwarf” forms he’d first seen and something closer to giants.

Of the forty-eight hours that followed, Aquilante retained almost nothing — only a persistent sense that he had continued flying, somewhere, for the duration. His memory picked back up only at the end, when the two beings set him down gently beside his own house. Before they left him there, they told him plainly that they would return to get him again.

The encounter’s aftermath lingered long after Aquilante’s physical return. According to his son Paolo, the old man never fully recovered — he lived afterward in what Paolo described as a nearly perpetual state of confusion, struggling with basic speech, and gripped by a persistent, specific fear: that the beings who had taken him once might come back to do it again.

RESEARCHER’S NOTES

Gricignano di Aversa — 1954 and a Detail Weather Couldn’t Explain

• Dry clothing after two days of documented rain is a genuinely specific, hard-to-dismiss detail: This isn’t a vague claim of feeling fine after a disappearance — it’s a concrete physical observation, made by family members examining Aquilante upon his return, that directly contradicts what two days of exposure to real, independently occurring rain should have produced.
• An independently witnessed, if separate, sighting during the search itself: The phosphorescent-eyed figures seen by two sons and a relative near the family home didn’t involve Aquilante directly, but their timing — during the exact window he was missing — and their unexplained disappearance when approached, adds a second, independently reported anomalous event to the case.
• A documented, lasting psychological aftermath: Paolo’s account of his father’s ongoing confusion, speech difficulty, and persistent fear describes a specific, observable change in the man following his return — not simply Aquilante’s own claim, but his son’s independent report of how the experience visibly affected him afterward.
• An elderly witness with no evident motive for elaborate fabrication: A hundred-year-old farmer inventing a complex, internally consistent size-shifting entity narrative, then living out the rest of his life in a state of genuine apparent distress about it, is a harder pattern to explain as simple invention than a briefly told, quickly abandoned tale would be.
• Minimal detail about the missing 48 hours themselves: Aquilante’s own account offers almost nothing about what filled the bulk of the missing time beyond a vague sense of continued flight — a limitation this archive states plainly rather than filling with invented content.

This case combines a specific, physically anomalous detail (the dry clothing), a documented lasting psychological effect witnessed by family members, and a genuinely elderly witness with no apparent reason to sustain an elaborate fabrication over the following months. It remains unresolved, with the missing 48 hours themselves almost entirely unaccounted for in Aquilante’s own recollection.

“Despite the fact that it had rained over the previous two days during which he went missing, Aquilante’s clothing was completely dry, even his shoes.”
— Paolo Fiorino, UFO Universe, on the Gricignano di Aversa, Italy case, December 1954