A UFO sighting is probably the strangest reason of all time that a game has been postponed, but it stands in the record books and, to be honest, who would be able to play or watch a football match while something flew across the pitch. Even with Fiorentina leading 6-2, none of their players complained, and really I should think none of the players really noticed that the game had ended. Flying saucers and aliens are the stuff of science-fiction, not of football!
Ardico Magnini had starred for Italy at the 1954 World Cup and was something of a hero in Florence, and he described what he saw that day.
“It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter. We were astonished, we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked.”
It would be easy to dismiss this as the heat or the pressure or, anything else, if it weren’t for the corroboration of so many people. Lifelong Fiorentina fan Gigi Boni remembered it differently, but equally strangely.
“They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars. They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked.”
He is convinced that they were extra-terrestrial, having spent the decades unable to come up with a more convincing explanation for the way in which the objects danced around the clouds, seemingly performing for the crowd, stopping and moving, before eventually zooming off into the distance, dropping silvery whisps as they went.
As fans made their way home, they discovered that this wasn’t just a football phenomenon. All across Tuscany people reported seeing objects in the sky, and a few reported seeing a white light to the north of the city. The whisps (“silver glitter”, Magnini described them) disintegrated soon afterward, or almost immediately when touched, making any kind of investigation difficult. UFO enthusiasts refer to it as “angel hair”, but scientists needed more conclusive proof.
Giorgio Battini was a journalist at a local newspaper, and also corroborates the sighting, describing “shiny balls” moving quickly across the skyline of the city. Being a diligent investigator, he went searching for some evidence, and found it in a forest outside of the city, where the trees were covered in this “angel hair”. Battini found that it disappearing as he touched it, but was able to collect some samples by rolling it around matchsticks. He carefully took his findings to a laboratory in the city. The tests performed by the scientists failed to find anything of note among the results, and unfortunately the samples needed to be destroyed at the same time.
So, is this a mystery that will never be solved? Did aliens really pick Fiorentina when they wanted some football? Fiorentina were building an exciting, powerful side at the time, so they could certainly have chosen worse.
But the truth is, probably, not quite visitors from outer space. People with experience of this kind of thing – scientists, pilots, interested amateurs – have instead advanced the spider philosophy. The objects in the sky were dancing on the wind, and they were made up of the very thin webs of young spiders, that got caught in the breeze and floated up in large numbers across Tuscany. The timing fits – spiders tend to migrate between September and November – and they use these floating webs to fly to new locations, sometimes as high as 14,000 feet in the air. The webs can billow in the wind and take rounded cigar shapes, and bits of web break off regularly; the angel hair that disintegrated on touch.
UFO enthusiasts reject the spider theory though, and we may never know what really happened in October 1954. Personally, I think the idea of aliens is significantly more comforting than flying spiders.
We aim to keep this site ad-free. Help us by donating below.
