Roberto Pinotti

Roberto Pinotti is an Italian journalist, sociologist, and aerospace-affairs writer who has been Italy's most prominent UFO researcher since founding the Centro Ufologico Nazionale (CUN) in 1967, at age 23, while collecting sighting documentation that had interested him since 1960. A former officer in a NATO Italian Army missile brigade near Venice, Pinotti built CUN into Italy's largest and most established ufology organization, publishing its long-running monthly magazine UFO Notiziario and steering the group toward archival research and case cataloguing modeled partly on American groups like NICAP. Since 1993, with the backing of the government of San Marino, he has organized the annual World UFO Symposium, which for three decades has drawn international researchers, contactees, and scientists to the small republic for Western Europe's most prominent UFO conference. Pinotti has authored or co-authored roughly fifty books in six languages covering historical UFO cases, ancient-astronaut speculation, and Italian sighting waves, and has served as a media commentator on Italian television for decades. He has occasionally courted controversy for entertaining more speculative material, including alleged historical and Vatican-related UFO documents, drawing criticism from more evidence-focused researchers even as he remains widely credited with institutionalizing UFO research in Italy and sustaining one of Europe's longest-running ufological organizations.