Ustica massacre, 42 years later: Was it the aliens?

It is a provocation that arises from the still open question about what happened on the night of June 27, 1980 in the sky above Italy. Was it the aliens? is the title of the review that every year at the museum for the memory of Ustica in Bologna remembers the Ustica massacre.

Also in 2022 the Relatives of the Victims Association is engaged on the one hand in the constant request to the Judiciary to conclude the investigations, reopened in 2008 after President Cossiga had attributed responsibility for the tragedy to France, and to indicate the culprits, on the other hand in keeping the memory alive by drawing on the most varied expressions of contemporary artistic languages.

For years Daria Bonfietti he repeats it, remembering that night. “The government of my country, Italy, must ask other countries what they were doing that night in our skies. It is evident to everyone: what is not known is why it was unspeakable for these countries. We know the truth about the massacre. We know that in Italy “on June 27, 1980” a civilian plane was shot down in peacetime, this is the truth, we do not yet know by whom it was shot down, but we will know when our country will have the strength to ask for answers to Friendly and allied countries that still do not tell us ».

It is the night she lost her brother who was among the 81 people aboard the DC-9 Itavia Bologna-Palermo shot down in the skies of Ustica on the night of June 27, 1980. Forty years have passed. The flight had departed two hours late from Bologna and was headed for Palermo. It was supposed to land 15 minutes after 9pm, but it was lost on radar just before 9am that evening. It was said a structural failure, a bomb on board, the trials over the years instead tell of a battle that night in the Italian skies. A reconstruction that has reached a definitive sentence, in the Supreme Court.

The Museum of Memory of Ustica houses what remains of that flight, the recovery dates back to 1987, together with a permanent installation by Christian Boltanski with 81 faint lights and 81 black mirrors covering speakers from which come phrases about remembrance and worry. «Our goal», said Daria Bonfietti, president of the association of the victims’ families, «is to make memories around the museum, in the best possible way. We want to remember through the arts, starting from the truths that have written the judgments of the courts ».