A roadhouse on the Stuart Highway in the middle of the Northern Territory — fuel, a campground and a pub — which has declared itself Australia's UFO capital. Reports have come from here since the 1940s, when an army camp stood nearby, and never stopped. The owners have taken an enterprising view: the walls are painted with green figures, models stand at the door, and the bar keeps a folder of cuttings and a book for visitors to write down what they saw. The honest part of the explanation is the sky. This is some of the darkest, clearest air on the planet, satellites and fireballs are visible to the naked eye, and the route to Pine Gap — the joint American-Australian facility, about whose work little is known — passes nearby.

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Villa Santina and Rapuzzi's Drawing

On 14 August 1947, six weeks after Kenneth Arnold's flight, an artist named Rapuzzi Johannis was walking in the mountains near this village in Friuli when, by his account, he met two short beings in tight suits and, behind them, a lens-shaped craft. He said they took his pencil and his drawing from him. At home he drew what he had seen. He gave the drawing and a full description to Italian researchers only in the 1960s. It is one of the earliest European contact reports and the first of its kind in Italy; its value is chiefly chronological — it appeared before the genre it would later be said to imitate had formed at all.