Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: DISCUSSION
Here we have another incredible yet intriguing and important encounter, one that begs all sorts of questions, of which the first must be: How truthful is the witness?
To begin with, owing to the ridicule incurred by Rizzi when discussing his experience with friends and relatives, he did not make his story public until 1979, in an interview for Radio Nord Bolzano. The story was first published in 1980 in Flying Saucer Review, based on a report written in less than accurate German by Rizzi (who is of Austrian-Italian parentage, Italian being his mother- tongue) and given to the investigators Hans and Daphne Markert, who subsequently passed it to Gordon Creighton. (With a few exceptions, the report I have used is the English version which Rizzi gave to Lou Zinsstag.) At their first meeting with Rizzi, in Germany, the Markerts were left with a very strong
impression that he was telling the truth.
Lou Zinsstag was equally impressed, she told me.
Responding to the article in Flying Saucer Review, an incredulous Willy Smith, of the Center for UFO Studies, objected: We [are told] that the [being’s] planet is ‘ten times the size of our Earth’, although no indication is given whether this ten-fold increase refers to mass, volume or diameter. At any rate, it would certainly imply a much stronger gravitational pull, requiring a corresponding increase in cross section of the bone structure in order to cope with the additional weight. Yet, the creature is described as ‘just like us’, with a height of 1.60 metres, and not particularly sturdy. The same reasoning applies to the ‘immensely tall trees’, which in such a heavy gravitational field would tend to have a wide base and limited height.
Rizzi told me that the home planet was larger in terms of volume, and that the aliens inhabited only the central, equatorial region.
It is only of academic interest whether the putative planet is larger in any measure, inasmuch as mass, volume and diameter are simply different measurements of a planet’s (or any sphere’s) size. ‘Ten times larger’ does not imply greater gravity than that of Earth, and in classical physics, I am told, the gravity of a planet is a function of its density, whereas mass, per se, is the inverse of gravity.
Among other objections, Smith notes that the landing site is described as completely uninhabited, whereas a photograph of Rizzi and others taken there shows a house in the upper left corner. I asked Rizzi about this. ‘That’s not a house,’ he replied, laughing. ‘It may look like a house, but in fact it’s one of several huts used to store hay. Nobody lives there!’ 35
Some of what Rizzi claims to have been telepathically informed by the androgynous alien is inconsistent with the same kind of information in several other contactee accounts. I find it impossible to accept, for example, that the aliens’ life-span is 100 times that of ours and that their galaxy is ‘millions of light years away’, as Rizzi told me. And although an estimated half of the stars in our galaxy are binary (where two suns move in an elliptical orbit around a common centre of mass), we have no proof so far for the existence of
component planets in such systems.
These stumbling blocks do not devalue Rizzi’s story for me. In the face of ridicule, he insists that this was the information conveyed to him. His story contains much that is new — and it has not changed over the years. In company with many other contactees, though, the encounter changed him. ‘The experience changed my character greatly and had a profound effect on my attitude to all questions of religion or politics,’ he declared.
‘It was the greatest experience of my life . . .