Overview
In the late 1950s and on through the 1960s, certain Italians took to buying fruit in quantities no household could explain. Not a basket but a crate, then more crates, then a whole truckload, driven up into the hills near Pescara or down toward the Adriatic and left, they said, at the entrance to a hidden base. The produce was meant to feed a colony of extraterrestrials living underground. Some months, the participants later claimed, it took two trucks to keep the beings supplied.
This is the core of what came to be called Amicizia, the Italian word for friendship, or the Friendship Case. The account holds that from 1956 until roughly 1978 a race of human-looking visitors kept steady contact with a widening circle of Italians, perhaps more than a hundred people over the years. The visitors called themselves the W56. To the contactees they were simply the Friends. No craft was ever recovered, no body examined, no base excavated. What remains is a chain of testimony, a handful of photographs said to show the visitors' vehicles, and two books that tried to hold the whole thing together decades after the fact.
The Friends and their opposites
By the tellers' description, the W56 were not the frail grey figures of later abduction lore. They looked human, and they varied in height in a way that made witnesses uneasy: one might stand barely a meter tall, another close to three. They spoke of themselves as an older, kinder branch of humanity, troubled above all by what the atomic age had put in human hands. Nuclear weapons alarmed them. They framed their presence as a kind of guardianship rather than an invasion.
Against the Friends stood an opposing faction the contactees knew as the CTR, sometimes rendered as the Contrarians or simply the Contrary. Where the W56 were said to radiate loyalty and affection, the CTR were described as cold and materialistic, working to disrupt the contact at every turn. The rivalry gives the story its arc. According to the accounts, it was the CTR who brought the whole arrangement to an end in 1978, striking at the bases and driving the Friends to withdraw. After that, the contacts stopped.
The men who kept the record
The case would have no shape at all without Bruno Sammaciccia. A scholar from the Marche region with training in psychology and psychiatry and a long shelf of published books behind him, Sammaciccia said the first meeting happened in April 1956, when he and two friends encountered two of the visitors near Ascoli Piceno. He became the story's central witness and, in time, its custodian, leaving instructions that the full account be set down after his death.
That task fell to Stefano Breccia, an Italian engineer who assembled the material into a book, published in Italian in the 2000s and in English in 2009 as Mass Contacts. Breccia organized it in three parts, moving from the beginnings through the separate Spanish Ummo affair and into the history of Amicizia itself. The book drew a mixed reception even among people sympathetic to UFO claims, in part because so much of it could not be checked against anything outside the witnesses' own words.
Other names give the case its texture. Gaspare de Lama, a surviving participant, sat for filmed interviews late in life and spoke of the Friends as though describing old acquaintances. And hovering at the edge of the story is Alberto Perego, an Italian diplomat who served as a consul and who, quite separately, spent the 1950s and 1960s documenting UFO sightings over Italy. Perego published several books on the subject and printed photographs he said showed a saucer that had come down near Francavilla on the Adriatic coast in October 1957. His involvement lent the affair a whiff of respectability that few contactee stories could claim.
Feeding the bases
The supply runs are the detail that sticks. The Friends, it was said, could not easily gather what they needed on the surface without drawing attention, so the contactees did it for them, buying fruit and food and water and hauling it to the base entrances. Metals came into it too. The material was collected, driven out, and handed over, month after month, at sites the tellers placed in several different Italian regions rather than one fixed location.
The practical strain of this is exactly where skeptical readers tend to push back. Truckloads of produce and metal, bought and moved on a schedule for the better part of two decades, would leave receipts, gaps in inventories, questions from neighbors. None of that paper trail has surfaced. Nor has any trace of a base, in a country whose coastline and hills have since been surveyed, drilled, and built upon many times over.
What can be checked
Almost nothing in the Friendship Case can be tested, but the documents about it can be dated, and the dates are the most informative thing available.
The English account, Mass Contacts, runs to 388 pages and was issued on 24 January 2009 through AuthorHouse — an author-pays imprint, which means the text passed no external editor or commissioning house on its way into print. It appeared thirty-one years after the contacts are said to have stopped, and six years after the man at the centre of them died. Sammaciccia died in 2003. He left instructions that the account be published, and it was, but it means the principal witness was never available to be questioned by anyone outside the circle that already believed him.
Sammaciccia himself is not in doubt, and this is where the case is more interesting than the usual contactee story. He was a real and productive author with a verifiable record — and that record is Catholic. His subject was relics and miracles: Il Volto Santo di Gesù a Manoppello, published at Pescara in 1978, is still listed in scholarly bibliographies of the Veil of Manoppello, the cloth held in the Abruzzo church that some hold to be the face of Christ. He wrote on the eucharistic miracle of Lanciano as well.
So the man who said he had spent twenty-two years carrying fruit to extraterrestrials was, in the documented literature, a writer about holy images and miraculous objects in exactly the region where the bases were supposed to be. That is not evidence against his account. It is the context the account came out of, and it is checkable, which is more than can be said for the bases.
The rest of the physical claim is where it has always been. Nothing was recovered, nothing was excavated, and the photographs have been argued over for decades without resolving — Breccia himself later said that images from separate events had become mixed together in the surviving material, which leaves even the pictures without a reliable date.
Where it stands
Amicizia reached a wider public mainly through a documentary, made around 2009 and circulated internationally soon after as an English-language version, which set de Lama's recollections alongside Perego's old photographs. It remains a story told from the inside. The people who lived it described it in warm, specific terms; the people who examine it note that warmth and specificity are not the same as evidence, and that everything material about the case has always been just out of reach. Both readings have coexisted for years now, neither able to close the file. What the Friendship Case offers is not proof of visitors under the Italian soil but a record of what a hundred-odd people said they believed, and of the fruit they swore they carried into the hills to prove it.