Clare Luce Sees A Flying Mystery
The Washington Post
October 29, 1954
ROME, Oct. 28 (AP) - Something strange - described by cab drivers as a flying saucer - was seen over Rome by several persons, including United States Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce.
"I saw something but I don't know what it was," she said. The Thing zipped over the city from Via Veneto, the fashionable street the United States Embassy is on, it looked like a moon dashing across the sky at fantastic speed.
"It flew silently and its size at the distance was of the diameter of an American half dollar," said Maurizio Andreolo, an Associated Press reporter. As a matter of fact, Andreolo said, he saw three things, two of them trailing the first.
Rome's Giornale D'Italia suggested "the threads may be some new form of radar confuser, similar to the tin foil dropped by bombers in the last war, now being tested by Italian or Allied planes."