Former top National Reconnaissance Office staffer David Grusch shocked the world last month when he revealed he had blown the whistle in sworn testimony to Congress and government watchdogs, about an alleged secret US program that has obtained multiple ‘non-human’ flying saucers.

Grusch claims one of these alien spacecraft crashed in Northern Italy in 1933, and was secreted away by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, before it was captured by American forces at the end of World War II and shipped to the US.

DailyMail.com understands Grusch was briefed on the supposed June 1933 crash by a staffer who allegedly worked on the ‘non-human’ craft in a secret US government program.

And this week Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Marco Rubio confirmed he has heard testimony from alleged first hand witnesses of such crash retrieval programs.

Now, in an interview with DailyMail.com to coincide with Sunday’s World UFO Day, Italian researcher Roberto Pinotti shared extraordinary details of the alleged saucer crash that occurred a full 14 years before the famous Roswell, New Mexico incident.

Pinotti, president of the National Ufological Center, which goes by the Italian initialism CUN, obtained documents he claims evidence the June 13, 1933 crash, and a secret department set up by Mussolini to study the alleged saucer.

Pinotti’s research has been met with skepticism in Italy since he first released it in 2000, and is still little-known outside its borders.

‘I and my colleague Alfredo Lissoni began investigating the story of the 1933 UFO crash in Lombardy in 1996, when we received some original secret documents about the case,’ he told DailyMail.com.

The documents were mysteriously mailed to Pinotti from an anonymous source who claimed to have inherited them from a family member who worked on Mussolini’s supposed UFO program.

They include two June 1933 telegrams in Italian, one demanding ‘absolute silence’ over an ‘alleged landing on national soil of unknown aircraft’.

Another, dated June 13, threatens the ‘immediate arrest’ and ‘maximum penalties’ for any journalists reporting news of an ‘aircraft of unknown nature and origin’.

‘Immediate recasting of any leads from the newspapers bearing said news is ordered,’ the second telegram said.

Both say they are by ‘personal order’ of ‘Il Duce’ – Mussolini himself.

Other documents sent to Pinotti refer to a mysterious government department called ‘Gabinetto RS/33’, or the RS (Special Research) 33 Cabinet, supposedly set up by the Italian dictator to manage the retrieval and study of the alleged saucer wreckage, as well as other UFO incidents.

Pinotti says RS/33 was headed by Nobel Prize-winning inventor Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio.

To this day, Italian historians and UFO researchers have found no other evidence of this shadowy alleged group or Marconi’s involvement.

Pinotti was also sent handwritten memos on paper with a government agency letterhead dated August 22, 1936 which include a sketch and description of a cylindrical aircraft with portholes on the sides and white and red lights spotted flying over Northern Italy.

Piecing together the mysterious documents, Pinotti was able to pinpoint SIAI Marchetti in Vergiate, an aircraft facility near the alleged crash site outside Magenta, a satellite town of Milan, as the likely site where the supposed wreckage was stored.

The site miraculously avoided regular bombing raids by Allied Forces during the Second World War, and 12 years later in 1945 the region was secured by US and UK troops.

US whistleblower Grusch claims it was around this time that the supposed craft was shipped back to the US; the first saucer recovery to his knowledge.

‘In 1933, a bell-like craft, around ten meters in size, was recovered in Magenta, northern Italy. It was kept by Mussolini’s government until 1944 when it was recovered by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a former US intelligence agency),’ he told French newspaper Le Parisien last month.

‘Ironically, it predates anything the public has heard about for decades, such as Roswell, etc.’

The former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency official declined to be interviewed on the record by DailyMail.com about his claims.

As the only UFO crash case which Grusch has specifically described as authentic, the alleged 1933 incident has taken on a new significance as an indicator of the reliability of his claims of a US crash retrieval program.

And Pinotti says he has been able to authenticate at least some of his paperwork.

The Italian researcher had one of his documents, dated 1936, tested by a forensic expert who concluded the paper and ink was from that period. The 1933 telegrams have not been tested.

The conclusion of the 2000 report by scientific consultant Antonio Garavaglia, shared with DailyMail.com, says: ‘It can be stated with reasonable certainty that only the sample examined and the subject of the appraisal can be considered original and, therefore, authentic.’

‘After four years of investigations and a forensic analysis showing the documents were really written in the 1930s, we published a detailed report in a book,’ Pinotti told DailyMail.com.

‘The evidence speaks for itself. And it shows that the first world leader who officially (although secretly) faced the UFO problem was not president Harry Truman with the Roswell incident in the United States but Italy’s Benito Mussolini.’

However, skeptics have pointed out that vintage paper and ink from the time could have been used to forge the papers, and that they bear no protocol numbers or official stamps that would help verify them as real government documents, appearing instead to be more like personal memos.

Even other Italian UFO researchers have poured scorn on the story. Giuseppe Stilo, a member of the Italian Center for UFO Studies, told Vice News Italy: ‘From a scientific point of view, these are embarrassing stories. Any historian would blanch at seeing how one claims to prove one thing or the other.’

British historian Graeme Rendall, who has written books on WWII UFO sightings, told DailyMail.com that he believes the evidence is inconclusive.

‘It’s one of these cases where we need more information,’ he said. ‘There’s claims made, but nothing really to back them up.

‘It would be nice if there was an independent examination of the original documents. That could rule out or in, whether this was a forgery or not.’

The Republic of San Marino, a tiny European city-state on the Italian mainland, is currently working with Pinotti and fellow CUN executive Paolo Guizzardi to lobby the United Nations to set up its own UFO investigations office.

The effort, named Project Titan, was approved by the San Marino government on January 19 this year, and Pinotti and Guizzardi had their first meeting with ministers on June 19.

Guizzardi says he wants San Marino to be the headquarters for the proposed UN UFO office, with the goal of making the city ‘the Geneva of UFOs’.

Rendall, author of UFOs Before Roswell: European Foo-Fighters 1940-1945, pointed out a telling detail from one of the 1936 memos Pinotti received, which describes Italian fighter biplanes as being unable to catch a cylindrical UFO traveling at ‘130 kilometers per hour’.

‘That’s very slow, about 80mph. The Italian Air Force fighter aircraft at the time, a CR-20 or CR-32, could go a lot faster than that – well over 200km/h,’ he said. ‘It’s one detail that makes you think twice.’

Despite the skepticism around the case, the former head of the US government’s UFO investigation unit told DailyMail.com that officials are taking the case ‘seriously’.

‘The incident is something we’ve taken seriously and we continue to take seriously,’ said Lue Elizondo, who helped lead AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Department of Defense until 2017.

One Italian resident near the site shared information with DailyMail.com that predates the discovery of Pinotti’s controversial documents.

Marco Negri, whose family have lived in Northern Italy for over a century, said his great-great grandfather told stories to his father of a strange metallic aircraft without wings that crashed in Magenta in the 1930s.

Marco, 42, said his ancestor Pietro Negri was Podesta (Mayor) of Arona from the 1920s through the 1950s, less than 10 miles from Vergiate where the alleged wreckage was supposedly stored, and about 30 miles from the suppoosed crash site.

‘My great-great grandfather Pietro told my father a story about the strange crash in 1933, since he was young,’ Marco said.

‘It was a second-hand story told to me by my father when I was a child in the early 1990s. But it matches the story of the crash.

‘I was told a strange metal plane with no wings crashed somewhere between Vergiate and Magenta.

‘I was told there was a big censorship around this crash. The fascist secret police were sent to the surrounding cities to keep people silent about it.’

Marco, who says he and his family disavow their ancestors’ fascist past, added that Pietro’s position as head of the town and its police force meant he was able to see telegrams about the crash.

Marco said his great-great grandfather died in the 1950s and his father and other older family members he told his story have also passed away, offering no corroboration for the tale.

The Lombardy resident said his great-great grandfather’s story also included a wild detail that Pinotti also described – without evidence: that two ‘bodies’ with blond hair were found inside the craft.

Marco said his ancestor described them as ‘child-sized’, whereas in presentations at UFO conferences, Pinotti said they were around 5’9′ with ‘light hair and eyes’.

The Department of Defense denies any crash retrievals by the US.

‘To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently,’ spokeswoman Susan Gough said.