Italian dictator Benito Mussolini covered up a UFO crash in the 1930s

Benito Mussolini covered up a UFO crash.

Roberto Pinotti, an aerospace engineer and ufologist, claims to have obtained documents describing the crash of a "metallic object" in Northern Italy in 1933.

Pinotti has alleged that the Italian government, led by the dictator Il Duce, set up a secret department to study the spacecraft that continued to operate for several years.

He told MailOnline: "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.

"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.

"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.”