20th Ann. Symposium Unidentified Flying Objects

At first glance, we might think of the poster for a film about extraterrestrials. In fact, the vignette of the stamp signed by Fabio Ferrini immediately brings to mind one of the cinematic masterpieces in the style of ‘Alien’ or even better Steven Spielberg's historic ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. A sunrise, the sun and the first rays touching the leaves of the trees in the foreground. Bordering the horizon on the left is one of the three symbolic ‘pens’ of the Titan, bulwarks defending freedom. It is no coincidence that the one portrayed is the Third Tower known as the Montale Tower, built at the end of the 13th century, the smallest in size, but the one that played a fundamental strategic role, thanks to its better position for the lookout. The absolute protagonist of the stamp in this case, however, is not the millenary beauty of Mount Titan, but the image of an unidentified flying object, or as we are more vulgarly accustomed to calling it a UFO, from the Anglo-Saxon acronym ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ coined by the US Air Force in 1947. The stamp that the AASFN has decided to issue is actually a tribute to the 20th edition of the World Ufology Symposium in San Marino. An event that has been attracting scholars from every nation for some time now and which at the last edition saw speakers debating the theme, ‘UFOs and aliens: which interlocutors on Earth?’. The 0.85 centime stamp thus pays tribute to a debate that will continue to hold sway in the future, and which saw in the 20th Symposium a moment of lively dialectic between experts in the field from all over Europe and the United States of America.