Castel Gandolfo Encounter

One night in July 1961, Pope John XXIII and his personal secretary Loris Francesco Capovilla were walking through the gardens of the Pontifical Palace at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence situated in the hills southeast of Rome.

According to Capovilla’s account, disclosed decades later, they observed an unknown craft radiating colored lights approaching across the gardens. The oval object, flashing blue and amber lights, descended and landed on the south lawn of the estate.

A being emerged from the craft. The figure appeared humanoid but was enveloped in a golden light. Its most distinctive feature was a pair of notably large, elongated ears. The encounter was brief.

The Pope reportedly knelt during the encounter. Afterward, he is said to have remarked: “The children of God are everywhere.” He requested that the incident be kept secret.

The account first appeared publicly in The Sun, a British tabloid, in 1985 — more than two decades after the alleged event and well after the Pope’s death in June 1963. A later version surfaced in the Argentine newspaper Diario Popular in 2014, attributed to a relative of Capovilla rather than directly to the secretary himself.

Capovilla honored the Pope’s request for secrecy throughout most of his life and was later elevated to Cardinal. He died on May 26, 2016 at the age of 100. He never publicly confirmed or denied the story in any verifiable mainstream source. No contemporaneous written record of the incident has surfaced, and no formal investigation was ever conducted. The Vatican Observatory’s director, Guy Consolmagno, S.J., has stated he knows of no credible evidence of extraterrestrial contact with the Vatican.