Paola Leopizzi Harris

Early Life and Background

Paola Leopizzi Harris was born in Italy and grew up in a transatlantic world that would come to define her career. She splits her residence between Rome and Boulder, Colorado, moving fluidly between the Italian-speaking press circuit and the English-language UFO research community. She holds a Master's degree in Education and has taught history and photojournalism at the American Overseas School of Rome, while also developing and delivering online exopolitics courses. This dual identity — rigorous educator on one side, tireless field investigator on the other — distinguishes her from many colleagues who work exclusively on one side of the Atlantic.

Harris traces her interest in the UFO subject to 1979, when she encountered the work of Dr. J. Allen Hynek — the Northwestern University astronomer who had served as the U.S. Air Force's scientific consultant on Project Blue Book before becoming one of the subject's most credentialed advocates. That encounter set the course of the next half century.

Career: Working with J. Allen Hynek

From 1980 to 1986, Harris worked directly alongside Hynek at the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Evanston, Illinois — the independent research organization Hynek had founded in 1973 after growing disillusioned with the Air Force's handling of the phenomenon. During those six years she assisted with case investigations, helped translate Italian UFO cases into English, and witnessed at close range how a scientist of Hynek's stature collected evidence, calibrated witness credibility, and pushed back against institutional dismissal. Hynek's methodological approach — go to the witness, document everything, withhold judgment until the evidence warrants a conclusion — runs through all of Harris's subsequent field work.

Hynek died in 1986, and Harris subsequently turned to photojournalism and investigative reporting full-time. Her bilingual fluency made her an essential bridge figure: she became a regular columnist for Area 51 UFO Magazine and contributed articles to Nexus (Australia), UFO Magazine, Notiziario UFO, and Dossier Alieni, reaching readerships that rarely overlapped. She began traveling internationally to interview witnesses, bringing European cases into English-language discourse and American cases to continental European audiences.

The Italian Dimension: Rome, the Vatican, and the European Network

One of the most distinctive threads in Harris's career is her sustained engagement with Italian and Vatican-adjacent religious figures who were willing to discuss extraterrestrial intelligence without either dismissing it or sensationalizing it. Chief among these was Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a Vatican theologian, demonologist, and exorcist who — starting in the late 1990s — became one of the Catholic Church's most visible voices willing to engage seriously with the possibility that other intelligent beings exist in the universe. Balducci gave numerous Italian television interviews in which he argued that extraterrestrial contact was not theologically incompatible with Christianity, and Harris cultivated a close relationship with him, bringing him into dialogue with American researchers.

Through her Italian base, Harris organized lectures and events that brought figures including Dr. Steven Greer, Travis Walton, and Nick Pope to Italian audiences — unusual cross-cultural dialogues between American experiencers and the European philosophical and theological tradition. She founded Starworks Italia, a non-profit Italian counterpart to her American media company StarworksUSA, which she has used to produce annual conferences in Laughlin, Nevada. She also served as International Liaison Director for the Exopolitics Institute, the academic body founded by Dr. Michael Salla that attempts to apply political-science frameworks to the question of how humanity should respond to confirmed non-human contact.

The Corso Connection and Roswell

In 1997, Harris traveled to Roswell, New Mexico, for the 50th anniversary commemoration of the famous crash and met Colonel Philip J. Corso (U.S. Army, Ret.), who had recently published The Day After Roswell with co-author William J. Birnes. Corso claimed to have served on the National Security Council staff under President Eisenhower and later at the Pentagon's Foreign Technology desk, where he alleged he had personally managed the transfer of recovered alien materials — fiber optics, integrated circuits, night-vision technology — into private industry under classified programs.

Harris interviewed Corso in depth and became a personal friend and confidante during the last years of his life (he died in 1998). She was instrumental in having The Day After Roswell translated into Italian and wrote the preface for that edition — a role that cemented her standing in Italian-language UFO publishing and introduced Corso's claims to a European audience that might not otherwise have encountered them. Critics of Corso's account — including several historians and former colleagues — have argued that his technological claims are unverifiable and internally inconsistent, and the book remains one of the more disputed entries in the Roswell literature. Harris, who knew him personally, regards his testimony as credible; readers must weigh that context.

The Disclosure Project and Witness Archives

In 2001, Harris was among the researchers who helped film witnesses for Dr. Steven Greer's Disclosure Project press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. (May 9, 2001). Over twenty witnesses — predominantly military, government, or intelligence personnel — testified to their knowledge of the government's handling of UFO encounters. Harris's contribution was primarily logistical and archival, reflecting her standing as a trusted intermediary capable of bringing witnesses forward.

Her 2003 book Connecting the Dots: Making Sense of the UFO Phenomenon, launched at the Roswell International UFO Museum, brought together her interview transcripts and analytical framework for a mainstream English-language audience. It remains one of the more accessible entry points into the oral-history dimension of UFO research: a large proportion of its pages consist of verbatim dialogue with witnesses, presented with journalistic apparatus — context, follow-up questions, biographical identification of the speaker — rather than the credulous narration common in the genre. A later volume, UFOs: All the Above… And Beyond (2016), continued the interview-anthology approach, widening the cast of characters and updating it to include post-Cold War witnesses.

Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret (2021)

Harris's most significant scholarly contribution is Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, co-authored with Jacques Vallée and published in 2021 (a second expanded edition followed in 2022). Vallée — the French-born information scientist and pioneering UFO researcher whose theoretical work since the 1960s has shaped the field more than almost any other figure — brought analytical rigor; Harris brought decades of field access and witness relationships.

The book's central claim is that a non-human craft crashed near San Antonio, New Mexico, in late August 1945 — fully two years before the Roswell incident, and just weeks after the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at the nearby Trinity test site on July 16, 1945. The primary witnesses were two young boys: José Padilla, aged nine at the time, and Réme Baca, aged seven, on the Padilla family's cattle land when they saw a craft strike the terrain and come to rest. Over the following nine days they returned repeatedly and observed an Army recovery detachment work to remove the object and its humanoid occupants. Both witnesses remained silent for approximately sixty years, fearing retaliation or disbelief.

Harris and Vallée conducted multiple on-site investigation surveys, collected photographs, documented the landscape, and cross-referenced the witnesses' accounts against available Army records. They describe physical evidence including fragments of unusual metallic material recovered from the site and the witnesses' consistent, detailed recollections across separate interviews conducted years apart. The proximity to Trinity — both in geography and in date — forms a central interpretive thread: the authors suggest that whatever intelligence was operating these craft may have been drawn to, or alarmed by, the first nuclear detonation on Earth.

The book was well received within the UFO research community and attracted wider mainstream attention than most crash claims, largely because of Vallée's involvement and methodological reputation. Skeptical readers have noted that the two primary witnesses were very young children at the time of the event, that sixty years elapsed before any public disclosure, that no independent corroboration of the physical evidence has appeared in peer-reviewed literature, and that both authors have a well-established prior commitment to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Harris has acknowledged these limitations in interviews while maintaining that the overall evidentiary pattern is compelling. A second edition published in 2022 added additional interviews and addressed some of the methodological objections raised after the first.

Reception and Criticism

Harris occupies an unusual position in the UFO research world. Her bilingual output and long-standing Italian-language publishing presence give her credibility and reach in Europe that is rare among U.S.-based researchers. Her direct, sustained relationships with key figures — Hynek, Corso, Balducci, Vallée, Greer — mean she has been present at many of the field's significant moments over four decades, and her interview archives constitute a genuine historical resource regardless of one's view on the underlying claims.

Critical assessment of her work focuses on several consistent themes. First, Harris is not a neutral observer: she has stated her belief in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs openly and over many years, and her interview subjects are mostly drawn from the witness-and-believer community rather than from skeptical or debunking perspectives. Second, the Trinity book's evidentiary standards have been challenged by researchers who note the absence of independently verified physical evidence and the reliance on childhood recollections from witnesses who came forward decades after the alleged event. Third, her association with figures like Corso — whose claims have been disputed by other Roswell researchers, including some who are themselves believers — creates credibility baggage that serious critics cite.

At the same time, dismissive critics occasionally underestimate the genuine historiographical value of her interview collection. Whether or not one accepts the extraterrestrial interpretation, the oral testimonies she has gathered from military witnesses, contactees, and researchers over forty-plus years form a primary source archive that historians of Cold War anxiety, popular religion, and American conspiracy culture will need to engage.

Legacy

As the UAP disclosure movement accelerated after 2017 — with the AATIP revelations, the To the Stars Academy, and eventually Congressional hearings on non-human intelligence — Harris remained an active voice, producing content through her YouTube channel, Patreon platform, and conference circuit. She has framed these developments as institutional confirmation of what she and colleagues like Vallée, Stanton Friedman, and Linda Moulton Howe had argued for decades.

Her most durable contribution is probably the Trinity book: whatever one concludes about the 1945 crash claim, the rigour that Vallée brought to the collaboration and the field work Harris contributed gave the story a documentary foundation that separates it from most rumor-based crash claims that dominate UFO literature. Whether that foundation proves ultimately sufficient is a question the research community continues to debate actively.