Paola Harris
Paola Leopizzi Harris is an Italian-American journalist and UFO researcher and a well-known proponent of exopolitics. Her best-known work is Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, co-written with Jacques Vallée, about an alleged 1945 UFO crash in New Mexico.
Paola Leopizzi Harris is an Italian-American investigative journalist and UFO researcher who has been known for decades for her interviews with witnesses, former military and government personnel, and researchers. She previously taught at the American Overseas School in Rome, and later at a Hawaii-based nonprofit organization that supports "contactees" who have come into contact with extraterrestrials, government whistleblowers, and the cause of so-called galactic diplomacy. She frequently appears at UFO conferences, on podcasts, and in documentaries, and has done much to build ties between Italian and American UFO researchers.
Work
Harris is a well-known proponent of exopolitics. This school of thought starts from the premise that extraterrestrials are already in contact with humanity, and that governments and society should treat this contact as a political and diplomatic matter. Her books include Connecting the Dots: Making Sense of the UFO Phenomenon and Exopolitics. She and the French-American researcher Jacques Vallée have long been studying the chemical and physical composition of alleged UFO debris fragments together.
The Trinity case
Her best-known work is Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, co-written with Vallée and published in 2021. According to the book, in 1945, barely a month after the first American atomic test, an avocado-shaped craft crashed in the New Mexico desert, not far from the White Sands range. The wreck and its mantis-like occupants were seen by two local boys, 9-year-old Reme Baca and 7-year-old José Padilla, and the craft was hauled away by a military detachment. According to the book, the two men kept silent about the incident for nearly sixty years.
Official and skeptical positions
According to AARO's 2024 report, there is no evidence that the US government has acquired extraterrestrial craft or their remains, and such claims stem largely from accounts that cite one another. The Trinity case was critiqued in detail by researcher Douglas Dean Johnson in 2023, and his critique was also summarized by Skeptoid. According to it, the story first appeared in 2003, 58 years after the alleged events, and its details changed from version to version: Baca earlier mentioned a date of 1947, then 1946, and a disc-shaped craft. Both witnesses were shown to have had false claims in their biographies, and the police officer named in the story was still fighting in Europe in 1945 and only became a police officer years later. Vallée responded publicly to the critique and stands by the story. According to skeptics, Harris's interviews generally present the witnesses' narratives to the public without independent verification.