Newspapers immediately referred to the phenomenon as extraterrestrial, and the sand as coming from Mars, specifically. Roberto Pinotti, president of Italy’s National UFO Center, rather deliberately describes the objects only as intelligent, technological, and not associated with any known occurrence on Earth. Of course, the material that fell from the sky, which he calls “angel hair,” was the most fascinating part of the event, as the substance actually fell in such great quantities and thickness that it draped itself over rooftops, and within an hour, disintegrated.

Professor Giovanni Canneri of the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence managed to procure a sample of the silvery substance. Spectrographic analysis indicated that it contained boron, silicon, calcium, and magnesium, and was not radioactive. The testing process, unfortunately, destroyed the sample. On the flip-side, US Air Force pilot and astronomer James McGaha, who calls the entire idea of extraterrestrials mere magic and myth, classified the cigar-shaped UFOs as pieces of a falling meteor, which happened to occur at the same time that, ludicrously, a whole bunch of spiders cast some webs in the sky that draped themselves over houses. Of course, spiderwebs aren’t composed of things like boron. 

Whatever happened, it can’t be attributed to mass hysteria (clinically known as collective obsessional behavior, according to Medical News Today; more akin to society-wide peer pressure), because there are too many witnesses and records. It’s unlikely, though, that a legion of flying spiders was involved.