Paola Harris

Paola Leopizzi Harris is an Italian-American photojournalist, author, and UFO researcher who has spent several decades conducting field interviews with whistleblowers, military witnesses, and government insiders on the subject of unidentified aerial phenomena and extraterrestrial life. A self-described "journalist researcher," she has served as an international correspondent for the UFO Disclosure community, and is the co-author, with Jacques Vallée, of the 2021 book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, a reinvestigation of an alleged 1945 UFO crash near San Antonio, New Mexico.

Biography

Early career and J. Allen Hynek (1979–1986)

Harris began her involvement in UFO research in 1979 after seeing the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, subsequently traveling to Evanston, Illinois, where she met J. Allen Hynek — the astronomer who had headed Project Blue Book — and assisted him with Italian translations.

Italy and Disclosure Project work (1986 – early 2000s)

Following Hynek's death in 1986, Harris relocated to Italy, where she lived for approximately fifteen years, teaching at a private school and writing for UFO Area 51 magazine. During this period she spoke at conferences in Switzerland, Paris, and across Italy, finding European audiences more receptive to serious treatment of the subject.

In Italy, Harris assisted Steven Greer with the Disclosure Project, conducting translations and helping identify witnesses — including military airline pilots — for Greer's interview efforts there. Among the witnesses she reportedly facilitated access to was Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a senior theologian to Pope John Paul II whose interview was later featured at DisclosureProject.org.

Harris later returned to Colorado and continued her research career. She allegedly participated in the briefing materials assembled for Lawrence Rockefeller's initiative to brief President Bill Clinton, hosted at the JY Ranch in the Grand Tetons in September 1993.

Fieldwork and witnesses

Philip Corso (1997–1998)

Col. Philip Corso became a defining figure in Harris's career. She met Corso by coincidence at the 1997 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash, where she was assigned a room adjacent to his at the Sally Port Inn. She described the encounter: "I was lucky enough to be the journalist who was closest to him, all by accident, because I had the room next to him at the Sally Port Inn in 1997 during the 50th anniversary of Roswell."

Following the encounter, Harris brought Corso to Italy twice — speaking in Pescara in 1997 and in the independent republic of San Marino in 1998 — where he met with scientists and reportedly gave his most extensive on-record testimony: "I had the opportunity to invite him to Italy twice. He spoke in Italy, in Pescara in 1997 and 1998 in San Marino, which is an independent republic. Corso did most of his speaking and most of his meeting of scientists and so forth in Italy." His grandsons accompanied him to Italy as a condition of the trip; he gave testimony twice. Harris later published her taped Corso conversations as the book Conversations with Colonel Corso, describing the work as an archival rather than interpretive project: "I always say I'm Barbara Walters, you know, I just want to archive what they actually said, not what the rumor was, what we think, what their fans say, but what actual people said. It's historical for me, it's historical data." She also contributed to the anthology The Day After Roswell Anthology: A Collective History of a Great American alongside Michael Salla.

Michael Wolf Kruvante (1999–2000)

Harris is credited with confirming the identity and credentials of Dr. Michael Wolf Kruvante, a self-described government insider, through extensive in-person contact. She reportedly visited him multiple times at his Hartford apartment, conducted approximately seventy audio-recorded interviews over two years, and described him as "the real deal." In April 1999 she published "The Michael Wolf Tapes II," a follow-up interview with Wolf about alleged secret government projects and ET contact. On 8 March 2000, Harris conducted a further interview with Wolf, described as a world exclusive, on the subject of UFO disclosure, extraterrestrial life, and alleged government contact programs.

Dan Burisch (2006)

Harris interviewed Dan Burisch, a microbiologist who claimed to have worked at the S-4 facility near Area 51, publishing the interview on her website paolaharris.com, where Burisch described his alleged experiences with extraterrestrial biological entities.

Clifford Stone and archival work

Harris maintained sustained fieldwork contact with Clifford Stone, a retired U.S. Army sergeant who claimed recovery-team service, and reportedly recovered thirteen of Stone's twenty-six boxes of personal files after his death; these are now archived at Rice University.

Trinity crash investigation and book (2010–2021)

Main article:

Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret

In 2010, Harris travelled to Gig Harbor, Washington, to track down Reme Baca, one of two surviving child witnesses to an alleged UFO crash on the Padilla ranch near San Antonio, New Mexico on 16 August 1945, roughly four weeks after the nearby Trinity nuclear test. She continued fieldwork in the region over the following decade, eventually visiting the alleged crash site with the other witness, Jose Padilla, in 2016.

Harris co-authored Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret with French-American astronomer Jacques Vallée, published in 2021, presenting the Padilla–Baca case as a pre-Roswell crash recovery allegedly linked to early atomic weapons testing. Harris described the project as the bookend of her career: "I began my career with Alan Hynek and I finished with... here's the book. It's called Trinity The Best Kept Secret." In the book, Vallée acknowledges Harris's frustration with the lack of institutional interest in the physical evidence she had gathered: "I have worked on it for seven years and the only people to take it seriously are outside the country."

Later work (2022–present)

In a 2022 episode of Exopolitics Today with Michael Salla, Harris gave a career-spanning interview covering her work with Hynek, Corso, Wolf, Burisch, Stone, and the Trinity investigation. A 2023 follow-up episode revisited Corso's revelations about alleged Roswell crash technologies and extraterrestrial contact.

Views

Harris has emphasised the significance of human-type non-human intelligences over the popular "gray alien" paradigm, citing her research in Italy and the contact experiences reported by figures such as Billy Meier and scientist Pier Luigi Ighina (an assistant to Guglielmo Marconi), who allegedly claimed that "Space Brothers" had inspired Marconi's technological work.

Selected bibliography

• Connecting the Dots: Making Sense of the UFO Phenomenon (2003) — compilation of field interviews and analysis of the disclosure movement.
• Conversations with Colonel Corso: A Personal Memoir and Photo Album (2009) — archival record of Harris's taped interviews with Philip Corso.
• Exopolitics: All the Above (2009) — essays on the exopolitics movement and field research.
• Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret (2021), with Jacques Vallée — reinvestigation of an alleged 1945 UFO crash near San Antonio, New Mexico.
• UFOs: How Does One Speak to a Ball of Light? — collected field interviews.

A personal website, paolaharris.com, serves as her platform for publishing interview transcripts and investigative articles.

See also

• Charles Hall
• Robert Dean

References