Luigi Romersa, an Italian journalist who claimed to have witnessed an explosion in October 1944 that he believed resembled an atomic bomb. Romersa, a war correspondent for the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera, was reportedly sent by Benito Mussolini to Germany to observe and report on the progress of secret Nazi weapons projects. According to his account, on October 12, 1944, he was taken to the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, off the German coast, where he observed a test of what German officials called a "disintegration bomb."