Recent activity

On 24 April 1949 a tracking team at White Sands used a theodolite to follow a second object they computed at about 56 miles up and seven miles per second; Edward Ruppelt could not explain it, and later accounts dispute the observer and the figures.

American inventor who claimed electric fields could control gravity (the Biefeld–Brown effect), founded NICAP in 1956 and was ousted within months; his 'electrogravitics' remains a staple of UFO propulsion lore.

Across 1968, a ufology compilation lists 31 Canadian reports of small or humanoid beings, most of them from rural and suburban Quebec, but the wave rests almost entirely on enthusiast literature rather than verified official files.

On 8 July 1947, several officers and engineers at the Army Air Field at Muroc, California, reported silver disc-like and oval objects over the base; sworn statements were taken and the case went to the Fourth Air Force, which left it pending.

Pilots of six commercial airliners over northern Chile reported bright, moving lights, some described as triangular, and the national civil aviation committee confirmed the reports without identifying the objects.

On the night of 6–7 July 1967, Canadian air traffic radar in Manitoba and Ontario logged unidentified targets, one of which tracked through seven sweeps and accelerated from about 720 to 3,600 knots, and which a 1967 Canadian Forces briefing later described as unexplained.

On 4 February 1978, six fishermen at the Dique La Florida reservoir in San Luis Province, Argentina, reported a plate-shaped craft and a blond, human-looking being that walked to the shore; provincial and federal police took testimony, and the file was later reported to have been forwarded to US authorities.

Long Island researcher and self-published author whose 36 years of exploring Camp Hero in Montauk produced the archive-style book Montauk Is Strange.

A night watchman at an agricultural cooperative in Prahova County reported a yellow, tailed light that hovered and landed in an orchard in September 1972; Romanian ufologists later called it the country's first scientifically examined UFO landing.

On the night of August 15–16, 1966, many residents of Fort Smith, Arkansas, reported moving and hovering colored lights; Project Blue Book logged the case as possible aircraft and stars, and the widely repeated 1,500-witness figure is not confirmed by the primary file.

In late January 1976, reports of hovering lights over Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, New Mexico, described jets chasing objects over the flight line. A declassified Air Force memo on the sighting exists, but the detailed accounts that followed rest largely on anecdote.

SETI Institute senior astronomer, science communicator and leading advocate of the 'SETI yes, saucers no' position on extraterrestrial intelligence.

On the evening of 5 March 1979, witnesses across several Canary Islands reported a luminous metallic object at sunset; a Spanish Air Force file later declassified concluded the phenomenon was real but of unknown origin, while skeptics have proposed Soviet or US missile tests.

Computer engineer who built the *U\** UFO Database, a DOS-era case archive of over 17,000 reports that became a standard research tool before his death in 2018.

Three Swiss Air Force Mirage III crews reported the same unexplained object over about a week of February 1971; the reports survive only as copies in federal military files and were never explained.

On 16 December 1965, shortly before reentry, Gemini 6A commander Wally Schirra and pilot Tom Stafford reported an object in polar orbit; the report became a Christmas episode when the crew played "Jingle Bells" on a harmonica and sleigh bells, and the "UFO" was later described as Santa Claus.

Over roughly ten days in mid-April 2004, residents of several northern Iranian cities reported low-flying, brightly coloured lights; state media covered the reports, and an Iranian astronomer attributed them to Venus, while others suggested satellites or surveillance aircraft.

A single still frame from a roughly four-second US reconnaissance clip of Mosul, Iraq (16 April 2016) shows a bright metallic-looking sphere; released by Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp in January 2023, it remains unauthenticated and unidentified, with skeptics favoring a balloon.

Folklorist whose 1987 two-volume study of UFO abduction reports remains one of the most comprehensive comparative analyses of the phenomenon

A British Airways Boeing 737 on approach to Manchester reported a solid, wedge-shaped object passing within feet of the cockpit; both pilots saw it, but radar showed nothing and the UK Civil Aviation Authority's airmiss group classed the risk and cause as 'unassessable'.

German rocket engineer from Peenemünde and Operation Paperclip who was named as a member of a 1950s Los Angeles saucer-investigation group and quoted in LIFE magazine in 1952; his identity in that coverage is disputed.

British earth-mysteries author who coined the term "earth lights" and argued that many UFO reports are unknown natural luminous phenomena rather than alien craft.

In August 1953 Papua New Guinea civil aviation official Tom Drury filmed an unidentified object over Port Moresby; the film was never identified and its footage was reportedly altered in official custody.

Between late 1955 and mid-1956, CIA information reports recorded second-hand accounts of unidentified craft over Budapest and a formation moving toward Moscow; the reports are unevaluated and their original text is not publicly verifiable in English.

On 7 February 1953 five U.S. Air Force radar and ground personnel at a Hokkaido detachment watched a star-like, colour-changing light for about 35 minutes, and a radar return was logged and dismissed; the Far East Air Forces concluded it was probably a Soviet weather balloon.

In 1953 the Air Force's Arctic air-defence outpost at Thule, Greenland, logged an unidentified radar track on a ground-controlled approach scope and a series of glowing lights seen by interceptor pilots. Both were explained as ordinary phenomena at the time, but the reports are still cited as early military UFO records from the Arctic.

Fortean writer whose 1989 essay "The Controllers" proposed that alien abduction reports may be an artifact of covert government mind-control research.

Ecuador's best-known ufólogo, who presided over the short-lived CEIFO government-linked UFO commission (2005–2007) and has since built his public profile on TV, books and claims the commission's files were never fully opened.

Two USAF KC-97 tankers refuelling off Newfoundland on 5 July 1955 tracked bright objects visually while ground radar followed them for about 49 minutes, with the pilot's direction changes matching radar returns.

Wellesley College planetary scientist and Galileo Project member who helps design the instrument packages meant to give UAP research the kind of measured, reproducible data it has long lacked.

Goon Show comedian and former RAF intelligence officer whose later account of wartime debriefings of bomber crews made him a figure in early British UFO history.

Experimental psychologist who spent two decades critically evaluating alien-abduction research and argued that conventional explanations were insufficient.

Soviet-era astrophysicist who led the Academy of Sciences side of the state UFO investigation and co-concluded that nearly all reports had mundane explanations

USAF Security Sergeant who claims to have touched a UFO and received binary code at Rendlesham Forest in 1980

On a night flight from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro, the crew of VASP Boeing 727 PP-SNG reported an object that moved around the airliner for roughly half an hour. The commander ruled out Venus; a 2014 Journal of Scientific Exploration paper argues Venus, possibly distorted by the atmosphere, is the likely explanation.

Long-serving NICAP official and author of the 1964 compilation *The UFO Evidence*, who spent four decades arguing that UFOs were an extraterrestrial phenomenon the government had concealed.

Over several days in mid-January 1967, police officers and residents across southwest Missouri and southeast Kansas reported a blue-green object hovering low over the area; the Joplin police lieutenant who watched it for over an hour is among the best-documented witnesses, and a University of Colorado team left three of six cases unidentified.

U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who accompanied Major Jesse Marcel to the Roswell debris field in July 1947, and whose shifting accounts became central to the Project Mogul debate.

On 6 May 1978 a bright cylindrical or egg-shaped object was reported falling and exploding on a mountain on the Bolivia–Argentina border; officials and the press gave conflicting explanations, and claims of a US retrieval remain unverified.

German author writing under the pen name Jan van Helsing, whose conspiracy books fuse Nazi-occult myth, flying-disc stories and extraterrestrial claims, and whose first titles were seized and indexed in Germany for antisemitism.

In January 1981 a Provençal landowner reported a lead-coloured, saucer-shaped object that landed and left ground traces; the French space agency's GEPAN studied soil and alfalfa samples and rated the case Class D (unexplained), though French sceptics dispute its methodology.

Self-published UFO historian whose roughly 10,000-page *UFOs: A History* (also titled *The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse*) is a day-by-day chronology of sightings and official responses from 1896 to 1963, built from a full review of Project Blue Book microfilm.

On 29 March 1952 a Vienna newspaper reported that two discs had been pursued by a fighter pilot over the uranium mines of Elisabethville in the Belgian Congo; the story was later filed as a CIA document but was never independently verified.

On the night of 23 November 1948, two US Air Force F-80 pilots at Fürstenfeldbruck saw a reddish light that a ground radar station tracked at 27,000 feet, later reported climbing to about 50,000 feet; the case is cited by Edward Ruppelt as an early example of simultaneous visual and radar contact.

Seattle-based nonfiction author whose 1987 book Light Years is a long-form, investigative account of Swiss contactee Billy Meier's claims.

On the night of 3 October 1951 a radar crew at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa tracked a large “sausage-shaped” target at speeds the Air Force later estimated at over 2,000 mph; a declassified intelligence analysis concluded it was probably a manufactured, possibly guided missile.

A county highway engineer took four Polaroids of a hat-shaped object and a black smoke ring near Santa Ana in 1965; the Air Force called them a hoax, NICAP and James McDonald long defended them, and the originals vanished for 28 years.

In January 1974 Florida writer Robert Spencer Carr claimed the Air Force kept two flying saucers in a 'Hangar 18' at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; the Air Force denied any such hangar exists, and the claim became a lasting part of Roswell-era folklore.

On 29 November 1960 two US Air Force officers flying a T-33 jet trainer south of Kyushu watched a white light move alongside their aircraft for about ten minutes; Project Blue Book carried it as unidentified, and a later blogger argues it was the Echo 1 satellite.

Ottawa-based independent UFO researcher whose papers, including the Wilbert Smith material, are now held by the University of Ottawa.

A bright, slow-moving object crossed several western states on the evening of April 18, 1962, and was tracked on Nellis AFB radar before ending in a flash near Mesquite, Nevada; the Air Force's bolide explanation was never fully reconciled with the radar record.

A 1997 internal CIA history by historian Gerald K. Haines reviewed four decades of the agency's involvement with UFO reports and concluded that U-2 and OXCART reconnaissance flights accounted for over half of the 1950s–60s sightings.

In April 2026 the FBI and House Oversight Committee began examining whether the deaths and disappearances of roughly ten scientists linked to sensitive research were connected, after retired Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland vanished in February and online UFO speculation took hold.

Air Force officer who led Project Blue Book during its most rigorous period, coined the modern term "unidentified flying object," and wrote the first insider account of the program before concluding that UFOs were a "space age myth."

On 2 September 1990 villagers near Atalanti in central Greece reported a crash of one of several luminous objects, followed by a Hellenic Air Force cordon and a Soviet-satellite explanation; no physical analysis has been published.

Scottish science writer and amateur astronomer who in 1973 claimed a radio message from an alien probe in lunar orbit, a claim he later withdrew.

Name attached to an unverified 2024 'missing UFO Congress director' story that no mainstream source confirms.

In the early hours of 31 March 1997, control-tower staff at Arica's Chacalluta airport reported three luminous objects that were reportedly confirmed on radar; the Chilean civil aviation authority publicly acknowledged the radar returns and the episode led to the creation of Chile's CEFAA committee on anomalous aerial phenomena.

Project Moon Dust was a covert U.S. Air Force program, run from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, to recover re-entered foreign spacecraft debris and exploit foreign hardware; declassified documents confirm its existence, but claims that it recovered crashed extraterrestrial craft remain unproven.

Canadian Department of Transport radio engineer who ran Project Magnet, a secret 1950s study of whether geomagnetism could detect or power flying saucers, and who later made increasingly sweeping extraterrestrial claims.

Apollo 14 lunar module pilot who, after leaving NASA, publicly asserted that aliens have visited Earth and that governments cover it up, while conceding his evidence was secondhand.

On 2 February 1967, the crew and about 52 passengers of a Faucett DC-4 flying from Piura to Lima reported a cone-shaped luminous object that paced the airliner for about an hour, with a second object joining it. Military authorities questioned the crew and confiscated the passengers' films. No official explanation was published.

On the evening of 7 July 2010 Hangzhou's Xiaoshan Airport was closed for about an hour after pilots and controllers reported an unidentified object; Chinese researchers later concluded it was probably an aircraft, possibly military, but the object was never publicly identified.

A mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars, photographed by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in July 1976, appeared face-like at low resolution and became one of the best-known UFO-adjacent images of the space age; later high-resolution orbiter images show a natural landform.

Elaborate 20-year Spanish UFO contact hoax involving hundreds of typewritten letters and physical sightings, later admitted as a social experiment by creator José Luis Jordán Peña.

Caltech mathematical physicist who chaired the 1953 CIA-convened Robertson Panel, which judged UFO sightings no threat to national security and recommended stripping them of their mystique.

On the night of 18–19 September 1976, luminous silver objects were reported across several Moroccan cities; King Hassan II's government asked the US embassy for an explanation, and the exchange was later published in declassified cables.

A French Foreign Legion sentry in Algeria reported a large object hovering near his camp for nearly an hour in March 1958; he was then observed for a week at a Paris military hospital, which found nothing abnormal, and no physical evidence or records have surfaced.

On September 27, 2004, members of an expedition led by ISRO scientist Anil Kulkarni reported a white, balloon-trailing object near a glacier at about 14,000 feet in the Indian Himalaya; it was never identified, and the case survives mainly in press accounts.

In late 1957 men on the North Yorkshire moors recovered a metal object described as a flying saucer, which contained a booklet of copper pages; the object was cut open and destroyed, and the surviving remains were tested in London in 1963 and found to be of Earth origin.

On October 25, 2017, an unidentified white aircraft with no transponder was tracked on FAA radar at about 37,000 feet over Northern California and Oregon, seen visually by airline crews, and chased by F-15Cs from Portland; it was never identified, and the FAA recordings were released under FOIA in 2018.

The Department of War's seventh UAP file batch (October 23, 2026) is led by an AARO memo on a silent, matte-black triangular object that two federal special agents and a third official reported at a sensitive western US site in June 2026.

Three teenagers in Dover, Massachusetts, reported a small, glowing-eyed humanoid creature over roughly 26 hours in April 1977; the reports were popularised by cryptozoologist Loren Coleman as the 'Dover Demon'.

During the International Geophysical Year, a four-person Chilean party stationed on an Antarctic island reported two stationary metallic craft in January 1956; the account survives mainly in ufology publications and a 2015 Chilean UFO-body write-up, with pseudonymous witnesses and no primary record found.

In the early hours of November 11, 2007, the crew of an Olympic Airways flight reported an unidentified bright object near Athens, prompting an F-16 intercept; the Greek Air Force later attributed it to the planet Venus, though the radar and dating accounts remain inconsistent.

On 19 November 2023, staff at Imphal airport in northeast India reported an unidentified flying object in controlled airspace; two flights were diverted, three delayed, and two Indian Air Force Rafale fighters were scrambled, without an identification being published.

On June 7, 2012, hundreds of Israelis flooded police hotlines reporting a spiralling light with a smoke trail, later linked to a Russian Topol ICBM test.

On September 2, 2021, Philippine air defense radar tracked an unidentified aircraft at 21,000 ft approaching national airspace; two FA-50 jets intercepted it, it ignored radio calls, then accelerated away and was never identified.

Between 11 August and 9 September 1914, thousands of South Africans reported a night-flying monoplane, or its headlights, in a wave that was widely attributed to German aircraft but was never identified and is now studied as a case of collective belief.

Former Bay Area city planner turned Bigfoot hunter and museum curator who argued that Bigfoot and Nessie were inter-dimensional, UFO-linked shape-shifters, and who feuded with skeptics and fellow cryptozoologists alike.