12 More Unexplained UAP / UFO Incidents from History (1947-2004)

A few years ago (back in 2023), I wrote an article about 8 Mysterious UFO / UAP Encounters from History (218 BCE – 1947) which covered Ancient Roman sightings, the “Celestial Battle” witnessed over Nuremberg in 1561, the Japanese Legend of the “Utsuro-Bune”, a “Phantom Airship” spotted across North America in the late 1800’s, the Magenta Crash of 1933, and several puzzling incidents throughout WWII – basically everything leading up to the Roswell Incident of 1947.

Since writing that article, the topic has only continued to snowball online with multiple public hearings within the US congress (including testimony under oath from multiple Navy pilots, a Rear Admiral, and a NASA scientist), a groundbreaking documentary, “The Age of Disclosure” (2025) – which prominently featuring 34 senior US officials, and a number of prominent scientists are now taking the phenomenon seriously (including Harvard Professor Avi Loeb, Dr. Michio Kaku, Dr. Garry Nolan, and even astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of ‘Star Talk’ radio) as more and more government whistleblowers come forward, while even more documents, data, and military videos are declassified to the public, and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is actively searching the cosmos for other Earth-like planets. Not to mention there’s a new Spielberg movie dropping this year called “Disclosure Day”!? 

In fact, earlier this year (2026), both Presidents Obama and Trump made some pretty shocking comments on the existence of ‘aliens’ which went viral on social media – leading the later to order the Pentagon to release everything it has on the subject of UFO’s or UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon), which lead to the creation of a public database (https://www.war.gov/ufo/) – including internal FBI documents regarding a “Flying Disk” recovered at Roswell in 1947 as well as previously classified photos and audio from NASA’s Gemini and Apollo Missions! So given all the renewed interest in the subject, I figured it might be time to strap on my tin foil hat once moor and dive into some of the most credible (?) UFO incidents of the 20th Century and beyond!

1. The Roswell Incident of 1947 

Note: Screenshot from “X-Files” Season 10 Episode 1

It goes without saying that the Roswell Incident of 1947 is by far the most famous UFO case in American history. Whether or not it actually happened has been the subject of intense debate for the past 80 years, but what we do know for certain is that the US government’s official story has changed several times over the decades, which further adds fuel to the speculative fire.

Before diving into the details of this story however, I think its first worth noting that the term “Flying Saucer” was coined just a month earlier by pilot, Kenneth Arnold. On June 24th, 1947, Arnold witnessed a string of 9, shinny, crescent-shaped “Unidentified Flying Objects” near Mount Rainier, while flying in Washington state. He estimated they must have been traveling at about 1,200 miles-per-hour, and were bizarrely “skipping like saucers”. This was the first major UFO sighting since the numerous “Foo Fighter” incidents during the war, where dozens of fighter pilots had seen orbs circling their planes. Now, amidst Cold War tensions in the air, Americans were primed to look towards the sky with suspicion…

Sometime around the 4th of July weekend of 1947 – *something* crashed on a farm outside of Roswell, New Mexico (some 200 miles east of the Los Alamos Trinity Test Site). A rancher named “Mac” Brazel discovered some strange debris scattered across his property and soon after hearing rumors about “Flying Saucers” in town, he reported it to the local Sheriff, who then contacted the Roswell Army Air Field. The military was scrambled and (according to some) the materials were recovered and quickly airlifted to Wright-Patterson Airbase in Dayton, Ohio.

Around the same time, on July 8th, 1947, the RAAF put out an official press release to the media that they had captured a “Flying Disk” – this news basically went ‘viral’ around the globe, but the story was soon retracted the following day when the Army then claimed that it was actually nothing more than a “Weather Balloon”. In fact, they even released a couple of photos of some officers posing with tin foil…

Seriously?

However, years later a number of people who were around at the time reported something else entirely. In fact, Jesse Marcel Sr., an Intelligence Officer from the RAAF (seen above on the right) came out publicly decades later and claimed that the whole thing was a cover-up, that the photos were staged, and that the real materials he witnessed that day were “not of this world”. What’s more is the Public Information Officer who wrote the “Flying Disk” press release, Walter Haut, signed a sealed affidavit that came out after his death in 2005, in which he claimed to have seen an unknown craft and ‘alien bodies’ at the Roswell crash site!

Dozens of other witnesses have come forward in the decades since saying they were sworn to secrecy, and some even say they were threatened by military officials to keep quiet. Many of the soldiers involved and their families recall seeing strange bodies, roughly the size of children, being loaded into crates, and shipped off, as well as multiple reports of an “egg-shaped” craft roughly 25 feet wide with some kind of hieroglyphics, and a light bendable metallic alloy that could retain its form.

Then in 1994, in an attempt to quell these rumors, the US government changed their official narrative once again, now claiming that it was actually a Top-Secret Project Mogul balloon – designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests at high-altitudes – specifically Test Flight No 4. The only problem is that Project Mogul Test Flight No 4 was *cancelled* due to weather! And many have pointed out that if it had launched, weather patterns would have taken it in a different direction. But it gets even weirder – in an attempt to explain away the ‘bodies’ that the Roswell townsfolk claimed to see, a report came out in 1997 that the military had been using crash test dummies for parachute tests. The only issue with that explanation is that crash test dummies weren’t invented until 1949 and weren’t in use by the military until 1953…

In the years since there have been a number of books written on the subject from multiple perspectives, from Col. Philip J. Corso’s “The Day After Roswell” (in which he claimed the US military reverse-engineered the transistor and other technologies from the remains of the craft) to “Area 51” by Annie Jacobsen (who claims the Roswell incident was actually a Soviet hoax orchestrated by Stalin to cause mass panic).

Regardless of whether or not we ever find out the truth behind what actually happened at Roswell in 1947, there’s no doubt that it sparked an absolute wildfire in the American consciousness, spawning an entire genre of B-movie Sci-Fi flicks about Alien Invaders from Mars throughout the 1950’s – with classics like “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), “The War of the Worlds” (1953), “Forbidden Planet” (1956), and of course “Earth vs the Flying Saucers” (1956)! 

2. The Korean War Encounters (1951 / 1952)

A common talking point among skeptics and debunkers is how often UFO sightings occur in the US, UK, or Australia, but some of the absolute biggest incidents have occurred outside of English speaking countries. One of the lesser known (but highly documented) cases was actually during the Korean War…

In May of 1951, Private First Class Francis P. Wall and his regiment were stationed 60 miles north of Seoul – in what is now considered South Korea. The American GI’s were preparing to bombard a nearby village with artillery when they noticed a strange light emerging from the hills, described as “a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the mountain”. Dozens of soldiers watched in stunned silence as the mysterious glowing object silently approached. Artillery airbursts began striking the unknown craft, but the hovering UFO remained unharmed. Its brilliant orange glow soon turned to a pulsating blue-green light.

The GI’s fearing for their lives began firing at the craft, assuming it was a secret Soviet weapon. Private Wall recalls using armor-piercing bullets fired from his M-I rifle which made a metallic ‘ding’. The UFO seemed to react erratically, moving from side to side with its flashing lights. Suddenly, they were attacked by some kind of ray! As a pulsing searchlight swept over the regiment, the soldiers later described a “burning, tingling sensation” that caused them to retreat into a nearby underground bunker where they witnessed the UFO shoot off at a 45-degree angle instantaneously!

Just three days later, the entire company had to be evacuated by ambulance – some were even too weak to walk, and all of them had symptoms consistent with radiation poisoning – including extremely high white-blood-cell counts and dysentery! In addition to severe PTSD, many of these veterans would have detrimental health effects for the rest of their lives. Most of the GI’s agreed to keep the incident to themselves for fear of being labeled as crazy, but for the ones who did speak up about what happened that day, their stories remained consistent.

If that’s not enough, the following year – on the night of January 29th, 1952, four American military personnel aboard two different B-29 bombers reported seeing a large, orange, ‘globe-shaped’ object over both Wonsan and Sunchon in what is now North Korea. Both B-29 crews reported being followed by the strange orbs while travelling hundreds of miles per hour!

What makes this whole story even more intriguing from a modern perspective is that a few years ago, the US National Archives started a depository for historical documents related to UFO’s and the file includes dozens of photographs from the Korean War! There have also been a lot of speculation surrounding a US military base in South Korea that just happens to be right outside of Seoul – that many are claiming is the site of a gigantic crashed UFO that was built over – as hinted at by Australian investigative reporter, Ross Coulthard…

*Honorable Mention: On January 24th, 1952, at a Belgian Uranium Mine in the Congo, a number of locals witnessed a bright, disc-shaped object in the sky. The same uranium mine was utilized during the Manhattan Project, a few years earlier to build the world’s first atomic bombs.

3. The Washington DC UFO Swarms of 1952

One of the most iconic (and credible) mass UFO sightings in American history occurred over the nation’s capitol throughout the summer of 1952…

It all started just before midnight, on the night of Saturday, July 19th, 1952, in Washington DC, when an Air Traffic Controller spotted a total of seven unidentified objects on his radar! This was then quickly corroborated by two other radar stations in the area! Edward Nugent was the first to spot the unknown objects from Washington National Airport and immediately grabbed his supervisor Harry Barnes who had them check the radar equipment before verifying the sighting with the other radar station at Andrews Air Force Base. Howard Cocklin was quoted as saying, “Did you see that? What the hell was that?!” Barnes later wrote: “We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed – their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.”

From the control tower at Andrews Air Force base, Airman William Brady reported an “object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail… unlike anything I had ever seen before!” – which then reportedly “took off at an unbelievable speed!” Around the same time, from the runway of the airport, a Capitol Airlines pilot, S.C. Pierman was in the cockpit of his DC-4 waiting for permission to take off, when he spotted what he thought was a meteor. Pierman radioed in about six objects – “white, tailless, fast-moving lights”. When he reported that the light had streaked off at a high-speed, Barnes said that it disappeared off their radar scopes. Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Charles Davenport observed an orange-red light that “would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude.”

During all of this, people started to see a series of disc-like objects hovering above both the White House and US Capitol building! Around 3 AM, to F-94 Starfire jet fighters were scrambled from Delaware. Just as the jets arrived however, the the objects vanished! The interceptor jets circled till they ran low on fuel, but as soon as they returned to base, the mysterious objects returned! Harry Barnes off-handedly joked, “the UFO’s were monitoring radio traffic and behaving accordingly.”  The unexplained objects disappeared once again around 5:30 AM, and the events of that night lead to a media frenzy across the nation…

Then, one week later, on Saturday, July 26th, 1952 – the objects inexplicably returned!

At 8:15 PM, a stewardess on a National Airlines flight on its approach to DC observed some lights above their plane. Within minutes, the radar towers once again started picking up the unknown blips! Charles E. Cummings, a US Master Sergeant for the Air Force later reported that “these lights did not have the characteristics of shooting stars. There was no trails – they traveled faster than any shooting star I have ever seen.” By 9:30 PM the radar center at the National Airport was detecting unknown flying objects in every sector. The UFO’s at first appeared to travel slowly and then would accelerate to 7,000 miles per hour!

Jets were scrambled once again from New Castle Airbase, with two more F-94’s. Captain John McHugo, the flight leader vectored toward the radar blips, but saw nothing, however his wingman, Lieutenant William Patterson saw “four white glows” and immediately gave chase! He later told reporters: “I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet” but despite being at maximum speed had no chance of overtaking them, with the cluster of lights moving at incredible speeds. At one point during the pursuit, ground control asked if he saw anything, and he reported “I see them now and they’re all around me. What should I do?!” but no one knew how to respond. 2 more jets were deployed, with another pilot reporting a “white light” that vanished before him as he approached.

The DC UFO Swarm was also clearly a massive inspiration for a number of Hollywood blockbusters – including, but not limited to “Independence Day” (1996)

Amid the public frenzy, following this second UFO incident over the US capitol, President Harry S. Truman demanded answers. So on July 29th, 1952, the Air Force held the largest press conference since World War II in an attempt to calm the public and dissuade mass panic. Major General John Samford announced the government’s official explanation: that the radar blips and visual anomalies were both caused by a “temperature inversion”.

Apparently, according to the Air Force: “a layer of warm air had trapped cold air beneath it over the city which then (somehow) caused radar signals to bend and mistake my track ground objects (like cars) as if they were in the sky. They also argued that this extremely rare anomaly must have caused ‘atmospheric distortion’ which then caused both stars and city lights to appear like floating, moving saucers…”

“Riiiiiiiiiiight”

Meanwhile, Lt. John Holcomb, a Navy Radar Specialist who was present for the event maintained that what they saw could not have been caused by a simple “temperature inversion” and that their targets were likely solid metallic objects. In fact, some of the top experts in the field chalked it up to nonsense. Regardless the public bought it and moved on. As a result of the media hysteria over this and the Roswell incident, the government decided to lockdown on media censorship protocols regarding military operations with the CIA’s creation of the Robertson Panel the following year, in 1953.

But here’s where the story gets really crazy – unbeknownst to anyone at the time, California’s Palomar Observatory took photographic evidence of multiple “artificial satellites” in orbit while observing the night sky – 5 years before the Russians launched Sputnik – the first artificial satellite in 1957! Not only that, but two of the dates observed were: July 19th and July 27th – the exact same dates as the Washington DC incidents!

This groundbreaking revelation was only discovered recently in 2023 when the photographic plates were being digitized and backed up, astronomers noticed a series of new stars that suspiciously appeared out of nowhere. While scientists have attempted to bend over backwards to explain it away, if you consider the other facts of the case, this entire incident could end up proving to be some of the best UFO evidence to date…

4. Project Blue Book (1952-1969) 

The US government’s “Project Blue Book” was officially started in March of 1952, as a follow up to the Air Force’s previous UFO investigations – Project Sign (1947) and Project Grudge (1949) – all of which was coordinated from Wright-Patterson Airbase in an attempt to scientifically analyze UFO’s. The program ran publicly until 1969, when it was shuttered after determining that there was “no visible threat to national security”, following the infamous “Condon Report”. During that time over 12,618 sightings were investigated, with 701 cases remaining officially “Unidentified”.

However, following the media panic of the Washington DC “UFO Swarm”, the CIA and military leadership decided to shift the focus of Project Blue Book from an objective scientific research inquiry to instead systematically debunk and minimize UFO reports in an attempt to prevent mass hysteria in the public, leading to a pervasive stigma that still lingers to this day.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astrophysicist, was initially brought onto the project as a consultant, but quickly grew frustrated with the Air Force’s dismissal of legitimately baffling cases with insane explanations like “Swamp Gas” or “Venus”, just to try and sweep it all under the rug. Professor Hynek began his career as a hardline skeptic, but as he investigated more and more cases, he quickly realized that there might really be something to the phenomenon worth studying, and became a pioneer in the field of ‘ufology’, going so far as to develop the now famous “Close Encounters” classification scale, which was widely popularized by Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – in which Dr. Hynek was given a cameo with his trademark pipe!

J. Allen Hynek was famously quoted as saying, “Ridicule is not a part of the scientific method and the public should not be taught that it is.”

*Honorable Mention: Of all the thousands of bizarre ‘alien abduction’ stories from the period, one of the earliest and most famous cases was that of Betty and Barney Hill – a couple of Civil Rights activists who claimed to have been abducted while driving through rural New Hampshire on the night of September 19th, 1961…

Many have debated their tale over the years with skeptics chalking up the entire incident to sleep deprivation, hypnotic suggestion, and false memories influenced by an episode of “The Outer Limits”. While this story shares many of the hallmarks of other abduction narratives (strange lights in the sky, missing time, etc), one of the most interesting aspects of this story was that Betty was able to recall and draw a star map that she recalled seeing onboard the ET craft, a map that astronomers were able to identify as Zeta Reticuli – a binary star system 39 light years away from Earth.

5. The Malmstrom Phenomenon (1967) 

Malmstrom Airbase (located in Cascade County, Montana) is a key component in America’s nuclear arsenal, housing a total of 150 Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. And in 1967 it became the center of one of the most baffling incidents of the 20th Century…

On the morning of March 16th, 1967, Captain Robert Salas was serving at the Oscar Flight Launch Control Center – an underground nuclear missile complex, when he received panicked warning calls from security guards above ground. They radioed in about a glowing red ‘saucer-shaped’ object overing directly over the front gate of the facility! Mid-conversation, his control panel lit up like a Christmas tree as a series of system failures cascaded throughout the compound. Within seconds, all of their ICBM’s were disabled! At the exact same time, a nearby launch facility, “Echo Flight” also reported that all of their nuclear missiles had been inexplicably shut down.

The Air Force immediately launched a thorough investigation into the incident, but Boeing engineers couldn’t find a single explanation for the systematic shutdown, there was no hardware or electrical failure accounted for – something had simply turned them off. The US government kept a tight lid on the incident with the public only finding out in 1996 thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Salas who later gave testimony to AARO (The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office) in 2022, where he argued that an “extraterrestrial intelligence” was sending humanity a message.

AARO even admitted that there seems to be a correlation with UAP sightings and nuclear sights. (Not to mention dozens of stories about UAP trailing behind military aircraft with nuclear payloads.) In fact, many of the US whistleblowers claim that UAP related matters are classified under the Department of Energy, along with our nation’s nuclear secrets.

What makes this story even more interesting is that a similar incident occurred in the Soviet Union in 1982 – but more on that later…

Click here for NUCLEAR FAILS: 10 of the Most Terrifying Atomic Mistakes in History!

*Honorable Mentions: Australia had two different UFO incidents in 1966 – on January 19th in Tuly, Queensland, a local banana farmer witnessed a saucer-shaped craft emerge from a swampy lagoon (later known as the “Tully Saucer Nest”), and then on April 6th in Clayton South, Victoria (near Melbourne), over 200 students and teachers at Westall Highschool watched in awe as a silver, disc-shaped object descended before zooming off into the sky at incredible speeds!

6. Tehran UFO Encounter – Iran (1976)

Another one of the most compelling military encounters with a UFO occurred above Iran’s capitol in 1976…

In the early morning hours of September 19th, 1976, the Mehrabad Airport control tower started to receive civilian phone calls reporting a bright, flashing object in the sky. The tower’s controller used a pair of binoculars and was stunned to see a luminous object alternating between red, green, blue, and orange lights. The Iranian Air Force decided to investigate, launching two F-4 Phantom II fighter jets to pursue the unknown craft.

The lead pilot, Captain Yaddi Nazeri, was closing in at around 30 miles of the flashing orb when all of his communications suddenly cut out, along with all of his onboard avionics! It was as though he’d been hit with an EMP, as all of his plane’s electronic components had simply shorted out, mid-flight! Nazeri managed to break off the intercept, heading back to base, and as soon as he moved away from the UFO, his avionics returned to normal without a hitch.

Meanwhile, the second pilot, Lieutenant Jafari had better luck locking onto the object with his onboard radar – which indicated that the craft was roughly the size of a Boeing 707 tanker aircraft. Traveling at supersonic speeds, the UFO began accelerating away at a fixed distance from the F-4 fighter jet. Just then, a smaller glowing object detached from the UFO homing in on Jafari! Believing he was under attack, the lieutenant attempted to fire a Sidewinder missile at the incoming bogey! However, the moment he locked on to his target, his entire weapons control panel went completely dark! With his weapons disabled, Jafari took evasive maneuvers, attempting to doge the projectile with a hard dive. To the pilot’s astonishment, the object didn’t strike him, instead it looped cleanly around him before darting back towards the ‘mother ship’!

What makes this particular incident so compelling is that it was backed by robust data and official documentation. In fact, the US Defense Intelligence Agency compiled an intelligent report on the encounter which was distributed to the NSA, the CIA, and the White House.

Click here for 25 Epic Aviation Milestones!

*Honorable Mention: In 1975, a logger named Travis Walton disappeared for five days after encountering a UFO in Arizona, later claiming to have been abducted and experimented on. The incident inspired the 1993 film, “Fire in the Sky”. 

7. Rendlesham Forest – UK (1980)

A series of unexplained sightings occurred in December 1989, on the outskirts of a British NATO base…

Rendlesham Forest sits between two RAF (Royal Air Force) outposts in Suffolk, England – Woodbridge and Bentwaters. At the time RAD Woodbridge was occupied by US Air Force personnel. It all started on the night after Christmas – December 26th, 1980.

8. The Soviet Nuclear Base Incident – Ukraine (1982)

In the early 1990’s, following the collapse of the USSR, several former high-ranking officials began leaking classified files on the Soviet’s own UFO programs, including Colonel Igor Chernovshchikov. Investigative journalist, George Knapp managed to sneak some of these documents out of Russia, and later testified before Congress about them in 2025. One of the most eye-opening revelations to come from this was a highly classified UFO incident that occurred during the height of the Cold War in Ukraine…

On the evening of October 4th, 1982, at the Byelokorovichy Soviet Nuclear base in Ukraine (which housed a division of R-12 thermonuclear warheads with a direct link to Moscow), multiple military personnel on duty began to report a massive, silent, object hovering in the sky – directly above the missile silos! They described it as “a perfect disc, roughly 900 feet in diameter, with no visible means of propulsion emitting an intense, steady glow”. Just like with the Malmstrom Airbase Incident (see above), below ground control panels began to light up without any input or authorization from the command crew.

Without warning, a rogue launch sequence initiated! The primary indicators suddenly shifted into high alert: the “Prepare” lights switched on, as the targeting system activated, and a countdown timer began ticking! For several agonizing minutes, the entire base’s control system indicated that they were moments away from launching a full-scale nuclear war…

The officers on duty immediately scrambled to manually override the launch sequence, but the consoles refused to respond to their inputs! Then – just as quickly as it had begun, the mysterious UFO darted off into the night sky, and instantaneously, the automated systems reset back to zero – no countdown, no emergency lights – everything was back to normal, without any indication that anything had gone wrong.

The Kremlin immediately launched an investigation headed by the KGB with a crack team of aerospace engineers, and cybernetic experts. After weeks of extensive testing, they couldn’t find any mechanical failures or signs of internal sabotage. The commission’s final report ultimately concluded that “the launch sequence had been initiated by a highly sophisticated, external electromagnetic signal of completely unknown origin”. A British Sky TV Special Report reported on the incident in 1995. 

Again, it’s astonishing that such a similar event occurred in both the US and USSR, during the midst of the Cold War in which UFO’s seemingly turned on and subsequently shut down a series of nuclear warheads – almost as if they were trying to warn us about the dangers of atomic weapons?

*Honorable Mentions: Two of the most famous Russian UFO cases were the Dalnegorsk Crash of 1986 – where a reddish spherical object slammed into a mountain that burst into flames (leaving behind metallic fragments of an unusual composition and microscopic structure), and the 1989 Voronezh Incident – a bizarre encounter with a “three-eyed alien entity” that allegedly briefly stepped out of a glowing red disk hovering above the ground at a park – witnessed by hundreds, and leaving behind depressions in the ground, elevated radiation levels, and even magnetic anomalies in the soil!

9. Japan Airlines Flight #1628 over Alaska (1986)

One of the most astonishing (and thoroughly documented) UFO sightings in aviation history occurred over Alaska in 1986…

Japanese Airlines Flight #1628 was a Boeing 747 Cargo plane en route to Tokyo from Paris.

On November 17th, 1986, while flying over eastern Alaska, at an altitude of 35,000 feet, traveling at about 600 MPH, the flight crew witnessed something extraordinary. At 5:10 PM, Captain Kenju Terauchi noticed some strange lights below and to the left of the aircraft. At that exact moment, two rectangular objects shut up and stopped in front of the 747! The unknown objects matched the plane’s speed and altitude hovering 500 feet in front of the cockpit. Terauchi’s co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji and the flight’s engineer, Yoshio Tsukuba also witnessed the strange event. In fact, the crew could feel intense heat from the object’s glowing amber exhaust ports!

Just as quickly as they arrived, the two small block-like objects zipped away. That’s when the flight crew noticed a much larger object approaching from the rear. This one was colossal in size, a gigantic dark silhouette trailing behind them! The captain estimated it to be roughly the length of two aircraft carriers, and was later described as spherical with a rim of lights. After about six minutes, they radioed the Anchorage Federal Aviation Administration who advised them to take “evasive action”, but the immense “mothership” mirrored their attempts to shake it, following the cargo plane for over 30 minutes and 400 miles!

What makes this encounter such a landmark case is that it wasn’t just a visual sighting, the crew’s reports were backed up by on-board instruments, the FAA’s ground radar, AND the mysterious object was even picked up by US military radar from a nearby base! The crew was debriefed in Anchorage where FAA investigators determined “they were ‘normal, professional, rational, (and had) no drug or alcohol involvement'”.

Despite the overwhelming evidence however, the FAA dismissed the incident as “radar split” anomalies caused by bad weather and atmospheric ice crystals. Unfortunately, Captain Kenji Terauchi, who was a well respected pilot with over 10,000 hours of flight time was grounded by Japan Airlines after he publicly spoke out about the incident.

Years later however, a former FAA Division Chief, John Callahan came forward with a shocking admission – back in 1986, he was ordered to present the radar data and flight logs at a high-level top-secret briefing that involved the CIA, the FBI, and President Reagan’s administration. According to him, the CIA ordered everyone present to swear that the meeting had never taken place before confiscating all the data tapes…

*Honorable Mention: The largest mass UFO sighting in Japanese history occurred in 2011 following the Fukushima nuclear disaster – where hundreds of survivors and local Buddhist monks reported seeing strange glowing orbs darting around in the sky above the nuclear power plant! Video footage went viral on Twitter at the time.

In more recent years, the Japanese government has formally acknowledged the phenomenon, and has vowed to begin releasing its UAP files to the public as of 2026.

10. The Varginha Incident – Brazil (1996)

One of the most infamous and confounding alleged alien encounters took place in Brazil in 1996…

What makes the Varginha Incident so striking is that it’s a multi-part tale taking place over the course of a week, involving more than two dozen direct civilian eyewitnesses, as well as hundreds of medical professionals, firemen, and military personnel, as well as dozens of American intelligence operatives. It all started on January 13th, 1996 when local teacher Carlos de Sousa saw a ‘cigar-shaped’ UFO losing altitude, and leaking smoke before crashing in an open field (about six miles away from Varginha, Brazil), followed by a flurry of military activity in the area.

A week later, on January 20th, three local young women (Valquíria Silva, Liliane Silva, and Kátia Xavier) reported seeing a strange crouching creature in a vacant lot, that then scurried off in fear. They ran home to tell their parents that they had seen “the devil”. What they described was a being with oily brown skin, three small horns, and large red eyes! They also reported an awful smell emanating from the creature.

That same day, the Brazilian Army cordoned off the entire town. Shortly after the girls encountered the alleged alien being, Corporal Marco Eli Chereze and his supervisor were driving down the road and spotted a strange creature darting across the road – a creature that matched the same exact description that the girls had seen. The soldier decided to leap out of the vehicle and ended up tackling the being to the ground with his bare hands, before hauling it into the back of their truck, and driving it to the local clinic. According to a number unconfirmed reports, the creature(s) passed away soon after and were immediately transferred to an American cargo plane.

However, what happened next might be the most crucial detail to the whole encounter – immediately, after handing the creature over to the medics, Marco Chereze started to notice a greasy, sticky substance on his skin, a residue left over from the creature, coupled with an acrid smell like ammonia that permeated his clothes. Shortly after, Marco fell deeply ill and was hospitalized. According to A.J. Gevaerd: “He developed this infection that wouldn’t go away. For two or three weeks it was getting worse and worse and worse, and it looks like his immunity system shut down. These were the words used by one of the doctors who treated him — he said, he’d never seen in his whole medical career anything like [it].” Marco was transferred to the ICU where he tragically succumbed to his infection shortly after on February 15th, 1996.

The Brazilian government immediately dismissed the whole incident as a hoax and attempted to explain away the sightings as a misidentified local man with a skin condition. However, a FOIA request related to the US involvement in the incident was denied, citing secrecy pertaining to “National Security” under a 1949 CIA Treaty. Regardless of the government’s official stance, the incident has since spurned a number of alien-themed monuments and museums as the local culture has embraced the urban legend as “the Roswell of Brazil”. The Varginha story was thoroughly covered in the 2022 James Fox documentary “Moment of Contact”. 

*Honorable Mention: Another famous sighting from the 90’s occurred at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe, Africa, on September 16th, 1994 – where an entire class of over 60 children claimed to have seen an alien being who communicated with them telepathically and warned them to take care of their planet.

11. The Phoenix Lights – Arizona (1997)

Easily one of the most famous and stunning mass UFO sightings in history occurred on the night of March 13th, 1997 – an event that was witnessed by thousands of people across a 300-mile corridor from Nevada to Arizona…

The first reported sighting occurred at 7:55 PM in Henderson, Nevada (a suburb of Vegas), on the evening of Thursday, March 13th, 1997 where a man reported seeing a massive “V-shaped” object with five bright lights pass silently overhead, traveling southeast. At about 8:15 PM, a police officer in Paulden, Arizona was driving north when he noticed a cluster of reddish-orange lights in a “V” formation.

Around 8:17 PM, a group of observers in Prescott, Arizona noticed that the object blotted out the stars as it passed overhead. It was at this point that a massive wave of calls started to flood in from residents all across Nevada and Arizona as people began alerting law enforcement and the media of the unidentified flying object. Some witnesses claimed that the craft was anywhere from 1,000 feet to a mile wide! One consistent detail in all the reports was also consistent with a surprising amount of UFO reports – the craft was completely silent.

John Kaiser was with his wife and two sons when he noticed the “cluster of lights” in the sky over Prescott Valley, reporting a distinct triangular pattern. He viewed the object for about two minutes through binoculars, before it “banked to the right” in the direction of Phoenix. A mother was driving near Camelback Mountain with her four daughters when they witnessed an object they described as “Sergeant’s Stripes” come into view in front of them, blotting out a large chunk of the sky, hovering over them for about five minutes. They recalled that it “fired a white beam to the ground, causing its lights to dim somewhat” before it moved south towards the Sky Harbor International Airport.

Around 8:20 PM, near Dewey, Arizona, a car full of friends was driving on Highway 69 when they witnessed the formation of lights. They pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store, and everyone stepped out to get a clear view of the behemoth-sized object which was now directly over them. According to a NUFORC report, the witness had substantial aviation experience and claimed that the object appeared large than his fist outstretched. He said the object was less than a thousand feet from the ground, but “absolutely silent” and moving “at a very slow pace” – both of which rule out conventional aircraft. The witness also noticed a small plane heading in the direction of Prescott Airport at the time. He even reported it to Luke Air Force Base where he spoke with a female operator who mentioned that they’d received a ‘deluge’ of similar reports.

In one of the wilder stories to come out of this incident, decades later, Hollywood actor Kurt Russell (Escape From New York, The Thing, Big Trouble In Little China, etc) was himself a firsthand witness to the “Phoenix Lights”, as a pilot! While flying down from Los Angeles on approach to land at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. His son Oliver pointed at the odd lights in the sky and asked if everything was ok. Russell decided to reach out to air traffic control to see they had anything on radar, and they replied “negative”. He later recalled that he’d completely forgotten about the incident for years until he was watching a UFO documentary with his wife and realized he was the pilot they were talking about! He later told the story on a BBC talk show.

Another compelling report came from a commercial truck driver who was driving down a long dark stretch of highway north of Phoenix on State Route 87 when he saw the massive craft directly overhead, blotting out the mountains and stars, filling his entire windshield! The trucker immediately pulled over and stepped out to get a better view of the gargantuan object – expecting to hear a massive engine roar, but was surprised by the silent desert air as the strange craft slowly floated by.

By 8:30 PM, the mysterious boomerang-shaped craft had reached the city of Phoenix, Arizona where it was seen by thousands of residents – many of whom were attempting to view the Hale-Bopp comet, but instead were astonished to see a titanic wedge gliding slowly above the city. Apparently at this point the craft was moving rather slow for an aircraft, only about 30 miles-per-hour. Some said it was so low to the ground that they felt like they could “throw a rock at it”. At one point, a whole family witnessed the craft pass over their Phoenix home – Tim Ley, his wife Bobbi, their son Hal, and even their grandson, Damien! Tim Ley described the ‘enormous wedge’ as a “solid sheet of glowing translucent dark ice”, with an almost ‘gunmetal’ polish.

Then around 8:45 PM, the object kept flying south, passing Oracle (just north of Tucson, Arizona), before it finally disappeared over the southern horizon mountain range, towards Mexico, around 9PM…

What’s even more astonishing is that the Arizona Governor, Fife Symington, who at the time was dismissive of the incident (in an attempt to avoid ‘mass panic’) admitted years later that he himself had also witnessed the object over Phoenix, “I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that’s in the air. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery. A total mystery… It was enormous. It just felt otherworldly.” 

Unfortunately, per usual, the US military’s “official explanation” was that it was a series of “flares” dropped by a squadron of A-10 Warthog aircraft, conducting “training exercises”. There are of course numerous issues with this explanation: for one, A-10 Warthogs are anything but silent, or slow, flares don’t move horizontally, they also don’t block out the stars, and none of that explains the well-documented flight path of the lights from Henderson to Tucson. Not to mention, the training exercise was conducted at 10PM – almost as if they were trying to distract from the real sighting…

*Honorable Mention: In addition to the Phoenix Lights, there have been a number of other mass sightings in the United States over the years…

• The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings of the 1980’s included 5,000 separate reports from Connecticut to New York over the course of 5 years where witnessed described seeing a massive silent craft about the size of a football field!
• In 2008, over 100 residents in Stephenville, Texas (southwest of Fort Worth) witnessed “a massive silent rectangular (or triangular?) craft with blinding white lights” that was being pursued by two F-16 fighter jets! The US military originally denied that the incident took place and later attempted to say it was “a training exercise”.
• On November 17th, 2006, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport – 12 airport employees, including United Airlines pilots, mechanical engineers, and hundreds of civilians – who all witnessed a metallic saucer-shaped craft (approximately 24 feet in diameter) hovering directly over Gate C-17! One eyewitness claimed that after about five minutes, the object shot through the clouds at high velocity leaving a clear blue hole through the clouds.

12. USS Nimitz: The “Tic-Tac” Incident – The Pacific Ocean (2004) 

In 2017, the New York Times published an Earth-shattering expose on the existence of a secret Pentagon Taskforce known as AATIP (The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) that was looking into the reality of UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon), along with three leaked videos showing what appeared to be crafts of unknown origin, with no visible means of propulsion, performing physics defying maneuvers. Those three videos were later confirmed as legitimate by the DOD in 2020. One of those videos was of a truly anomalous incident known to most as the “Tic Tac” – by far the most credible and consequential UAP encounter of all time…

This was an event that took place in November 2004, off the coast of Southern California. The US Navy’s Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting routine training exercises, 100 miles from the San Diego coast, when the USS Princeton suddenly ordered two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets from the “Black Aces” Squadron to investigate an anomalous radar target.

Aboard the USS Princeton, Senior Chief Kevin Day had been tracking clusters of anomalous radar readings for the past two weeks. These objects, in groups of 5 to 10, would drop from above 80,000 feet (i.e. “space”) down to 20,000 feet in less than a second, hover in place for hours and shoot straight back up without any explanation.

The Navy fighter pilots included two seasoned aviators – Commander David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich who were both firsthand visual witnesses to what was later described as “The Tic Tac” because of its unique look and color. Together, the two Super Hornets visually tracked what appeared to be a 45 foot object for over 5 minutes in broad daylight! Both pilots confirmed that the mysterious craft appeared without visible wings, rotors, exhaust plumes, or even windows! The UAP hovered (erratically like a ping pong ball) above churning water. Commander Fravor attempted to spiral down for a flower look when all of a sudden, the “Tic Tac” mirrored his movements ascending before accelerating away “like a bullet fired from a gun”. It’s “impossible” maneuvers baffled everyone.

Note: Artist rendering

Just seconds after the UAP darted off and disappeared from their instruments, it somehow reappeared 60 miles away – “Sir, you won’t believe this, but that object is back at your Cap Point”  – indicating that it not only travelled 60 miles in a matter of seconds, but it was somehow privy to Naval intelligence.

After Fravor and Dietrich returned to the carrier, another pilot, Chad Underwood was tasked with capturing the object on his jet’s newly equipped advanced infrared tracking camera (AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR) – leading to one of the most famous UFO videos to ever go viral. Just as Underwood’s systems attempted to lock on to the capsule-shaped object, his radar was jammed, and the ‘Tic Tac’ shifted left before zooming off screen at extreme velocity! When Commander Fravor later testified to Congress in 2023, he said “The technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we had, have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10-plus years.” 

Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich

Shortly after the incident, (according to several Navy servicemen) helicopters arrived on the aircraft carrier with unidentified personnel who systematically confiscated any and all flight logs, data tapes, and hard drives containing the telemetry data. Information about the event was suppressed by the government for the next decade until the (now famous) Navy videos leaked to the public along with the 2017 New York Times article, eventually putting enough pressure on the Pentagon to finally admit that the footage was real. Then, in 2020, David Fravor and Alex Dietrich were interviewed for a 60 Minutes episode on their incredible experience.

What makes this particular case so compelling to military officials and scientists is that it wasn’t just an anomalous event that could be easily explained away, it was an event that disrupted a military training exercise, was witnessed by numerous highly-trained and credible observers – with the telemetry data and footage to back it up.

The 2004 Nimitz encounter is also a key case illustrating “The Five Observables” of Advanced Technology:

1. Instantaneous Acceleration (accelerated from zero to super sonic speeds – estimated at over 100 G’s)
2. Hypersonic Velocity (travelled 60 miles in seconds without creating a sonic boom)
3. No Visible Propulsion (No wings, rotors, jet intake, or thermal exhaust plume on infrared)
4. Trans-Medium Travel (Radar tracking suggests that these craft are able to transition between the air, the ocean, and space with ease)
5. Low Observability (Actively jammed the advanced radar systems when attempts were made to lock on)

On July 26th, 2023, David Fravor testified before a Congressional Hearing (under oath), alongside a fellow Navy pilot, Ryan Graves, and a former Air Force Intelligence Officer, David Grusch, where he said: “This is not a ‘we saw a light in the sky.’ This is four trained observers, all military combat pilots, looking at an object in bright daylight on a crystal-clear day over the Pacific… It was a perfectly formed white object. No windows, no wings, no seams, no rotors.”

Meanwhile, Ryan Graves spoke about his experiences on the East Coast, most notably a UAP incident he witnessed in 2014 off the coast of Florida – where these types of encounters were becoming a *daily* potential flight hazard. Graves spoke about the problems with public stigma, and emphasized the need for transparency on the issue: “If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are an open concern for flight safety… Military pilots and commercial pilots are witnessing these phenomena on a regular, routine basis.”

However, the big bomb drop that came from that first congressional hearing was from David Grusch, a former member of the Pentagon’s UAP Taskforce, who claimed: “I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access.” and that “non-human biologics” were recovered from some of these recoveries – potentially alluding to both the 1933 Magenta, Italy UFO incident (which I briefly mentioned last time), and perhaps even the Roswell Incident of 1947…

At the time of this writing, we still don’t have ‘concrete proof’ of the existence of NHI (Non-Human Intelligence), but a lot has happened with this topic over the last several years. We’ve had more Congressional Hearings including a former Department of Defense official, Luis Elizondo, as well as Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, a former NASA official, Michael Gold, and investigative journalist, George Knapp who originally broke the story on Area 51 in the 80’s. Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds put forth a bipartisan UAP Disclosure Act in 2023 (which was later shot down by Representative Mike Turner of Ohio – whose primary donors are aerospace contractors). But perhaps most stunning revelation came earlier this month, with the release of hundreds of declassified UFO documents, including several audio logs and photographs from the Apollo missions (specifically from Apollo 17) allegedly showing UAP activity on the lunar surface!

For now, I suppose we’ll have to wait and see where this all goes, and follow the evidence to wherever it ultimately leads, but in the meantime, the truth is out there… probably.

– Erik Slader 

In the meantime, feel free to follow me on social media @ErikSlader, check out my podcasts at ProbablyWork.com , and you can support me by buying my books on Amazon and Audible!

Other Epik Articles Worth Reading:  

From the Earth to the Moon: The Origins of NASA and the Space Race (1514-1972)

SPY HISTORY: 7 Eras of Spycraft Declassified

Pioneers of the Sky: 25 Epic Aviation Milestones! (1782-1994)

20 of the Worst Aircraft Designs of All Time? (1918-1988)

Presidential Pros and Cons (Parts 1-11 / 1789-1989)

History of the Digital Age (Part 2: 1936-2000) – The Transistor, Microchips, and the Dawn of the Internet