Pillar of Cloud and Fire (Exodus 13-14)
After the Israelites leave Egypt, the Book of Exodus says God led them with a moving column: a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, so that they could…
Livy's Phantom Ships in the Sky
In the anxious winter after Hannibal crossed the Alps and beat the Romans at the Trebia, the historian Livy lists a run of portents reported in and around Rome. The first…
Star of Bethlehem (Matthew 2)
Only the Gospel of Matthew tells this story. Magi, astrologer-priests from the east, arrive in Jerusalem during the reign of Herod the Great, asking where the newborn…
Fiery Dragons over Northumbria, 793
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's entry for 793 begins with dread. That year terrifying omens came over the land of the Northumbrians: great sheets of light rushing through the…
Winthrop's Light over the Muddy River, Massachusetts Bay, 1639
Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony kept a running journal of colony affairs, and among the entries for 1639 he set down a short, strange report. James…
Great Airship Wave: Sacramento and California, November 1896
On the evening of 17 November 1896 a bright light drifted slowly over the eastern side of Sacramento, California, at what witnesses judged to be about a thousand feet. It…
Great Airship Wave: The Midwest, April 1897
After California went quiet, a second and much larger airship wave began in Nebraska in February 1897 and rolled east through the spring. Lights and occasionally dark…
New England Phantom Airship Wave, 1909-1910
In December 1909, Worcester businessman Wallace Tillinghast claimed he had built a heavier-than-air machine and had secretly flown it from Worcester to New York and back…
Scandinavian Ghost Fliers, 1933-1934
From Christmas Eve 1933, when an aircraft with a brilliant searchlight was reported coming in from the Gulf of Bothnia over Kalix in northern Sweden, the far north of…
Battle of Los Angeles, 1942
Less than three months after Pearl Harbor and a day after a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, Southern California was on a hair trigger. In the…
Foo Fighters, 1944-1945
In the last winter of the Second World War, American night-fighter crews flying over the Rhine began reporting glowing balls of light that joined them in the dark. On 27…
Ghost Rockets over Sweden, 1946
In the summer of 1946, a year after Germany's V-weapons fell silent, Swedes began reporting 'ghost rockets': fast rocket- or cigar-shaped objects, sometimes winged…
Gorman Dogfight, Fargo
George Gorman, a 25-year-old World War II fighter veteran flying with the North Dakota Air National Guard, stayed aloft over Fargo after his flight landed, to log some…
Farmington 'Saucer Armada', New Mexico
On the morning of 17 March 1950 traffic slowed on Farmington's Main Street as crowds stood pointing at the sky. For about an hour, the Farmington Daily Times reported…
Great Falls (Mariana) Film, Montana
Checking the wind before an afternoon game at Great Falls' empty Legion Stadium, baseball manager Nick Mariana saw a flash and then two bright, silvery objects moving…
Lubbock Lights, Texas
On the evening of 25 August 1951 three Texas Technological College professors relaxing in a backyard in Lubbock saw a loose arc of twenty or thirty soft, bluish-green…
Tremonton Film, Utah
Driving north from Tremonton, Utah, on 2 July 1952 with his family, Navy Warrant Officer Delbert Newhouse, a veteran aerial photographer with more than a thousand hours…
Washington, D.C. Radar–Visual Flap
Just before midnight on Saturday 19 July 1952, controller Edward Nugent at Washington National Airport picked up seven unknown blips south-southwest of the city, moving…
Flatwoods Monster, West Virginia
At dusk on 12 September 1952, boys playing in Flatwoods, West Virginia, saw a bright object streak across the sky and seem to come down on a hilltop farm. With local…
Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter, Kentucky
Around 7 pm on a hot Sunday, visitor Billy Ray Taylor came in from the well at the Sutton family's rural farmhouse near Kelly, Kentucky, saying he had seen a shining…
Lakenheath–Bentwaters Radar-Visual Case, England
From about 9:30 pm on 13 August 1956, USAF radar operators at RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk tracked targets crossing their scopes at thousands of miles an hour, including a…
RB-47 Radar and ELINT Encounter
In the early hours of 17 July 1957 an RB-47H electronic reconnaissance jet, carrying six officers and gear for detecting enemy radar transmissions, was heading home from…
Levelland, Texas
Late on 2 November 1957, a month after Sputnik, farm workers Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz phoned the Levelland, Texas, police: driving west of town they had seen a blue…
Father Gill, Boianai, Papua
Rev. William Gill, an Australian Anglican priest running the mission at Boianai in what was then the Territory of Papua, had written to a colleague on 26 June 1959 that…
Betty and Barney Hill
Driving home to Portsmouth from a holiday in Niagara Falls and Montreal, Betty and Barney Hill noticed a bright point of light that seemed to shadow their car down U.S…
Deception Island, Antarctica
In the dark of the Antarctic winter of 1965, men at the military research stations crowded onto Deception Island reported a lens-shaped light that refused to behave like…
Exeter, New Hampshire
In the small hours of 3 September 1965, 18-year-old Norman Muscarello was walking home along Route 150 in Kensington when, he said, a silent object with a row of…
Wanaque Reservoir, New Jersey
On the evening of 11 January 1966 the police radio in Wanaque, a Ramapo Mountains town around the Newark water supply reservoir, was flooded with about 30 calls from…
Michigan "Swamp Gas" Sightings (Dexter and Hillsdale)
In mid-March 1966 southern Michigan was alive with reports of lights in the sky, some seen by sheriff's deputies. On the night of 20 March, farmer Frank Mannor near…
Portage County Police Chase, Ohio
Before dawn on 17 April 1966, Portage County deputy Dale Spaur and auxiliary officer Wilbur 'Barney' Neff stopped to check an abandoned car on Route 224 near Ravenna…
Malmstrom AFB / Echo Flight Missile Shutdown
At 8:45 on the morning of 16 March 1967, all ten Minuteman I nuclear missiles of Echo Flight, controlled from a capsule beneath the Montana prairie near Malmstrom Air…
Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia
Late on 4 October 1967, after a night of odd lights reported by an Air Canada crew over Quebec, a fishing captain off Sambro and callers in Halifax, 17-year-old Laurie…
Kōfu Encounter, Japan
Two seven-year-old cousins were roller-skating near their housing estate in Kōfu at dusk when two glowing orange objects appeared overhead. Frightened when the lights…
Tehran F-4 Intercept
Shortly after midnight on 19 September 1976, residents of Tehran's Shemiran district phoned Mehrabad tower about a brilliant object in the sky. The controller saw it too…
Colares and Operação Prato
In 1977 people in the fishing communities around Colares, at the mouth of the Amazon, began telling of lights that came down at night and attacked them. Fishermen spoke…
Petrozavodsk Phenomenon
Around 4 a.m. on 20 September 1977, early-shift dockworkers, police officers and an ambulance crew in Petrozavodsk watched a brilliant 'star' rise from the north-east and…
Frederick Valentich Disappearance
On the evening of 21 October 1978, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich took off from Moorabbin in a Cessna 182 bound for King Island across Bass Strait. Just after 7 p.m. he…
Kaikoura Lights
On 21 December 1978 the crew of a Safe Air Argosy freighter flying from Blenheim to Christchurch saw strange lights around their aircraft, and Wellington air traffic…
Manises Incident, Spain
Flight JK-297, a TAE Super Caravelle carrying 109 holidaymakers from Salzburg to the Canary Islands, had refuelled in Palma and was over the sea near Ibiza at about 11…
Rendlesham Forest and the Halt Memo
Around 3 a.m. on 26 December 1980, US Air Force security police at the east gate of RAF Woodbridge saw lights apparently coming down into Rendlesham Forest and went to…
Hudson Valley Boomerang Sightings
From New Year's Eve 1982 and through the next two years, people across the commuter towns north of New York City reported a vast, quiet shape gliding low over highways…
Hessdalen Lights
Hessdalen is a remote 12-kilometre valley south-east of Trondheim with only a couple of hundred residents. Odd lights have been reported there since at least the 1930s…
Official Night of the UFOs, Brazil
At dusk on 19 May 1986, the lone controller in the tower at São José dos Campos airport saw three bright lights over the field that kept changing colour, red to yellow to…
Japan Air Lines Flight 1628
A Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 freighter carrying French wine from Reykjavík to Anchorage was cruising at 35,000 feet over remote Alaska in the early evening of 17 November…
Knowles Family, Nullarbor
Driving east across the empty Nullarbor in the small hours of 20 January 1988, the Knowles family saw a light on the road ahead. They thought at first it was a truck, but…
Belgian UFO Wave and the F-16 Night
On the evening of 29 November 1989, people around Eupen in eastern Belgium, police officers among them, reported a large, flat, triangular craft with lights beneath it…
Bonnybridge, Scotland
Bonnybridge is an unremarkable former foundry village between Falkirk and Glasgow, yet from 1992 it became one of the most talked-about UFO spots on the planet. The flap…
RAF Cosford Incident
In the early hours of 31 March 1993, people across western Britain saw bright lights speeding across the night sky. Most of the reports, clustered between about 1:10 and…
Yukon Mass Sighting
On a clear, cold night in December 1996, people along a roughly 120-mile stretch of the Klondike Highway in Yukon reported a huge row of lights moving across the sky…
Phoenix Lights
On the evening of 13 March 1997, people across a 300-mile corridor from the Nevada line through Phoenix to Tucson reported strange lights. Two separate things were seen…
Chulucanas Lights, Peru
Chulucanas, a town in Peru's northern Piura region known for its pottery, has a long reputation for strange lights. On 13 October 2001, according to the account given by…
Mexican Air Force FLIR Video
On 5 March 2004 a Mexican Air Force crew on a routine anti-drug-smuggling patrol over southern Campeche recorded a cluster of bright points, eleven in all, on their…
Alderney Pilots (Aurigny)
On the afternoon of 23 April 2007, Aurigny Air Services captain Ray Bowyer, a pilot with 18 years' experience, was flying a Trislander from Southampton to Alderney at…
Stephenville, Texas
Just after sunset on 8 January 2008, dozens of people around Stephenville, a dairy town about 100 miles south-west of Dallas, saw a display of bright white lights above…
Norway Spiral
Before dawn on 9 December 2009, people across northern Norway saw something astonishing: a blue beam of light seemed to rise from behind the mountains, stop in mid-air…
Xiaoshan Airport, Hangzhou
Around 9 pm on 7 July 2010, a flight crew descending toward Hangzhou's Xiaoshan International Airport in eastern China reported a strange glowing object in the sky…
Jerusalem Dome of the Rock Video
In late January 2011 a video appeared online that seemed to show a bright light descending over Jerusalem at about 1 am, hovering just above the golden Dome of the Rock…
New Jersey drone sightings
From mid-November 2024, residents across New Jersey began reporting large numbers of drone-like lights moving at night, including near Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons…
AARO FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP
On 14 November 2024, the day after the Exposing the Truth hearing, the Defense Department and ODNI released AARO's consolidated annual report for fiscal 2024. Between May…
AARO FY2025 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP
AARO's report for fiscal 2025, issued by what is now styled the Department of War, covers 2 June 2024 to 30 May 2025 but was not published until July 2026, months after…