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The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Sightings8 Jan 2019
Heathrow stopped departures for about an hour after the Metropolitan Police received a report of a drone near the airport around 17:05 GMT. It came three weeks after drone sightings shut Gatwick; no drone operator was publicly identified.
Photo: Adrian Pingstone, Public domain
Whistleblowers2019
In sworn 2023 testimony, former intelligence officer David Grusch said that as a National Reconnaissance Office reservist he was a member of the UAP Task Force from 2019 to 2021. He said this work was the basis for his later claims, which the Pentagon disputes.
Photo: U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, Public domain
Media2019
UNC Wilmington religious studies professor D. W. Pasulka published 'American Cosmic' with Oxford University Press. Based on six years of interviews with scientists and tech figures who believe in extraterrestrial contact, it treats UFO belief as a new, technology-centered form of religion.
Media2019
Jacques Vallee published the fourth volume of his journals, Forbidden Science, Volume Four: The Spring Hill Chronicles, covering 1990-1999. It was issued in hardcover by Documatica Research of San Francisco.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings19 Dec 2018
Reported drone sightings over the runway closed London Gatwick from the night of Dec. 19, 2018 into Dec. 21, disrupting tens of thousands of passengers. Sussex Police called it a deliberate act, and the Defence Secretary confirmed the Army was brought in to support police.
Photo: Chris Sampson, CC BY 2.0
Sightings18 Dec 2018
A roughly 10 m meteor exploded over the Bering Sea off Kamchatka on Dec. 18, 2018. Infrasound stations logged it, but astronomers did not notice until March 2019, when NASA's JPL added it to its fireball database and it drew attention at a planetary science conference.
Photo: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team, Public domain
Military4 Dec 2018
The U.S. Patent Office granted a Navy-assigned patent naming Salvatore Pais for a 'craft using an inertial mass reduction device'. A patent grant does not show a device works; the patent later lapsed for unpaid fees.
Photo: Salvatore Cezar Pais, Public domain
Media12 Nov 2018
Harvard astronomers Shmuel Bialy and Avi Loeb argued in a peer-reviewed letter that sunlight pressure could explain the first known interstellar object's odd acceleration if it were a very thin sheet, raising the possibility of an artificial light sail. Most astronomers favored natural explanations.
Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons (Queen's University Belfast), Isaac Newton Group, Public domain
Sightings9 Nov 2018
British Airways and Virgin Atlantic crews told Shannon air traffic control they saw very bright, fast-moving lights off Ireland's southwest coast. Controllers saw nothing on radar. The Irish Aviation Authority opened a confidential occurrence review; one pilot suggested a meteor.
Photo: Rex and Fido, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings26 Sep 2018
Late on a rainy night, a stone dented a house roof in Komaki, Aichi, then holed a neighbor's carport. Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science found space-made isotopes, confirming a fresh L6 chondrite fall, the country's first confirmed fall since 2003.
GovernmentSep 2018
NASA convened scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston to review the state of the search for technosignatures, signs of technology from other civilizations, and what role NASA might play. The workshop's report was posted in December 2018.
MediaSep 2018
Ryan Eslinger's film UFO, with Alex Sharp and Gillian Anderson, follows a math student trying to explain a saucer-like object seen hovering over an airport runway. One review said the story was based on an unexplained sighting at a Chicago airport.
Media20 Jul 2018
The History channel premiered a 10-episode revival of 'In Search Of', the 1977-1982 series hosted by Rod Serling and Leonard Nimoy, with Zachary Quinto as host. Its first season included an episode on alien abductions, sightings and government UFO investigations.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings3 Jul 2018
Greenpeace activists flew a drone into the no-fly zone of EDF's Bugey nuclear plant in France and crashed it into the wall of the spent-fuel building to show the site's vulnerability. EDF said two drones overflew the site, one was intercepted, and the security of the installations was not affected.
Photo: Spiritrespect, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government28 Jun 2018
A National Assembly commission of inquiry, with Paul Christophe and Barbara Pompili as authors, delivered its report on the safety and security of French nuclear installations, listing drones alongside cyberattacks and insider threats as new forms of threat.
Photo: Pmau, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government27 Jun 2018
A team led by Marco Micheli reported in Nature that 'Oumuamua was moving slightly faster than gravity alone predicted. The authors favoured comet-like outgassing as the cause even though no gas or dust was seen, and the result later fed speculation that the object was artificial.
Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons ( Astrophysics Research Centre , Queen's University Belfast ), Isaac Newton..., Public domain
Sightings21 Jun 2018
A bolide exploded over Russia's Lipetsk region early on 21 June 2018, logged by NASA's fireball database at about 27 km altitude. Fragments were recovered and classified as the Ozerki L6 chondrite, studied by Russian scientists.
Sightings2 Jun 2018
The NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey spotted a small asteroid about eight hours before it struck the atmosphere over Botswana as a fireball. Searchers found a meteorite in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve on June 23, one of very few cases of an impact predicted in advance.
Photo: Tomruen, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media22 Mar 2018
Stanford and UCSF researchers published a whole-genome study in Genome Research showing that 'Ata', a tiny skeleton from Chile's Atacama Desert promoted in a 2013 UFO documentary as possibly alien, was a human female, likely a fetus, carrying rare bone-related mutations.
Media9 Mar 2018
Former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon argued in the Washington Post that military UAP encounters were going largely unanalyzed and urged a serious collection effort. Later commentary credited the piece with helping move the topic into mainstream news.
Photo: Max Moszkowicz, CC BY 3.0
