Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
MediaJun 2012
A Kelton Research survey of 1,114 U.S. adults, commissioned by National Geographic Channel to promote its series Chasing UFOs, found 36 percent believed aliens had visited Earth, 48 percent were unsure, and 79 percent thought the government kept UFO information secret.
Photo: AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media25 May 2012
Columbia Pictures released Men in Black 3 in the U.S. In the third film, Agent J travels back to 1969 to save a younger Agent K, with the story built around the Apollo 11 moon launch.
Photo: Richard Goldschmidt , piqtured.com, CC BY 3.0
Media18 May 2012
Universal released 'Battleship' in the U.S., an action film in which aliens follow a NASA signal beamed into space and land off Hawaii, where a handful of Navy ships cut off during exercises fight them.
Photo: Dustin Sisco, Public domain
Sightings22 Apr 2012
A loud morning fireball over the Sierra Nevada was tracked by Doppler weather radar to rare carbonaceous meteorites near Coloma, site of the 1848 gold discovery. A 2012 Science paper reported a record entry speed of about 28.6 km/s.
Photo: Peter Jenniskens (SETI Institute) and Eric James (NASA Ames), Public domain
Media23 Mar 2012
Nacho Vigalondo's comedy Extraterrestre, about a couple waking after a one-night stand to find a giant saucer hovering over an evacuated Madrid, opened in Spanish cinemas after showing at the 2011 Toronto festival.
Photo: Frank Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media12 Mar 2012
A NASA solar observatory sequence showing a planet-sized dark sphere apparently tethered to the sun spread online as a UFO refueling. NASA Goddard scientists Joseph Gurman and C. Alex Young said it was an erupting prominence seen beneath a filament channel.
Photo: NASA/SDO, Public domain
MediaFeb 2012
Finnish director Timo Vuorensola's comedy Iron Sky, about Nazis who fled to the far side of the Moon in 1945 and return to invade Earth, premiered at the 2012 Berlin film festival.
Photo: Sarista, CC BY 3.0
Government2012
Dedicated funding for the program began in 2008 and ended in 2012, the Pentagon said in 2017, because other priorities merited the money. A later Pentagon statement said DIA found the contractor's reports of limited value; people who worked on it say UAP study continued informally.
Photo: MSGT KEN HAMMOND, Public domain
Military2012
Indian army border troops in Ladakh reported about 100 sightings of yellowish glowing objects drifting from the Chinese side over several months in 2012. Astronomers later sent by the army reportedly identified many as Jupiter and Venus, though earlier cases had been blamed on Chinese lanterns.
Photo: Stanzin1945, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media2012
Anomalist Books published a 590-page history of how governments handled UFO reports, drawn largely from official documents. Michael Swords and Robert Powell led a team of researchers; most chapters cover the U.S., with others on Sweden, Australia, Spain and France.
Sightings2012
Winnipeg-based Ufology Research's annual Canadian UFO Survey counted 1,981 UFO reports in Canada for 2012, about double 2011 and above the prior 2008 record. It judged about 7.5 percent of the 2012 reports unexplained, down from 11 percent the year before.
Media25 Dec 2011
Summit Entertainment released 'The Darkest Hour' in the U.S. on Christmas Day, an alien-invasion film in which nearly invisible, electricity-feeding creatures attack Moscow and a group of young foreigners try to survive.
Photo: Tabercil, CC BY-SA 2.0
GovernmentNov 2011
Answering 'We the People' petitions seeking UFO disclosure, Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote that the government had no evidence of life beyond Earth or of extraterrestrial contact, and no credible information that such evidence was being hidden.
Photo: U.S. Government, Public domain
SightingsNov 2011
After residents near Onamatunga reported loud bangs, police recovered a hollow 6 kg metal ball near a small crater. Namibia's forensic institute said it was a known alloy used in spacecraft and ruled out anything extraterrestrial; no space agency claimed it.
Photo: Oshilumbu5, Public domain
Media14 Oct 2011
Universal released a prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 'The Thing', set at a Norwegian Antarctic base where scientists dig a shape-shifting creature out of the ice near a buried alien spacecraft.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media25 Aug 2011
History aired a two-hour special following journalist Leslie Kean, based on her best-selling book of on-record accounts from generals, pilots and officials. A network executive told HuffPost the film would not exist without the book.
Sightings24 Aug 2011
The Progress M-12M cargo ship bound for the International Space Station was lost when its Soyuz-U upper stage failed after launch from Baikonur. Its wreckage came down over the sparsely populated Altai Republic; officials later reported normal radiation and no toxic contamination.
Media29 Jul 2011
Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens, starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, opened in U.S. theaters. The western follows townspeople in the 19th-century frontier who join forces after an alien attack.
Photo: The Conmunity - Pop Culture Geek from Los Angeles, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0
Sightings18 Jul 2011
Several people near Tata in southern Morocco reported a bright fireball that turned from yellow to green around 2 a.m. Stones recovered afterward were verified by meteorite scientists as coming from Mars, the first witnessed Martian meteorite fall since 1962.
Photo: the paleobear from Lontananza, Loreto, Peru, CC BY 2.0
Close encountersJul 2011
New Hampshire put up a state historical marker on Route 3 in Lincoln titled 'Betty and Barney Hill Incident', calling it the first widely reported UFO abduction report in the U.S. A resident petitioned for it; the state said it marked the story's cultural impact, not its truth.
