Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Media19 Jun 2011
TNT premiered Falling Skies, an alien-occupation drama executive produced by Steven Spielberg, with Noah Wyle as a history professor leading resistance fighters. Variety reported the two-hour opener drew 5.9 million viewers, cable's top new series launch of the year so far.
Photo: starbright31, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media10 Jun 2011
Paramount released Super 8, written and directed by J.J. Abrams and co-produced by Steven Spielberg. Set in a 1970s Ohio town, it follows children filming a movie who witness a train crash that unleashes a mystery. Critics compared it to Close Encounters and E.T.
Government6 May 2011
Argentina's air force set up CEFAe, a commission of military and civilian experts, to study reported aerial phenomena. Press accounts say it examined few cases at first; in 2019 it was restructured as the CIAE, which reports that the cases it analyzed were identified as ordinary objects.
MediaMay 2011
Joe Cornish's debut feature Attack the Block, in which a teenage street gang defends a South London tower block from invading aliens on Guy Fawkes Night, was released in British cinemas by Optimum. Screen Gems later picked it up for U.S. release.
Photo: Raffi Asdourian from New York, United States, CC BY 2.0
GovernmentApr 2011
The FBI launched The Vault, an online reading room for released records, including its UFO file and a 1950 memo by agent Guy Hottel relaying a secondhand saucer-crash story. Some outlets called it Roswell proof; the FBI later said it never investigated the claim and saw no Roswell link.
Photo: Guy Hottel, Public domain
GovernmentApr 2011
The 42-dish Allen Telescope Array, built by UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute largely with Paul Allen's money, was put into hibernation in April 2011 when funding ran out. Private donations let it resume observing in December 2011.
Photo: brewbooks from near Seattle, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media18 Mar 2011
Universal released Paul in the U.S., a comedy by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost about two British sci-fi fans who tour U.S. UFO sites after Comic-Con and pick up an alien who escaped from Area 51.
Photo: Paul Hudson, CC BY 2.0
Media11 Mar 2011
Sony's alien-invasion film Battle: Los Angeles opened with marketing tied to the real February 1942 air raid false alarm over Los Angeles, when anti-aircraft guns fired at unidentified objects. The studio's press junket even included a UFO panel.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Government3 Mar 2011
A National Archives release of MoD UFO files showed that Defence Intelligence UFO files for 1980-82, which would have covered the Rendlesham Forest case, had been found destroyed in a 2000 search. Archives consultant David Clarke said the main Rendlesham file was already public.
Photo: N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0
Government23 Jan 2011
A farmer found a roughly 70 m circular pattern in a rice field at Berbah, Sleman, in January 2011, prompting talk of a UFO landing. After examining it and a second circle in Bantul, Indonesia's space agency LAPAN said both were made by people using a stake and boards.
Photo: Daddy Hidayat, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings14 Jan 2011
Over the mid-Atlantic, the first officer on an Air Canada Boeing 767 first took Venus for an aircraft, then misjudged real oncoming traffic and pushed the nose down. Canada's Transportation Safety Board found 14 passengers and 2 flight attendants were injured.
Photo: Jean-Philippe Boulet, CC BY 3.0
Government2011
Interviewees told AARO that KONA BLUE was a DHS compartment for retrieved non-human material. AARO found it was a 2011 proposed special access program, pushed by people from DIA's AAWSAP/AATIP, that DHS's deputy secretary disapproved; it never got funding or material.
Photo: U.S. Coast Guard, Public domain
Whistleblowers2011
John B. Alexander, a retired Army colonel who had asked about UFOs inside intelligence and defense circles, published a book saying he found no secret government UFO program or cover-up, while still treating some sightings as real and unexplained.
Photo: US mil, Public domain
Media2011
Swedish treasure hunters of the Ocean X Team publicized a sonar image of a northern Baltic seafloor feature that some likened to a crashed spacecraft. Stockholm University geologist Volker Bruchert said their rock samples were what a glacial basin would be expected to hold.
GovernmentDec 2010
New Zealand's Defence Force released thousands of pages of previously secret UFO reports dating from 1952, including material on the 1978 Kaikoura lights. Most were reports of lights in the sky, and the military did not draw conclusions about them.
Photo: Daderot, CC0
Media12 Nov 2010
Universal released Skyline, directed by visual-effects specialists Greg and Colin Strause, in which partygoers wake to find alien ships over Los Angeles drawing people up with pulses of light. Trade critics panned the story but noted its effects.
Photo: donabelandewen (Flickr), CC BY 2.0
Sightings8 Nov 2010
A KCBS news helicopter filmed a billowing trail rising over the Pacific northwest of Catalina Island that many viewers took for a missile launch. The Pentagon first called it unexplained, then said it was most likely an airplane contrail distorted by camera angle and the setting sun.
Military4 Nov 2010
Images and video from a Chilean Air Force change-of-command ceremony at El Bosque base showed a small object near the aerobatic team. In 2012 retired general Ricardo Bermudez of the air force's CEFAA committee said experts ruled out birds, aircraft and meteors; skeptics suggested an insect.
Photo: Unknown photographer, Public domain
Media28 Oct 2010
Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck published Wonders in the Sky, a sourced catalog of more than 500 aerial-anomaly reports from antiquity through 1879, arguing each era read such sightings through its own beliefs.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings28 Oct 2010
Michigan Tech students in the university's SPIE chapter reported that the Paulding Light, a long-reported mystery light in the Upper Peninsula, is vehicle headlights on US-45. A telescope showed cars, and logged traffic times matched the sightings.
Photo: Flivver 99 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0
