Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Sightings13 Oct 2010
Crowds and TV cameras watched shiny objects over Chelsea in Manhattan on October 13, 2010, prompting calls to police and the FAA. A Mount Vernon school said they were balloons that blew away from a teacher's engagement party about an hour before.
Whistleblowers27 Sep 2010
At a briefing organized by researcher Robert Hastings, former Air Force personnel including Robert Salas, Robert Jamison and Charles Halt said UFOs had been seen at nuclear weapons sites and claimed some missiles went offline. The accounts were their own; no new official records were released.
Sightings11 Sep 2010
Chinese media reported that airline flights bound for Baotou in Inner Mongolia were diverted on September 11, 2010, after an unidentified object was reported over the airport. No official cause was given, and the story drew wider notice abroad weeks later.
MediaSep 2010
British press reported that Mazlan Othman, head of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, would coordinate humanity's response to alien contact. She denied it to the Guardian, and at an October 2010 UN press conference said she had not been and would not be appointed.
Photo: US Mission/Bednarzek, Public domain
Media10 Aug 2010
Journalist Leslie Kean's book, published by Harmony Books with a foreword by John Podesta, collected first-person chapters by military pilots, generals and former officials from several countries, including France's Jean-Jacques Velasco and Belgium's Wilfried De Brouwer.
Government9 Aug 2010
Brazil's Air Force commander signed Portaria 551/GC3, limiting the Air Command's UFO role to registering reports and forwarding them to the National Archives. Air defense command catalogs reports and the Air Force documentation center sends originals to the archive.
Government5 Aug 2010
A National Archives release of MoD UFO files included a second-hand account that Winston Churchill ordered a wartime encounter between RAF bombers and a UFO kept secret to avoid mass panic. The claim came via a relative of one of Churchill's bodyguards and is unconfirmed.
Photo: Sgt. J. Mapham, No. 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Public domain
Media15 Jul 2010
Syfy launched Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, in which a team led by former FBI agent Ben Hansen tried to recreate viral photos and videos, including UFO footage, to judge whether they were hoaxes or unexplained.
Sightings7 Jul 2010
Flights at Hangzhou's Xiaoshan airport were halted on the night of July 7, 2010, after an unidentified glowing object was reported, affecting about 18 flights. Chinese reports differed on radar detection, and suggested explanations ranged from sunlit aircraft to a military flight.
Photo: jo.sau, CC BY 2.0
Skinwalker RanchJul 2010
Utah State University plant scientist Frank Salisbury's 1974 study of Uintah Basin UFO reports, written with local teacher Joseph Junior Hicks, was republished in an expanded 2010 edition that, according to Salt Lake Magazine, added interviews with neighbors of what became Skinwalker Ranch.
Photo: BLMUtah, Public domain
Sightings13 Jun 2010
Japan's Hayabusa asteroid probe returned to Earth over South Australia; its sample capsule entered at about 13:51 GMT and was recovered in the Woomera Prohibited Area, while the mothership broke apart in a long fireball filmed from NASA's DC-8 airborne observatory.
Photo: NASA/Ames Research Center; cropped for clean upload by User:Huntster, Public domain
Media4 Jun 2010
Rosie Jones's documentary Westall '66 premiered on the Sci Fi Channel on Foxtel. It follows teacher Shane Ryan as he tracks down former students and staff who say they saw an object land near a Melbourne school in April 1966.
Photo: Effluvium1, CC BY-SA 4.0
WhistleblowersJun 2010
Retired Col. Charles Halt, former deputy commander at RAF Woodbridge, signed a notarized statement saying he believed the objects he saw in 1980 were extraterrestrial and that U.S. and UK services downplayed them. His former base commander rejected the cover-up claim.
Photo: Simon Leatherdale, CC BY-SA 2.0
MediaJun 2010
New Page Books published 'Science Was Wrong' by nuclear physicist and UFO lecturer Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden, a survey of cures, theories and inventions once declared impossible, used to argue that scientists also dismiss UFO evidence too quickly.
Photo: AllenS, Public domain
Whistleblowers26 Apr 2010
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, head of Russia's Kalmykia region, said on Channel One's Pozner program that aliens visited his Moscow apartment in 1997 and showed him their ship. Duma deputy Andrei Lebedev wrote to President Medvedev asking about state-secret risks; the Kremlin declined to comment.
Photo: A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings14 Apr 2010
A bright fireball seen across four Midwest states broke up over southwest Wisconsin around 10 p.m. with a prolonged sonic boom. National Weather Service Doppler radar captured its smoke trail, which helped hunters recover meteorites near Mifflin.
Photo: Wikideas1, CC0
Skinwalker Ranch11 Mar 2010
A Defense Intelligence Reference Document, Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues, produced under DIA's AAWSAP program, studied burns and neurological effects reported after close encounters and proposed electromagnetic fields as a cause. DIA later released it.
Photo: Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings28 Feb 2010
An exceptionally bright fireball crossed eastern Slovakia at night with loud explosive sounds. Clouds blocked the science camera networks, but three security cameras in Hungary filmed it, letting researchers compute its path and orbit and recover meteorites west of Kosice.
Photo: Jon Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0
Government18 Feb 2010
The UK National Archives released 24 Ministry of Defence UFO files, over 6,000 pages covering 1994 to 2000. Highlights reported included a 1952 Churchill memo asking about flying saucers and a 1997 triangle report near Michael Howard's Folkestone home, which the MoD found no evidence for.
Photo: Christopher Hilton, CC BY-SA 2.0
Government25 Jan 2010
The Royal Society opened a two-day meeting in London on detecting extraterrestrial life and its consequences for science and society. Speakers included Frank Drake, Paul Davies and Christian de Duve, with NASA, ESA and UN representatives. Papers appeared in Philosophical Transactions A.
Photo: Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0
