Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Close encountersSep 1999
University of Waterloo psychologists J. Allan Cheyne, Steve Rueffer and Ian Newby-Clark published research on hallucinations during sleep paralysis. They described an 'Intruder' pattern of sensed presence, fear and visions, which researchers have weighed as one source of night-visitor accounts.
Photo: JFVoll, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media17 May 1999
UC Berkeley's SETI@home project went public, letting volunteers' home computers search Arecibo radio telescope data for narrow-band signals that might come from another civilization. About a million people joined quickly; no confirmed signal was found.
Photo: Alberthuang2 ( talk ), CC BY-SA 3.0
Media12 Feb 1999
Walt Disney Pictures released a film remake of the 1960s sitcom about a Martian stranded on Earth, directed by Donald Petrie, with a cast including Jeff Daniels, Christopher Lloyd and the series' original star Ray Walston. It was poorly reviewed and lost money.
Photo: Gabriel Tyner, CC BY 2.0
Military1999
A French working group of about a dozen specialists led by retired Air Force General Denis Letty issued a report on UFOs and defense and took it to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. It cautiously raised an extraterrestrial explanation; it was a private effort, not a government study.
Sightings1999
The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena began collecting pilot and aircrew UAP reports as an aviation-safety matter. Its first technical report, by former NASA Ames scientist Richard Haines in 2000, argued pilots under-report sightings for fear of ridicule.
Government1999
In the summer of 1999 the Cosmic Call project broadcast deliberate messages toward nearby stars from the RT-70 radio telescope near Yevpatoria, Ukraine. Canadian astrophysicists Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas designed its main coded message; a second set followed in 2003.
Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0
Skinwalker Ranch1999
Las Vegas real-estate owner Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace to build expandable space habitats, later flying Genesis 1 and 2 and NASA's BEAM module. A Bigelow spin-off, BAASS, later held the Pentagon's AAWSAP contract and ran studies at the Utah ranch.
Photo: Bill Ingalls, Public domain
Media1999
Distributor BKN launched an animated series named for the 1947 Roswell crash legend, in which aliens are behind myths such as werewolves and vampires. Trade press said BKN pitched it to ride the X-Files wave, with a U.S. run on its Bulldog TV block from late August 1999.
Media28 Dec 1998
Fox, which aired 'Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?' in 1995, broadcast 'World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed,' hosted by Lance Henriksen. The special presented the autopsy footage as staged and was made by the same executive producer, Robert Kiviat.
MediaDec 1998
Photos of a dark, oddly shaped object taken during shuttle mission STS-88 were later promoted online as an ancient alien 'Black Knight' satellite. Astronaut Jerry Ross and former NASA engineer James Oberg identified it as a thermal blanket that drifted away during a spacewalk.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Media19 Jun 1998
20th Century Fox released the first X-Files feature film, which carried the TV series' story of a government cover-up of alien activity to a theatrical audience between the show's fifth and sixth seasons. It grossed about $189 million worldwide.
Photo: Fox Broadcasting Company, Public domain
Government5 Apr 1998
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor photographed the Cydonia feature known as the 'Face on Mars' at ten times the resolution of the 1976 Viking image. The camera's operator, Malin Space Science Systems, describes the feature as one hill among the region's buttes and mesas that happened to resemble a face.
Media25 Mar 1998
Hon-Ming Chen, leader of the Taiwanese group Chen Tao, had predicted God would appear on TV channel 18 and then in person on March 31 at his Garland home, arriving by flying saucer. When nothing aired on March 25, Chen told reporters his predictions could be treated as nonsense.
Media20 Jan 1998
UPN aired the mock documentary Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, a TV remake of Dean Alioto's 1989 McPherson Tape. Many viewers took it as real and some local papers ran notices that it was fiction, while some UFO researchers, including Stanton Friedman, argued it reflected a real tape.
Sightings1998
Project Hessdalen set up an automated station, a container with cameras and sensors known as the Blue Box, to record the unexplained lights reported in the Hessdalen valley since the early 1980s. The project says the station has recorded since 1998 and streams camera footage around the clock.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1998
Temple University historian David M. Jacobs published The Threat with Simon and Schuster, arguing from hypnosis sessions with abductees that aliens were running a breeding program to produce human-alien hybrids. Kirkus Reviews received the claims skeptically.
Photo: Hinata47d, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1998
Cornell University Press published political scientist Jodi Dean's study of UFO and abduction culture, which treated aliens as cultural icons of distrust and conspiracy in late-1990s America. The New York Review of Books gave it a sharply critical cover review.
Photo: Institute of Network Cultures from the Netherlands, CC BY-SA 2.0
Government14 Oct 1997
Lord Hill-Norton tabled written questions in the House of Lords on the 1980 Rendlesham Forest reports, including the Halt memo and its radiation readings. The government replied that the MoD had judged the memo of no defence significance and would neither confirm nor deny nuclear storage claims.
Photo: Anefo (photographer unknown), CC0
MediaOct 1997
Earth: Final Conflict, developed from concepts left by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, began in U.S. first-run syndication. The series imagined aliens arriving openly on Earth and a human resistance that suspects their motives.
Photo: Beth Madison, CC BY 2.0
Close encounters29 Sep 1997
Nine physical scientists in a review directed by Stanford's Peter Sturrock heard eight UFO investigators present their strongest physical-evidence cases at a 1997 workshop. Their 1998 report found no proof of unknown physics or alien origin but said some cases deserve careful study.
