Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Sightings17 Nov 1996
Russia's Mars 96 probe, stranded in Earth orbit after a launch failure, reentered over the Pacific and northern Chile. Witnesses in the Atacama reported a fireball breaking up, and its roughly 200 g of plutonium in power units was thought to have reached the ground.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
MediaNov 1996
Amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek called Art Bell's late-night radio show to report an object trailing Comet Hale-Bopp, and others then claimed it was an alien craft. Astronomers identified it as an ordinary star; the story later figured in coverage of the Heaven's Gate suicides.
Photo: ESO/E. Slawik, CC BY 4.0
Media21 Sep 1996
NBC premiered Dark Skies, a drama in which a young couple in 1960s Washington uncovers Majestic-12, a secret agency fighting an alien presence. Critics compared it to The X-Files; it ran one season.
Photo: Universal Television, Public domain
Skinwalker RanchSep 1996
Weeks after the Shermans went public, Robert Bigelow offered about $200,000 for the ranch and the sale closed in September 1996. His NIDS team set up an observation post; a spokesman said in 1997 that researchers had seen no flying craft.
Photo: Paul from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
MediaSep 1996
A Gallup survey taken September 3-5, 1996 found 71 percent of U.S. adults believed the government knew more about UFOs than it was telling, a figure Gallup later used as the benchmark for its 2019 result of 68 percent.
Photo: Gallup, Inc., CC BY 4.0
Government7 Aug 1996
NASA scientists led by David McKay said features in Martian meteorite ALH84001 might be traces of ancient microbes, and President Clinton spoke on it at the White House. Later studies showed the features could form without life, and most scientists were not persuaded.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Media2 Jul 1996
20th Century Fox released Independence Day, an alien-invasion blockbuster. It set records as the fastest film to $100 million and grossed over $300 million in the U.S. and about $817 million worldwide.
Photo: 20th Century Studios, Public domain
MediaJul 1996
Hakui, a coastal city on the Noto Peninsula that promotes itself as a UFO town citing an old shrine manuscript about objects in the sky, opened the Cosmo Isle Hakui space and UFO museum in July 1996. It displays genuine U.S. and Soviet space hardware beside UFO material.
Photo: Motokoka, CC BY-SA 4.0
Skinwalker Ranch30 Jun 1996
Deseret News reporter Zack Van Eyck published the Sherman family's account of repeated UFO sightings and cattle losses on their Uintah Basin ranch, with Terry Sherman speaking publicly for the first time. Robert Bigelow bought the ranch later that year.
Photo: Paul from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media21 Apr 1996
The SETI League, a volunteer group formed after Congress ended NASA's SETI funding, put Project Argus online on Earth Day 1996. It linked amateur radio telescopes, many built from old satellite TV dishes, aiming at real-time coverage of the whole sky.
Close encountersApr 1996
Psychologists Leonard Newman and Roy Baumeister published a target article in Psychological Inquiry proposing that abduction memories are largely spurious, elaborated under hypnosis, with masochism-like themes reflecting a wish to escape the self. Several researchers published replies.
Photo: ZURICH.MINDS, CC BY-SA 3.0
Close encounters27 Feb 1996
The PBS science series NOVA examined alien abduction accounts, giving time to Budd Hopkins, John Mack and abductees, then weighing them against sleep paralysis, suggestibility and false-memory research presented by Carl Sagan, Elizabeth Loftus and other skeptics.
Photo: PBS, Public domain
MediaFeb 1996
After the TSS-1R tethered satellite broke loose from shuttle Columbia on STS-75, shuttle camera footage showed the tether amid many small drifting lights. UFO promoters later called it a swarm of craft; NASA and skeptics said the lights were debris and ice lit by sunlight.
Photo: NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain
Sightings20 Jan 1996
Three young women in Varginha, Minas Gerais, said they saw a strange crouching creature, and rumors of an army capture followed. A 1997 Brazilian Army military police inquiry found no military operation and concluded they had likely seen a local man; the files were made public in 2026.
Photo: Felipe Trombini, CC BY 3.0
Media9 Jan 1996
NBC premiered 3rd Rock from the Sun, a sitcom about extraterrestrials posing as a human family in Ohio to study people. The series ran until 2001 and won eight Emmys, part of the mid-1990s wave of alien-themed entertainment.
Photo: The Carsey-Werner Company, Public domain
Media1996
John Greenewald Jr., then 15, began filing Freedom of Information Act requests in the summer of 1996 and started an online archive of the records he obtained, first called John's World and later The Black Vault. By 2020 it held more than two million pages, much of it on UFOs.
Media1996
Astronomer Carl Sagan's book on scientific skepticism used UFO and alien abduction claims as central case studies, attributing reported encounters to hallucination, misidentification, hoaxes and therapists' influence, and comparing abduction stories with older demon lore.
Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government1996
Through 1996, MP Martin Redmond put a run of written questions to ministers on UFOs and the 1980 Rendlesham Forest case. Answers recorded in Hansard said the MoD looked at reports only for defence significance and that John Major's government had no plans to fund research.
Close encounters1996
Pocket Books published Budd Hopkins' 'Witnessed', which presents a woman's claimed November 1989 abduction from a Manhattan apartment as seen by diplomats in a stalled motorcade. Hopkins called it the most-witnessed abduction; reviewers noted the changed names left little that could be checked.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1996
Nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman published 'Top Secret/Majic', defending the authenticity of the disputed Majestic-12 papers, which describe a secret Truman-era group handling a recovered saucer. The papers' authenticity is widely disputed, and skeptics call them fakes.
Photo: AllenS, Public domain
