Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Whistleblowers1996
Nick Pope, who handled UFO reports for a Ministry of Defence division from 1991 to 1994, published a nonfiction account of official reactions to UFO reports drawn from that posting. The MoD's position was that it looked at reports only for defence significance.
Photo: David Howard, CC BY 2.0
Government1996
Nevada officially designated State Route 375, which passes near the secret Area 51 base, as the Extraterrestrial Highway in a tourism push built on the area's UFO lore. The state's tourism office still promotes it under that name.
Photo: Astronautilus, CC BY 2.0
Media1996
Researcher Jacques Vallee published FastWalker, a novel written in collaboration with screenwriter Tracy Torme. The Library of Congress catalogued it under the subject 'Unidentified flying objects -- Fiction'.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1996
The X-Files aired Jose Chung's From Outer Space, an episode about aliens. Its art direction, by Graeme Murray and Shirley Inget, drew a 1996 Emmy nomination but lost to Murder One.
Photo: Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A., CC BY 2.0
Media1996
David Twohy's The Arrival starred Charlie Sheen as a SETI radio astronomer who detects an alien signal, is fired, and uncovers aliens disguised as humans who are secretly warming Earth. It was overshadowed by Independence Day, released soon after.
Photo: Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government30 Nov 1995
At a Christmas tree lighting in Belfast, President Bill Clinton answered a 13-year-old's letter by saying that, as far as he knew, no alien craft crashed at Roswell in 1947, and that if the Air Force had found alien bodies it had not told him.
Photo: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media6 Oct 1995
At a conference in Florence, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva announced 51 Pegasi b, a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Their Nature paper followed in November 1995, and the find earned a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Photo: L. Weinstein/Ciel et Espace Photos, CC BY 4.0
Skinwalker RanchOct 1995
Las Vegas real estate developer Robert Bigelow founded the National Institute for Discovery Science, a privately funded nonprofit that studied UFO reports, animal mutilations and survival of consciousness. It disbanded in 2004.
Photo: Bill Ingalls, Public domain
Government29 Sep 1995
President Clinton signed Presidential Determination 95-45, exempting the Air Force operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada, from waste-law provisions that would force disclosure of classified information. It cited pending litigation; the site, popularly called Area 51, is central to UFO lore.
Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
GovernmentSep 1995
The American Institutes for Research reviewed the government's remote viewing program, which grew out of 1970s work by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI. Its September 1995 report found no use for intelligence operations and the program was ended.
Media28 Aug 1995
Fox broadcast a special built around Ray Santilli's black-and-white film said to show a 1947 alien autopsy, hosted by Jonathan Frakes. In 2006 Santilli admitted the film was a staged recreation, while still claiming it was based on genuine footage he had seen; no such footage has been produced.
Media28 Aug 1995
Star Trek: Voyager opened its second season with 'The 37's', in which the crew finds Amelia Earhart and other people abducted from Earth in 1937 by aliens called the Briori and held in stasis on a distant planet.
Photo: Underwood & Underwood (active 1880 - c. 1950) [1], Public domain
Close encountersAug 1995
After a year-long faculty review of psychiatrist John Mack's work with people reporting alien abductions, Harvard Medical School chose not to censure him. Its dean affirmed Mack's academic freedom but warned him to keep to the faculty's research standards.
Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0
GovernmentAug 1995
The National Research Council of Canada, which had collected UFO sighting reports since taking over from the Department of National Defence in 1968, stopped collecting them in August 1995, according to a Library and Archives Canada research guide.
Photo: JustSomePics, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings31 Jul 1995
Capt. Jorge Polanco of Aerolineas Argentinas flight 674 reported a bright light pacing his Boeing 727 on approach to Bariloche during a power cut; Gendarmeria pilots also reported it. A 2018 Argentine Air Force report attributed it to a searchlight aimed at the clouds; files were released in 2020.
Photo: Nocturnogatuno, CC BY 3.0
Government28 Jul 1995
Answering Rep. Steven Schiff, the General Accounting Office reported finding only two 1947 records on the Roswell crash, an FBI teletype describing a balloon with a radar reflector and a base history. It found Roswell base outgoing messages from 1946-49 destroyed, with no record of who approved it.
Photo: Congressional Pictorial Directory, Public domain
GovernmentJun 1995
USAF Fact Sheet 95-03 set out the Air Force's standing answer on UFOs: Blue Book logged 12,618 sightings, 701 stayed unidentified, none showed a threat or evidence of extraterrestrial craft, and nothing since 1969 justified resuming investigations. Af.mil still carries the text.
Photo: U.S. Air Force, Public domain
Sightings25 May 1995
The crew of America West 564, flying from Tampa to Las Vegas, reported a row of strobe-like lights and a long dark object near Bovina, Texas. Controllers checked with NORAD; accounts of what radar showed conflict, and circulating ATC audio has not been officially authenticated.
Photo: Aero Icarus from Zurich, Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media19 May 1995
Fox aired 'Anasazi', the X-Files season 2 finale. A hacker leaks Defense Department files on UFOs, written in Navajo code, and Mulder finds a buried boxcar full of alien-looking bodies in New Mexico before it is set on fire with him inside.
Photo: Fox Broadcasting Company, Public domain
Media26 Mar 1995
Showtime premiered a revival of the 1963 anthology series The Outer Limits. It ran seven seasons and 152 episodes, the last on Syfy, and its stories included alien encounters such as a woman possessed by an alien entity.
Photo: MGM Television, Public domain
