Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Close encounters1994
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, drawn from his work with people who said they had been taken by aliens. Harvard reviewed his methods and in 1995 decided not to censure him, affirming his academic freedom.
Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government1994
The Royal Australian Air Force stopped investigating UFO sightings in 1994. According to the National Archives of Australia, it reasoned that only about 3 percent of reports could not be explained by natural phenomena and that these posed little or no security threat.
Photo: Nick Dowling at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Close encounters1994
Weeks after pupils at the Ariel School reported a craft and beings in September 1994, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack went to the school with a filmmaker and recorded interviews with the children. The footage later anchored documentaries on the case.
Skinwalker Ranch1994
Terry and Gwen Sherman bought a 480-acre cattle ranch south of Fort Duchesne, Utah. In a June 1996 Deseret News story they reported odd lights and craft, voices, and missing or dead cattle; the property later became known as Skinwalker Ranch.
Photo: Paul from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Close encounters1994
Chinese and foreign media reported that a craft had landed on Phoenix Mountain at a forest farm in Wuchang, and farm worker Meng Zhaoguo claimed he was abducted by aliens. Astronomer Liu Yan analyzed the accounts and in 1995 concluded it was likely hallucination or delusion if not invented.
Photo: Jay Fang, CC BY-SA 3.0
GovernmentDec 1993
The European Parliament's energy and research committee issued a report by physicist and MEP Tullio Regge on a 1990 motion to create a European centre for observing UFOs. The proposal never led to an EU body.
Photo: Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media20 Nov 1993
The Sci-Fi Channel aired 'Official Denial', its first made-for-TV movie, filmed in Australia. Parker Stevenson plays a man whose abduction claims are dismissed until a secret government team shoots down an alien craft and holds its sole survivor.
Photo: ABC Television, Public domain
Close encountersNov 1993
Psychologist Nicholas Spanos and colleagues at Carleton University reported in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology that UFO reporters scored no higher on psychopathology tests than comparison groups, but that intense experiences were more often sleep-related.
Media10 Sep 1993
Fox premiered Chris Carter's drama The X-Files, in which a skeptic and a believer investigate unexplained phenomena. It ran to 2002, and its 1996 Peabody citation said it prompted viewers to discuss unexplained phenomena and the motives of government officials.
Photo: Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A., CC BY 2.0
GovernmentSep 1993
The Senate adopted Sen. Richard Bryan's amendment cutting NASA's search for extraterrestrial intelligence, then called the High Resolution Microwave Survey. House and Senate conferees left $1 million for shutdown costs, ending federal funding; the SETI Institute continued privately.
Photo: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Public domain
Close encounters7 Aug 1993
Kelly Cahill said that driving home near Melbourne she and her husband saw a lit craft, then lost time, later recalling tall dark figures. Researchers said people in another car gave similar accounts, but no report was released and those witnesses never went public.
Photo: Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media23 Jul 1993
Paramount released Coneheads, a comedy based on the Saturday Night Live sketch, starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin as stranded aliens passing as suburban Americans while immigration agents pursue them.
Sightings28 May 1993
Seismographs recorded a large unexplained disturbance in the Western Australian outback, and truckers and locals reported bright flashes and booms. Nearby Banjawarn Station was owned by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which a 1995 U.S. Senate staff report said tested sarin there; no blast was established.
Military31 Mar 1993
Police and military witnesses, including a patrol at RAF Cosford, made more than 30 reports of bright lights across central England over about six hours. MoD radar replays showed nothing unusual; most sightings were traced to the re-entry of the Russian rocket that launched Cosmos 2238.
Photo: N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0
MediaMar 1993
Director Robert Lieberman's film Fire in the Sky, starring D.B. Sweeney as Travis Walton, opened in March 1993. It dramatized Walton's claim that he vanished for five days in 1975 after a UFO encounter in Arizona, and the suspicion that fell on his co-workers.
Photo: SMG2019, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1993
Art Bell's overnight talk show Coast to Coast AM, broadcast from his home studio in the Nevada desert, became syndicated nationwide and turned into a leading outlet for listener calls about UFOs and the paranormal. Bell died in 2018.
Close encounters1993
Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack started PEER through his Center for Psychology and Social Change, with funding from Laurance Rockefeller, to study how reported alien encounters affected people's lives and worldviews, without trying to prove or disprove them. It ended in 2002.
Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings10 Dec 1992
A 6.4 kg stone struck a two-story house in Mihonoseki, Shimane Prefecture, at about 9 p.m. Scientists from Tokyo's National Science Museum and Okayama University classified it as an L6 ordinary chondrite. The meteorite is displayed at the Meteor Plaza in Mihonoseki.
Government12 Oct 1992
NASA began its High Resolution Microwave Survey on Columbus Day 1992, with a targeted search of nearby Sun-like stars at Arecibo and a sky survey at Goldstone, California. Congress cancelled the program in 1993, about a year later.
Photo: H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF, CC BY 4.0
Sightings9 Oct 1992
A bright, fragmenting fireball crossed several eastern U.S. states and was caught on at least 16 independent videos before a meteorite struck a parked car in Peekskill, New York. Scientists used the videos to reconstruct its orbit, a well-documented natural object in the sky.
Photo: Wknight94, CC BY-SA 3.0
