Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Media1991
Bob Brown and Wendelle Stevens started the International UFO Congress, an annual convention mixing researchers, witnesses and enthusiasts. Held for years in Laughlin, Nevada, it drew nearly 1,000 people by 2009 and moved to the Phoenix area in 2011.
Photo: Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government1991
By his own account, civil servant Nick Pope was given a Ministry of Defence desk handling unexplained cases in 1991, during a 21-year MoD career. He later became a public commentator on the subject.
Photo: David Howard, CC BY 2.0
Sightings7 Nov 1990
Guests, staff, police officers and La Presse reporters watched a cluster of lights above the Hotel Bonaventure for nearly three hours. A 1992 study by Bernard Guenette and Richard Haines argued for a large object; the case has no official explanation.
Photo: Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings5 Nov 1990
Around 7 p.m. a bright luminous formation crossed much of France, and CNES's SEPRA received more than 1,100 witness reports and police statements. A NASA telex let SEPRA identify it as the reentering third stage of the Soviet rocket that launched the Gorizont 21 satellite.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Media25 Oct 1990
Fox aired the first Simpsons 'Treehouse of Horror' Halloween episode. In its segment 'Hungry Are the Damned', tentacled aliens Kang and Kodos abduct the family for a feast, a riff on the Twilight Zone's 'To Serve Man'. The pair became recurring characters in later Halloween episodes.
Sightings4 Aug 1990
Two men photographed a large diamond-shaped object with a jet nearby near Calvine in the Scottish Highlands. The Daily Record passed the pictures to the Ministry of Defence, which kept them. A surviving print held by a retired RAF press officer was made public by researcher David Clarke in 2022.
Photo: Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media27 Apr 1990
Disney released 'Spaced Invaders', in which a tiny Martian crew picks up Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' broadcast, lands in a small Illinois town to join the supposed invasion, and is mistaken for trick-or-treating children.
Military30 Mar 1990
On March 30-31, 1990, two Belgian F-16s were scrambled after ground radar contacts that matched visual reports; pilots saw nothing but recorded brief radar locks. The Air Force said it could not identify the phenomena; skeptics trace the locks to the other F-16 and false echoes.
Photo: Pedro Aragao, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1990
NBC's Unsolved Mysteries revisited the 1965 Kecksburg fireball case in a 1990 segment, helping the local story reach a wider audience. A mockup of the reported object made for the program is displayed by the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department.
Photo: Ryright, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings1990
A photo said to show a lighted triangle over Petit-Rechain became the best-known image of the Belgian wave and was analyzed by the Royal Military Academy and others. Its author later admitted it was a hoax.
Photo: J.S. Henrardi, Public domain
Media1990
Jerome Clark published UFOs in the 1980s, the first volume of The UFO Encyclopedia, a multi-volume reference that ran from 1990 to 1996 and later grew into a larger edition titled The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning.
Close encountersJan 1990
Writer Martin Kottmeyer argued in Magonia that the wraparound eyes Barney Hill described under hypnosis matched an alien in The Outer Limits episode 'The Bellero Shield', aired days before that session. Others dispute a single-episode source, and the link remains debated.
Media1990
Jacques Vallee published 'Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects' in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, arguing that the reports did not fit a simple visiting-spacecraft explanation.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings1990
New residents of the house where Ed Walters lived when he took his famous Gulf Breeze UFO photos found a model of foam plates resembling the object. A Pensacola News Journal reporter used it to closely recreate the photos; Walters said the model was planted.
Photo: Tbrighamphd, CC0
Media1990
Jacques Vallee published Confrontations (Ballantine), the second book of his alien contact trilogy, describing his own field investigations of some forty UFO cases around the world.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters30 Nov 1989
Linda Napolitano told researcher Budd Hopkins she was floated from her Lower East Side apartment into a craft. Hopkins cited letters from purported witnesses, including men claiming to guard a world leader. Investigators Hansen, Stefula and Butler published a detailed critique of the case.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings29 Nov 1989
Gendarme patrols near Eupen reported large, silent triangular objects with bright lights, starting months of similar reports across Belgium. On the night of 30-31 March 1990 the Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s after a radar contact; the pilots saw nothing and the object was never identified.
Photo: Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0
Sightings27 Sep 1989
On October 9, 1989, the Soviet news agency TASS reported that a craft had landed in a Voronezh park on September 27 and that tall three-eyed beings had emerged. TASS stood by the story when questioned; it drew worldwide attention and wide skepticism in the glasnost era.
Media9 Aug 1989
20th Century Fox released James Cameron's The Abyss, in which oil-rig divers helping the U.S. Navy reach a lost nuclear submarine encounter a non-human intelligence living deep in the ocean, an early big-screen take on underwater unidentified craft.
Photo: Towpilot, CC BY-SA 3.0
Whistleblowers15 May 1989
Las Vegas station KLAS aired George Knapp's live interview with a man called 'Dennis', who said alien technology was being tested at a hidden site near Area 51. Months later he went public as Bob Lazar. His account and background have never been independently verified.
Photo: Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA, CC BY 2.0
