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The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Government21 Sep 1987
In an address to the UN General Assembly, President Reagan said that if humanity faced an alien threat from outside this world, its differences would quickly vanish. It was a rhetorical point about global unity, not a statement about UFOs, but it is often quoted in UFO discussions.
Photo: Reagan Library, CC BY 3.0
Close encounters6 Apr 1987
Random House published Budd Hopkins' Intruders, built on hypnosis sessions with an Indianapolis woman called 'Kathie Davis' and describing claims of alien-human interbreeding. Skeptic Philip Klass argued in the Skeptical Inquirer that leading questions under hypnosis shaped the accounts.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government5 Mar 1987
The FAA's Alaskan Region publicly released its file on the November 1986 JAL 1628 sighting: pilot-controller transcripts, crew and controller interviews, the captain's drawings and radar data. It said it could not confirm the event and attributed the radar returns to uncorrelated signals.
Media20 Jan 1987
NBC aired the first Unsolved Mysteries special, hosted by Raymond Burr, from Cosgrove/Meurer Productions. Under later host Robert Stack it became a long-running series whose segments included UFO cases such as the 1965 Kecksburg incident.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Government1987
Papers describing 'Majestic 12', a supposed 1947 committee handling a Roswell crash, were published by UFO researchers in 1987. The FBI closed an inquiry after learning the document was 'completely bogus', and the National Archives found no record of it beyond an unrelated 1954 memo.
Photo: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Public domain
Close encounters1987
Horror novelist Whitley Strieber published Communion, a first-person account of beings that he said probed him at his cabin in upstate New York. The book became a bestseller and a 1989 film, and made Strieber a widely known and widely doubted figure.
Photo: RobertoTenore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government1987
Stanford astrophysicist Peter Sturrock published a review of the Air Force-funded Condon Report in the first issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. He argued the director's summary differed substantially from the staff's case findings, which stressed unanswered questions.
Media1987
British author Timothy Good published Above Top Secret, a long compilation of official documents and testimony arguing that governments worldwide were hiding what they knew about UFOs. A 1997 CIA history cited it as a source of cover-up claims, and skeptic reviewers faulted its rigor.
Media1987
Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings by J. Allen Hynek, Philip Imbrogno and Bob Pratt was published by Ballantine after Hynek's 1986 death, collecting accounts of the large lights reported over New York's Hudson Valley in the 1980s.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Close encounters1987
Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard, who earned his doctorate at Indiana University, catalogued about 300 abduction reports for the Fund for UFO Research in UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery. He reported that the more reliable accounts shared many details of sequence and content.
Media1987
The Society for Scientific Exploration began publishing the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1987, a peer-reviewed outlet for research on anomalies outside established fields. Its papers have included work by UFO researchers such as Jacques Vallee.
Media1987
Peter Jackson's low-budget New Zealand splatter comedy, shot on weekends over about four years, has aliens invade a small seaside town to harvest humans for an intergalactic fast-food chain.
Photo: Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand, CC BY 2.0
Media1 Dec 1986
Georgiy Daneliya's Mosfilm satire Kin-dza-dza!, in which two Muscovites are carried by an alien device to a desert planet called Pluke, opened in Soviet cinemas and became a cult comedy.
Photo: Alexey Yushenkov/, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government17 Nov 1986
The crew of a Japan Air Lines 747 cargo flight bound for Anchorage reported lights and a large object pacing their aircraft over interior Alaska. The FAA interviewed the crew and reviewed the radar data.
Photo: contri from Yonezawa, Yamagata, Japan, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media22 Sep 1986
NBC premiered ALF on Sept. 22, 1986, a sitcom about a furry alien who moves in with a suburban family after his spaceship crashes into their garage. It ran four seasons to 1990.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Military19 May 1986
Air Force radar and civilian and military witnesses reported about 21 unidentified objects over four Brazilian states, and five fighter jets were sent to intercept them. The air minister said days later there was no technical explanation; an Air Force report on the night was released in 2009.
Close encounters27 Apr 1986
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, longtime scientific consultant to the Air Force UFO projects, died at 75 in Scottsdale, Arizona. He had become a critic of Blue Book's methods, founded the Center for UFO Studies and coined the 'close encounters' terms in his 1972 book.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Whistleblowers1986
Ralph Noyes, a retired senior Ministry of Defence official, wrote to the MoD in 1986 that in 1970 he had been shown RAF Venom gun-camera film of UFOs at a secret screening in MoD Main Building. The letter is among MoD UFO files released by The National Archives.
Media1986
Disney released Randal Kleiser's Flight of the Navigator, in which a 12-year-old returns home to find eight years have passed while he has not aged. He learns he was aboard an alien craft, a missing-time premise familiar from abduction accounts.
Photo: Almagordo; derivative work by Keraunoscopia, Public domain
Media1986
Cannon released Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1953 film Invaders from Mars, written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, with Hunter Carson, Karen Black and Louise Fletcher. As in the original, a boy sees a saucer land and aliens take over the minds of the adults around him.
Photo: Dark Attsios, CC BY-SA 3.0
