Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
SightingsMar 1983
Starting in the early 1980s, many people in New York's Hudson Valley and nearby Connecticut reported a large V of lights moving slowly at night. Local reports traced some sightings to light-aircraft pilots flying in formation; some witnesses rejected that explanation.
Military1983
Lt. Col. Charles Halt's January 1981 memo to the UK Ministry of Defence, 'Unexplained Lights', describing lights and landing traces near RAF Woodbridge, was released in the U.S. under FOIA. In October 1983 the News of the World ran it as a front-page UFO landing story.
Photo: Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, Public domain
Media1983
Prometheus Books published Philip Klass's argument that claims of a government UFO cover-up misread the record and that the public had been misled by promoters and credulous media. The Skeptical Inquirer reviewed it in 1984.
Photo: Robert Sheaffer, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1983
Mike Gray's low-budget New World Pictures film Wavelength follows a woman who traces telepathic cries to child-like aliens held at a military installation in the Los Angeles hills. In 1985 critics said Starman borrowed its spherical spaceship.
Sightings21 Oct 1982
A man told the gendarmerie that a luminous object had hovered over his garden, and that amaranth plants nearby were found dried out. Gendarmes and GEPAN took plant samples; GEPAN Technical Note 17 (1983) analyzed them and discussed a possible strong electric field.
Media12 Oct 1982
PBS's NOVA broadcast 'The Case of the UFOs', which its listing presents as a scientific television inquiry sorting genuine reports from fiction and hoaxes. The program drew on film and eyewitness testimony, astronauts among them, and weighed arguments on both sides.
MediaOct 1982
Carl Sagan and 68 other scientists, among them seven Nobel laureates, published a petition in Science urging a coordinated worldwide radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence, arguing the question could only be settled by observation.
Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media25 Jun 1982
Universal released John Carpenter's The Thing, which opens with a flying saucer crashing to Earth and follows an Antarctic research team menaced by a shape-shifting alien. Critics savaged it on release, but it later came to be regarded as a classic.
Photo: Kyle Cassidy, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media11 Jun 1982
Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial opened across the U.S. after closing the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Its story of a gentle stranded alien befriended by a boy became a huge box office success and cemented a benevolent image of aliens in popular culture.
GovernmentMay 1982
Australia's Bureau of Air Safety Investigation released its summary report on pilot Frederick Valentich, who vanished over Bass Strait in 1978 after radioing about an unidentified craft. It said the reason for the disappearance had not been determined and presumed it fatal.
Photo: Ulfl, Public domain
Government8 Mar 1982
Citizens Against UFO Secrecy sued the National Security Agency over withheld UFO-related records. The group lost in district court, the D.C. Circuit affirmed in November 1981, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in March 1982.
Photo: National Security Agency, Public domain
Sightings8 Feb 1982
The captain of a VASP Boeing 727 flying from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro reported a bright, color-changing light that seemed to follow the plane, and some passengers also saw it. Ground radar showed nothing; a 2014 journal analysis argued the light was Venus, possibly distorted by a mirage.
Photo: HELIO BASTOS SALMON, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1982
British researcher Paul Devereux's book Earth Lights argued that some unexplained light reports are natural geophysical phenomena linked to stresses in the earth's crust. Critics, including a 1983 Magonia review, disputed the tectonic link.
Media1982
Space engineer and writer James Oberg published 'UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries: A Sympathetic Skeptic's Report' with Donning. Reviewers noted he examined astronaut and space-related UFO stories and hoax photos and concluded the evidence did not convince him.
Photo: RobertoTenore, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1982
Scientists including Stanford's Peter Sturrock formed the Society for Scientific Exploration to study anomalous phenomena. Its council first met on Jan. 5, 1982 in Washington, its first annual meeting followed that June, and it later launched the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Photo: Mohammad Javanshiry, Public domain
Media2 Dec 1981
Jean Girault's La Soupe aux choux, adapted from Rene Fallet's novel, opened in France. Louis de Funes and Jean Carmet play elderly farmers visited by an extraterrestrial; it drew just over 3 million admissions.
Photo: Marisa Rastellini (Mondadori Publisher), Public domain
SightingsDec 1981
Residents of Norway's Hessdalen valley began reporting strange lights in December 1981, up to about 20 a week into 1984. Project Hessdalen ran an instrumented field study in 1984, and Ostfold University College set up an automatic measuring station in 1998. Their cause is still debated.
Photo: National Archives of Norway (Riksarkivet), CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings8 Jan 1981
A man near Trans-en-Provence in southern France told gendarmes a craft had landed briefly on his property and left marks on the ground. Gendarmes took samples, and GEPAN analyzed the soil and plants in a 1983 technical note. It remains one of France's most discussed cases.
Photo: Tredok, CC BY-SA 2.0
Close encounters1981
New York artist Budd Hopkins published Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions, drawing on interviews and hypnosis sessions with people who reported unexplained gaps in memory. It helped put abduction reports at the center of UFO research.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1981
Skeptic Robert Sheaffer, a longtime Skeptical Inquirer columnist, published The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence (Prometheus Books), reviewing well-known UFO cases and arguing they had ordinary explanations.
Photo: Sgerbic, CC BY-SA 3.0
