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The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
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
Sightings29 Dec 1980
Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Landrum's grandson said a fiery object hovered over their road near Houston and was then escorted by more than 20 helicopters, and later blamed illnesses on it. Their lawsuit against the U.S. was dismissed in 1986 after agencies said they had no such aircraft.
Media14 Dec 1980
Episode 12 of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos, 'Encyclopaedia Galactica', opened with a dramatized retelling of Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 abduction claim, which Sagan then picked apart, before turning to the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Photo: NASA/JPL, Public domain
MilitaryDec 1980
U.S. Air Force personnel at RAF Woodbridge reported unexplained lights in Rendlesham Forest on two nights, including an object seen near the base's back gate. Deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt reported the events to the UK Ministry of Defence in a January 1981 memo.
Photo: Charles Halt, CC0
MediaSep 1980
Yorkshire Television began the 13-part ITV series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. Its UFO episode covered cases including the Robert Taylor incident and an interview with Kenneth Arnold, with Clarke weighing the reports cautiously.
Photo: ITU Pictures, CC BY 2.0
MediaAug 1980
Columbia released a recut Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The studio funded the reissue on condition that Steven Spielberg add a scene inside the alien mothership; he later said the interior should have stayed a mystery and dropped it from his 1998 cut.
Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings11 Jun 1980
Polish-born miner Zigmund Adamski, missing from his home near Wakefield since June 6, was found dead on a coal heap in Todmorden's railway goods yard. The coroner found he died of a heart attack but recorded an open verdict; the case was later woven into local UFO lore.
Photo: Richard Vince, CC BY-SA 2.0
Military9 May 1980
A U.S. defense attache cable from Lima reported that Peruvian Air Force officers saw a round object hovering near Mariano Melgar air base at La Joya, and that an Su-22 fired on it without effect. Pilot Oscar Santa Maria Huertas later gave his own account. The object was never identified.
Photo: U.S. DoD photo, uploaded by en:User:Victor12, Public domain
SightingsMay 1980
A UFO enthusiasts' liaison office set up at Wuhan University in 1979 grew by May 1980 into the China UFO Research Association, which later claimed dozens of branches and thousands of members. It gained legal standing under a state-linked umbrella body in 1988 and lost it in 1997.
Photo: Howchou, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1980
Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore's book The Roswell Incident revived the 1947 debris story as a crashed-saucer cover-up. The Air Force's 1997 report called Roswell essentially a non-story until the late 1970s and cited the book among sources for later claims.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Government1980
Retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel, funded by a federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant through the New Mexico First Judicial District Attorney, investigated mutilation reports and concluded the damage matched normal predator and scavenger activity, finding no support for UFO theories.
Media1980
Linda Moulton Howe's 1980 TV documentary 'A Strange Harvest' presented cattle mutilations as possibly linked to UFOs, bringing that idea to a wide audience. Official inquiries such as the 1980 Rommel report attributed the carcass damage to predators.
Photo: Larry W. Howe, CC BY 4.0
Sightings1980
The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the largest civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s, stopped collecting reports in 1980. Its case files survive as one of the major collections now held by the National UFO Historical Records Center.
Media1980
Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman founded The Planetary Society, a member-funded space advocacy group. By its own account members began funding SETI research in its first year, and it later sponsored Harvard searches such as Project META.
Photo: credit NASA JPL, Public domain
Close encounters1980
University of Wyoming psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle founded the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation, held in Laramie each June, where people reporting contact experiences met. His papers on the psychology of UFO witnesses are held at the university's American Heritage Center.
Photo: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0
Media1980
Sunn Classic Pictures released Hangar 18, directed by James L. Conway, a drama in which the Air Force hides a crashed saucer at a Texas base while the White House chief of staff keeps it quiet before an election. Its title echoes a claim made at a 1974 symposium about a stored crashed craft.
Close encounters26 Nov 1979
Friends of Franck Fontaine, 19, told police he vanished from a car near Paris after a UFO appeared; he reappeared a week later. France's GEPAN found nothing of value. In 1983 friend Jean-Pierre Prevost told a reporter he had staged it and hidden Fontaine in an apartment.
Photo: Alvar Lavague, CC BY-SA 4.0
