Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
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
Military11 Nov 1979
A TAE Super Caravelle bound for the Canary Islands diverted to Valencia-Manises after its crew reported red lights closing on the aircraft. A Spanish Air Force Mirage F1 later chased lights without success; the declassified file records no radar contact. A deputy raised it in parliament.
Photo: Rob Hodgkins, CC BY-SA 2.0
Sightings26 Aug 1979
Marshall County deputy Val Johnson said a brilliant light approached his patrol car on a rural highway before dawn and he woke in a ditch with eye burns. The windshield and a headlight were broken and antennas bent. Investigators reached no conclusion; the car is kept at the county museum.
Photo: Myotus, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings11 Jul 1979
NASA's Skylab space station broke up on reentry and scattered debris across southern Western Australia. Esperance residents reported sonic booms and several bright orange lights crossing the sky, and recovered fragments are held at the Esperance Museum.
Photo: Rycho626 at English Wikipedia, Public domain
Government20 Apr 1979
Sen. Harrison Schmitt and U.S. Attorney R. E. Thompson hosted a conference on livestock mutilations in Albuquerque attended by law officers and investigators from 11 states. Schmitt had been pressing the FBI to investigate; the later Rommel report attributed the deaths to predators.
Photo: U.S Government, Public domain
Sightings5 Mar 1979
The Spanish Air Force's air operations command compiled a 234-page intelligence file on strange phenomena reported over the Canary Islands on 5 March 1979. The file was declassified in 1995 and is published by the Defence Ministry.
Government5 Mar 1979
FBI headquarters told its Albuquerque office to investigate livestock mutilations on Indian lands in New Mexico, including the Jicarilla Apache and Santa Clara reservations, where the Bureau had jurisdiction. Elsewhere it lacked jurisdiction and did not investigate.
Photo: awmcphee, CC0
Media31 Jan 1979
Jean Girault's comedy Le Gendarme et les extra-terrestres opened in French cinemas. Louis de Funes plays gendarme Ludovic Cruchot, who sees a flying saucer and struggles to convince others that extraterrestrials have arrived around Saint-Tropez.
Photo: Rolf Gebhardt, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government18 Jan 1979
The Earl of Clancarty moved a House of Lords debate calling for an intra-governmental study of UFOs. Replying for the government, Lord Strabolgi said reports had ordinary explanations, denied any cover-up and saw no case for an official study. The motion was withdrawn.
Close encounters1979
Allan Hendry, chief investigator for Hynek's Center for UFO Studies, published a guide drawn from 1,307 reports he probed in 15 months. He found prosaic causes for all but about 8.6 percent; skeptic Philip Klass praised it highly in a review.
Close encounters1979
Jacques Vallee published Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (And/Or Press), a critical look at contactee groups and UFO cults that questioned the motives of those promoting alien-contact beliefs.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1979
Investigator Raymond Fowler published The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall), a book-length account of Betty Andreasson's claim that she was taken aboard a UFO from her Massachusetts home in 1967, based largely on hypnosis sessions.
Military1979
Uruguay created CRIDOVNI, a commission within its Air Force to receive and investigate UFO reports. It was still active decades later, publicly explaining or rejecting viral sighting claims.
Photo: vectored by FOX 52, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1979
The Fund for UFO Research was founded in 1979 to give grants for UFO research and public education rather than investigate cases itself. Physicist Bruce Maccabee chaired it from the start; it was later led by Richard Hall and Don Berliner.
Photo: Jacques Poulet ( Jacquespoulet at en.wikipedia ), CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1979
The Center for UFO Studies, founded by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, began publishing the Journal of UFO Studies in 1979 as a scholarly outlet. The first series ran to 1983 and a second series from 1989 to 2006.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Sightings31 Dec 1978
A TV crew aboard a Safe Air Argosy cargo flight filmed lights off the Kaikoura coast, with returns reported on Wellington radar and the plane's own radar. An Air Force inquiry concluded natural but unusual phenomena; UN-post files released in 2021 show DSIR scientists left them unidentified.
Photo: Richard Goring, CC BY-SA 2.0
