Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Media24 Mar 1975
Saturday Review Press/Dutton published John Keel's account of his 1966-67 investigation of 'Mothman' sightings, strange lights and visitors in West Virginia. Keel framed the events as 'ultra-terrestrial' rather than extraterrestrial; the book was loosely adapted into a 2002 film.
Photo: Jacket design by Peter Parnell, Public domain
Media21 Mar 1975
Walt Disney Productions' 'Escape to Witch Mountain', directed by John Hough, opened in Los Angeles. Two orphans with psychic powers learn they came to Earth by spaceship from a dying planet, and the film ends with a spaceship lifting them away.
GovernmentFeb 1975
J. Allen Hynek's article 'The UFO Mystery' in the February 1975 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin urged police to pass UFO reports to his Center for UFO Studies in Northfield, Illinois, which kept an unpublished toll-free hotline for police and official agencies.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media20 Jan 1975
Claude Poher of the French space agency CNES and Jacques Vallee presented a statistical paper on patterns in UFO reports at the AIAA 13th Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Pasadena, placing the subject before a major engineering society.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1975
Swiss farmer Eduard 'Billy' Meier said in 1975 that visitors from the Pleiades had landed and spoken with him, and he released photos of their 'beamships'. Critics, notably Kal Korff, argued the craft were small models, and most ufologists rejected his claims.
Media1975
Former Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek and computer scientist Jacques Vallee published 'The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying Objects', treating UFOs as a real but unexplained phenomenon and proposing a framework for further study.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media1975
Jacques Vallee published The Invisible College (Dutton), describing an informal network of scientists he said had quietly traded UFO data for years, and asking whether the phenomenon acts on human belief. A French edition, Le college invisible, appeared the same year.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1975
David M. Jacobs published The UFO Controversy in America with Indiana University Press, a history of the U.S. debate over UFO reports.
Photo: Hinata47d, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings1975
Through spring and summer 1975 residents around Carman, Manitoba reported a recurring red light that locals nicknamed 'Charlie Redstar'. Some reports went to the RCMP and federal agencies; researcher Chris Rutkowski, who studied the wave, says most were distant lights in the night sky.
Photo: Winnipeg Photo. Co., Public domain
Government1975
Colorado Sen. Floyd Haskell repeatedly urged the FBI to investigate cattle mutilations in western states. FBI records show the Bureau declined, explaining it had no jurisdiction without evidence of interstate transport. Its file also holds clippings on helicopter and UFO theories.
Photo: Unknown, Public domain
Government1975
During Colorado's 1975 wave of cattle mutilation reports, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took up the cases at the governor's direction and in December reported 203 suspected cases, attributing all but 11 to predators. An Elbert County sheriff disputed some findings.
Photo: Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 4.0
Media1975
Arizona State University librarian Larry Kusche checked the records behind famous Bermuda Triangle disappearances one by one. His Harper and Row book found many losses happened in storms, outside the area, or had ordinary explanations, and it is widely credited with debunking the legend.
Government21 Nov 1974
The House and Senate overrode President Ford's veto to enact amendments tightening the Freedom of Information Act. UFO researchers later used the law in suits such as Ground Saucer Watch's, which led the CIA to release hundreds of UFO documents in 1978.
MediaOct 1974
NBC aired the TV movie The Disappearance of Flight 412, starring Glenn Ford. Two Air Force fighters vanish while intercepting radar UFOs, and the surviving crew is held at a remote base and pressed to deny what they saw. It dramatized the idea of an official UFO cover-up.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Sightings23 Aug 1974
John Lennon and May Pang said they saw a silent object with lights from their East 52nd Street apartment at about 9 p.m. Lennon noted the date in the 'Walls and Bridges' booklet and later wrote about it; a friend's calls reportedly found others had reported sightings.
Photo: Bob Gruen; Distributed by Capitol Records, Public domain
SightingsAug 1974
From August 1974 into 1976 the Cascade County Sheriff's Office handled more than 100 reported livestock mutilations, many investigated by deputy Keith Wolverton, amid reports of helicopters. A 1980 New Mexico review said Montana's livestock lab blamed scavengers for carcasses it examined.
Photo: Aualliso, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government26 Mar 1974
Physicist Edward U. Condon, a Manhattan Project veteran who was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947-1949, died in Boulder, Colorado.
Photo: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public domain
Government21 Feb 1974
Asked about UFOs by journalist Jean-Claude Bourret on France Inter, Minister of the Armed Forces Robert Galley said something remained unexplained, urged an open mind toward witnesses, and noted that his ministry had collected reports since 1954. The press called it a first for a sitting minister.
Photo: Nikoze, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings23 Jan 1974
A loud bang and bright lights over the Berwyn Mountains in north Wales led to a fruitless search and later claims of a covered-up crash. Seismologists recorded a magnitude 3.5 earthquake near Bala that night, and MoD files released in 2010 attribute the event to the quake plus a bright meteor.
Photo: Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0
MediaJan 1974
Aviation Week editor Philip J. Klass published UFOs Explained with Random House, arguing case by case that reports came from balloons, meteors, rocket debris, aircraft, radar effects, hoaxes and mistaken witnesses rather than alien craft. It became a standard skeptical reference.
Photo: Robert Sheaffer, CC BY-SA 3.0
