Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Sightings10 Aug 1972
A meteoroid perhaps the size of a small truck grazed Earth's upper atmosphere in daylight, seen from Utah to Alberta and photographed over the Tetons, then skipped back into space. It is a classic example of a natural object that can look like a craft.
Government2 Mar 1972
NASA's Pioneer 10 launched carrying an aluminum plaque showing a man and a woman, the solar system and the Sun's position relative to 14 pulsars, so that any intelligent finder could tell where and when the craft came from.
Photo: Designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake . Artwork prepared by Linda Salzman Sagan . Photograph..., Public domain
Close encounters1972
Northwestern astronomer J. Allen Hynek, long a scientific consultant to the Air Force's UFO projects, published The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. It sorted reports into close encounters of the first, second and third kind, a scheme later echoed in Spielberg's 1977 film.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media1972
Cornell University Press published 'UFO's: A Scientific Debate', edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page. It collects papers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium on UFOs held in Boston on Dec. 26-27, 1969.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Sightings4 Sep 1971
A Costa Rican government mapping aircraft at 10,000 feet photographed a disc-shaped image over Lago de Cote that no one aboard saw; the frames before and after did not show it. Researchers Richard Haines and Jacques Vallee analyzed copies in 1989 and could not identify it.
Photo: Sergio Loaiza, Public domain
GovernmentSep 1971
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Sciences jointly held a symposium on communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations at Byurakan Observatory in Soviet Armenia. Carl Sagan, Frank Drake and Francis Crick took part; Sagan edited the 1973 proceedings.
Photo: Rita Willaert, CC BY 2.0
Government13 Jun 1971
University of Arizona atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald, who had spent his last years analyzing UFO reports as a scientific problem, died on June 13, 1971. His American Meteorological Society obituary said the work brought him into conflict with certain scientists and he found few allies.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
SightingsMay 1971
The Belgian civilian group SOBEPS was launched in May 1971, with Lucien Clerebaut and Patrick Ferryn among its founders. During the 1989-1991 Belgian wave it organized night watches and investigated reports; it dissolved after 36 years.
Government1971
A NASA-sponsored team led by Bernard Oliver, with John Billingham as co-chair, spent ten weeks in summer 1971 designing a large radio array to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. The resulting Project Cyclops report weighed costs, search strategy and signal processing.
Military8 Sep 1970
USAF exchange pilot Capt. William Schaffner was lost when his RAF Lightning from Binbrook hit the sea at night during an exercise shadowing a slow RAF target aircraft; his body was never found. Claims from 1992 on that he chased a UFO conflict with the inquiry's accident findings.
Photo: Adrian S Pye, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media26 Apr 1970
Harald Reinl's West German documentary Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, built on Erich von Daniken's ancient-astronaut thesis, premiered aboard a Lufthansa 747 from Frankfurt to New York. Scholars reject the thesis as pseudoscience, yet the film drew an Oscar nomination.
Photo: Michal Manas, CC BY 3.0
Media1970
Writer John A. Keel published UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse through Putnam. The book linked modern UFO reports to strange phenomena recorded over the centuries. Keel later wrote The Mothman Prophecies.
Photo: Jacket design not credited, Public domain
Close encounters26 Dec 1969
The American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsored a two-day UFO symposium at its Boston meeting. Its papers appeared in 1972 from Cornell University Press as 'UFO's: A Scientific Debate', edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page.
Photo: NASA/JPL, Public domain
Government17 Dec 1969
Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans Jr. announced the end of Project Blue Book, citing the Condon study and its review by the National Academy of Sciences. The Air Force said no case it had studied showed a threat to national security or evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles.
Photo: United States Air Force Archive, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government20 Oct 1969
Brig. Gen. C. H. Bolender, Air Force deputy director of development, recommended ending Project Blue Book. It noted that UFO reports that could affect national security went through standard military channels and were not part of the Blue Book system. Researchers disagree on what that implies.
MediaOct 1969
Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery) compared modern accounts of UFO occupants with fairy lore and religious legends, and listed a century of reported landings. It became the key text for treating UFO encounters as part of a folklore tradition.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings28 Sep 1969
Just before 11 a.m. a fireball broke apart over Murchison, Victoria, and residents heard a series of loud booms. They gathered fragments of a rare carbonaceous meteorite, in which scientists reported extraterrestrial amino acids in Nature in 1970.
Photo: Daderot, CC0
GovernmentJul 1969
Lynn E. Catoe of the Library of Congress compiled 'UFOs and Related Subjects: An Annotated Bibliography', listing more than 1,600 items, at the request of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to support the University of Colorado UFO study.
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain
Close encounters31 May 1969
Walt Andrus and chemistry professor Allen Utke founded the Midwest UFO Network as a regional network of field investigators. As it spread beyond the Midwest it was renamed the Mutual UFO Network, keeping the MUFON acronym; Guinness lists it as the largest civilian UFO investigative group.
MediaApr 1969
In a review essay titled 'The Condon Report and UFOs', Blue Book science consultant J. Allen Hynek argued that the report's own unexplained cases did not support its conclusion that further UFO study was not worthwhile, and faulted its case selection and methods.
Photo: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Public domain
