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The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Government5 Apr 1966
The House Armed Services Committee held an open hearing on UFOs with Air Force Secretary Harold Brown, Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek and Maj. Hector Quintanilla. Brown said an advisory board found no threat and urged contracts with universities to study selected sightings.
Photo: United States Department of Defense, Public domain
Government28 Mar 1966
House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan wrote to the leaders of the House Armed Services and Science and Astronautics committees urging an investigation of UFOs, calling the Air Force's 'swamp gas' explanation of the Michigan sightings flippant. The Armed Services hearing followed on April 5.
Photo: Gerald R. Ford / US Congress, Public domain
Sightings20 Mar 1966
Police and residents near Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan reported glowing lights over swampy ground. Air Force consultant J. Allen Hynek suggested swamp gas, drawing ridicule, and Rep. Gerald Ford called for hearings, which the House Armed Services Committee held that April.
Photo: Gerald R. Ford / US Congress, Public domain
GovernmentMar 1966
An ad hoc committee of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board chaired by Brian O'Brien reviewed Project Blue Book and recommended a university-based scientific study of UFO reports. That recommendation led to the University of Colorado project headed by Edward Condon.
GovernmentMar 1966
After meeting Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey about the Dexter sightings, Michigan Rep. Weston Vivian went to Washington planning to ask the Defense Department and the Air Force to investigate, according to a press report entered in the April 1966 House hearing record.
Photo: US Government Printing Office, Public domain
Sightings19 Jan 1966
Queensland farmer George Pedley said a saucer rose from a lagoon near Tully, and a swirled circle of flattened reeds was found there. The story became international news; meteorologists suggested a whirlwind. It is often cited as a forerunner of crop circles.
Photo: Frances76 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings11 Jan 1966
Police, a reservoir guard, the mayor and dozens of callers in Wanaque, New Jersey reported a very bright white light over the reservoir on two evenings. The New York Times covered it, and an Air Force statement said the New Jersey sightings were probably Venus and Jupiter.
Photo: Mckdawg08, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1966
Journalist John G. Fuller published The Interrupted Journey, a book written with Betty and Barney Hill's cooperation that told their 1961 experience and hypnosis sessions. It brought the idea of alien abduction to a wide audience.
Government1966
University of Arizona atmospheric physicist James McDonald began an intensive study of UFO reports and visited Wright-Patterson AFB to review Air Force UFO files. He later told a House symposium the files surprised him and changed his views.
Media1966
Jacques and Janine Vallee published 'Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma' with Regnery in Chicago. The book analyzed patterns in UFO reports by place, time and object type, and Kirkus called it the most rational of that year's UFO books.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1966
Journalist John G. Fuller published 'Incident at Exeter', a book-length account of the 1965 police and civilian sightings around Exeter, New Hampshire, and of other reports from that period.
Photo: United States Air Force, Public domain
Media1966
Holden-Day published Intelligent Life in the Universe, Carl Sagan's expanded translation of a book by Soviet astronomer I. S. Shklovskii. It weighed the odds of life elsewhere, radio contact, and claims of past alien visits to Earth.
Photo: A. T. Service, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government1966
NSA cryptologist Lambros Callimahos wrote an unclassified paper, published in the NSA Technical Journal in 1966, on how humans might exchange messages with an alien civilization, starting with simple beeps for numbers and building up to letters and math. It is about signal design, not UFO reports.
Sightings9 Dec 1965
After a fireball crossed several states, witnesses in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, said an object came down in the woods and military personnel hauled something away. A FOIA suit led NASA to a court-monitored search in 2007-2009 that found no records of a recovered object.
Photo: Ryright, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings4 Dec 1965
On their second orbit, Gemini 7 astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell reported a 'bogey' and many small particles alongside their booster. The Air Force-funded Condon study listed it among a few astronaut sightings it had not adequately explained.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Close encounters25 Oct 1965
The Boston Traveler began a five-day series by reporter John H. Luttrell, opening on its front page, on the Hills' claim that they were taken aboard a craft in 1961. The Hills had not consented; the series made them nationally known and preceded John G. Fuller's book on the case.
Sightings23 Oct 1965
Jerry Townsend, a 19-year-old KEYL radio announcer, said his car died on Highway 27 near Long Prairie beside a tall rocket-like object and small figures. The sheriff reported odd marks on the road. Project Blue Book listed the case as 'psychological', apparently without a field investigation.
Photo: Myotus, CC BY 4.0
Military7 Oct 1965
Edwards Air Force Base reported about a dozen moving lights over the base on October 7, 1965; an F-106 was scrambled and found nothing. About 40 minutes of a six-hour recording of the night's radio and phone traffic were declassified when Blue Book closed.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Media26 Sep 1965
Italy's Centro Ufologico Nazionale (CUN) traces its founding to a September 1965 meeting of a Turin UFO group, where members agreed to create a national body uniting the country's scattered civilian UFO associations.
Sightings3 Sep 1965
Hitchhiker Norman Muscarello and Exeter police officers Eugene Bertrand and David Hunt reported a low object with bright red lights over fields near Kensington, N.H. Officers from Pease AFB investigated, and the policemen publicly disputed the Air Force's conventional explanations.
Photo: United States Air Force, Public domain
