Newest first
The latest events on the record: hearings, official reports, releases and reported encounters. Each one links to its sources.
Government5 Aug 1960
Donald Keyhoe's NICAP told UPI that Senate leader Lyndon Johnson had the Preparedness subcommittee staff keep watch on UFO sightings; congressional sources confirmed it. NICAP kept pressing for open hearings, which a House panel declined in 1961.
Photo: US Senate, Public domain
Close encountersAug 1960
At the August 1960 Los Angeles convention of his Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, contactee Gabriel Green was put forward as a candidate for U.S. president, a request he attributed to space people. A recording of the convention survives.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
GovernmentApr 1960
Radio astronomer Frank Drake used an 85-foot dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to listen near 1420 MHz for signals from Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani from April to July 1960. Nothing artificial was found; it began scientific SETI.
Photo: NRAO/AUI/NSF, CC BY 4.0
Media30 Mar 1960
Paramount's Visit to a Small Planet, adapted from Gore Vidal's play, opened in Los Angeles. Jerry Lewis plays Kreton, an alien student who flies a spaceship to Earth and lands at a suburban home. It was Lewis's last film under his contract with producer Hal Wallis.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
Sightings4 Mar 1960
A bright fireball and detonation over central Alberta in the early morning was seen by hundreds of people. Nearly 700 stones were then recovered near Bruderheim, the largest meteorite fall recovered in Canada, most of them by the University of Alberta.
Government28 Feb 1960
NICAP made public a December 1959 Air Force Inspector General directive telling commands to treat UFO reports as serious defense business. NICAP board member Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first CIA director, said a copy went to Congress and called for open congressional hearings.
Photo: U.S. Gov., Public domain
MilitaryFeb 1960
The Navy's new Dark Fence space-surveillance radar detected an unidentified object in orbit, prompting speculation about a Soviet spy satellite. The Defense Department said it was part of a stray U.S. Discoverer satellite. The episode was later folded into the 'Black Knight' satellite legend.
Photo: Unknown US Air Force member, Public domain
MilitaryFeb 1960
In February 1960 Argentina's navy closed Golfo Nuevo and spent weeks chasing sonar and radar contacts it described as one or two unidentified submarines, with U.S. equipment sent to help. No vessel was ever found or identified; TIME noted sonar can mistake whales or wrecks for submarines.
Photo: Horacio_Fernandez, CC BY 3.0
Media8 Jan 1960
CBS aired Rod Serling's adaptation of a Richard Matheson story in which two families steal an experimental saucer-shaped craft to flee a coming nuclear war. The closing twist reveals that the world they are heading for is Earth.
Photo: Bureau of Industrial Service. This was a division of ad agency Young & Rubicam which was widely..., Public domain
Media1960
The second edition of former Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects added three chapters reviewing later cases and ending with a far more skeptical view, closing on the phrase 'our Space Age Myth - the UFO'.
Photo: Associated Press, Public domain
Government1960
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force's scientific consultant on UFO reports, chaired Northwestern University's astronomy department and directed its Dearborn Observatory from 1960 to 1978, the base for his later UFO research.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media1960
MGM released Wolf Rilla's British film Village of the Damned, adapted from John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. A whole English village falls unconscious, and the women later bear telepathic children; the BFI describes it as tapping fears of alien invasion and mind control.
Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Public domain
Media1960
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode shows a suburban street turning on itself after a power failure, as neighbors accuse one another of being disguised aliens. TIME later ranked it among the series' ten best episodes and noted its echo of the Red Scare.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Media26 Dec 1959
Toho released Ishiro Honda's 'Battle in Outer Space' (Uchu Daisenso), with effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, in which a fleet of alien flying saucers attacks Earth and its space stations. Columbia later released a dubbed version in the U.S.
Media2 Oct 1959
CBS premiered Rod Serling's anthology series The Twilight Zone with the episode Where Is Everybody? The original series ran five seasons to 1964, and several of its stories about alien visitors became reference points in later popular culture.
Photo: CBS Television via the Bureau of Industrial Service, Public domain
Media19 Sep 1959
Cornell physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison argued in Nature that radio telescopes could detect deliberate signals from other civilizations, suggesting a search near the 21 cm hydrogen line. The paper is widely regarded as the scientific starting point of SETI.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
MediaJul 1959
Ed Wood's low-budget film, in which saucer-flying aliens raise the dead to stop Earth's nuclear weapons, was released by Distributors Corporation of America. Long mocked, it became a cult emblem of 1950s flying-saucer cinema.
Photo: Distributors Corporation of America, Public domain
Close encounters26 Jun 1959
Anglican missionary William Gill and about three dozen people at the Boianai mission reported a large lit object with human-like figures on top over two evenings; Gill said the figures waved back. An RAAF officer who interviewed Gill months later suggested planets seen through moving cloud.
Photo: Project Blue Book, Public domain
Close encountersMay 1959
Queen Juliana of the Netherlands received contactee George Adamski at the palace despite pleas from her court and cabinet to cancel. Time reported that the air force chief of staff, who attended, called Adamski a pathological case, and that an Amsterdam paper called the audience a national shame.
Photo: Unknown, likely a Buffalo Evening News photo or a press photo from Adamski, Public domain
Sightings7 Apr 1959
Cameras of the Ondrejov Observatory photographed a bright fireball whose meteorites fell near Pribram. It was the first meteorite fall traced back to its orbit in the solar system from photographs, a model for instrument-based study of fireballs.
Photo: Czech Wikipedia user Packa, CC BY-SA 3.0
