Place
United States
34.05 N, 118.24 WView on OpenStreetMap (opens in a new tab)
11 events here, 1951 to 2020, in date order.
Engineers and writers led by North American Aviation employee Edward J. Sullivan formed Civilian Saucer Investigation in Los Angeles in late 1951. It collected sighting reports, shared many with the Air Force, issued four bulletins and folded in 1954; its files later passed to NICAP.
RKO and Howard Hawks's Winchester Pictures released The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby. Air Force men find a saucer frozen in Arctic ice and a hostile creature that the military must destroy. Critics count it among the first films to merge science fiction and monster movies.
At the 26th Academy Awards, held at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, Paramount's 1953 Martian-invasion film The War of the Worlds won the award for Special Effects.
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.
At the 50th Academy Awards, Vilmos Zsigmond won the cinematography Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film also received a Special Achievement Award for sound effects editing, credited to Frank E. Warner.
At the 55th Academy Awards, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial won four of its nine nominations: original score for John Williams, sound, sound effects editing and visual effects.
At the 69th Academy Awards, Independence Day won the Oscar for visual effects, credited to Volker Engel, Douglas Smith, Clay Pinney and Joseph Viskocil. It was the film's only win from two nominations.
On ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live, former President Bill Clinton said that in his second term he had Area 51 records checked and the Roswell papers reviewed, and found no aliens. He added he would not be surprised if Earth were visited some day.
A Lufthansa A380 crew approaching Los Angeles International at about 5,000 feet reported a drone passing roughly 200 feet above the jet, 14 miles out. The FAA notified Los Angeles police, whose air unit did not find the drone; the plane landed safely.
A Falcon 9 carrying 10 Iridium satellites lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at dusk, leaving a sunlit plume seen across Southern California. Drivers stopped to watch and many people posted UFO fears; the Los Angeles Fire Department said the light came from the rocket launch.
A China Airlines crew told controllers they saw what looked like a person in a jetpack at about 6,000 feet, seven miles northwest of LAX, the second such report in two months. The FAA notified police and the FBI said it was investigating; no explanation was made public.
