Topic
Official programs, reports, laws and hearings, from Project Blue Book to AARO and the National Archives. 366 events, newest first.
Government14 Oct 1997
Lord Hill-Norton tabled written questions in the House of Lords on the 1980 Rendlesham Forest reports, including the Halt memo and its radiation readings. The government replied that the MoD had judged the memo of no defence significance and would neither confirm nor deny nuclear storage claims.
Photo: Anefo (photographer unknown), CC0
Government4 Jul 1997
A 1997 Army inquiry (IPM) found no sign that soldiers or vehicles captured a creature in Varginha and concluded the witnesses most likely saw a local man crouching in the rain. A military judge ordered it archived; the records were made public in 2026.
Photo: Olimor, Public domain
Government24 Jun 1997
Days before Roswell's 50th anniversary, the Air Force released a 231-page report by Capt. James McAndrew. It said accounts of alien bodies likely stemmed from anthropomorphic test dummies dropped from high-altitude balloons in the 1950s, plus a 1956 crash and a 1959 balloon mishap.
Photo: James McAndrew, Public domain
Government19 Jun 1997
Arizona Gov. Fife Symington called a press event on the March 1997 Phoenix Lights, promised an inquiry, then announced a 'suspect' in custody: his chief of staff Jay Heiler in an alien costume. Ten years later Symington said he had seen the lights himself.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government1997
Historian Gerald K. Haines's study in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence said agency officials estimated that U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for over half of UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s, and that the Air Force made misleading statements to protect them.
Photo: NASA Glenn Research Center, Public domain
Government1997
Chile set up CEFAA, a committee within its civil aviation directorate (DGAC, part of the Air Force structure), to study anomalous aerial phenomena reported at airports and by aircrews. It became one of the longest-running official UAP study bodies in the world.
Photo: Direccion General de Aeronautica Civil, Public domain
Government7 Aug 1996
NASA scientists led by David McKay said features in Martian meteorite ALH84001 might be traces of ancient microbes, and President Clinton spoke on it at the White House. Later studies showed the features could form without life, and most scientists were not persuaded.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Government1996
Through 1996, MP Martin Redmond put a run of written questions to ministers on UFOs and the 1980 Rendlesham Forest case. Answers recorded in Hansard said the MoD looked at reports only for defence significance and that John Major's government had no plans to fund research.
Government1996
Nevada officially designated State Route 375, which passes near the secret Area 51 base, as the Extraterrestrial Highway in a tourism push built on the area's UFO lore. The state's tourism office still promotes it under that name.
Photo: Astronautilus, CC BY 2.0
Government30 Nov 1995
At a Christmas tree lighting in Belfast, President Bill Clinton answered a 13-year-old's letter by saying that, as far as he knew, no alien craft crashed at Roswell in 1947, and that if the Air Force had found alien bodies it had not told him.
Photo: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0
Government29 Sep 1995
President Clinton signed Presidential Determination 95-45, exempting the Air Force operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada, from waste-law provisions that would force disclosure of classified information. It cited pending litigation; the site, popularly called Area 51, is central to UFO lore.
Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
GovernmentSep 1995
The American Institutes for Research reviewed the government's remote viewing program, which grew out of 1970s work by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI. Its September 1995 report found no use for intelligence operations and the program was ended.
GovernmentAug 1995
The National Research Council of Canada, which had collected UFO sighting reports since taking over from the Department of National Defence in 1968, stopped collecting them in August 1995, according to a Library and Archives Canada research guide.
Photo: JustSomePics, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government28 Jul 1995
Answering Rep. Steven Schiff, the General Accounting Office reported finding only two 1947 records on the Roswell crash, an FBI teletype describing a balloon with a radar reflector and a base history. It found Roswell base outgoing messages from 1946-49 destroyed, with no record of who approved it.
Photo: Congressional Pictorial Directory, Public domain
GovernmentJun 1995
USAF Fact Sheet 95-03 set out the Air Force's standing answer on UFOs: Blue Book logged 12,618 sightings, 701 stayed unidentified, none showed a threat or evidence of extraterrestrial craft, and nothing since 1969 justified resuming investigations. Af.mil still carries the text.
Photo: U.S. Air Force, Public domain
Government1995
Sweden's Submarine Commission reported that hydrophone recordings once judged sure signs of foreign submarines were partly caused by swimming minks, and said other such recordings could likely be explained the same way. Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson also cited minks that year.
Photo: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0
Government8 Sep 1994
Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall released a records search, prompted by a GAO inquiry requested by Rep. Steven Schiff, concluding the 1947 Roswell debris most likely came from Project Mogul, a then-secret balloon program to detect Soviet nuclear tests. It found no evidence of a crashed spacecraft.
Photo: United States Air Force, Public domain
Government1994
The Royal Australian Air Force stopped investigating UFO sightings in 1994. According to the National Archives of Australia, it reasoned that only about 3 percent of reports could not be explained by natural phenomena and that these posed little or no security threat.
Photo: Nick Dowling at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
GovernmentDec 1993
The European Parliament's energy and research committee issued a report by physicist and MEP Tullio Regge on a 1990 motion to create a European centre for observing UFOs. The proposal never led to an EU body.
Photo: Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0
GovernmentSep 1993
The Senate adopted Sen. Richard Bryan's amendment cutting NASA's search for extraterrestrial intelligence, then called the High Resolution Microwave Survey. House and Senate conferees left $1 million for shutdown costs, ending federal funding; the SETI Institute continued privately.
Photo: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Public domain
