Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 342 events, newest first.
MediaJun 2023
Harvard's Avi Loeb led a June 2023 search off Papua New Guinea for fragments of the 2014 fireball IM1, recovering tiny metal spherules he said might be interstellar or even technological. Other scientists disputed it, attributing the material to coal ash and the seismic trace to a passing truck.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Media2023
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb published 'Interstellar' (HarperCollins), a popular book following his earlier 'Extraterrestrial' and tied to his search for interstellar objects and possible alien technology.
Photo: Aviloeb, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media18 Oct 2022
James Fox's documentary on the 1996 Varginha, Brazil reports was released digitally by 1091 Pictures. Narrated by Peter Coyote, it presents townspeople, former military personnel and figures such as Christopher Mellon; the 1996 creature reports it revisits remain disputed.
Photo: Felipe Trombini, CC BY 3.0
Media22 Jul 2022
Universal released Jordan Peele's 'Nope', in which a brother and sister try to film a hostile object hiding in the clouds over their California horse ranch. The AP described it as a flying saucer horror about spectacle. It grossed about $171 million worldwide.
Photo: Capital FM Kenya, CC BY 3.0
Media14 Jun 2022
Science and Technology Daily, a state-run paper, reported that a Beijing Normal University team had found suspicious narrow-band signals in FAST data; the report was then removed. Lead scientist Zhang Tongjie said radio interference was a very likely cause.
Photo: SCJiang, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media20 May 2022
Randall Nickerson's feature documentary Ariel Phenomenon was released for streaming. It revisits the 1994 Ariel School case in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, through interviews with former pupils who, now adults, still describe seeing a craft and beings near their school.
MediaJan 2022
Garry Nolan, Jacques Vallee, Sizun Jiang and Larry Lemke published a paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences on isotopic and other instrumental methods for characterizing unusual materials, framed as potentially relevant to what the authors call aerospace forensics.
MediaJan 2022
A cube-like shape seen by China's Yutu 2 rover on the Moon's far side, dubbed a 'mystery hut' by a CNSA-affiliated outreach account in December 2021, turned out to be a rock when the rover drove close in January 2022. The team nicknamed it 'Jade Rabbit'.
Photo: CNSA, CC BY 4.0
Media30 Oct 2021
Harvard's Galileo Project, led by Avi Loeb, named former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon and former AATIP figure Luis Elizondo as research affiliates, to help choose sites for its sky-watching instruments and weigh the implications of any findings.
Photo: Max Moszkowicz, CC BY 3.0
Media30 Sep 2021
Peacock premiered Unidentified with Demi Lovato, a four-part unscripted series in which the singer, their sister and a skeptical friend talk with UFO eyewitnesses and experts, look at government reports and run their own UFO experiments.
Photo: Soho Media Group, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media20 Aug 2021
A Gallup poll taken in July 2021, weeks after the ODNI's preliminary UAP assessment, found 41 percent of U.S. adults thought some UFOs were alien spacecraft, up from 33 percent in 2019. Half said all sightings could be explained by human activity or natural phenomena.
Media8 Aug 2021
Showtime debuted 'UFO', a four-part documentary series from J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot and Zipper Bros. Films directed by Mark Monroe and Paul Crowder. It covered cases such as the Phoenix Lights and O'Hare, the Pentagon's AATIP study and the leaked Navy videos.
Photo: Montclair Film Festival, CC BY 2.0
MediaJul 2021
Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart's book 'In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science' came out from HarperCollins in Australia, with a U.S. edition that October. Reviewers were divided; Coulthart later conducted the 2023 Grusch interview.
Photo: Mosman Library, CC BY 2.0
Media30 Jun 2021
A Pew Research Center survey of 10,417 U.S. adults found 65% thought intelligent life likely exists elsewhere and 51% said military UFO reports are at least probably evidence of it. About 87% saw UFOs as no threat or a minor threat to national security.
Photo: Pew Research Center, Public domain
Media3 Jun 2021
Three weeks before the ODNI preliminary assessment, senior officials told the New York Times the report found no evidence that objects seen by military pilots were alien craft, nor that they were secret U.S. technology, while most incidents stayed unexplained.
Photo: DNI, Public domain
Media30 May 2021
University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank, who searches for signs of alien technology, argued in a New York Times guest essay that the UFO reports then in the news were poor evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, while saying the sightings deserve scientific study.
Photo: DanielPenfield, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media16 May 2021
CBS's 60 Minutes aired Bill Whitaker's report in which former Navy pilot Ryan Graves said his squadron saw unidentified objects over restricted airspace off Virginia for years, and Navy aviators David Fravor and Alex Dietrich described the 2004 Nimitz encounter, weeks before the ODNI report.
Photo: U.S. House Committee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, Public domain
MediaMay 2021
In May 2021, former President Barack Obama said officials could not explain how some objects seen in the sky moved or what their trajectories were. The remarks drew wide attention weeks before the ODNI preliminary UAP assessment.
Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, Public domain
Media30 Apr 2021
Gideon Lewis-Kraus published a long New Yorker account of how UFOs moved from punch line to Pentagon concern, centered on journalist Leslie Kean and the 2017 AATIP story. It ran online weeks before a promised intelligence report on UAP was due to Congress.
MediaApr 2021
Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell released night-vision video of blinking 'pyramid' shapes he said was filmed from USS Russell off San Diego in July 2019. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed Navy personnel took the imagery and that the UAP Task Force was examining it, without saying what it showed.
Photo: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Michael K. McNabb, Public domain
