Cases and themes
Glowing balls of light and formations of lights, from the foo fighters to Hessdalen and the Phoenix Lights. 20 events, newest first.
Select any year above to see what happened that year.
Open Lights and orbs as a timeline
Military30 Oct 2024
At a September 2025 House Oversight hearing, Rep. Eric Burlison played a video he said was taken on October 30, 2024 by an MQ-9 tracking an orb off Yemen as another MQ-9 fired a Hellfire missile that appeared to strike it. The video's source was not officially authenticated at the hearing.
Photo: House Creative Services, Public domain
Military2023
At the July 2023 House Oversight UAP hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz said a member of an Eglin AFB flight crew showed him a photo of an orb a pilot saw near four craft in a diamond formation over the Gulf of Mexico. He asked that the image and radar data be given to the committee.
Photo: Ike Hayman, U.S. House Office of Photography/House Creative Services, Public domain
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
Media21 Apr 2017
Cinelou Films released Phoenix Forgotten, a found-footage horror film imagining teenagers who vanish while filming a search for the source of the 1997 Phoenix Lights. Ridley Scott was among its producers. The story is fiction.
Sightings28 Oct 2010
Michigan Tech students in the university's SPIE chapter reported that the Paulding Light, a long-reported mystery light in the Upper Peninsula, is vehicle headlights on US-45. A telescope showed cars, and logged traffic times matched the sightings.
Photo: Flivver 99 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0
Sightings2010
Physicists G.S. Paiva and C.A. Taft proposed in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics that the Hessdalen lights are clusters of Coulomb crystals in a plasma made by radon decay ionizing dusty air. It is a theoretical model, not an observation.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
WhistleblowersMar 2007
Former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who mocked the 1997 Phoenix Lights at a staged news conference, said he had seen a large craft that night and believed it was not of this world. An astronomer quoted by AP traced sightings that night to flares dropped by A-10 aircraft.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings2007
Ostfold University College and Italy's Institute of Radio Astronomy reported optical spectra of a Hessdalen light showing silicon, iron, scandium and titanium lines, suggesting ionized gas rather than a solid object. The researchers called the result preliminary.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encountersJan 2007
Chris Bledsoe of Hope Mills, North Carolina, says that on a fishing trip on the Cape Fear River he saw glowing orbs and lost several hours. He later self-published a book about this and later experiences; his account has not been independently verified.
Media2005
Paradise Valley physician Lynne Kitei, author of a book on the 1997 Phoenix Lights, premiered her documentary on the sightings at a Phoenix-area cinema in 2005. She has said she witnessed the lights herself.
Sightings21 Aug 2004
Residents of suburban Tinley Park, Illinois, reported three silent red lights hovering in a triangle for up to half an hour, with similar reports on later nights including Halloween 2004. A resident filmed them; suggested explanations include flares or balloons, and no official cause was given.
Photo: Zarka Khalid, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings10 May 2004
A dozen members of the UT Dallas Society of Physics Students spent May 10-14, 2004 filming the Marfa lights, counting traffic on U.S. 67 and sending a chase car. Their 2005 progress report found all lights reliably observed during the study were car headlights.
Photo: Allison Meier from Brooklyn, United States, CC BY 2.0
Sightings2004
Italian astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani published 'A Long-Term Scientific Survey of the Hessdalen Phenomenon' in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, reviewing instrumented observations of the Norwegian valley lights. Later papers cite it as an early proposal of a geological origin.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
SightingsAug 2000
Scientists from Italy's CNR radio astronomy institute at Medicina and Ostfold College ran radio receivers in Hessdalen for 25 days to study its recurring lights. Their preliminary report described anomalous VLF signals and sightings, with any physical models offered as speculative.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings1998
Project Hessdalen set up an automated station, a container with cameras and sensors known as the Blue Box, to record the unexplained lights reported in the Hessdalen valley since the early 1980s. The project says the station has recorded since 1998 and streams camera footage around the clock.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
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
Sightings13 Mar 1997
Many people across Arizona reported and videotaped bright lights in the night sky. In July 1997 the Maryland Air National Guard said its A-10 jets had dropped flares over a range southwest of Phoenix, though that does not account for every report. Former Gov. Fife Symington said in 2007 he saw it.
Sightings24 Mar 1994
Scientists met in Hessdalen, Norway, in March 1994 for the first international workshop on the valley's recurring unexplained lights. Organized from Ostfold University College, it launched the second phase of Project Hessdalen and plans for instrumented study.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
SightingsDec 1981
Residents of Norway's Hessdalen valley began reporting strange lights in December 1981, up to about 20 a week into 1984. Project Hessdalen ran an instrumented field study in 1984, and Ostfold University College set up an automatic measuring station in 1998. Their cause is still debated.
Photo: National Archives of Norway (Riksarkivet), CC BY-SA 4.0
MilitaryJan 1945
An AP story datelined January 1, 1945 reported that U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron crews had for weeks seen balls of light pacing their planes over Germany, which they called 'foo-fighters'. TIME followed on January 15; suggested causes ranged from flares to St. Elmo's fire, and none was settled.
Photo: United States Army Air Forces, Public domain
