Culture and science
Astronaut reports, NASA statements and the NASA UAP study team. 88 events, newest first.
Select any year above to see what happened that year.
Open NASA and space as a timeline
Government19 Dec 2025
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS came no closer to Earth than about 270 million km (1.8 AU), on Dec. 19, 2025, per NASA, posing no danger. Astrophysicist Avi Loeb kept pointing to anomalies, while NASA treated it as a natural comet.
Photo: NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui, Public domain
Government19 Nov 2025
After a shutdown delay, NASA held an online briefing releasing 3I/ATLAS images from about a dozen missions. Associate Administrator Nicky Fox said it behaves like a comet and that NASA saw no technosignatures, answering speculation that it was an alien craft.
Photo: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI), CC BY 4.0
Government3 Oct 2025
As 3I/ATLAS passed about 30 million km from Mars on Oct. 3, 2025, ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter imaged its coma, and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN and Perseverance also observed it, showing a fuzzy comet.
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona, Public domain
Media16 Jul 2025
Weeks after the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was found, Avi Loeb and two co-authors posted a non-peer-reviewed paper asking whether it could be alien technology. NASA describes it as a comet, and astronomers quoted in the press said the evidence points to a natural object.
Photo: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. Bolin, CC BY 4.0
Government1 Jul 2025
The NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, found a fast object on an interstellar path, reported to the Minor Planet Center on July 1, 2025. Named 3I/ATLAS, it was only the third known interstellar visitor and was classified as a comet.
Photo: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/K. Meech, CC BY 4.0
Government14 Sep 2023
NASA's independent UAP study team released its final report, urging better-calibrated sensors and data and a larger NASA role. It said the scientific literature holds no conclusive evidence of an extraterrestrial origin. NASA said it was appointing a director of UAP research.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Government14 Sep 2023
Alongside its independent UAP study report, NASA named Mark McInerney, its former liaison to the Defense Department on UAP, as director of UAP research, charged with centralizing data and building a database for evaluating future reports.
Photo: NASA Headquarters / NASA/Joel Kowsky, Public domain
Government31 May 2023
NASA's independent UAP study team held a livestreamed public meeting ahead of its report. Chair David Spergel said the main lesson was the need for high-quality data, and NASA said it had seen no convincing evidence linking UAP to extraterrestrial life. Panelists reported online harassment.
Photo: NASA Headquarters / NASA/Joel Kowsky, Public domain
Sightings18 Jan 2023
A livestream camera at the Subaru Telescope recorded a glowing spiral over Maunakea before dawn. Japan's national observatory linked it to the deployment of a satellite SpaceX had launched that day, sunlit high above; a similar spiral was seen in April 2022.
Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Matsopoulos, CC BY 4.0
Government21 Oct 2022
NASA named 16 people to its independent UAP study team, chaired by Simons Foundation president David Spergel, with work starting Oct. 24, 2022. The nine-month study was limited to unclassified data and aimed to recommend how NASA could collect and analyze UAP data.
Photo: NASA Headquarters / NASA/Joel Kowsky, Public domain
Sightings30 Jul 2022
The spent core stage of China's Long March 5B fell back uncontrolled on July 30, 2022. NASA's administrator faulted China for not sharing trajectory data. Debris was later found in Malaysia and the Philippines, a case where fiery lights in the sky had a known cause.
Sightings19 Jun 2022
People across the South Island photographed a glowing spiral in the evening sky. The New Plymouth Astronomical Society said it was most likely a fuel dump from the Falcon 9 upper stage that had launched a Globalstar satellite that day.
Photo: NASA Headquarters / NASA/Aubrey Gemignani, Public domain
Government9 Jun 2022
NASA said it would commission an independent team, chaired by astrophysicist David Spergel, to study unidentified aerial phenomena using only unclassified data and recommend how NASA could help. The 16-member team began work in October 2022.
Photo: NASA Headquarters / NASA/Joel Kowsky, Public domain
MilitaryApr 2022
U.S. Space Command officials confirmed the velocity data for a January 2014 fireball off Papua New Guinea that Harvard researchers had argued came from outside the solar system. NASA noted the short data record makes the interstellar origin hard to confirm.
Photo: Abraham Loeb and Frank H. Laukien (Galileo Project), CC BY 4.0
Sightings3 Dec 2021
A moving line of lights puzzled residents of Pathankot in Punjab and parts of Jammu and Kashmir. Indian media cited defence sources calling it a satellite and linked it to a batch of SpaceX Starlink satellites launched from Florida the day before.
Photo: Dktue, CC0
Government19 Oct 2021
In a University of Virginia Center for Politics talk with Larry Sabato, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he had spoken with Navy pilots whose radars locked onto unknown objects. He said no one knew what they were and hoped they were not an adversary's technology.
Photo: Bill Ingalls, Public domain
SightingsJun 2021
The SIGMA2 commission of France's aeronautics and astronautics association 3AF, drawing on former CNES, ESA, DGA and ONERA staff, released a progress report on unidentified aerospace phenomena days before the US intelligence report on UAP.
WhistleblowersDec 2020
Haim Eshed, who long headed Israel's defense space programs, told Yedioth Ahronoth that the U.S. and Israel were in contact with aliens and that a joint base existed on Mars. Israel Space Agency chair Isaac Ben-Israel said he went too far; NASA said it had found no signs of extraterrestrial life.
Sightings24 May 2019
A day after SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink satellites, a Dutch satellite tracker filmed them crossing the sky as a line of lights. The Dutch reporting site UFOmeldpunt got more than 150 reports, an early case of satellite trains being mistaken for UFOs.
Media15 Apr 2019
Harvard's Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb posted a paper arguing that a small meteor that hit the atmosphere near Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014, recorded in U.S. government fireball data, had an orbit showing it came from outside the solar system. The claim remains debated.
Photo: Aloeb, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings18 Dec 2018
A roughly 10 m meteor exploded over the Bering Sea off Kamchatka on Dec. 18, 2018. Infrasound stations logged it, but astronomers did not notice until March 2019, when NASA's JPL added it to its fireball database and it drew attention at a planetary science conference.
Photo: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team, Public domain
Sightings2 Jun 2018
The NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey spotted a small asteroid about eight hours before it struck the atmosphere over Botswana as a fireball. Searchers found a meteorite in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve on June 23, one of very few cases of an impact predicted in advance.
Photo: Tomruen, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings16 Jan 2018
Hundreds of people saw and filmed a bright flash over southeast Michigan. NASA said a small meteoroid exploded with about 10 tons of TNT energy; NOAA's GOES-16 caught the flash and the ground blast registered like a magnitude 2.0 quake.
Photo: Philipp R. Heck et al., CC BY 4.0
Sightings22 Dec 2017
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.
Photo: U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jim Araos, Public domain
Sightings29 Jun 2017
A NASA sounding rocket launched from Wallops before dawn released blue-green and red vapor tracers to test a new canister system. The glowing clouds were seen from New York to North Carolina, and NASA received nearly 2,000 reports and photos.
Photo: NASA/Terry Zaperach (Wallops Flight Facility), Public domain
