Culture and science
Astronaut reports, NASA statements and the NASA UAP study team. 88 events, newest first.
Sightings6 Feb 2017
A bright green fireball seen by hundreds of people around Lake Michigan at 1:25 a.m. CST was identified by NASA as an asteroid fragment of at least 600 pounds that broke apart over the lake. Weather radar tracked falling fragments, and police dash cams recorded it.
Sightings10 Nov 2016
A metal cylinder about 4.5 m long fell on a jade-mining site in Hpakant, Kachin State, and a smaller piece with Chinese writing pierced a house roof; no one was hurt. State media said it might be satellite or missile parts, and experts linked it to a Chinese Long March 11 launched the day before.
Photo: Arezarni, CC BY-SA 3.0
MediaOct 2016
Emails to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, published by WikiLeaks, included messages from musician Tom DeLonge seeking a private meeting on a 'sensitive topic' and from astronaut Edgar Mitchell on extraterrestrial disclosure. Whether any meeting took place is unclear.
Photo: NHD-INFO, CC BY 2.0
MilitaryOct 2014
A small object launched with Russian military satellites in May 2014, first catalogued by U.S. trackers as debris, was later seen changing orbit. A British analyst identified it as Kosmos 2499 and speculated it might be an inspector satellite; the report carried no Russian explanation.
Government8 Apr 2014
Bright spots in Curiosity Navigation Camera images from April 2-3, 2014 drew online claims of a light on Mars. NASA said the likely causes were cosmic-ray hits on the detector or sunlight glinting off rock, noting such spots appear nearly every week.
Media12 Mar 2012
A NASA solar observatory sequence showing a planet-sized dark sphere apparently tethered to the sun spread online as a UFO refueling. NASA Goddard scientists Joseph Gurman and C. Alex Young said it was an erupting prominence seen beneath a filament channel.
Photo: NASA/SDO, Public domain
Sightings28 Feb 2010
An exceptionally bright fireball crossed eastern Slovakia at night with loud explosive sounds. Clouds blocked the science camera networks, but three security cameras in Hungary filmed it, letting researchers compute its path and orbit and recover meteorites west of Kosice.
Photo: Jon Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0
Sightings8 Oct 2009
Residents near Bone in South Sulawesi reported a loud blast and fireball. NASA's NEO office said an undetected asteroid of about 5-10 m exploded in the atmosphere with roughly 50 kilotons of energy, recorded by 11 international infrasound stations.
Photo: Midori, CC BY 3.0
Sightings15 Feb 2009
A daylight fireball with a sonic boom was seen across central Texas days after the Iridium-Cosmos satellite collision. The FAA first suggested space debris, then said it was a natural object, and U.S. Strategic Command said it was unrelated to the collision.
Photo: Jon Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0
Sightings7 Oct 2008
Asteroid 2008 TC3 was found on Oct. 6, 2008 and predicted to hit within hours; it exploded over northern Sudan as forecast. A KLM crew over Chad saw the flash, satellites recorded it, and meteorites were later recovered from the desert, the first impact predicted in advance.
Photo: Peter Jenniskens, Public domain
WhistleblowersJul 2008
Apollo 14 moonwalker Edgar Mitchell told the UK station Kerrang! Radio that Earth had been visited and that the Roswell crash was real, citing briefings from unnamed sources. NASA replied that it does not track UFOs, is not covering anything up and does not share his view.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Whistleblowers12 Nov 2007
A panel of former pilots and officials from seven countries, moderated by former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, described encounters with unidentified objects at the National Press Club and urged the U.S. to reopen official UFO investigations through the Air Force or NASA.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
GovernmentOct 2007
Settling journalist Leslie Kean's federal FOIA lawsuit, NASA agreed to search its archives again for records on the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, incident and to pay her legal fees. The court-supervised search ended in 2009 without resolving what fell; many files were missing.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Sightings20 Jul 2007
Cameras of Australia's Desert Fireball Network photographed a fireball over the Nullarbor Plain, letting researchers compute its path and orbit. Searchers found the first stones near the predicted spot in October 2008; the rock proved an unusual basaltic meteorite.
Photo: Rmhowie, CC BY-SA 4.0
MediaApr 2007
Videos posted to YouTube in April 2007 claimed to show a secret 'Apollo 20' mission finding an alien craft and a body on the Moon. No Apollo 20 ever flew (the mission was canceled), and French artist Thierry Speth later said he made the videos as fiction.
Media2005
In a 2005 Science Channel documentary, Aldrin described a light that seemed to travel alongside Apollo 11. He later told the AP the interview was edited to omit his explanation: most likely sunlight off a panel shed by the spacecraft. The 1969 crew debrief records the sighting.
Photo: Neil A. Armstrong, Public domain
Sightings15 Oct 2003
China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, said in a 2016 interview that during his 2003 Shenzhou 5 flight he heard a knocking like a hammer on an iron bucket that ground teams could not reproduce. Later crews reported similar sounds; proposed causes include thermal flexing.
Photo: Dyor, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings25 Sep 2002
A bright bolide exploded about 30 km above the Vitim River near Bodaybo, seen by residents and detected by U.S. satellites. Russian Academy of Sciences expeditions found felled trees and tiny spherules but no craters or meteorite fragments.
Photo: Serj Kras, CC BY-SA 3.0
Military6 Jun 2002
U.S. early-warning satellites saw a small asteroid explode over the Mediterranean with an estimated 20 to 30 kilotons of energy. Brig. Gen. Simon Worden later told a House subcommittee that a similar blast over India or Pakistan, then in a nuclear standoff, could have been mistaken for an attack.
Photo: US Air Force, Public domain
Sightings23 Mar 2001
Russia deliberately deorbited the Mir space station into the South Pacific. Witnesses in Fiji described white fireballs streaking across the sky and sonic booms, a planned reentry that produced a vivid light show rather than an unexplained event.
Photo: GW (Wikimedia Commons user), Public domain
WhistleblowersAug 2000
Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper's memoir Leap of Faith, written with Bruce Henderson, says that in 1957 at Edwards AFB camera crew filmed a saucer-shaped craft landing, and that the film was sent to the Pentagon on orders and never heard of again. No official record of it has been confirmed.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Sightings6 May 2000
A daytime fireball over the Czech Republic was recorded by videographers, seismographs, an infrasound station and satellites, and meteorites were recovered. Scientists called it one of the best documented falls ever, a benchmark for analyzing bright sky events.
Photo: Czech Wikipedia user Packa, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings18 Jan 2000
A morning fireball brighter than daylight was seen across the Yukon and northern British Columbia. U.S. defense satellites recorded a 2-3 kiloton explosion, and a local guide found carbonaceous meteorites on the ice of Tagish Lake a week later.
Photo: Mike Zolensky, NASA JSC, Public domain
Sightings2000
Former NASA research scientist Richard Haines wrote NARCAP's first technical report, 'Aviation Safety in America: A Previously Neglected Factor', arguing that pilot encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena are under-reported and can affect flight safety.
Sightings1999
The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena began collecting pilot and aircrew UAP reports as an aviation-safety matter. Its first technical report, by former NASA Ames scientist Richard Haines in 2000, argued pilots under-report sightings for fear of ridicule.
