Cases and themes
Photographs, films and videos, from the 1950s to the Navy infrared footage. 242 events, newest first.
Media27 May 1953
Universal's first 3-D film, directed by Jack Arnold from a Ray Bradbury story, premiered in Los Angeles. Its stranded visitors want only to repair their ship and leave, a contrast to the hostile invaders of other saucer-era films.
Photo: Universal Pictures, Public domain
Media9 Apr 1953
William Cameron Menzies' color film, distributed by 20th Century-Fox, premiered in Detroit. A boy sees a saucer land behind his house and finds Martians controlling townspeople, including his parents, through devices implanted in their necks.
Photo: Twentieth Century-Fox, Public domain
GovernmentOct 1952
An FBI memo from V. P. Keay to A. H. Belmont relayed Air Intelligence's view that about 90 percent of saucer reports were explainable but a small share of credible ones were not, citing a film studied by the Air Technical Intelligence Center and officials weighing 'interplanetary ships'.
Military20 Sep 1952
During the NATO exercise Mainbrace, a U.S. reporter aboard a carrier in the North Sea photographed a silver sphere that pilots and deck crew were watching. Naval Intelligence found no ship that had launched a balloon, and witnesses split over whether it was one.
Photo: AFC J.J. Swartz, U.S. Navy, Public domain
Military1 Aug 1952
An Air Defense Command radar near Bellefontaine tracked a fast target north of Dayton, and two Wright-Patterson F-86 pilots photographed a silver sphere on gun-camera film. Blue Book first carried it as unknown, then attributed it to a jet and a weather balloon.
Photo: USAF photo 82042 AC, Public domain
Military2 Jul 1952
Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse filmed a group of bright points milling in the sky north of Tremonton while driving with his family. The Robertson Panel concluded the images were sunlight off seagulls; the Condon study found the film consistent with birds.
Photo: Project Blue Book, Public domain
Military1952
After the Air Force photo lab failed to identify the Tremonton, Utah film, Navy photo analysts at Anacostia spent about two months on it and told the Robertson Panel the lights were not aircraft or birds. The panel rejected this and concluded the images were sunlight on seagulls.
Military1952
Project Blue Book planned cameras fitted with diffraction gratings to split UFO light into a spectrum and tell meteors, aircraft and balloons apart. Chief Edward Ruppelt later wrote that in tests they could not usefully photograph a bright flare at 450 yards, but were sent out anyway.
Photo: US Air Force, Public domain
Sightings25 Aug 1951
Texas Tech professors reported formations of soft glowing lights over Lubbock, and student Carl Hart Jr. photographed a formation days later. Blue Book's Edward Ruppelt investigated; birds reflecting new streetlights was the main lead, but he reached no firm conclusion on the photos.
Media27 Apr 1951
United Artists released The Man from Planet X, an Edgar G. Ulmer film in which a visitor from an approaching planet lands its spaceship on the moor of a remote Scottish island. It was one of the earliest U.S. features about a landed alien craft.
Photo: film trailer screenshot (United Artists), Public domain
Media1951
Twentieth Century Fox released Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which the visitor Klaatu lands a flying saucer in Washington with his robot Gort to warn humanity against violence. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1995.
Photo: "Copyright 1951 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. ", Public domain
Sightings15 Aug 1950
Baseball manager Nick Mariana filmed two bright lights crossing the sky over Great Falls on 16mm film. The 1953 Robertson Panel attributed them to sunlight off two Air Force interceptors; the 1969 Condon study left the case unexplained, though it said aircraft could not be ruled out.
Photo: parkerdonaldmusic, Public domain
Sightings11 May 1950
Paul Trent took two photos of a disc-shaped object his wife Evelyn saw over their farm near McMinnville; a local paper and then Life ran them. A Condon study analyst found them consistent with a real distant object but could not rule out fabrication; skeptics call them a hoax.
Photo: Paul Trent, Public domain
Media4 Jan 1950
Mikel Conrad's independent film The Flying Saucer opened in New York; general release followed Jan. 10. In it an agent races Russian agents to a saucer hidden in Alaska. The AFI Catalog calls it the first saucer feature and found none of the real saucer footage Conrad claimed in its print.
Government16 Feb 1949
Los Alamos lab staff met with FBI, Atomic Energy Commission and military representatives to discuss green fireballs seen over New Mexico. The meeting judged them no serious threat and led to Project Twinkle, a camera watch that was never fully set up and ended about two years later.
Military5 Dec 1948
From late 1948, pilots, security staff and others near Albuquerque and Los Alamos reported bright green fireballs. Meteor expert Lincoln LaPaz doubted they were ordinary meteors; the Air Force's Project Twinkle camera effort photographed nothing and faded out.
Sightings4 Jul 1947
Off-duty Coast Guard yeoman Frank Ryman photographed what he called a white saucer from his Lake City home in Seattle. Newspapers ran it the next day as one of the first photos of the 1947 wave; analysts later dismissed it as a weather balloon.
