Cases and themes
Photographs, films and videos, from the 1950s to the Navy infrared footage. 242 events, newest first.
MediaFeb 1996
After the TSS-1R tethered satellite broke loose from shuttle Columbia on STS-75, shuttle camera footage showed the tether amid many small drifting lights. UFO promoters later called it a swarm of craft; NASA and skeptics said the lights were debris and ice lit by sunlight.
Photo: NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain
Media28 Aug 1995
Fox broadcast a special built around Ray Santilli's black-and-white film said to show a 1947 alien autopsy, hosted by Jonathan Frakes. In 2006 Santilli admitted the film was a staged recreation, while still claiming it was based on genuine footage he had seen; no such footage has been produced.
Media28 Oct 1994
MGM released Roland Emmerich's Stargate, starring Kurt Russell and James Spader, which builds on the ancient-astronaut idea that an alien posed as an Egyptian god. It launched a long-running TV and film franchise.
Photo: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0
Close encounters16 Sep 1994
About 60 children at the Ariel School outside Harare said they saw a craft land near the playground and figures beside it. A BBC crew filmed interviews days later, and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack interviewed pupils. Skeptics cite mass suggestion after a rocket re-entry fireball days earlier.
MediaJul 1994
Showtime aired Roswell, a TV film directed by Jeremy Kagan with Kyle MacLachlan as an Air Force intelligence officer revisiting the 1947 events and Martin Sheen in support. It dramatized claims that a flying saucer was recovered and the story covered up.
Photo: Roswell Daily Record, Public domain
Close encounters1994
Weeks after pupils at the Ariel School reported a craft and beings in September 1994, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack went to the school with a filmmaker and recorded interviews with the children. The footage later anchored documentaries on the case.
Media20 Nov 1993
The Sci-Fi Channel aired 'Official Denial', its first made-for-TV movie, filmed in Australia. Parker Stevenson plays a man whose abduction claims are dismissed until a secret government team shoots down an alien craft and holds its sole survivor.
Photo: ABC Television, Public domain
MediaMar 1993
Director Robert Lieberman's film Fire in the Sky, starring D.B. Sweeney as Travis Walton, opened in March 1993. It dramatized Walton's claim that he vanished for five days in 1975 after a UFO encounter in Arizona, and the suspicion that fell on his co-workers.
Photo: SMG2019, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings9 Oct 1992
A bright, fragmenting fireball crossed several eastern U.S. states and was caught on at least 16 independent videos before a meteorite struck a parked car in Peekskill, New York. Scientists used the videos to reconstruct its orbit, a well-documented natural object in the sky.
Photo: Wknight94, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings11 Jul 1991
During the total solar eclipse over Mexico City, a number of residents reported seeing a strange hovering craft, in what has been called one of the largest mass UFO sightings; reports also came from other Mexican cities. A skeptic suggested viewers without eye protection were seeing spots.
Photo: Claudio Lelli 2, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings20 May 1991
Soviet TV's Vremya newscast on 21 May 1991 showed a glowing object filmed near the Mir station the previous evening. Cosmonaut Musa Manarov, who was filming a docking, said he saw it come off the spacecraft; the report said its nature was unclear.
Photo: UR3IRS at Russian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings7 May 1991
Cameras of the European Fireball Network photographed a very bright bolide over what is now the Czech Republic. Early searches found nothing; after a 2011 reanalysis moved the predicted impact area, researchers recovered small meteorites there, about 20 years after the fall.
Sightings4 Aug 1990
Two men photographed a large diamond-shaped object with a jet nearby near Calvine in the Scottish Highlands. The Daily Record passed the pictures to the Ministry of Defence, which kept them. A surviving print held by a retired RAF press officer was made public by researcher David Clarke in 2022.
Photo: Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0
Sightings1990
A photo said to show a lighted triangle over Petit-Rechain became the best-known image of the Belgian wave and was analyzed by the Royal Military Academy and others. Its author later admitted it was a hoax.
Photo: J.S. Henrardi, Public domain
Media1989
Philippe Mora's film Communion, adapted by Whitley Strieber from his bestselling 1987 account of alleged abduction experiences, starred Christopher Walken as Strieber. The Deseret News called it a disappointment despite solid lead acting; it put Strieber's visitors on cinema screens.
Photo: John Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1989
Dean Alioto made UFO Abduction, a low-budget found-footage film of a family menaced by aliens. Copies circulated without credits and were shown at a UFO convention, and some viewers treated it as genuine; Alioto later remade it for UPN in 1998.
Media1989
Fox turned the 1988 film Alien Nation into a weekly police series about a human detective and his Newcomer partner, a thinly veiled satire on race relations. Fox dropped it after one season in 1990; TV movies followed from 1994.
Photo: Keith McDuffee from Northborough, MA, USA, CC BY 2.0
Military10 Nov 1988
The Pentagon officially confirmed a squadron of F-117A stealth aircraft based in Nevada and released a single blurry photo. The angular jets had flown for years only at night from the Tonopah Test Range, an example of the secret aircraft often raised as explanations for some sightings.
Photo: USAF Technical Sgt. Marvin Lynchard, Public domain
Close encounters1987
Horror novelist Whitley Strieber published Communion, a first-person account of beings that he said probed him at his cabin in upstate New York. The book became a bestseller and a 1989 film, and made Strieber a widely known and widely doubted figure.
Photo: RobertoTenore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1 Dec 1986
Georgiy Daneliya's Mosfilm satire Kin-dza-dza!, in which two Muscovites are carried by an alien device to a desert planet called Pluke, opened in Soviet cinemas and became a cult comedy.
Photo: Alexey Yushenkov/, CC BY-SA 3.0
Whistleblowers1986
Ralph Noyes, a retired senior Ministry of Defence official, wrote to the MoD in 1986 that in 1970 he had been shown RAF Venom gun-camera film of UFOs at a secret screening in MoD Main Building. The letter is among MoD UFO files released by The National Archives.
Media1986
Cannon released Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1953 film Invaders from Mars, written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, with Hunter Carson, Karen Black and Louise Fletcher. As in the original, a boy sees a saucer land and aliens take over the minds of the adults around him.
Photo: Dark Attsios, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media21 Jun 1985
Twentieth Century Fox released Ron Howard's Cocoon, in which visitors from the planet Antarea retrieve cocoons off St. Petersburg, Florida, and residents of a retirement community are rejuvenated by them. Don Ameche won a supporting-actor Oscar and the film won for visual effects.
Media1983
Mike Gray's low-budget New World Pictures film Wavelength follows a woman who traces telepathic cries to child-like aliens held at a military installation in the Los Angeles hills. In 1985 critics said Starman borrowed its spherical spaceship.
Media12 Oct 1982
PBS's NOVA broadcast 'The Case of the UFOs', which its listing presents as a scientific television inquiry sorting genuine reports from fiction and hoaxes. The program drew on film and eyewitness testimony, astronauts among them, and weighed arguments on both sides.
