Cases and themes
Photographs, films and videos, from the 1950s to the Navy infrared footage. 242 events, newest first.
Media11 Jun 1982
Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial opened across the U.S. after closing the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Its story of a gentle stranded alien befriended by a boy became a huge box office success and cemented a benevolent image of aliens in popular culture.
Media1980
Sunn Classic Pictures released Hangar 18, directed by James L. Conway, a drama in which the Air Force hides a crashed saucer at a Texas base while the White House chief of staff keeps it quiet before an election. Its title echoes a claim made at a 1974 symposium about a stored crashed craft.
Sightings31 Dec 1978
A TV crew aboard a Safe Air Argosy cargo flight filmed lights off the Kaikoura coast, with returns reported on Wellington radar and the plane's own radar. An Air Force inquiry concluded natural but unusual phenomena; UN-post files released in 2021 show DSIR scientists left them unidentified.
Photo: Richard Goring, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media3 Apr 1978
At the 50th Academy Awards, Vilmos Zsigmond won the cinematography Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film also received a Special Achievement Award for sound effects editing, credited to Frank E. Warner.
Photo: Attilaphoto at Hungarian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media15 Nov 1977
Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind had its premiere in New York. Its title uses a term coined by Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who was credited as a technical adviser. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 2007.
Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 4.0
MilitaryOct 1977
After residents of Colares and nearby Para coastal towns reported lights in the sky, a Brazilian Air Force team from Belem logged sightings and took photographs into 1978. The Air Force says the files went to the National Archives; no explanation covers every report.
Government25 Jul 1976
NASA's Viking 1 orbiter photographed a mesa in Mars's Cydonia region whose shadows looked like a human face; NASA's 1976 caption called it an illusion. NASA says geologists attribute the landform to natural processes, and Mars Global Surveyor imaged it at ten times the resolution in 1998.
Photo: Viking 1, NASA, Public domain
Media18 Mar 1976
Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth premiered at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, with David Bowie in his first major film role as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien visiting Earth.
Photo: Jean-Luc, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media24 Mar 1975
Saturday Review Press/Dutton published John Keel's account of his 1966-67 investigation of 'Mothman' sightings, strange lights and visitors in West Virginia. Keel framed the events as 'ultra-terrestrial' rather than extraterrestrial; the book was loosely adapted into a 2002 film.
Photo: Jacket design by Peter Parnell, Public domain
Media21 Mar 1975
Walt Disney Productions' 'Escape to Witch Mountain', directed by John Hough, opened in Los Angeles. Two orphans with psychic powers learn they came to Earth by spaceship from a dying planet, and the film ends with a spaceship lifting them away.
Close encounters1975
Swiss farmer Eduard 'Billy' Meier said in 1975 that visitors from the Pleiades had landed and spoken with him, and he released photos of their 'beamships'. Critics, notably Kal Korff, argued the craft were small models, and most ufologists rejected his claims.
MediaOct 1974
NBC aired the TV movie The Disappearance of Flight 412, starring Glenn Ford. Two Air Force fighters vanish while intercepting radar UFOs, and the surviving crew is held at a remote base and pressed to deny what they saw. It dramatized the idea of an official UFO cover-up.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Media1974
Robert Emenegger's documentary, hosted by Rod Serling, presented a possible 1964 alien landing at Holloman AFB. Emenegger later said officials had promised him real footage that never arrived, so the film used illustrations; only his account supports the promise.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Sightings17 Oct 1973
Falkville, Alabama police chief Jeff Greenhaw said he answered a call about a UFO in a field and found a tall figure in a foil-like suit, which he photographed before it outran his patrol car. The account rests on his word; he faced ridicule and resigned weeks later.
Photo: Brian Stansberry, CC BY 4.0
Sightings10 Aug 1972
A meteoroid perhaps the size of a small truck grazed Earth's upper atmosphere in daylight, seen from Utah to Alberta and photographed over the Tetons, then skipped back into space. It is a classic example of a natural object that can look like a craft.
Close encounters1972
Northwestern astronomer J. Allen Hynek, long a scientific consultant to the Air Force's UFO projects, published The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. It sorted reports into close encounters of the first, second and third kind, a scheme later echoed in Spielberg's 1977 film.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Sightings4 Sep 1971
A Costa Rican government mapping aircraft at 10,000 feet photographed a disc-shaped image over Lago de Cote that no one aboard saw; the frames before and after did not show it. Researchers Richard Haines and Jacques Vallee analyzed copies in 1989 and could not identify it.
Photo: Sergio Loaiza, Public domain
Media26 Apr 1970
Harald Reinl's West German documentary Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, built on Erich von Daniken's ancient-astronaut thesis, premiered aboard a Lufthansa 747 from Frankfurt to New York. Scholars reject the thesis as pseudoscience, yet the film drew an Oscar nomination.
Photo: Michal Manas, CC BY 3.0
Sightings18 Aug 1968
Emil Barnea, then an Army employee, reported photographing a disc-shaped object over the Hoia-Baciu forest outside Cluj around midday, with companions present. The photos became Romania's best-known UFO images; their authenticity has been debated and no official analysis is known.
Photo: Lajsikonik, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media2 Apr 1968
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered at the Uptown Theater in Washington. The film signals alien intelligence only through a black monolith rather than showing aliens. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1991.
Photo: Warner Brothers, Public domain
MediaJan 1968
Frank Telford's 'The Bamboo Saucer' opened in Providence, Rhode Island, in late January 1968. In the film, a U.S. team and a Soviet team searching mainland China for a reported UFO find the craft hidden in a ruined church and join forces against Chinese troops.
MediaNov 1967
Hammer released Roy Ward Baker's film of Nigel Kneale's serial Quatermass and the Pit, titled Five Million Years to Earth in the U.S. Workers extending the London Underground uncover an ancient Martian spacecraft. The story turns on Martians having visited Earth millions of years ago.
Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Public domain
Government20 Feb 1967
Condon and four committee members visited the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, which agreed to give technical help on UFO photos as long as the work was never identified as CIA work. In May 1967 NPIC briefed them on an analysis that debunked photos from Zanesville, Ohio.
Media1967
Alfredo B. Crevenna's film Santo el Enmascarado de Plata vs la Invasion de los Marcianos pits the masked wrestler Santo against Martians who land in Mexico and demand that humanity give up nuclear weapons. It was one of many Mexican lucha libre films with science-fiction plots.
SightingsSep 1966
Gemini 11 astronauts Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon reported and photographed a large tumbling object on their 18th orbit. NORAD identified it as the Soviet Proton 3 satellite, and the Condon study's review of the photos suggested several pieces of that launch.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
