Culture and science
Scientific studies, academic projects, panels and surveys. 227 events, newest first.
WhistleblowersOct 2017
Luis Elizondo, who said he ran the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, left the Defense Department in October 2017, citing a lack of support for the work, and joined Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy.
Photo: Max Moszkowicz, CC BY 3.0
MediaAug 2017
To The Stars Academy's August 2017 SEC filing lists Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and Senate Intelligence Committee staff director, on its advisory board. He was presented with the team at its October launch.
Photo: Max Moszkowicz, CC BY 3.0
MediaJul 2017
In June 2017 the streaming site Gaia and journalist Jaime Maussan promoted a 'three-fingered' body said to come from Nazca, Peru. In July Peruvian scientists said they would file a complaint over altered ancient remains, with the Ministry of Culture and prosecutors to review.
Media14 Mar 2017
To The Stars Academy's 2017 SEC offering filing lists physicist Harold Puthoff, known for SRI remote viewing research, as a director from 14 March 2017 and its vice president for science and technology. The company later released Navy UAP videos.
Media26 Feb 2017
At the 89th Academy Awards, Arrival, Denis Villeneuve's film about linguists decoding visiting aliens, won for sound editing. It had eight nominations, including Best Picture, directing and adapted screenplay.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
MediaNov 2016
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, a first-contact story centered on a linguist trying to communicate with visiting aliens, opened in November 2016. It grossed more than $200 million worldwide and earned eight Academy Award nominations, winning for sound editing.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
Government25 Sep 2016
China's state news agency Xinhua reported the opening of the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in Guizhou, then the world's largest single-dish radio telescope. Chinese astronomers said its work would include studying possible interstellar communication signals.
Photo: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, Public domain
Media13 Oct 2015
The second Chapman University Survey of American Fears added paranormal beliefs, finding about 20 percent agreed aliens visited Earth in the ancient past and about 18 percent that they have come in modern times. Later waves of the survey tracked the same questions.
Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0
Sightings7 Sep 2015
A bright fireball crossed the sky over Bangkok around 8:40 am and was filmed by many dashboard cameras, prompting rumors of a downed aircraft. A Thai observatory astronomer said it was a meteor burning up, and officials in Nakhon Ratchasima called off a crash search.
Sightings2 Sep 2015
A night fireball filmed over Bingol province broke up and rained stones on the village of Saricicek. Scientists documented 343 stones, the first recorded fall of a howardite, a meteorite type linked to the asteroid Vesta.
Sightings10 Aug 2015
A volunteer group, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, released an analysis of the 2013 Aguadilla infrared video arguing a wind-borne object could not explain it. In 2025 AARO assessed with moderate confidence that the objects were sky lanterns.
Photo: Miguelpr91 at English Wikipedia, Public domain
Government8 Jul 2014
France's space agency CNES, through its UAP study unit GEIPAN, hosted a two-day international workshop in Paris on better ways to collect and analyze UAP reports. Scientists, gendarmerie and air force officials and outside researchers presented; GEIPAN published the papers and slides.
Photo: GEIPAN / Wizly-08, Public domain
GovernmentOct 2013
Peru's air force said it was reviving DIFAA, an office set up in 2001 to study anomalous aerial phenomena that had been dormant for about five years, citing a rise in reported sightings. Col. Julio Vucetich said it would pair air force staff with scientists and take public reports.
Photo: Lizet Morales Zaragoza, CC BY-SA 4.0
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
Military2012
Indian army border troops in Ladakh reported about 100 sightings of yellowish glowing objects drifting from the Chinese side over several months in 2012. Astronomers later sent by the army reportedly identified many as Jupiter and Venus, though earlier cases had been blamed on Chinese lanterns.
Photo: Stanzin1945, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings18 Jul 2011
Several people near Tata in southern Morocco reported a bright fireball that turned from yellow to green around 2 a.m. Stones recovered afterward were verified by meteorite scientists as coming from Mars, the first witnessed Martian meteorite fall since 1962.
Photo: the paleobear from Lontananza, Loreto, Peru, CC BY 2.0
Media19 Jun 2011
TNT premiered Falling Skies, an alien-occupation drama executive produced by Steven Spielberg, with Noah Wyle as a history professor leading resistance fighters. Variety reported the two-hour opener drew 5.9 million viewers, cable's top new series launch of the year so far.
Photo: starbright31, CC BY-SA 2.0
Sightings28 Oct 2010
Michigan Tech students in the university's SPIE chapter reported that the Paulding Light, a long-reported mystery light in the Upper Peninsula, is vehicle headlights on US-45. A telescope showed cars, and logged traffic times matched the sightings.
Photo: Flivver 99 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0
Skinwalker RanchJul 2010
Utah State University plant scientist Frank Salisbury's 1974 study of Uintah Basin UFO reports, written with local teacher Joseph Junior Hicks, was republished in an expanded 2010 edition that, according to Salt Lake Magazine, added interviews with neighbors of what became Skinwalker Ranch.
Photo: BLMUtah, Public domain
Sightings2010
Physicists G.S. Paiva and C.A. Taft proposed in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics that the Hessdalen lights are clusters of Coulomb crystals in a plasma made by radon decay ionizing dusty air. It is a theoretical model, not an observation.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings25 Sep 2009
Seven all-sky cameras of Western University's Southern Ontario Meteor Network recorded a fireball about 100 times brighter than the full Moon at 9:03 pm. Analysis pointed to the Niagara Peninsula, and a 46 g fragment was found on the hood of an SUV with a cracked windshield in Grimsby.
Sightings20 Nov 2008
A fireball seen by thousands from Edmonton to Saskatchewan was caught on widely shared video. A University of Calgary team traced it to a field near Lloydminster and recovered more than 100 meteorites, a record-setting Canadian fall.
Photo: Dale Nosko, CC0
Media6 May 2008
Political scientists Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall argued in the journal Political Theory that a taboo keeps states and science from taking UFOs seriously, and that this taboo serves modern sovereignty, which is organized around humans alone.
Photo: Rion Hiun, CC0
WhistleblowersMar 2007
Former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who mocked the 1997 Phoenix Lights at a staged news conference, said he had seen a large craft that night and believed it was not of this world. An astronomer quoted by AP traced sightings that night to flares dropped by A-10 aircraft.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Close encounters2007
Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill's niece, published 'Captured!' with New Page Books. It retells the 1961 Hill abduction claim, drawing on the Hills' papers, letters and audiotapes, which Marden held as conservator, and compares their hypnosis sessions.
Photo: SMG2019, CC BY-SA 4.0
