Some well-known UFO incidents
1 The Mantell incident resulted in the crash and death of 25-year-old pilot Captain Thomas Mantell, on January 7, 1948. Mantell was in pursuit of a UFO after Godman Field at Fort Knox, Kentucky, received a report from the Kentucky Highway Patrol of an unusual flying object near Maysville, Kentucky. Reports of sightings of a circular object also came in from Owensboro and Irvington in Kentucky. Reports put out by Project Sign (later known as Project Blue Book, USAF’s UFO investigation project headed by Edward J. Ruppelt) suggested Mantell had been chasing the planet Venus, which was of course ridiculed. The explanation was later changed to a Skyhook balloon.
2 In 1946 and 1947, there were numerous reports of “ghost rockets” over Scandinavian countries, primarily Sweden. One USAF top secret document from 1948 stated that Swedish Air Force Intelligence informed them that some of their investigators felt that the reported objects were not only real but could not be explained as having earthly origins.
3 Three professors from Texas Technical College spotted 20-30 lights flying in a V shape over Lubbock, Texas, in 1951. It was photographed by a student of the college, which appeared in Life magazine, but no explanation of the sightings has been found.
4 On December 9, 1965, a large, brilliant fireball was seen by thousands in at least six US states and Ontario, Canada. It streaked over the Detroit, Michigan/Windsor, Ontario area, and reportedly dropped hot metal debris over Michigan and northern Ohio, starting some grass fires and causing sonic booms in western Pennsylvania. While many brushed it off as a meteor, eyewitnesses in the small village of Kecksburg, 30 miles south-east of Pittsburgh, claimed something crashed in the woods and also reported a lot of military activity in the area. The military claimed they found nothing, while some believed it may have been debris from Kosmos 96, a Soviet satellite. However, in a 1991 report, US Space Command concluded that Kosmos 96 crashed in Canada at 3.18am on December 9 about 13 hours before the fireball was recorded.
5 The reported abduction of Barney and Betty Hill from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1961 is another oft-mentioned story. The couple had reportedly been kidnapped by aliens, after a flying saucer followed their car, and then subjected to an intimate physical examination. The story gained a lot of interest and publicity, especially after both held up to their story even under hypnosis.
6 In 1973, co-workers Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker claimed that they were abducted by aliens while fishing near Pascagoula, Mississippi. This is among the best-known claims of alien abduction.
7 From February 21 to late April 1973, the Piedmont (Missouri) police received over 500 reports of UFO sightings. Among them were high school basketball coach Bone, two team managers and three players who saw a “bright shaft of light beaming down out of the sky” 20 miles south of Piedmont. They saw the UFO “200 yards off the road hovering over an open field” but couldn’t determine the size or shape because it was dark. They saw four lights like portholes: red, green, amber and white, which after a while suddenly went directly up in the air with absolutely no noise and disappeared over a hill.
8 In September 19, 1976 a radar and visual UFO sighting was made over Tehran. During the incident, two F-4 Phantom II jet interceptors reportedly lost instrumentation and communication as they approached, one of them even suffered temporary weapons systems failure. It remains one of the best-documented military encounters with UFOs, and many senior Iranian military officers have gone on record stating they believed that the object was not of terrestrial origin.
9 The Rendlesham Forest incident refers to a series of sightings of unexplained lights and landing of a craft or multiple craft of unknown origin in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England, in late December 1980. Dozens of USAF personnel — the area was being used by USAF at that time — were eyewitnesses and this ranks amongst the best-known UFO events worldwide. It is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s Roswell”.
10 Between 1989 and 1990, around 13,500 people claimed to have observed large, silent, low-flying black triangles in the skies above Belgium. There were 2,600 written statements.
21st century UFO sightings
The UFO Sightings Desk Reference, compiled by Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller Costa, records 121,036 UFO sightings in the United States between 2001 and the end of 2015.
Compiled by Chandreyee Chatterjee
• Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman claimed to have seen falling debris and “men in black” who threatened them after a sighting in Maury Island in 1947. Dahl later retracted his statements. It is believed now to have been a hoax.
• Ed Walters, a building contractor, in 1987 claimed to have seen a small UFO flying near his home and took some photographs of the craft. He documented the sightings over three weeks and took many photographs. These sightings were known as the Gulf Breeze UFO incident. But three years later when new residents moved into the Walters’ home, they found a model of a UFO that looked a lot like the one in Walters’ photographs!
