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September 19, 1961. Betty and Barney Hill were driving home to Portsmouth through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Near Lancaster, Betty noticed a bright light near the Moon. It stayed with them. South of Indian Head, a huge, silent craft descended toward their car and hovered 80 to 100 feet above the road. Barney stepped out with binoculars. Behind a row of windows, figures were watching him.

Nevada. March 1989. A car sits in the dark about 5 miles up the Groom Lake road. Inside are Bob Lazar and his friends. Lazar says the tests happen on Wednesday nights. A bright light rises above the mountains. It jumps. It stops dead and hovers. Then it settles slowly back behind the ridge.

Rendlesham Forest is often called "Britain's Roswell." It is the rare UFO case backed by an official memo from a senior military officer, a real-time audio tape made during the event, written statements from the airmen, and an independent police report.

July 8, 1947. At noon, Roswell Army Air Field announced that it had come into possession of a flying saucer. The Roswell Daily Record put it on the front page. RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.

1994. Uintah County, Utah. Terry and Gwen Sherman moved onto a ranch south of Fort Duchesne with their two children. By mid-1996 they said strange activity had gone on for over 15 months. A small boxlike craft with a white light. A 40-foot-long object. A ship comparable in size to several football fields. Lights emerging from orange, circular doorways that seemed to appear in midair.

November 1944. The Rhine valley, north of Strasbourg. A Beaufighter of the US 415th Night Fighter Squadron flies through the dark. Then the lights appear. Eight or ten of them in a row. Orange balls of fire, moving at a terrific speed. The pilot, Edward Schlueter, turns toward them. They vanish. Then they reappear far off.

October 4, 1967. Late at night on Highway 3 in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia. Laurie Wickens, 17, was driving with four friends when four orange lights flashed in sequence above the sea. Then they dove at a 45-degree angle toward the water. Something stayed afloat, glowing, about half a mile offshore. Wickens ran to a phone booth and reported a plane crash.

December 29, 1980. About 9 p.m. on a country road in the Piney Woods of East Texas. Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and seven-year-old Colby Landrum were driving home to Dayton. Then a bright light appeared in the sky.

January 8, 2008. Early evening in Erath County, Texas. Steve Allen, a private pilot of more than 30 years, stood at a campfire near Selden with two friends. Then the lights came. They stretched about a mile long and a half mile wide. There was no sound. The lights changed shape, split, and left at a speed Allen put at 3,000 mph.

14 May 2008. The Ministry of Defence began to open its UFO files. For more than 50 years its UFO desk had collected the nation's sightings. Now those papers were going to The National Archives at Kew, and online. A bright, circular object over an airfield near England's east coast. A diamond hovering over Perthshire. Two orange balls above a Coventry garden. Some 11,000 sighting reports, with drawings and photographs, came out in tranches over five years.

Tuesday, 28 January 1975. A one-armed Swiss man named Eduard "Billy" Meier walked into the Frecht nature reserve near Hinwil. At 14:15 he took his first photograph. A disc came shooting out of the clouds, slowed, and curved toward him with a very soft buzzing. Then it touched down in the clearing, completely silently.

June 1764. A young woman tending cattle in the Mercoire Forest near Langogne saw a beast come at her. "Like a wolf, yet not a wolf." Her herd defended her.

Cova da Iria, Portugal. 13 October 1917. Rain had soaked the crowd since mid-morning. Three children had promised a miracle, and tens of thousands had come to see it.

Enfield, North London. Late August 1977. In a council house at 284 Green Street, a chest of drawers slid about 18 inches across a bedroom floor. Nobody was touching it. Peggy Hodgson pushed it back and felt it resist.

13 December 1973. Morning, in the crater of Puy de Lassolas, a dormant volcano near Clermont-Ferrand. Mist hangs over the ground. Claude Vorilhon, a 27-year-old motoring journalist, sees a flashing light in the fog. Then something like a bell of shiny metal comes down. Slowly. Without a sound.

1817. A cornfield on the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee. John Bell raised his gun at an animal that looked like a dog with the head of a rabbit. He fired several times. It vanished. That evening, the knocking began.

24 June 1981. About 6 pm, on a hillside above Medjugorje in Herzegovina. Ivanka Ivanković, 15, saw the shimmering silhouette of a woman bathed in a brilliant light. She held a little child in her arms. She said nothing. She beckoned the young people closer.

July 25, 1976. Viking 1 is circling Mars, photographing the Cydonia region to find a landing site for Viking 2. Frame 035A72 comes back with something among the eroded mesas. Eyes. A nose. A mouth. A human head, 1.5 kilometres across.

Thursday, 11 February 1858. Bernadette Soubirous, 14, the daughter of a poor miller's family, stood by the Gave de Pau outside Lourdes. She heard a sound like a gust of wind. The trees were quite still. In the grotto of Massabielle she saw a lady dressed in white, with a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot.

March 31, 1848. A rented cottage in Hydesville, New York. For about two weeks the Fox family had been hearing knocking. That evening Kate Fox, about twelve, clapped her hands. "Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do." The raps answered with the same number of knocks.

July 19, 1952. 11:40 p.m. At Washington National Airport, controller Edward Nugent watched seven blips appear on his radar scope. No known aircraft were in the area. The objects followed no flight path. Senior controller Harry G. Barnes knew at once that a very strange situation existed.

December 31, 1982. Shortly before midnight, a retired New York City police officer looked south from his home and saw a V-shaped group of very bright lights. It was the first of thousands of reports. Over the next few years, people across Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess counties described the same thing. A shape as big as a football field. Brilliant white, red and green lights. Absolutely no sound.

July 19, 1946. 11:45 in the morning. Knut Lindbäck and Beda Persson were haymaking on the shore of Lake Kölmjärv in Norrbotten, northern Sweden. A humming sound came from the sky. Lindbäck thought it was an airplane and looked up. Instead he saw an ashen-gray, rocket-like device, about two meters long, diving toward the lake. It struck the water. A tall column of water rose, then another.

30 June 1908. Breakfast time at the Vanavara trading post in Siberia. S. Semenov was sitting by his house, facing north, when the sky split in two. Fire spread high and wide over the forest. The heat was so fierce it felt as if his shirt was on fire. Then a thump. A blast threw him a few metres, and the earth shook.

November 29, 1989. Early evening, near Eupen in eastern Belgium. Two gendarmes on patrol saw a powerful light illuminate the ground from the sky. Above the field hung a dark, flat triangle. Three blinding white lights at its corners. A red light pulsing at its centre. Almost no sound.

October 11, 1973. Pascagoula, Mississippi. Two shipyard workers, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, were fishing on the west bank of the Pascagoula River as dusk fell. Then came a buzzing sound. An oblong craft with a blue light hovered just above the ground behind them. Three beings floated out. Wrinkled grey skin. Long arms ending in claw-like hands. They carried the men inside.

January 7, 1948. Godman Field, Fort Knox, Kentucky. Early afternoon. The tower crew found something in the sky. Round and white. Visible through thin cirrus. The base commander studied it through binoculars and called it "very white," about one fourth the size of the full moon. Nobody could identify it.

June 21, 1947. About two in the afternoon. Harold Dahl was working the East Passage of Puget Sound off Maury Island, with his 15-year-old son and two crewmen aboard. Above them, six very large doughnut-shaped craft circled. One sank toward the water, unsteady. Then it began to spew material from its center. Sheets of light white metal fluttered down like newspapers. Dark, hot rock followed. Dahl said his son was hurt and his dog was killed.

Thursday, 21 August 1879. Knock, County Mayo. Heavy rain falls on a small parish church. Then, on its south gable wall, three life-size figures appear in a clear, white light. The Virgin Mary, crowned, eyes raised to heaven. St Joseph, head bent towards her. St John the Evangelist, holding a book. Beside them stand an altar, a lamb and a cross.

February 25, 1942. Just after 3 a.m. Sirens had already wailed across Los Angeles County. Then a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica. The anti-aircraft batteries opened fire.

December 26, 1985. A secluded log cabin in upstate New York, the night after Christmas. Horror novelist Whitley Strieber woke to an odd noise. The house alarm was set. Yet a small figure was coming into his bedroom.

November 2, 1957. Night on the South Plains of Texas. Four miles west of Levelland, farm workers Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz saw a blue flash near the road. Their engine died. Their headlights went out. A rocket-shaped object about 200 feet long rose and came toward them. Saucedo hit the dirt as it passed over with a sound like thunder. He felt a lot of heat.

March 1948. A mesa in Hart Canyon, about 12 miles northeast of Aztec, New Mexico. According to the story, a disc 99.99 feet across came to rest there. Not 100. Inside were sixteen small bodies, dressed in a cloth that could not be torn.

August 24, 1953. About 2 a.m. George Van Tassel was asleep near Giant Rock, a seven-story boulder in the Mojave Desert. A man woke him. He called himself Solganda, and he said he came from Venus.

10 August 1901. Two women from St Hugh's College, Oxford, went walking in the gardens of Versailles, looking for the Petit Trianon. The sky was a little overcast. The sun was shaded. Then something changed. Men in long greyish-green coats and small three-cornered hats gave directions. A cloaked man sat by a garden kiosk, his face "most repulsive." The trees looked "flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry." No wind stirred them. It was all intensely still.

June 24, 1947. A private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier. He was searching for a crashed Marine Corps transport. Then a bright flash reflected on his airplane.

September 12, 1952. Flatwoods, West Virginia. Three boys watched a bright object cross the evening sky and seem to come down on a hillside farm. Kathleen May led a group up the hill, among them a 17-year-old National Guardsman and the family dog. Near the top, a red light pulsed. They walked into a foul-smelling mist.

December 8, 1981. Åge and Ruth Marry Moe looked out of their kitchen window in the Hessdalen valley. They saw a burning fireball in the evening sky.

August 1966. Two electronics technicians from Campos dos Goytacazes climbed Morro do Vintém, a hill in Niterói, Brazil. Days later a kite flyer reported their bodies in a clearing near the top. They wore suits and raincoats. Beside them lay two crude eye masks cut from lead. And a note: "protect metals await signal mask."

August 1945. Thirty days after the Trinity atomic test, two boys rode out across a ranch near San Antonio, New Mexico. Reme Baca was 7. José Padilla was 9. A brilliant light. A crunch that shook the ground. At the end of a gouge as long as a football field lay a dull metallic craft, shaped like an avocado. Inside, thin gray figures moved as if they could will themselves from place to place.

November 5, 1975. Seven members of a logging crew were leaving a Forest Service job near Turkey Springs in Arizona's Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. Six said they watched a bright oval object hover near the trees. Travis Walton approached it. A blue-green beam struck him, they reported, and he vanished. Five days later, Walton called his family from a Heber gas station and said he had awakened aboard a craft. A large search had found no trace of him. The crew's reports, conflicting polygraph results, and a disputed contract motive have kept the case alive for fifty years. No official inquiry established an abduction or proved a hoax.

21 October 1978. Just after sunset. A 20-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich was flying a rented Cessna across Bass Strait toward King Island. At 19:06 he radioed Melbourne. Was there any known traffic below five thousand feet? There was not.

October 1957. Antônio Villas Boas, a 23 year old farmer near São Francisco de Sales, said an egg shaped craft descended while he ploughed alone at night. His tractor stopped. Four small beings in grey suits carried him aboard, where he said they stripped him, rubbed a clear liquid over his body, took blood from his chin and left him with a fair haired woman.

On the evening of Wednesday 11 November 1987, Ed Walters, a building contractor in Gulf Breeze, Florida, said he was working in his home office when he noticed a glow behind a pine in his front yard. He stepped outside and reported a brilliant, top-shaped craft. He said he photographed it five times before a narrow blue beam pinned him in place.

May 20, 1967. Stefan Michalak, an amateur prospector from Winnipeg, was alone on the rocks north of Falcon Lake, Manitoba, looking for quartz and silver. Geese nearby raised an alarm. He looked up. Two objects were descending, glowing with an intense scarlet glare. One stopped dead in the air. The other landed on a flat rock about 160 feet away.

November 14, 1996. In Houston, Texas, amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek took a CCD image of Comet Hale-Bopp. Beside the comet sat something his sky-chart software could not name. A bright point with spikes. It looked like Saturn, rings and all. And it seemed to be following the comet.

January 2015. Off the US East Coast, an F/A-18F Super Hornet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt had its infrared pod locked onto something above the clouds. A dark, oblong shape. A glowing aura. "There's a whole fleet of them," a crew member said. Then the object seemed to stop. And rotate. "Look at that thing! It's rotating!"

Wednesday, 6 April 1966. Late morning at Westall High School in Clayton South, Melbourne. Students on the oval looked up. A silver-grey object with a dome on top was drifting over the school. For about 20 minutes it ducked and dived while light aircraft circled it. Then it dropped behind the pine trees at The Grange. Students ran after it. Some say they found it hovering just above the grass, humming. Then it turned on its side and shot straight up.

April 1934. A London surgeon was on the north shore of Loch Ness. Robert Kenneth Wilson said he noticed a considerable commotion on the surface, perhaps two or three hundred yards out. Then something broke the surface. A small head. A slender neck, swan-like, rising about three feet above the loch. He made four exposures. By then the object had completely disappeared.

November 15, 1966. Close to midnight. Two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, were in the TNT area, an old wartime munitions works north of town. Near the old power plant, they saw something. It was shaped like a man, six or seven feet tall, with wings. Its red eyes were six inches apart. They drove away fast. It followed, gliding over their car at about 100 miles an hour.

November 14, 2004. Clear skies over the Pacific, about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. For days, radar operators aboard the USS Princeton had been tracking strange contacts. Two Navy F/A-18s on a training flight went to take a look.

October 20, 1967. Early afternoon on Bluff Creek, deep in the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. Two former rodeo riders from Yakima, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, round an overturned tree on horseback. Across the creek, something is standing. The horses spook. Patterson grabs his rented 16 mm camera and runs.

November 17, 1986. Night over interior Alaska. A Japan Air Lines cargo 747 is carrying French wine toward Anchorage at 35,000 feet. Captain Kenju Terauchi sees lights off the left front. They do not move like aircraft. Two objects stop in front of the cockpit. The cockpit fills with light. He feels warm in the face.

November 7, 2006. A grey afternoon at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. The overcast hung low. A United ramp employee pushing back Flight 446 looked up and saw something above the gate. A dark grey disc. Silent. No lights. It hovered under the clouds over Gate C17.

Wednesday, 23 January 1974. 8:38 p.m. A thud rolled through the villages beneath the Berwyn mountains in North Wales. Houses shook. Crockery fell. Residents of Llandrillo, Llandderfel and Bala reported a loud noise and a bright light in the sky.

December 12, 1948. 9:01 pm. On Highway 84 near Starvation Peak, New Mexico, meteor expert Lincoln LaPaz watched a bright green fireball cross the sky. Its path was almost exactly horizontal. It lasted almost exactly two seconds. It made no sound. Then it broke into fragments, still bright green.

June 30, 1983. A summer night on the east side of Indianapolis. Debbie Jordan stood at the kitchen sink of her parents' home and saw an odd light coming from the swimming pool pump house. What followed, she later recalled, was a blinding "fist of light" that struck her in the chest. Figures glided toward her across the yard. There was a craft shaped like an egg. Afterwards the yard bore an 8-foot circle and a 49-foot streak.

November 17, 1896. Sacramento. Between 6 and 7 in the evening, a brilliant light came over the housetops, out of the East. One witness saw an oblong shape with fan-like wheels. Others heard voices from above. "Lift her up quick! You are making directly for that steeple!"

May 11, 1950. Evening on a farm outside McMinnville, Oregon. Evelyn Trent was feeding the rabbits behind the house. She looked up. Something was gliding over the fields. Round. Shiny. Wingless. Silver-bright mixed with bronze. She ran for her husband. Paul Trent took up the family Kodak and made two pictures, about 30 seconds apart. Then the object sped away to the west. No sound. No smoke.

January 8, 1981. About 5 pm. Renato Nicolaï was working on his property outside Trans-en-Provence, in the south of France. The weather was turning colder. Then he heard a faint whistling.

November 20, 1952. Shortly after lunch, a small party pulled off the highway in the California desert, about 10 miles from Desert Center. Seven people. Telescopes, cameras, binoculars. Then, they said, a gigantic silvery ship came gliding over the mountain ridge.

1 July 1965. Early morning on the Valensole plateau in Provence. Lavender farmer Maurice Masse was in his field before work. He heard a whistling sound. He went to look. On the ground sat a strange machine, shaped like a rugby ball and the size of a small Renault car. It stood on six legs and a central pivot. Beside it were two small beings in one-piece suits. One of them raised his right arm, an object in hand. Masse could not move.

April 17, 1897. About 6 o'clock in the morning. The early risers of Aurora, Texas, were astonished by the sudden appearance of the airship that had been sailing through the country. It flew due north, lower than ever before. It passed directly over the public square. Then it struck the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion.

November 11, 1979. Night over the Mediterranean. A TAE Super Caravelle, flight JK-297, had left Palma about 15 minutes earlier with 109 passengers on board. Then the crew saw them. A set of red lights, fast approaching the aircraft. They closed to about half a mile and stayed there, matching every change in altitude. Evasive manoeuvres proved impossible. Captain Francisco Javier Lerdo de Tejada made his decision. He diverted to Manises Airport, Valencia.

Saturday, 19 September 1936. About four in the afternoon. Two photographers from Country Life were working on the main staircase of Raynham Hall in Norfolk. Captain Hubert C. Provand was under the focusing cloth. His assistant, Indre Shira, stood beside the camera with the flash pistol. Then Shira saw it. An ethereal veiled form, coming slowly down the stairs. A shout. A flash. Provand looked up and saw nothing at all.

January 20, 1996. In Varginha, Minas Gerais, sisters Liliane de Fátima Silva and Valquíria Aparecida Silva and their friend Kátia Andrade Xavier said they encountered a crouching, dark brown creature with large red eyes and three bumps on its head. Their report became the center of Brazil’s best-known alien story.

1977. The Bay of Marajó, at the mouth of the Amazon. In the fishing villages around Colares, people began to fear the night. Lights came in low over the water. They made no sound. They hovered over houses and sent down sharply defined beams. Villagers called them chupa-chupa. Witnesses said the beams burned them, paralysed them and drew their blood. The local doctor treated dozens of victims.

March 30, 1993. Across England, Wales and Ireland, people looked up and saw lights. Two of them, bright and white, racing towards the south-east horizon. Just after 1 am, a two-man RAF Police patrol at RAF Cosford watched two circular creamy white lights pass at about 1000 feet. No engine noise. Then, at RAF Shawbury, a Met Office observer saw a triangular craft sweep a narrow beam across the fields, humming so deeply he could feel it.

March 13, 1997. Arizona. Across a corridor of some 300 miles, people looked up. A family in Prescott Valley saw five lights in an arc. As the lights came closer, the arc became an upside-down V. It crossed the sky so slowly it seemed to hover. It made no sound. Some said it was one enormous craft, blotting out the stars. One witness was the Governor of Arizona, a pilot. "It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen."

December 9, 1965. Late afternoon. A fireball tore across the sky over the Great Lakes and was seen in several states and Ontario. Near the village of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a boy told his mother he had seen something "like a star on fire." She stepped outside. Blue smoke was rising from the woods.

9 December 2009. Just before 8 a.m. in northern Norway. The sky was clear and cold. Then a light rose, stopped, and began to spin. A white spiral wheeled out from the end of a blue beam that seemed to reach down to the earth. It kept growing into a huge halo with a dark centre. Then it faded.

Burgh Marsh, Cumberland. A bright afternoon in May 1964. Jim Templeton, an off-duty Carlisle fireman, took three photographs of his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth by the Solway Firth. Nobody was standing behind her. He was sure of it.

July 24, 1948. About 2:45 in the morning. An Eastern Air Lines DC-3 is flying at about 5,000 feet, 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama. Captain Clarence S. Chiles sees a light dead ahead. It is closing fast. He takes it for a new Army jet.

Wednesday, 19 December 2018. Shortly after 9 pm. An off-duty security officer waited in the rain at a staff bus stop at London Gatwick Airport. Two lighted objects were hovering low. One hung above a vehicle inside the airport complex. The other flew alongside the perimeter fence.

June 18, 1961. Evening. Four girls in a mountain village in Cantabria had taken apples that were not theirs. In a sunken lane at the edge of San Sebastián de Garabandal, they threw stones at the spot where they thought the devil stood. Then came a sound like thunder. A brilliant figure appeared before them. They said it was the Archangel Michael.

December 11, 1984. Burbank, California. Television producer Jaime Shandera was at home reading Variety. Then something dropped through the mail slot. A brown envelope. An Albuquerque postmark. Inside, a canister of undeveloped 35mm film.

Friday, 9 November 1979. Mid-morning on Dechmont Law, near Livingston. Forester Robert Taylor walked his red setter, Lara, up a forest path to check a young plantation. He stepped into a clearing and stopped. In front of him was a dark grey dome with a rim like the brim of a hat. It made no sound. Its surface kept turning half transparent.

November 30, 1989. About 3:00 a.m. On Manhattan's Lower East Side, Linda Napolitano lay paralysed in her bed on the 12th floor. Then a blue beam lifted her out through the closed bedroom window. Three grey beings rose with her into a craft hovering overhead. Below, two men in a stalled car beneath the FDR Drive say they watched it all. So did a woman on the Brooklyn Bridge. Once she was aboard, the object plunged into the East River.

April 21, 1977. Dover, Massachusetts. A quiet, wealthy town about 15 miles southwest of Boston. Bill Bartlett, 17, was driving north on Farm Street at about 10:30 p.m. His headlights caught something on a low stone wall. A small, hairless body. A huge melon-shaped head. Two glowing orange eyes.

September 12, 2023. Mexico City. The Chamber of Deputies was holding its first public hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Then journalist Jaime Maussan unveiled two small bodies in glass-fronted, coffin-shaped boxes. Elongated heads. Skinny limbs. Three long fingers on each hand.

Autumn 1973. Across the American South and Midwest, police phones would not stop ringing. Sheriffs in Louisiana chased pulsating orange objects. Military police in Georgia said a saucer dove at their patrol car. In Alabama, a police chief photographed a figure in a silvery suit. In Ohio, the governor told the press he had seen one himself.

February 1996. Space Shuttle Columbia is circling the Earth, trailing a satellite on a cable many kilometres long. Then the tether snaps.

Bridgeport, Connecticut. 1953. Albert K. Bender runs the International Flying Saucer Bureau from his home on Broad Street. It has been called the first major civilian UFO club in the world. Then something changes. Bender tells a friend that three men had visited him and "in effect shut him up completely as far as saucer investigation is concerned." Dark clothes. Black hats. For a couple of days he cannot eat.

August 1914. The British are falling back from Mons, and the men have gone days without sleep. A lance-corporal sees a strange light above the German line. Inside it, three shapes. The one in the centre appears to have outspread wings. Three officers, riding at night, watch a very large body of horsemen keep pace in the fields beside them. When a party goes to look, there is no one there.

September 1913. On Rattlesnake Knob, near Cold Spring, observers watched a light rise over the lower slope of Brown Mountain. A distinct ball. Fiery red. Smaller than the full moon, larger than any star. It climbed a short way, wavered, and went out in less than a minute. Then it came back. About 7:30 p.m., again 20 or 30 minutes later, and again at 10 o'clock.

August 21, 1955. A farmhouse near Kelly, Kentucky. Around 7 p.m., Billy Ray Taylor went to the well for water and saw something bright cross the sky. Then the dog started barking.

October 1, 1948. Fargo, North Dakota. Second Lieutenant George F. Gorman of the North Dakota Air National Guard was bringing his F-51 Mustang in from a cross-country flight. Then something passed him on his right. It looked like the taillight of another airplane. The tower said only a Piper Cub was up.

August 27, 1979. About 1:40 a.m. Marshall County deputy sheriff Val Johnson was on patrol in northwest Minnesota when a bright light came through his side window. He thought it might be a small plane in trouble. He turned onto State Highway 220 to look.

January 1909. Fresh snow lay across South Jersey. Then the tracks appeared. Hoof-like prints went over fences, across backyards and up onto rooftops, and stopped in the middle of open fields.

January 1953. Washington, D.C. Five scientists met in secret to weigh the evidence on flying saucers. The CIA had called them together. Six months earlier, radar in the capital had tracked unknown targets. Interceptors went up and found nothing.

Essex. 28 July 1900. Four sisters watch a nun move along a garden path, head bowed, telling her beads. When one of them goes to meet her, the nun turns and comes toward her.

Saturday, 18 May 1946. About 22:45. Gösta Carlsson was walking back from the beach through the pine forest south of Ängelholm. At the edge of a clearing he saw a light. From a distance it looked like a crew setting up a carousel.

June 25, 2021. A Friday. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent nine unclassified pages to Congress. The title was plain: "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." Inside were 144 reports, mostly from U.S. Navy personnel, gathered between November 2004 and March 2021. Of these, 80 involved multiple sensors.

Oak Park, Illinois. December 1954. A housewife named Dorothy Martin said her hand had begun to write on its own. The messages came from the Guardians of a planet called Clarion. A flood would come before dawn on December 21. The faithful would be rescued first.

January 17, 1871. France is losing a war. Prussian troops have entered Mayenne. In the hamlet of Pontmain, 12-year-old Eugène Barbedette steps out of his family's barn into the freezing evening. Above a neighbouring house, in a patch of sky empty of stars, he sees a smiling Beautiful Lady. A deep blue robe. Gold stars. A gold crown.

September 1921. A British party climbs toward a high Himalayan pass in bright moonlight, near Mount Everest. In the snow they read the night's traffic. Hares. Foxes. And one mark like a human foot.

The Kaikōura Lights were not one sighting but a cluster over two nights in December 1978, off the east coast of New Zealand's South Island. Safe Air freight crews flying the Blenheim to Christchurch route reported bright lights that appeared to pace their Argosy aircraft. Wellington air traffic control also recorded unusual radar returns.

August 15, 1950. Great Falls, Montana. Nick Mariana, general manager of the city's ball club, walked to the grandstand at Legion Park to check the wind before a game. Above him hung two bright lights. Stationary.

Todmorden, West Yorkshire. 28 November 1980. About 5 a.m. PC Alan Godfrey was near the end of his night shift, out on Burnley Road after loose cattle. Something straddled the road ahead. He took it for a double-decker bus. It was not a bus.

September 27, 1989. Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow. The day was fading toward evening in Yuzhny Park. A group of boys saw a pink glow in the sky. It became a sphere of red-burgundy color, about ten meters across. It circled. It flew away. Within minutes it returned and hovered over the park.

March 8, 1994. West Michigan. Around nine in the evening, Cindy Pravda looked out her kitchen window in Grand Haven and saw four lights, each the size of the full moon. She was not alone. Up and down the frozen shore of Lake Michigan, the 911 lines began to ring. Callers described something like Christmas lights. Red, white and green, where nothing should be.

June 29, 1988. Browntown Road, through Scape Ore Swamp outside Bishopville, South Carolina. Seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was driving home from a night shift at McDonald's when a tire went flat. He changed it. Then he saw something coming out of the trees, kicking up dust as it ran.

December 2023. Just after sunset, drones began crossing the restricted airspace over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. They came back for 17 nights. The commander of Air Combat Command watched them from a rooftop.

June 1, 1967. Evening, south-west of Madrid. A disc appeared almost above the Castillos de San José de Valderas. Witnesses said it looked like two soup plates united by their concave side. On its belly was a strange sign, a six-armed letter one eyewitness compared to the gearshift of old automobiles.

London, January 1762. A narrow lane near Smithfield is so packed with people that nobody can pass. Inside a parish clerk's house, a girl of about twelve lies in bed. Around her come scratches and knocks, like a cat scratching a chair. The knocks answer questions. One for yes. Two for no.

September 14, 2023. Washington, D.C. NASA released the final report of its UAP Independent Study Team. Sixteen independent experts, chaired by David Spergel, had spent months asking how science could approach unidentified anomalous phenomena. The answer was calm and firm. No evidence of an extraterrestrial origin. Not enough good data to say much more.

2 November 1966. Interstate 77, West Virginia. Sewing-machine salesman Woodrow Derenberger was driving home from Marietta, Ohio. An object swerved in front of his truck and forced him to stop. It was shiny and charcoal-colored, shaped like a kerosene lamp. A man stepped out. He had a good tan, dark hair combed straight back and a glossy coat that looked metallic. He smiled. His mouth never moved.

August 23, 1971. Bélmez de la Moraleda, a village of about 2,000 people in the Sierra Mágina. In the kitchen at Calle Real 5, María Gómez Cámara saw a face forming in the concrete floor. Human features. A gaze that seemed to follow whoever looked at it.

Cottage City, Maryland. January 1949. A 14-year-old boy and his grandmother heard a dripping noise in her bedroom. Then came scratching under the floorboards. Within weeks, fruit flew across rooms, a heavy armchair tilted slowly and fell over, and words appeared on the boy's skin. His Lutheran pastor watched him through the night and wrote to the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine at Duke.

April 24, 1964. Socorro, New Mexico. Police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car. Then he heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky. He thought the town's dynamite shack had exploded. He drove toward it. From a hilltop he saw a shiny object to the south. At first it looked like a car turned upside down. Two figures in white coveralls stood very close to it. Then came the roar. The flame. And the object was gone.

19 May 1986. Shortly after 6 pm, a controller in the São José dos Campos tower saw a light in the north-west. It was brighter than the stars around it. And it was not moving.

November 7, 1990. Evening in downtown Montreal. An American tourist was doing the backstroke in the rooftop pool of the Hôtel Bonaventure. Directly overhead, she saw it. "An oval shape with a yellowish colour."

July 1969. Apollo 11 was coasting towards the Moon, about a day out. Something was out there. It had "a sizeable dimension to it," Buzz Aldrin said, so the crew put the monocular on it. Houston told them their spent rocket stage was 6000 miles away.

Kaolinovy, on the edge of Kyshtym in the Russian Urals. May 1996. A pensioner named Tamara Prosvirina said a telepathic order called her out of the house. She came home with a tiny creature, about 20 to 25 cm tall. Brown body. No hair. Big protruding eyes. It squeaked. It drank sugar water from a spoon. She called it her son. Alyoshenka.

July 1969. Greer Island, on the shore of Lake Worth at the edge of Fort Worth, Texas. Couples parked there after dark.

Saturday 19 September 1846. Around 3 p.m. Two young cowherds were watching cattle on a high pasture above La Salette, in the French Alps. Mélanie Calvat was 14. Maximin Giraud was 11.

Palm Springs, February 1954. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was on vacation. On the evening of Saturday the 20th, he dropped out of the press corps' sight for a few hours. An Associated Press bulletin reported him dead. About two minutes later it was withdrawn. The official word: a chipped cap on a front tooth, and a trip to the dentist.

September 3, 1965. The small hours. Norman Muscarello, 18, was hitchhiking home to Exeter along Route 150 in Kensington, New Hampshire. Then something came up on him all of a sudden. Pulsating red lights. No silhouette he could make out. No sound at all. A nearby house turned blood red, and horses in a barn began kicking their stalls.

August 25, 1951. Evening in Lubbock, Texas. Four professors from Texas Technological College sat in a backyard, discussing micro meteorites. Then a formation of lights streaked directly over their heads. Bluish green. Fifteen to thirty of them, in a semicircle, moving north to south in seconds. No sound. About an hour later, the lights went over again.

January 25, 1967. South Ashburnham, Massachusetts. The lights in the Andreasson house blinked out. A pulsating reddish-orange light shone through the kitchen window. Betty Andreasson's father, Waino Aho, went to the window. He saw creatures outside the glass. They jumped one after the other, "just like grasshoppers."

January 5, 2000. Just after 4 a.m. in the countryside east of St. Louis. Melvern Noll had stopped to check the pipes at his business in Highland. Above him floated something he called "a flying house with windows on the top and bottom."

Spring 1933. A couple were driving along the north shore of Loch Ness, near Abriachan Pier. The water was flat calm. Then it wasn't.

Christmas Day, 1964. Just after 6 am, Marjorie Bye was walking to Holy Communion in Warminster. The air above her began to crackle. Then came the vibrations. Shockwaves pounded at her head, neck and shoulders, and she was thrown to the ground.

October 25, 1974. Late afternoon in the Medicine Bow National Forest, south of Rawlins, Wyoming. Oil driller Carl Higdon raised his new 7 mm magnum at a bull elk and fired. No recoil. No sound. The bullet, he said, went about 50 feet and dropped.

Late 2014. Two Navy Super Hornets head for a training area off Virginia Beach, flying about 100 feet apart. At the entry point, something is waiting. It is motionless against the wind. To the pilot it looked like a dark cube inside a clear sphere, five to 15 feet across.

October 1933. Major William Henry Langley and his wife were sailing in Haro Strait off Chatham Island, near Victoria, British Columbia. First came the sound. A grunt and a snort, accompanied by a huge hiss. Then they saw a huge dome of back, greenish brown, serrated along the top. Langley had been whaling. This was no whale.

November 23, 1953. A stormy night over Lake Superior. Radar picked up an unknown return flying west to east across the lake, about 30 miles off the flight plan course. An F-89C Scorpion scrambled from Kinross Air Force Base with two men aboard. The pilot was Felix Moncla. The radar observer was Robert Wilson.

November 1951. High on the Nepal-Tibet watershed, three men come down from the Menlung La onto a glacier. In the snow lies a line of footprints. Large. Fresh. Leading down the ice.

July 1924. Mount St. Helens. Five gold prospectors had spent days hearing whistles and booming thumps in the dark around their log cabin. Then two of them saw it. A hairy creature, seven feet tall, standing by a pine tree. They opened fire.

November 2, 1971. A sheep farm outside Delphos, Kansas. Sixteen-year-old Ronald Johnson was doing his evening chores when he heard a rumbling, like a washing machine out of balance. In a grove of trees hung an object shaped like a toadstool. It glowed blue, red and orange, just above the ground. Then it lifted away with a high-pitched sound and left him briefly blinded.

August 21, 2004. Around 10 p.m. Ozzfest had just ended at the Tweeter Center in Tinley Park, Illinois. Thousands of concertgoers sat in gridlocked traffic. From their cars, they saw it. Three red lights. No sound. They floated, stopped, and held a triangle in the sky for as long as 30 minutes.

February 21, 1973. Night on Route 60 in southeast Missouri. Coach Reggie Bone was taking five of his Clearwater High basketball players home from a tournament. Near Brushy Creek, they stopped. About 200 yards away, some fifty feet off the ground, lights hung in the dark. Red, green, amber and white, flashing. After about ten minutes the object rose silently at an angle and disappeared over a ridge.

October 19, 2017. A survey telescope near the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui, was searching the sky for near-Earth objects. Rob Weryk spotted a faint point of light on a path that no normal orbit could explain.

September 1, 1969. Labor Day in the Berkshires. The Reed family was driving home from their diner in Sheffield, Massachusetts. An amber glow appeared on both sides of the dirt road. It rose. Then came a huge craft, pewter and gold, larger than a football field. The car stalled. A dead silence fell.

July 11, 1972. Late afternoon on the rural edge of Louisiana, Missouri. Terry Harrison, 8, and his brother Wally, 5, were playing in the yard. Terry screamed.

Fall 1989. About 1:30 in the morning. Lorianne Endrizzi was driving home from work along Bray Road, outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Something was kneeling at the side of the road. It had pointed ears and long claws. It held what it was eating palms up. Its eyes glowed.

Friday, 10 September 1954. Quarouble, near Valenciennes, close to the Belgian border. Marius Dewilde's dog began barking wildly. The 34-year-old metalworker took a torch into his garden beside the railway. On the tracks sat a dark mass. Two small beings in helmets, like divers, hurried towards it.

Sunday, 18 August 1968. A hot, windless day in the Hoia-Baciu forest, just outside Cluj. Emil Barnea, a construction technician and former army officer, was out in a clearing with friends. Then his girlfriend, Zamfira Mattea, shouted that she had seen something.

August 25, 1974. 10:07 p.m. A US air-defence radar picked up something coming in over the Gulf of Mexico at 2,200 knots. It slowed. It turned west into Mexico. Near the desert town of Coyame, Chihuahua, it vanished from the screens. At about the same time, a small plane out of El Paso disappeared in the same place.

January 8, 2007. Chris Bledsoe was fishing on the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville, North Carolina, with his son and three co-workers. The fishing was slow. So he walked up the muddy track toward the main road. Then he saw them. Three large orange balls, moving down toward the ground and toward him. They stopped just over the trees and hovered.

December 18, 1975. George and Kathy Lutz moved their three children into a Dutch Colonial at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville. In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. had shot six members of his family in that house as they slept.

Ruwa, Zimbabwe. Friday, 16 September 1994. Shortly after ten in the morning, the pupils of Ariel School were out on their break. The teachers were in a staff meeting. Beyond the playing field, in the rough bush and trees, something came down.

March 20, 1966. Dexter, Michigan. The farm dogs started barking. Frank Mannor and his son Ronald walked toward a glowing object hovering over the swamp behind their house. It was brown, with a quilted surface and bluish-green lights that turned brilliant red. Police from several departments converged. At least 40 people, including 12 policemen, reported seeing something.

4 August 1990. Around 9 pm. Two young hotel chefs from Pitlochry walked onto the moorland above Calvine, in the Scottish Highlands. Above them hung a large grey diamond. It made no sound. For about ten minutes it hovered, while a military jet, later identified as a Harrier, made pass after pass nearby. Then the object shot straight up and vanished. One of the men took six photographs.

July 7, 2010. A flight crew preparing for descent into Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport saw an object with a bright, comet-like tail. They reported it to air traffic control. The airport shut down. Outbound flights were held. Inbound flights were sent to Ningbo and Wuxi. Nearby, Ma Shijun was out walking with his wife. "I felt a beam of light over my head," he said.

September 4, 1971. An Aero Commander from Costa Rica's Instituto Geográfico Nacional flies at 10,000 feet over Lago de Cote, a small crater lake near Arenal. Beneath the fuselage a Zeiss mapping camera works through its routine survey. Nobody on board notices anything unusual.

Friday, 17 March 1950. St. Patrick's Day. Late morning on Main Street in Farmington, New Mexico. People looked up and saw silvery discs high in the sky. Then more. One witness put the count at about 500. They played tag. They made right-angle turns. One red object, bigger and faster, seemed to lead them.

1992. A country road between Falkirk and Bonnybridge. Local businessman James Walker was forced to stop his car. Just ahead of him, hovering above the road, a brightly shining star-shaped object was blocking his way. Then it took off at tremendous speed and was gone.

January 6, 1969. Leary, Georgia. Shortly after dark. A group of Lions Club members stood outdoors, waiting for their meeting to begin at 7:30 pm. Among them was the visiting speaker, a Lions Club district governor named Jimmy Carter.

October 18, 1973. An Army Reserve Huey was flying home to Cleveland at 2,500 feet. Near Mansfield, Ohio, crew chief Robert Yanacsek spotted a red light on the horizon. It turned toward them. Captain Lawrence Coyne pushed the helicopter into a dive. The light kept coming.

August 13, 1956. A clear summer night over Suffolk. At RAF Bentwaters, radar operators watched a single target cross the entire scope at thousands of miles per hour. Above the base, a C-47 pilot at 4,000 feet saw a bright light streak beneath his aircraft.

1803. The coast of Hitachi Province, Japan. Fishermen spotted something strange offshore and towed it onto the beach. It was round, like an incense box. Its top was set with glass windows sealed with pine resin. Its base was plated with iron. Inside was a young woman with red hair and long white extensions. She spoke no language anyone knew. She held a square box and would let no one touch it.

Rosenheim, Bavaria. Autumn 1967. In the law office of attorney Sigmund Adam, the lights would not stay on. Fluorescent tubes went dark and were found twisted in their holders. Bulbs exploded. Fuses tripped with no cause anyone could find. And the telephones kept calling the speaking clock, with nobody at the dial.

Spring 1941. Evening, somewhere between 9:00 and 9:30. The phone rang for Rev. William Huffman, pastor of Red Star Baptist Church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The police wanted him at a plane crash. Someone had to pray for the victims.

July 17, 1956. A farm near Rosetta, in the foothills of the Drakensberg. Elizabeth Klarer, a meteorologist and pilot, raised a Brownie box camera toward the sky. A disc darted silently over a rise near the farmhouse. She took seven photographs before it suddenly shot away.

September 4, 1964. The Tahoe National Forest, near Cisco Grove, California. At dusk, bowhunter Donald Shrum lost his companions on a ridge. He climbed a pine to wait out the night.

Monday, 5 November 1990. About seven in the evening. Across France, people looked up and saw something enormous crossing the sky. A formation of lights. Silent. Slow. Moving from west to east. Some saw a triangle. Others saw a delta wing, a rectangle, a V. In Colmar, a teacher filmed it. To his wife, he said: "They're finally here."

September 22, 2025. Evening at Copenhagen Airport. Police reported three or four big drones over the airport. They came from different directions. They turned their lights on and off. Then, after several hours, they were gone.

Western Queensland. Flat country, a long empty road, and a night so still the wind has died. Then a light appears.

January 1981. Early morning in the Ajusco forest, south of Mexico City. Photographer Carlos Díaz sat in his car, waiting for a journalist. Then a glow rose out of the valley. It was a large, orange, oval object, hovering about 30 metres away. His car began to shake. He got out and took two more frames. Then the craft sped straight up into the sky.

December 29, 1972. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 went down in the Florida Everglades. 101 people died. Captain Bob Loft was among them. Flight engineer Don Repo was pulled out alive and died later.

Tehran. Just after midnight on 19 September 1976. Residents of Shemiran phoned an air force command post about a strange light in the sky. The officer on duty looked for himself and saw a star, bigger and brighter. He scrambled an F-4. Then another.

August 1976. Four young artists from Boston paddle out onto Eagle Lake, deep in Maine's Allagash Wilderness Waterway. A bonfire burns on the shore behind them. Then Chuck Rak feels something staring at him.

Wednesday, 27 October 1954. Florence. About 10,000 people were watching Fiorentina play Pistoiese at the Stadio Comunale. Then the crowd looked up. Players and referee froze. The game stopped.

October 27, 1975. Loring Air Force Base, Maine. Staff Sgt. Danny K. Lewis was patrolling the nuclear weapons storage area. Near the north perimeter, at about 300 feet, he saw an aircraft with a red navigation light and a white strobe. On radar, it circled. It came within 300 yards of the storage area. It answered no radio call.

23 April 2007. Mid-afternoon over the English Channel. Captain Ray Bowyer was flying an Aurigny Air Services Trislander from Southampton to Alderney. Then he saw it. A bright light close to the horizon, almost directly ahead.

2 April 1968. Zeitoun, a district of Cairo. Across the street from St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church, Muslim workers at a public-transport garage saw a woman dressed in white on the church roof. One man thought she was a nun about to jump.

September 2000. A Bigfoot expedition is camped in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest of southern Washington. For several nights the team has broadcast a recorded scream into the dark. At about 3:00 AM, two of them leave fruit beside a rainwater puddle near Skookum Meadow. By morning, three of the six apples are gone.

March 5, 2004. Late afternoon over southern Campeche. A Mexican Air Force surveillance plane was hunting drug-smuggling aircraft when its radar found an unknown echo 37 miles away. The crew closed in. Nobody on board could see a thing. But the infrared camera could. Up to 11 bright heat sources, spherical and very hot, moving in groups of two and three. Then they seemed to surround the plane. "We are not alone! This is so weird."

November 11, 2014. A Chilean Navy helicopter was on a routine daytime patrol off the coast, west of Santiago. The pilot and a technician saw an object. A flat, elongated shape. The technician turned the infrared camera on it and zoomed in. For 9 minutes and 12 seconds they filmed it as it kept pace with the helicopter. Twice it released a hot plume. Radar saw nothing. Radio calls went unanswered.

November 28, 1981. Kibeho College, a girls' boarding school in southern Rwanda. A young student named Alphonsine Mumureke saw a Lady of incomparable beauty, dressed in white. She called herself "Nyina wa Jambo". The Mother of the Word.

April 30, 2023. Just before midnight, a green streak cut across the sky over Las Vegas. A police body camera caught it. About forty minutes later, a family in the northwest valley called 911. Something had fallen into their backyard. There was a big impact. Now something was standing there. "They're like eight foot, nine-foot, 10 foot," the caller said. "And they're not human."

October 25, 1973. About 9 p.m. On a farm near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, about 15 people watched a large red object slowly sink toward a pasture. George Kowalczyk, 22, went up the field with two 10-year-old boys. On the ground sat a glowing white dome. Along the fence walked two figures. One over 8 feet tall. The other over 7. Long matted hair. No neck. Glowing green eyes.

June 17, 2020. Dawn over Sendai. High above Aoba Ward, residents noticed something white hanging in the sky. It did not move. A white sphere, with a cross-shaped frame beneath it and propellers that seemed to turn.

Boulder, Colorado. October 1966. The University of Colorado agreed to take on an Air Force-funded scientific study of UFOs. The physicist Edward U. Condon took charge. His team examined 59 cases, from a silvery object photographed over an Oregon farm to an object that got behind a fighter over England. More than a quarter stayed unexplained.

December 1968. A farm near Rollingstone, Minnesota. A refrigerated trailer holds a glass-topped coffin, and inside the coffin is a block of ice. For three days two naturalists lean over it. Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans see a hairy, barrel-chested male about 6 ft tall. One eye dangles from its socket. The glass cracks, and out comes the stench of rotting flesh.

May 8, 1954. A Saturday morning in Maida Vale, London. George King, a taxi driver, was doing the household chores in his small flat at 18 Clifton Gardens. Then, he said, came a loud voice. "Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament."

Sunday, 25 September 2005. Toronto. A former Minister of National Defence took the stage at a symposium at the University of Toronto. Paul Hellyer was 82. He had run Canada's military under Lester B. Pearson. And he had something to say. "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

1 June 1933. Frank Smythe was alone on the north face of Mount Everest, coming down from a record high point without supplementary oxygen. He was some 200 feet above his tent at Camp VI. He glanced toward the north ridge. Two dark objects were floating in the sky.

August 1978. A wooded lot two miles west of Minerva, Ohio. Behind the Cayton house lay an old strip mine and a gravel pit. Over several nights, the family and their friends reported a hairy, upright creature about 7 feet tall. It stood at the lit kitchen window for close to ten minutes. It appeared beside two large cats near the old chicken coop. Rocks hit the roof. A deputy arrived to a strong ammonia-sulphur stench.

The River Ness. The province of the Picts, traditionally AD 565. Columba and his monks reach the water and find locals burying a man. A monster seized him as he swam. Columba sends his companion Lugne Mocumin into the river to fetch a boat from the far bank. The beast rises from the bottom of the stream. It gives an awful roar and darts after him, mouth wide open. Then the saint raises his hand.

March 16, 1967. 08:45. Deep under the Montana plains, all ten Minuteman I missiles in Echo Flight dropped off strategic alert. Almost at the same moment. The Air Force's own records confirm it.

January 16, 1958. Around midday. The Brazilian Navy ship Almirante Saldanha lay at anchor off Trindade Island, far out in the South Atlantic, about to sail home to Rio de Janeiro. On deck, a reserve Air Force pilot pointed out something to the photographer beside him. It was coming in over the sea.

July 2, 1952. A clear, cloudless morning on U.S. Highway 30S, about seven miles from Tremonton, Utah. Norma Newhouse looked up and saw a group of objects she could not identify. Her husband Delbert was a Navy Chief Photographer with 21 years of service. He hunted through the luggage for his camera. Then he filmed.

Canóvanas, Puerto Rico. The second week of August 1995. Livestock had been dying across the island, and nobody knew why. Madelyne Tolentino was at her mother's house when she looked out of the window.

December 17, 1977. A Saturday night in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Kenny Drake, 17, and his nephew Randy James, 12, were driving to the Richman Gordman store. Then they saw a reddish object falling straight down into Big Lake Park. It disappeared behind the trees. A bluish-white flash followed, then two "arms of fire."

Sunday, 9 February 1913. About nine in the evening. Near High Park in Toronto, the painter Gustav Hahn looked up. Fireballs. Forty to sixty of them came in twos and threes and fours, tails streaming, all on the same path. They did not streak past. They moved slowly. Majestically. Witnesses compared them to a fleet of airships, to battleships attended by cruisers and destroyers, to a brilliantly lighted passenger train.

April 1990. Petit-Rechain, Belgium. Sabine was letting the dog out into the backyard when she spotted a series of strange stationary lights in the sky. Her boyfriend, Patrick, fetched his reflex camera. He snapped two photos. Then the lights began to move and disappeared behind a neighbour's house.

Mexico City. May 5, 2015. Nearly 7,000 people filled the Auditorio Nacional for an event called BeWitness. On stage, Jaime Maussan promised them what he called the evidence they had been waiting for. It was two Kodachrome slides showing a small body laid out on a shelf behind glass. The promoters tied it to Roswell. A forensic examiner listed 43 anomalies.

Columbus, Ohio. A team of analysts who were never named. From March 1952, the Battelle Memorial Institute coded about 3,200 UFO reports onto IBM punched cards for the Air Force. Four scientific analysts sorted every case. To call one unknown, all four had to agree.

Edwards Air Force Base, California. Early morning, May 1957. Two civilian camera operators, James D. Bittick and John R. Gettys Jr., saw something golden low in the northern sky. A domed saucer, they said, with ports around the dome. They turned their Askania phototheodolite on it and took pictures.

Monday, 9 September 1991. The Today newspaper ran a front-page exposé under the headline "Men who conned the world". Two watercolour painters from the Southampton area, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, aged 67 and 62, said they had been making crop circles in the English countryside for years. Their tools were a plank, a length of string and a baseball cap with a wire sight.

Friday, 23 May 1952. Around midnight. Orfeo Angelucci was driving home from his swing shift at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. A red, faintly glowing oval appeared near his car. Two smaller green discs came out of it and hung silently a few feet away. Then a masculine voice spoke in perfect English. "Don't be afraid, Orfeo. We are friends!"

High Bridge, New Jersey. Around 1932. A ten-year-old boy walks into the woods near his home. A woman is waiting there. Long golden hair. Golden eyes. A seamless, translucent suit like ski wear. "I have come a long way to see you, Howard… and to talk with you."

September 1964. On a fire trail high above Big Sur, an Air Force camera crew aimed a telescope south toward Vandenberg. An Atlas missile climbed out of the coastal fog. Lieutenant Robert Jacobs shouted: "There it is!"

Summer 1981. Condado de Treviño, a pocket of Burgos surrounded by Álava. Prudencio Muguruza, a young bank employee from Vitoria, was out walking with his hunting dog near Ochate. The dog grew agitated. Then a bright flash lit up the area.

September 12, 1952. Flatwoods, West Virginia. A group of boys was playing football in the schoolyard. A bright light streaked across the sky and seemed to come down on a hill on G. Bailey Fisher's farm. They climbed up with Kathleen May and Eugene "Gene" Lemon, 17. A pulsing red light waited on the hill. Lemon raised his flashlight.

Friday, 4 February 1977. Rain over Broad Haven, a village on the Pembrokeshire coast. At lunchtime, children at the primary school were playing football. Then something popped up from behind the trees. Silver. Cigar-shaped. About the size of a bus, with a dome on top and a red light pulsing above it. Six of the children said a tall figure in a silver suit stood beside it.

6 August 1848. The South Atlantic, somewhere between the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. The sky is dark and cloudy. A long swell runs under the frigate HMS Daedalus, homeward bound from the East Indies.

December 3, 1967. About 2:30 in the morning. Sergeant Herbert Schirmer, 22, was on patrol outside Ashland, Nebraska, when he saw red lights blinking at the junction of two highways. He took them for a truck. They were not. A saucer-shaped object hovered above the road, its oval portholes glowing red, its surface like polished aluminum. It rose with a siren-like sound and shot out of sight.

Cergy-Pontoise. Before dawn on Monday 26 November 1979. Three young market traders were loading a car for an open-air market. A light came down. Jean-Pierre Prévost described three or four small spheres rotating around the car, merging into a kind of luminous cigar. When he and Salomon N'Diaye came back, the car door was open and the engine had stalled. Franck Fontaine was gone.

September 1957. A beach near Ubatuba, on the northern coast of São Paulo state. A fisherman and some friends saw a flying disc come in toward the shore at unbelievable speed. It seemed about to hit the water. At the last moment it turned sharply upward and climbed. Then it exploded in flames. Thousands of fiery fragments fell sparkling.

June 1950. The Soviet Zone of Germany. Before dawn, Oskar Linke, the former mayor of Gleimershausen, was riding home with his daughter Gabriele, 11, when his motorcycle tyre blew out near Haselbach. Gabriele pointed to something in the distance.

August 19, 1952. A moonless road inland from West Palm Beach, Florida. Scoutmaster Sonny DesVergers was driving three boys home. From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of light in the palmettos. Thinking a plane had gone down, he took a machete and two flashlights and walked into the scrub.

June 24, 1947. Pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine objects flashing in formation near Mount Rainier. They moved, he said, like a saucer skipped across water. Within days, the sightings spread across the country.

Summer 1952. Mormon Mesa, Nevada. Truman Bethurum, a mechanic on a highway crew, had parked his pickup to nap after a night shift. He woke to find small, dark-haired men gathered around his truck. They spoke perfect English. They led him to a huge disc of burnished steel, floating a few feet above the desert brush. Its captain was a beautiful woman named Aura Rhanes. She said she came from Clarion, a planet always hidden behind the Moon.

Lake Van, eastern Turkey. 1997. Ünal Kozak was 26, a teaching assistant at Yüzüncü Yıl University. Since 1995, locals had been reporting something in the water. He interviewed about 1,000 of them. Then he waited at the spots where most sightings had been reported. He said he saw it three times. And he filmed it.

Tuesday, 29 November 1932. Around six in the evening, five children stood outside a convent school in Beauraing, Belgium. Albert Voisin, eleven years old, looked up at the railway viaduct. "Look! the Virgin walking on that bridge!" The girls saw her too. A lady in white, walking in the air. Clouds hid her feet. They were frightened. They ran.

September 1931. A remote hill farm called Doarlish Cashen, near Dalby on the Isle of Man. The Irving family began to hear something in the walls. First noises. Then animal imitations. Then words.

23 April 1960. Loch Ness. Aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale was on the last morning of a six-day watch, alone on a road high above Foyers Bay. Then he saw it. Through binoculars, a long oval hump lay on the water. A distinct mahogany colour. A huge dark blotch on its flank, "like the dapple on a cow."

23 October 1642. The first great battle of the English Civil War was fought beneath Edge Hill in Warwickshire. About two months later, around Christmas, shepherds near Kineton heard drums in the dark, far off. Then soldiers appeared in the air. There were two armies, one under the King's colours and one under Parliament's. Muskets. Cannon. Horses neighing. The fight went on until two or three in the morning. It came back on the nights that followed.

July 4, 1950. White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. Daniel Fry, a technician for Aerojet General, had missed the last bus to the Independence Day celebrations in Las Cruces. So he set off on foot along a dirt road. Overhead, the stars began to go out, one after another. Something dark was coming down. It settled on the sand without the slightest bump or jar. Then a voice spoke. "Better not touch the hull, pal, it's still hot!"

March 23, 1909. About five in the morning. A police constable on patrol in Peterborough heard what he took for a distant motor car. Then he realised the sound was overhead. A powerful light, some 1,200 feet above the ground. Behind it, a dark body, oblong and narrow, outlined against the stars.

September 1941. A sunny afternoon at a cabin above the Fraser River, near Ruby Creek, British Columbia. Jeannie Chapman's eldest boy ran inside. He said a cow was coming down out of the woods.

8 January 2014. A small, very fast fireball streaked into the sky north of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. US government sensors recorded it. No human eyewitness account is on record. In 2019, Harvard undergraduate Amir Siraj and astronomer Avi Loeb studied its catalogued speed and made a bold claim. It had come from another star system. They named it IM1.

Van Meter, Iowa. September 1903. For five nights, something moved across the rooftops of Main Street. The witnesses described a creature at least eight feet tall. Half human, half animal. Enormous bat-like wings. A horn-like growth on its head that gave off a dazzling light.

Night falls over the high desert east of Marfa, Texas. Out over Mitchell Flat, facing the Chinati Mountains, a light appears. At first it looks like a distant star. Then it brightens, flickers, splits in two and drifts back together.

July 11, 1991. The eclipse of the century. At 13:24, the Moon swallowed the Sun over Mexico City and millions of people looked up.

July 2019. Off the coast of San Diego, Navy ships in the training ranges were logging unknown objects at night. Aboard the destroyer USS Russell, night-vision cameras caught blinking, pyramid-shaped lights hovering about 700 ft above the ship. Aboard USS Omaha, an infrared screen showed a sphere moving slowly toward the sea. "Whoa, it splashed!" Then it was gone. No wreckage. A submarine search reportedly found nothing.

Laxou, on the western edge of Nancy. Thursday 21 October 1982, a little after midday. A 30-year-old researcher in cell biology was in the small garden behind their house. A bright point in the sky changed course. It seemed to head straight for the house.

January 11, 1966. Evening at the frozen Wanaque Reservoir in northern New Jersey. A patrolman pulled into a sandpit and saw a light bigger than any star. It pulsed white, then turned red. Soon the mayor, councilmen and police stood on the dam in the freezing cold, watching. No one heard a motor.

Monday, 16 August 1954. Tananarive, capital of French Madagascar. Late afternoon on Avenue de la Libération. A large ball of brilliant electric green drops almost vertically out of the sky and seems to graze the Queen's Palace. A minute later it is back. Lower. Faster. A glowing green lens, some 40 metres long, leads a silvery metallic body almost to the height of the roofs. There is no sound at all.

October 7, 1987. Wythe County, Virginia. Radio news director Danny B. Gordon made his routine call to the sheriff. Sheriff Wayne Pike had news. Officers near Fort Chiswell had seen a bright red and green light in the night sky.

August 5, 1927. About half-past nine in the morning, in the Kukunor district not far from the Humboldt chain. Members of Nicholas Roerich's Central Asian Expedition were watching a remarkably big black eagle above their camp. Then a caravaneer shouted. There was something far above the bird.

Italy, 1978. For a whole year the reports kept coming. Domed discs over country roads. Car engines that died and then restarted. Small figures in suits and helmets circling a stalled car. On the Adriatic, fishermen watched columns of water rise from the sea and their compasses go "drunk".

December 4, 1965. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were a few hours into a planned 14-day flight aboard Gemini 7. Then Borman called the ground. "We have a bogey at ten o'clock high." Houston asked if it was the booster. Borman answered that this was an actual sighting. Hundreds of little particles were going by, three or four miles out. On his side, Lovell watched the booster, a brilliant body in the sun, slowly tumbling.

North Tedworth, Wiltshire. 1662. A vagrant drummer named William Drury was caught with a forged licence, and his drum ended up in the house of John Mompesson. Then the knocking started.

December 11, 1998. Space Shuttle Endeavour is 213 nautical miles above the South Atlantic, west of southern Africa. Below, the night side of the Earth lies under heavy cloud. Against it, a dark, twisted shape. A Hasselblad with a 250 mm lens catches it frame after frame. Each time, its silhouette is different.

July 1974. The summer pasture at Machermo, high in Nepal's Khumbu below Gokyo. A young Sherpa woman named Lhakpa Domani Sherpa was herding yaks. Then something came up behind her.

December 1, 1716. Epworth Rectory, Lincolnshire. A maid hears groans at the dining-room door. Susanna Wesley would describe them as "several dismal groans, like a person in extremes, at the point of death."

Easter, 1976. Two sisters were playing among the gravestones of an old church in Mawnan, Cornwall. June Melling was 12. Vicky was 9. A strange sound made them look up. Above the church tower, a large winged creature was hovering. A man, covered in feathers, with two large wings.

10 May 1978. Early morning near Emilcin, in eastern Poland. Jan Wolski, a 71-year-old farmer, was driving his horse-drawn cart home. Two small beings with green faces jumped onto the moving cart. They sat behind him, legs hanging down.

September 15, 1991. Space Shuttle Discovery is in orbit, about 355 miles above the Earth. A camera at the back of the cargo bay is pointed at the horizon, and its pictures are going out live on NASA's television feed. Between 20:30 and 20:45 GMT, several glowing objects drift across the screen. Then a flash appears in the lower left. The objects change direction and accelerate away sharply, as if in response. A streak of light cuts through the space the flash left behind.

A coalition base in Anbar Province, Iraq. Night. Above it, a tethered aerostat watches through a thermal camera. A shape drifts into frame, dark and light at once, with tentacle-like parts hanging beneath it. Its heat signature shifts from black to grey to white.

7 February 1974. Nine in the evening. Twenty people stood among the hills of the Chilca desert, 60 km south of Lima, waiting for something they had been told would come. Then it did. A lens-shaped object, full of lights, with half a dozen little windows, came out from between the desert hills and settled some eighty metres above their heads.

June 1977. Two Air Force medics from Whiteman Air Force Base pitch a tent in a meadow at Devil's Den State Park, Arkansas. After sunset, three lights appear low on the horizon. They form a perfect triangle. They rotate. They come closer.

30 November 1861. The French Navy dispatch steamer Alecton was bound from Toulon to Cayenne, some forty leagues from Tenerife. Around two in the afternoon, something brownish red lay floating at the surface. It was a gigantic squid. Eighteen feet from head to tail, by the commander's estimate. Eight arms. Eyes the size of a plate.

Amherst, Nova Scotia. September 4, 1878. In a yellow cottage on Princess Street, 18-year-old Esther Cox cried out that she was swelling up and would burst. Then three terrific reports sounded beneath her bed. The whole room shook.

A Sunday in April 1890. Two ranchers were riding home from the Huachuca Mountains across the open desert of Arizona Territory. There they found it. A winged monster, like a huge alligator, with an extremely elongated tail and wings the Tombstone Epitaph put at about 160 feet tip to tip. It was exhausted. It could fly only a short distance at a time. The men gave chase on horseback for several miles and opened fire with their Winchesters.

August 3, 1965. Myford Road, outside Santa Ana, California. Orange County traffic inspector Rex Heflin had stopped his van to photograph a railroad crossing sign. His radio call to headquarters cut off. Then something crossed the road in front of him.

August 23, 1974. A Friday night on Manhattan's East Side. John Lennon and May Pang were at home, a penthouse at 434 East 52nd Street. Lennon felt an urge and went to the window. Above the next building hung a dark, circular object. White lights blinked around its rim. A red light burned steady on top. It made no sound at all.

Venezuela. The forests south-west of Lake Maracaibo. A Swiss oil geologist named François de Loys is camped on a tributary of the Tarra River. Two large creatures approach. At first he takes them for bears. Then he sees them clearly. Hairy. Tailless. Ape-like. They howl, tear at branches and advance on the party. The men open fire. The female falls.

Autumn 1954. Across France, ordinary people began reporting craft on the ground. A metalworker at a railway crossing. A site foreman and his men. Children in the Jura. Cyclists on a country road. They described craft in meadows and on railway tracks, and small figures about a metre tall in what looked like diving suits. Engines died. Headlights failed. Some witnesses said they could not move.

Spring 1983. Near South Molton, on the edge of Exmoor, a farmer counted his dead sheep. Throat wounds. By one account over 100 animals in three months. The story reached the national papers. The Daily Express offered a reward for footage. Then Devon police asked for help, and a team of Royal Marines snipers was sent from Lympstone to hunt the killer.

1891. Ben Macdui, the second-highest mountain in the British Isles. Norman Collie is coming down from the summit cairn. He is alone, in mist. Then he hears it. A crunch. Then another. Something is walking after him, taking steps three or four times the length of his own.

April 25, 1977. Before dawn on Pampa Lluscuma, high in the Andes near Putre. Corporal Armando Valdés Garrido and seven young conscripts were guarding army horses beside a campfire. A light came down behind the hills. A second one, ovoid and violet, settled between them about 500 metres away. It made no sound.

August 8, 1980. Just before midnight. Three security policemen guarding the Manzano Weapons Storage Area at Kirtland AFB watched a very bright light race across the New Mexico sky. It stopped suddenly over Coyote Canyon. Then it landed.

December 2019. Northeastern Colorado. After dark, the calls started coming in to the Phillips County Sheriff's Office. Lights in the sky. Red, white and green. Flying in groups, 200 to 300 feet up, sweeping the farmland in slow, deliberate squares.

October 17, 1973. Falkville, Alabama. A woman phoned the police, nearly hysterical. A spaceship, she said, had landed in a pasture outside town. Chief of police Jeff Greenhaw drove out with the department's Polaroid camera. He found no craft.

November 12, 1976. Talavera la Real air base, near Badajoz, Spain. Around 01:45, two sentries at the fuel depot heard a piercing, high-pitched whistle that hurt their ears. Then came a glow like a lit flare. A third soldier arrived with a German Shepherd. The dog came back staggering, as if dizzy.

October 29, 1983. Emil Bachurin, a geologist from Perm, was out near the village of Molyobka in Russia's Perm Krai. Over the forest, he saw a glow. He took a compass bearing and walked to the spot. There, on fresh snow, lay a perfect circle 62 to 63 metres across. The grass inside was crushed and dried, as if by a giant iron. His watch had lost about two hours.

Ireland. The middle of the eighth century. Irish monks kept a record of each year's wonders, deaths and battles. One entry stands apart. "Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Cluain Moccu Nóis."

A beach on the Sea of Marmara. The hours between midnight and dawn. Yalçın Yalman, a 51-year-old night-watchman at the Yenikent holiday village in Kumburgaz, pointed his camera south over the water. What he recorded, summer after summer from 2007 to 2009, is still argued over today. Bright crescent and disc shapes hung over the sea. Red and orange lights pulsed. In some frames, figures seemed to move inside a lit window.

October 24, 1968. North Dakota, in the small hours. Airmen in the Minuteman missile field at Minot Air Force Base saw a large glowing object. It hovered. It changed colour. It seemed to follow a maintenance truck down the road.

February 12, 2023. Twenty thousand feet above Lake Huron. Two F-16 pilots of the 148th Fighter Wing close in on something they can barely make out. "I wouldn't really call it a balloon… I don't know what… I can see it outside with my eyes," one of them radios. It is small. It is slow. Lines hang beneath it, with nothing attached.

March 3, 1972. About 1:00 a.m. on an icy road outside Loveland, Ohio. Officer Ray Shockey saw something at the roadside and took it for a dog. Then it stood up. Three or four feet tall. Leathery skin. A face like a frog or a lizard. Its eyes caught his headlights. It climbed the guardrail and went down toward the Little Miami River.

4 December 2000. A secret report went out from Britain's Defence Intelligence Staff. It was classified SECRET UK EYES ONLY. Its code name, Condign, was chosen due to sensitivity. Inside, its author had sifted about 10,000 UFO sightings reported to the Ministry of Defence. Triangles. Cigars. Rectangles. Mostly silent. Sometimes darting and bobbing near the ground.

Saturday, 15 August 1663. The Feast of the Dormition. A great crowd had gathered in a parish church in the Robozero district. Then a great noise. Out of a cloudless sky came a very large fire, low over Lake Robozero.

Wednesday, 7 January 1970. Imjärvi, southern Finland. Two men on a cross-country ski trip stopped in a forest clearing and heard a faint buzzing. Forestry worker Aarno Heinonen and farmer Esko Viljo looked up. A light was coming down toward them. When it stopped, they could see a luminous red-grey mist swirling round it.

1 December 1994. Around three in the morning. Night watchmen at Duxi Forest Farm, north of Guiyang, heard an enormous roar like a steam locomotive. Something giving off strong red and green light whistled past through the air. At a railway vehicle factory nearby, two police officers felt a violent gust behind them. They felt blown off the ground.

Sunday, 19 November 2023. Imphal, Manipur. At Bir Tikendrajit International Airport, a CISF member spotted an object in the sky. It was small and white, and it was sitting in Imphal controlled airspace just above the ATC tower.

February 1959. Nine hikers die on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl in the Northern Urals. Their deaths become a mystery that never quite closes. But in the weeks around the tragedy, people across the region were watching the sky.

April 22, 1976. About 11 p.m. Relief policeman George Wheeler was on patrol outside Elmwood, Wisconsin. He saw an orange glow near Tuttle Hill and took it for a fire.

Spring 1956. Ascoli Piceno. Three friends went to the old fortress above the town, the Fortezza Pia. Two figures emerged from behind the castle. They looked entirely human. Except for their size. One was a little over a metre tall. The other stood about three metres.

Urquhart Bay, Loch Ness. August 1972. Two boats sat on the dark water off Temple Pier. One carried a sonar. The other lowered a camera and strobe into the depths, firing every 45 seconds or so.

October 2003. Hampton Court Palace, on the River Thames west of London. A fire door near Clock Court kept flying open, three nights in a row. Security staff went to the CCTV to find out who was leaving it open.

Canneto, Sicily. A seaside village on the Tyrrhenian coast. In late December 2003 the fires began. Fuse boxes, televisions, mattresses and even unplugged cables reportedly burst into flame. Between January and March 2004 there were 92 of them. "It is like we are living in a microwave," said Nino Pezzino.

November 5, 1957. Reinhold Schmidt, a grain buyer, was driving his Buick along the Platte River near Kearney, Nebraska. The engine stalled. In a field stood a silvery craft, some 100 feet long, shaped like a blimp. A beam of light left him briefly paralyzed. Then two men came out and escorted him aboard.

July 31, 1968. About nine in the morning. Luce Fontaine, a 22-year-old Creole farmer, was cutting grass for his rabbits in a small clearing in an acacia wood on the Plaine des Cafres, Réunion. Twenty-five metres away, an ovoid craft hung four or five metres above the ground. Through its blue, translucent middle he saw two small figures in bumpy suits. He called them the "Babas Michelin".

August 1966. A council house at 30 East Drive, Pontefract. Joe and Jean Pritchard were on holiday in Devon with Diane. Phillip stayed behind with grandmother Sarah Scholes. Then a cool gust of wind blew through the house. Chalk-like dust fell from just below the ceiling. Pools of water appeared on the kitchen floor.

June 22, 1976. Off Fuerteventura, the crew of the Spanish Navy corvette Atrevida watched a light climb from the horizon. It stopped. Then it bloomed into a vast halo of yellow and blue. Across the Canary Islands, several hundred people watched the same thing for more than 40 minutes.

July 31, 1995. About 20:15. Aerolíneas Argentinas flight AR 674, a Boeing 727 from Buenos Aires, was on final approach to Bariloche. Captain Jorge Polanco saw a white light rush straight at his aircraft. Then it stopped suddenly. It settled beside the wing. He described an upside-down soup plate, about 30 metres across, with green lights spinning and an orange light on top that seemed to breathe.

Sunday, 1 September 1974. Langenburg, Saskatchewan. Around 10:30 in the morning, farmer Edwin Fuhr was swathing a field beside a slough when something caught his eye at the water's edge. He thought it was a prank. Then the grass began to move.

May 21, 1953. Arthur G. Stansel, an engineer working for the Air Force, was picked up at Indian Springs AFB for a job he could not talk about. He later said a bus with blacked-out windows carried him and about 15 other specialists into the desert near Kingman, Arizona. There, embedded in the sand, lay an oval craft that looked like two deep saucers, one inverted upon the other. Its only occupant lay in a tent nearby. About 4 feet tall. A dark brown complexion. A silvery, metallic suit.

Mirassol, São Paulo. June 1979, about three in the morning. Antônio Carlos Ferreira, a 21-year-old night watchman, had just punched the time clock at a furniture factory construction site. Then a red luminous sphere came down behind the building.

Summer 1924. Toba Inlet, on the British Columbia coast. Albert Ostman, a prospector born in Sweden, was asleep in his sleeping bag. Then something picked him up. For about three hours he was carried through the dark. Uphill, downhill, then at a trot. At dawn he heard chatter. Four figures stood around him, covered in hair. An old man, an old lady and two young ones.

September 23, 1947. At Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, Lt. Gen. Nathan F. Twining signed a SECRET letter. It went to Washington, for the attention of Brig. Gen. George Schulgen. Its verdict was blunt. The flying discs of that summer were "something real and not visionary or fictitious."

July 1, 1937. About one in the afternoon. On a plantation six miles downstream from Newport, Arkansas, Bramlett Bateman watched something rise from a deep eddy of the White River. It was grey. It was smooth. It had the skin of an elephant. It stayed there for some five minutes.

July 1884. A train climbs the Fraser Canyon above Yale, British Columbia. Engineer Ned Austin sees what looks like a man asleep beside the track. He signals for the brakes. The figure springs up, gives a sharp quick bark and scrambles up the rock bluff. After five minutes of perilous climbing, the crew has it cornered on a ledge.

September 1889. A farmhouse seven miles from Shawville, in Clarendon Township, Quebec. Money vanished from a drawer. Then the fires began. Eight in a single day. Stones crashed through the windows, thrown by invisible hands. At the centre of it all stood Dinah Burden McLean, an eleven-year-old orphan from Scotland.

April 25, 2013. About 9:20 at night. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection patrol plane has just taken off from Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The crew spots a pinkish to reddish light above the Atlantic, moving toward the airport. The tower sees it too. Nobody can say what it is.

20 May 1957. Late one cloudy night over East Anglia. Lt. Milton Torres pushed his F-86D Sabre to about 31,000 feet, chasing a target ground radar had watched for some time. It had been motionless for long intervals. Then came the order. Fire a full salvo of 24 rockets.

May 1971. A rented frame house just outside Fouke, Arkansas. The Ford family had lived there less than a week. Late at night, Elizabeth Ford lay asleep on a couch in the front room. She saw the curtain move. Then a hand came through the screen window. It was covered in heavy hair. It had claws. Its eyes looked like coals of fire.

July 5, 1977. Around noon on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain. Sandra Mansi watched the water stir like a school of fish. Then a head broke the surface. Then a neck. Then a back.

April 18, 1961. A late breakfast on a farm four miles from Eagle River, Wisconsin. Joe Simonton, 60, heard a noise outside. A silver craft, brighter than chrome, came straight down like an elevator and hovered a foot above his driveway. A hatch opened. Inside were three dark-haired men in dark knit clothing. One held up a jug and gestured for water. Simonton filled it. In return he was handed small, hot cakes from a flameless grill. He ate one. It tasted like cardboard.

January 1986. A summer night in the hills outside Capilla del Monte, in Argentina's Córdoba province. The Gómez family was playing cards with the doors and windows open. Then a bright red light came in through them. At first they took it for a car's headlights. It was coming from the sky.

August 13, 1960. Just before midnight. Two California Highway Patrol officers were on a country road east of Corning, watching for a speeding motorcycle. Then something that looked like an airliner came falling out of the sky. Charles A. Carson and Stanley Scott jumped out of the car, expecting a crash. Instead they met an absolute silence.

26 June 1972. A Monday morning on Braeside farm, outside Fort Beaufort in South Africa's Eastern Cape. Farm worker Boer de Klerk saw something near the farm reservoir. Then an object, hovering just above the bush.

30 October 2024. Off the coast of Yemen. An MQ-9 Reaper's infrared sensor holds a glowing object in its crosshairs. It moves in a straight line above the waves. A second Reaper, never seen on camera, fires a Hellfire missile. Contact. No explosion. The object deforms, tumbles and sheds fragments. And it keeps going.

Basel. Summer of 1566. On the evening of 27 July, the sun lost all its radiance and looked no bigger than the full moon. That night the moon looked almost blood-red. Then, at dawn on 7 August, many large black spheres appeared before the sun. They moved with great speed, coming and going, turning against each other as if fighting. Some became red and fiery. Then they faded and went out.

August 8, 1954. 3:01 p.m. Inside a 12 × 12 ft hut at Shirley's Bay, on the Ottawa River west of Ottawa, a recording gravimeter began to swing. The deflection on the graph paper was far larger than a passing aircraft could explain. In the words of Wilbert B. Smith, "the gravimeter went wild."

25 April 1977. The Japanese trawler Zuiyō Maru was fishing for mackerel off the east coast of New Zealand's South Island. Its net brought up the huge, rotting carcass of an animal nobody on board could identify. About 10 metres long. A small head on a long neck. Four large, reddish fins. A smell unlike any fish.

7 December 1905. Morning, off the northeast coast of Brazil. Two naturalists stand on the deck of the Earl of Crawford's steam yacht Valhalla. Edmund Meade-Waldo and Michael John Nicoll are Fellows of the Zoological Society of London. Then they see something that does not fit.

20 July 1970. About 8 pm. A truck moves along a road near the Rokunohara Dam, at the foot of Mount Hiba in Hiroshima Prefecture. Something comes out onto the road. It walks on two legs. It is gorilla-like, about the size of a calf. It notices the driver. Then it slowly goes back into the forest.

August 1817. Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. Something long and dark moved through the calm water off Cape Ann. Ship masters, merchants and a ship carpenter watched it play in circles, sink straight down and rise again two hundred yards away. One said its head was shaped like a sea turtle's. Another saw bunches along its back.

1968. A summer drive along Highway 97, beside Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. Art Folden and his wife saw something large and lifelike moving on the calm water. Folden pulled over and raised his home movie camera.

December 1978. The hills behind Genoa are locked in freezing fog. Night watchman Pier Fortunato Zanfretta sees four small lights moving in the garden of a villa at Marzano, near Torriglia. He suspects burglars. The engine and headlights of his patrol car fail. Then his voice reaches the operations room: "Mamma mia, quant'è brutto… no, non sono uomini, non sono uomini." The line goes dead.

Tuesday night, January 6, 1976. Mona Stafford's 36th birthday. Three friends leave a restaurant on U.S. 27 and head home to Liberty, Kentucky. Louise Smith is at the wheel of her 1967 Chevy Nova. Mona Stafford and Elaine Thomas sit beside her.

24 March 1997. The Hale-Bopp comet was at its peak and many people were out watching the sky. That night, low shapes crossed the rooftops around Sheffield, heading for the moors. One witness saw a triangle with the corners cut off, pink lights on the front, blue lights all around. A gamekeeper saw a big plane, very long, slow and low.