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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

July 30, 1954. About 4:00 p.m. on a small hill farm near Mountain View, Missouri. Buck Nelson's radio began to go crazy wild. His dog barked. His pony raised all kinds of cane. He stepped out the kitchen door. Three huge disks were right over the house.

January 18, 1978. The small hours at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Bluish-green lights wheel in tight formation high over the base. One oval object, glowing and featureless, drops low and hovers over a military police patrol car. Then something appears in front of the car. About four feet tall. Greyish brown. A fat head, long arms, a slender body.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

Sunday, 24 April 1949. A clear, cloudless morning in the New Mexico desert, a few miles north of Arrey. Balloon engineer Charles B. Moore and four Navy enlisted men were tracking a small pilot balloon through a theodolite. Moore leaned back to glance at it with his naked eye. Something else was up there. A whitish elliptical object, much higher than the balloon, moving the opposite way.

Western Zimbabwe. 22 July 1985. As the sun went down, air traffic controllers at Bulawayo Airport watched a bright, rounded object with a short cone above it hover in the sky. They also had it on radar. Dozens of people on the ground saw it. Two Air Force of Zimbabwe Hawk jets were scrambled from Thornhill. The pilots described something incredibly shiny, reflecting the colours of the sunset. Later accounts say it climbed away from them to 70,000 feet in under a minute.

Southern France. The night of 1 to 2 November 1968. A physician known only as Dr. X was woken shortly before 4 a.m. by his infant son, who was crying and gesturing toward the window. Through the shutters came long, regular flashes. He took them for a storm.

December 28, 1988. Evening in Cabo Rojo, in the south-western corner of Puerto Rico. Above Sierra Bermeja, witnesses watched a huge triangle hang in the sky. It blinked with coloured lights around a glowing yellow sphere.

October 18, 2013. Ten in the morning. At an air force headquarters in Miraflores, Lima, Peru reopened its office for anomalous aerial phenomena. Col. Julio Vucetich gave the reason. Sightings were rising, and people were reporting them to the media.

September 1967. The San Luis Valley, Colorado. A 3-year-old Appaloosa mare named Lady fails to come home for her evening drink. Two days later she is found a quarter mile from the ranch house. Her head and neck are stripped to bleached bone. There is no blood. Her tracks stop 100 feet short of the body. A sickening sweet odor hangs in the air.

Oloron-Sainte-Marie. Friday, 17 October 1952. Around half past one in the afternoon, a school supervisor named Jean-Yves Prigent looked up with his family and saw a narrow white cylinder, tilted at 45 degrees, drifting toward the southwest. A plume of white smoke escaped from its upper end. Ahead of it flew some thirty smaller objects. They moved in pairs. They zigzagged.

July 12, 2022. Somewhere over the Middle East, a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone is watching the ground through its daylight camera. Then something slips into the frame. A small, silver ball. It shimmers as it crosses above houses and empty fields. The camera slews to follow it. The whole clip lasts 24 seconds.

Friday, 17 November 1882. About 6 p.m. A great magnetic storm was raging, and an aurora flickered across the northern sky over England. Then something else rose in the east.

June 26, 1959. Dusk at the Boianai Anglican Mission on Goodenough Bay, Papua. Rev. William Booth Gill watched a brilliant light approach and stop above the mission. On its upper deck, figures moved. Gill kept a timed log as it happened: "Now 3 men, moving, glowing, doing something on deck. Gone."

July 31, 1952. Passaic, New Jersey. Mid-morning at 221 Brooks Avenue. George J. Stock looked up and saw a disc drifting in from the east. It was dull metallic grey, with a dome on top. It had no seams or portholes, and it made no sound. It stopped almost directly over his head and hung there for a few minutes. Stock ran for his camera.

November 1957. Two in the morning. Two sentries stand watch at Fort Itaipu, a coastal artillery fortress guarding the approach to Santos harbour in Brazil. Out over the Atlantic, a new and unusually bright star appears. It grows. It comes straight at them. Then it slows, sinks without a sound, and hangs over the fort. A glowing orange disc, buzzing like a generator.

12 July 1987. A Sunday at the Vranov Reservoir, a few kilometres from the Austrian border. Below, crowds swim and sunbathe. Above, a Czechoslovak Mi-24 attack helicopter closes on a radar target that came from across the border in Austria.

July 28, 1989. Night in the Kapustin Yar district of Astrakhan Oblast. At a Soviet Army signal centre, soldiers saw luminous objects in the dark, 3 to 5 km away. By 23:30, Ensign Valery Voloshin was climbing an antenna tower.

5 December 1904. On the Merionethshire coast, a farmer's wife named Mary Jones began preaching at a small chapel called Egryn. Then the lights came.

Roskovec, Albania. 4 May 2006. Around seven in the evening, on a clear day, the area suddenly darkened. Mist gathered as though rain were about to fall. A strong, cold wind bent the branches of the trees.

December 22, 2017. Just after sunset over Los Angeles. Drivers on the 405 Freeway started pulling over. Above them, a bright object was racing across the sky. Behind it a vast teardrop-shaped plume kept growing until it swelled to huge proportions. It glowed. It looked like a jellyfish. TV stations as far away as San Diego got calls. In Phoenix, a former governor asked what the lights were. Some residents feared a nuclear attack.

March 22, 1953. An isolated cabin in the Big Tujunga Canyon, north of Los Angeles. At 2:00 a.m. Sara woke to a deathly stillness and a glow of light flooding the cabin. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, it was 4:20. More than two hours were gone. She and her partner Jan ran from the cabin, past a vaporous something with the head and shoulders of a long-haired personage.

January 3, 1979. Evening, on Okeechobee Road outside Hialeah, Florida. Filiberto Cárdenas and his friend Fernando Marti were driving out to buy a pig. The car lost power. The engine died. It reflected red and violet light in sequence, and a sound rose around them like a swarm of bees.

Paciência, Rio de Janeiro. September 1977. Bus driver Antônio La Rubia was walking to a pre-dawn shift. In a field he found a huge, dull-grey object shaped like a hat. A blue light froze him where he stood. Three stocky, one-legged robots with spinning antennae closed in.

Monday, April 19, 1897. About 10:30 at night. On a farm near Le Roy, Kansas, stockman Alexander Hamilton was woken by a noise among his cattle. He went to the door. An airship was slowly descending over his cow lot. Cigar-shaped. Possibly three hundred feet long. A lighted carriage of glass hung beneath it, and inside were "six of the strangest beings I ever saw." When it rose, it took a two-year-old heifer with it on a red cable.

The end of Buddhist Lent on the Mekong. Night falls over Phon Phisai, and the crowds wait on the Thai bank. Then the fireballs come. Red, pink and orange, they rise silently out of the river, climb a couple of hundred metres and vanish. Locals say the Phaya Nak, a giant serpent in the riverbed, sends them up to greet the Buddha.

August 28, 1963. After dinner, three boys were in a backyard on Rua Conselheiro Lafaiete, in the Sagrada Família neighbourhood of Belo Horizonte. Over an avocado tree floated a transparent sphere, lit from inside. Four figures could be seen within it.

Massachusetts Bay Colony. The year is 1638 by the colonists' calendar. 1639 by ours. James Everell, "a sober, discreet man," was on the Muddy River at night with two companions in a lighter. Then they saw it. A great light. When it stood still, it flamed up, about three yards square. When it ran, it contracted into the figure of a swine and shot "as swift as an arrow towards Charlton." Up and down. For two or three hours.

January 19, 1966. About nine in the morning. George Pedley, a 28-year-old banana farmer, was driving his tractor past Horseshoe Lagoon near Tully, in far north Queensland. Then came a loud hissing, like air escaping from a tyre.

August 7, 1968. The boat dock at Buff Ledge Camp, a girls' summer camp on the shore of Lake Champlain in Colchester, Vermont. Two young staff members, Michael Lapp, 16, and Janet Cornell, 19, watched a bright light come down fast over the water. Three smaller lights broke away and began to maneuver. One dove into the lake.

February 1989. Sand Mountain, northeast Alabama. A woman calls the Fyffe police about a light in the sky. It is not moving. Assistant Police Chief Fred Works and Chief Junior Garmany drive out to look. As they get closer, the light begins to move.

18 February 1954. An afternoon near Lossiemouth, on the Moray coast of Scotland. An amateur astronomer named Cedric Allingham was watching for rare birds. Then a 50-ft saucer, domed and fitted with portholes, came down and landed beside him. He met its pilot. About six feet tall. Dark haired. Human in appearance. Through gestures and drawings, the visitor indicated he came from Mars.

January 29, 1952. Night over North Korea. A B-29 bomber flew above 20,000 feet near Wonsan. Then its crewmen saw a companion. A bright orange globe, glowing like the sun, with a halo of bluish flame. It pulled level with the bomber and stayed there for about five minutes.

August 1678. A pamphlet appears in England with a strange tale out of Hertfordshire. A rich farmer haggles with a poor mower over three half acres of oats. The mower asks too much. The farmer swears the Devil should mow it rather than he.

May 5, 1980. A young mother was near Eagle Nest, New Mexico, with her son. Over a meadow she saw two huge objects. They were silent and hovering, each about the size of a Goodyear Blimp. The next day she walked into the State Police office at Cimarron.

August 25, 1972. Kera, a district of rice paddies on the east side of Kōchi City. Thirteen-year-old Michio Seo saw a small device flying erratically above a field. It was dull silver, with a wide brim sloping up to a bell-shaped flat top. He moved closer. It shot a bright beam of light at him.

5 May 1954. Woomera, South Australia. On the rocket range, a radar operator at Post R picked up a target at about 60,000 yards. It swept in from the north, curved over the post and raced away to the east. He timed it. Fifteen thousand yards in ten seconds. About 3600 miles per hour.

July 17, 1957. Before dawn over the Gulf Coast, a USAF RB-47H reconnaissance plane picked up a radar signal that behaved wrongly. Then the pilots saw it. A very intense white light, closing fast, crossing in front of them at an angular velocity Maj. Lewis D. Chase had never seen matched in 20 years of flying.

June 1994. Phoenix Mountain, in the forests of Wuchang, Heilongjiang. Villagers saw a giant circular object flashing brightly on the south slope. Forestry worker Meng Zhaoguo climbed toward it. He said a light as intense as a welding arc struck him in the forehead and knocked him out.

August 5, 1953. Night had just fallen over western South Dakota. At a Ground Observer Corps post near Black Hawk, a volunteer spotter saw an extremely bright light low in the northeast. She called it in. At Ellsworth Air Force Base, the radar found a target. Solid. Bright. 16,000 feet up.

October 4, 1982. Evening, near a Soviet nuclear missile base at Usovo, in the Ukrainian SSR. Officers on a military bus saw two brightly shining objects above the road. Each was a ring of lights like a New Year's tree garland. Small glowing balls broke away and flew toward the earth. Another officer saw a smooth disc bank on its edge like a plane. It made no sound.

May 25, 1995. Night over the Texas Panhandle. America West Flight 564, a Boeing 757, is cruising west at 39,000 feet toward Las Vegas. Off to the right, a row of bright white strobes fires in sequence. Left to right. Then lightning flickers in a distant storm. For an instant, the crew see what carries the lights. A dark, wingless, cigar-like shape. They put it at 300-400 feet long.

May 5, 1981. Salyut 6 was over the area of South Africa, about to cross into Earth's shadow. Commander Vladimir Kovalyonok looked through a porthole and saw an object he could not explain. Elliptical, like a melon, with a rotating cone at its front. It flew with the station.

Deception Island. 3 July 1965. 19:40.

January 12, 1975. The small hours of a Sunday. George O'Barski was driving home through North Hudson Park in North Bergen, New Jersey. Static swallowed the music on his radio. Beside his car, a dark, round object with brilliantly lit windows moved the same way he did, humming.

May 3, 1975. A 23-year-old pilot named Carlos Antonio de los Santos Montiel was flying a small Piper from Zihuatanejo to Mexico City. Near Lake Tequesquitengo, at about 15,000 feet, he felt something. He turned. An object was coming over the surface of his wing.

5 October 2000. 9:15 pm. Bonsall, a quiet village in the Derbyshire Dales. Sharon Rowlands had been given a camcorder only days earlier. Now she pointed it at something over Middleton Wood.

21 January 1959. Before dawn in the Port of Gdynia, dock workers were loading the ship Jarosław Dąbrowski. Then something burning came out of the sky. Witnesses called it orange, red, pink. A saucer, a cigar, a barrel. It hung over the port for a dozen or so seconds. Then it fell into Basin IV with a metallic screech and a cloud of steam.

September 20, 1973. Skylab 3 is on Flight Day 55. Jack Lousma looks out the wardroom window and notices a rather large red star. It is much brighter than Jupiter. Its light swells and fades in almost exactly 10 seconds.

July 16, 1952. Hampton, Virginia. Paul R. Hill, an aerodynamicist at the NACA laboratory at Langley, stood by the water with Frances Hoback, looking south over Hampton Roads. Two amber lights came in from the south, side by side, at about 500 mph. They slowed almost to a stop. They jittered. Then they turned and began to revolve around each other in a tight horizontal circle, a manoeuvre Hill later calculated at about 100 g. Two more lights arrived. All four sped away to the south.

All Saints' Day, 1954. Just after dawn in the Tuscan hills. Rosa Lotti Dainelli, a 40-year-old farm worker, walked barefoot toward the church of Cennina. She carried her best shoes and stockings, and a bunch of carnations for the altar of the Madonna Pellegrina.

Somewhere near the English coast, in the latter part of the war. An RAF reconnaissance plane is heading home from France or Germany. Suddenly a metallic object is at its side. It matches the aircraft's speed. It hangs there, silent. Then it is gone.

November 4, 1957. Just after one in the afternoon on US Highway 54, in the desert south of Orogrande, New Mexico. James W. Stokes was driving from Alamogordo to El Paso when his radio faded. Then his engine died. Ahead of him, other cars had stopped too, their drivers out on the road, staring at the sky.

8 April 1665. About two in the afternoon. Six fishermen were out after herring in the waters off Stralsund, a Baltic port in Swedish Pomerania. Above them, a flock of birds took the form of a ship. More ships followed. Then they fought.

July 14, 1952. A Pan American DC-4 cruises at 8,000 feet over the Chesapeake Bay, bound for Miami. In the cockpit, First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry look toward Newport News. A red brilliance appears near the ground. Six glowing discs, each perhaps 100 feet across, streak toward the airliner in formation, well below it. They flip on edge. They reverse course like a ball ricocheting off a wall. Two more join them. Then all eight climb away and blink out, one by one.

October 26, 1978. Early morning in Clarenville, Newfoundland. Residents on the waterfront had been watching something over Random Sound. They called the RCMP. Constable James Blackwood, 25 years old, went down to the shore.

Phoenix, Arizona. Monday, 7 July 1947. Late afternoon. William Albert Rhodes was walking to his home workshop. Then he heard a loud whoosh. He took it for a jet-propelled Lockheed P-80. Above his home, a flat, gray object was circling, shaped like the heel of a shoe with a small hole in the center. It went completely silent. Rhodes grabbed his box camera and took two pictures.

July 4, 1947. Independence Day. United Air Lines Flight 105 had just climbed out of Boise, Idaho. Eight minutes into the flight, First Officer Ralph Stevens saw something ahead. At first it looked like an approaching aircraft. It was not.

April 22, 1966. About 9:00 p.m. in Beverly, Massachusetts. Eleven-year-old Nancy Modugno looked out of her bedroom window and saw an object about the size of an automobile, flashing blue, green, red and white lights. Her mother and two friends went to the field behind Beverly High School. One of the women waved her arms. The object stopped circling. Then it came across the field toward them.

Sunday, 23 February 1975. Kōfu, Japan. Two second-grade cousins were roller-skating after dusk when two orange lights came over the mountains. One of them dropped low. It seemed to follow them.

August 1953. A Mexico City taxi driver named Salvador Villanueva Medina was driving two American passengers north toward Laredo in a Buick. Near Ciudad Valles, the car broke down. The passengers went for help. He stayed behind, alone.

July 1947. The flying disc wave was at its peak. At Muroc Army Air Field in the Mojave Desert, people whose job was flight looked up and saw something they could not name.

February 17, 1977. Four in the morning at Estancia La Aurora, a ranch by the Río Daymán in northern Uruguay. A strong light shone from behind the feed shed. Ángel María Tonna, his children and some farmhands watched a glowing disc come down over the corral. About 3 metres across. About 15 metres up. The cows stampeded and trampled a worker. The dogs howled in terror. Tonna raised his arm against the glare, and the burns on that arm kept returning for about two years.

Saturday, 2 April 1966. 2:21 pm. James Kibel stepped into his parents' garden in Balwyn, Melbourne, to use up the last of an old Polaroid film. Something was coming down out of the sky. It was very shiny, "just like a mirror", and shaped like a big mushroom with the stalk pointing towards earth. It tipped, pivoted, and took off northwards at terrific speed. Then came a boom.

April 16, 2016. Mosul, northern Iraq. A US MC-12 reconnaissance aircraft is recording the city from above. At 09:47 UTC something slides into its camera frame. A round, shiny object with a metallic shine on its surface moves across the rooftops. It stays on screen for about one second. The whole clip lasts four.

7 May 1989. A Sunday. According to papers later leaked to British researchers, a South African Navy ship picked up something on radar. It was racing toward Africa at 5746 nautical miles per hour. Two Mirages were scrambled. A squadron commander fired an experimental laser. The object flashed, lost altitude and came down in the Kalahari Desert. A silver disc, tilted in a crater 150 m wide.

May 25, 2019. Shortly before one in the morning, people across the Netherlands looked up and saw something none of them could name. A long, straight line of lights. Dozens of them, moving together at a constant speed. "It looked as though a train was driving through the sky," one witness in Landgraaf wrote. In The Hague, an observer wondered: "Is Russia attacking America? Are they UFOs?"

Early May 1968. Route 2, on the outskirts of Chascomús. A Buenos Aires lawyer, Dr. Geraldo Vidal, and his wife were driving toward Maipú in a Peugeot 403. A dense white fog appeared out of nowhere and wrapped around the car.

August 2007. A shaky clip appears on YouTube under the title "UFO Haiti." Palm trees whip in the wind. Dogs bark. A woman gasps. Two large craft pass low over her head with a faint roar, then head toward a mountain range where about 12 more wait in formation.

August 12, 1883. Zacatecas, Mexico. On the hill of Cerro de la Bufa, astronomer José Bonilla turned his telescope toward the Sun to study its spots. Then something began to cross the solar disc.

May 10, 2007. A man who called himself Chad emailed photographs to Coast to Coast AM. They showed a strange machine hovering near Bakersfield, California. A circular, ringed centre. Three spiked arms. Alien-looking glyphs on its underside. He said it was almost silent and crackled like power lines.

April 2013. The Collahuasi copper mine, high on the Chilean altiplano. Four technicians saw a flattened disc of brilliant color in a perfectly clear sky. It made no sound. It rose, dropped and slid sideways in short steps, about 600 meters above the ground. It stayed for more than an hour. Then it headed off to the east.

1974. A Cessna Citation approaches Bakersfield, California, maybe 9 or 10 o'clock at night. On board is the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Behind the plane hangs a big white light.

February 20, 1962. John Glenn was alone in Friendship 7, the first American to orbit the Earth. Over the Pacific, the sun came up. Suddenly the capsule was surrounded.

Carolingian Gaul, around 815. Agobard of Lyon is writing against a belief common in his region. Ships, people say, sail in the clouds. They come from a land called Magonia. Their aerial sailors carry off the crops beaten down by hail, and pay the local storm-makers for the grain.

Salem, Massachusetts. 16 July 1952. 09:35 in the morning. Inside the photo lab at Coast Guard Air Station Salem, photographer Shell R. Alpert was filing negatives with his back to the window. He turned. Something bright hung in the sky beside the power plant smokestacks. Four almost brilliant lights, in a V.

Monday, 4 September 1967. Southern England woke to find flying saucers on the ground. Six of them. Silver, seamless, a little over four feet across, with a dome on top. And they were beeping.

Saturday, 6 May 1978. Late afternoon on the border between Bolivia and Argentina. Something came out of the east at enormous speed. Witnesses described a metallic object, oval or cylindrical, trailing smoke and fire. It dropped behind the mountains. Seconds later, a tremendous explosion. The ground shook in towns on both sides of the frontier.

July 4, 1969. Evening at the Casateja farm, on the edge of Anolaima, Colombia. The children shouted "platillo volador". A little light, like a balloon's, grew out of the distance and came in low along the trees. Silent. Glowing amber.

March 21, 1990. Night over the towns north of Moscow. Soviet air defence radar tracked a target that would not answer the identify, friend or foe request. At 21:38 Lt. Col. A. A. Semenchenko got the command to go on an alert exercise. At 22:05 he saw it. Two flashing white lights, and a dim silhouette against the city lights below.

July 23, 1947. Deep in the forested interior of Paraná, surveyor José Carlos Higgins was at work with his crew. Then came an extremely sharp sound. A large metallic disc descended and settled on curved legs about 50 meters away. His workers ran. Higgins stayed.

July 11, 2023. Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, about 10 hours by river from Iquitos, the Ikitu community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu began to see strangers at night. About 2 metres tall. Silver. Long heads, long masks, yellowish eyes. Round shoes with a red light on the heel. They did not touch the ground.

Tuesday, 29 August 1967. Cussac, on a high plateau near Saint-Flour in the Cantal. François Delpeuch, aged 13, and his sister Anne-Marie, aged 9, were out with the cows behind a low stone wall. The dog barked. The cattle grew restless.

January 29, 1986. 19:55. Over the mining town of Dalnegorsk, a glowing sphere crossed the dark sky. It was reddish orange and round, without protrusions. It made no sound. One witness said it looked like slightly heated stainless steel.

August 1993. The foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, south-east of Melbourne. It is after midnight, and the Cahill family is driving home.

February 1951. A US Navy R5D was crossing the North Atlantic at night, bound for Argentia, Newfoundland. Some 200 miles out, a crewman saw a glow beneath the clouds. It seemed to sit on the sea itself.

November 4, 1957. Late evening at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque. In the tower, two civilian controllers, R. M. Kaser and E. G. Brink, watched a white light move east across the airfield. Then a dark object came down steeply at the end of Runway 26.

October 21, 1963. A farm outside Trancas, in Argentina's Tucumán Province. The generator had failed and the house was dark. Fifteen-year-old maid Dora Martina Guzmán saw lights by the railway line and thought there had been a train accident. It was not a train.

2 November 1982. A Tuesday morning over Portugal. Lieutenant Júlio Miguel Guerra, a Portuguese Air Force flight instructor, was flying alone in a DHC-1 Chipmunk out of Ota. Below him, something bright was moving. A small metallic object, built like two joined hemispheres.

August 5, 1952. Tokyo. Just before midnight, two airmen crossing the ramp at Haneda Air Force Base looked northeast over Tokyo Bay. They saw a large brilliant light. From the control tower, four operators watched it through binoculars for nearly an hour. The light seemed to sit on a large, round, dark shape, with dimmer lights running along its lower edge.

November 9, 1965. Early evening over Syracuse, New York. Pilot Weldon Ross was bringing a student in to land at Hancock Field. Above the twin 345,000-volt towers of the Clay substation, he saw a huge red ball of brilliant intensity. About 100 feet in diameter. It hovered over the power lines. Then it began to rise.

March 1967. Somewhere northeast of Cuba, two MiG-21s closed on a target no one could identify. The pilots called it a shiny metallic sphere. No wings. No markings. The flight leader armed his weapons and locked his radar on it. Seconds later his wingman was on the radio. The leader's jet had disintegrated.

April 1966. Night on a straight stretch of sealed road near Burkes Flat, in central Victoria. Ron Sullivan was driving alone in his new Ford Falcon. He saw a light in a paddock and took it for a tractor. Then his headlight beams bent to the right. Towards the light. "As if they were magnetised."

31 July 1975. A chilly, misty morning outside Loxton, a small village in the Karoo. Danie van Graan walked over the earth bank that shields the village from flood water. In the field below sat something he took for the aluminium roof of a caravan.

Sioux City, Iowa. January 20, 1951. A clear, cold night. In the control tower, John M. Williams was watching an odd light high in the west. Then it accelerated. Mid-Continent Airlines Flight 9 had just taken off, and Captain Lawrence W. Vinther turned his DC-3 to follow it.

Hauraki Plains, New Zealand. August, 1969. Farmer Bert O'Neill noticed a pale patch among the ti-tree on a run-off section of his land near Ngātea. On 4 September 1969 it was inspected.

September 13, 1966. Gemini 11 is in Earth orbit, heading into sunset. Off to the left, the crew has company. A large object, tumbling at about one revolution per second, flying alongside the capsule like a wingman. Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon take three photographs.

January 20, 1988. Before dawn on the Eyre Highway, about 40 km west of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse. The Knowles family was driving east across the Nullarbor Plain in a blue Ford Telstar. Ahead, a light hung over the road. They took it for a truck. It grew bigger and brighter. Then it followed them.

December 1, 1987. Early morning on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. It was dark and overcast. A retired police officer, known to the world only as Philip Spencer, was crossing the moor toward East Morton with a camera and a compass.

19 September 1952. RAF Topcliffe, North Yorkshire. Just before 11 am. Aircrew of 269 Squadron were waiting for orders in the middle of NATO's Exercise Mainbrace. A Gloster Meteor was coming down towards nearby RAF Dishforth. Then Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn saw a white object in the sky behind it.

Devon, England. 24 October 1967. Shortly after 4 a.m.

January 28, 1994. Air France Flight AF3532 was cruising from Nice to London, nearly 12,000 metres above Seine-et-Marne. In the cockpit, the chief steward pointed to something off the left side. A weather balloon, he thought. Captain Jean-Charles Duboc looked again. It was enormous. A dark bell that became a brown-red lens with fuzzy edges. No wings. No engines. Then, as the Airbus left it behind, it turned transparent and was gone.

February 24, 1959. American Airlines Flight 139 was cruising west over Pennsylvania at 8,500 feet. The sky above was clear. No moon. Off the left wingtip, Captain Peter W. Killian saw three lights in a line. They were brighter than any star. At first he took them for the Belt of Orion. Then he looked again and saw both.

Lincolnshire. The evening of Saturday 3 January 2009. Near the village of Conisholme, residents watched orange-yellow spheres of light move across the sky toward the Fen Farm wind farm. One witness saw a low flying object skimming toward the turbines. Another saw "a massive ball of light with tentacles going right down to the ground."

Gangwon Province, Joseon Korea. The 25th day of the 8th lunar month, 1609. The sky was clear. Not a speck of cloud in any direction. Then thunder broke out, and everyone looked up.

August 1947. A painter walks alone through the fir trees above Raveo, in the mountains of Friuli. A dried-up stream. Then, wedged in a ravine no more than 50 metres away, he sees a red, lens-shaped object with a low dome and a telescopic antenna.

March 2, 1965. Mid-afternoon in the scrub near Brooksville, Florida. John F. Reeves, a 66-year-old retired longshoreman, was hunting snakes. In front of him stood a landed flying saucer on four legs. A robot-like figure about five feet tall approached. It wore a silver-grey suit and a glass dome helmet. It raised a black sphere and set off a blinding flash. Twice.

July 11, 1947. Three days after Roswell. In Twin Falls, Idaho, residents heard a thud in the night and took it for a truck. At 8:20 a.m. a neighbor found something on the Thompson lawn. A small domed disc, its sides glistening silver and gold. Two narrow strips of turf were torn up.

4 September 1957. Four F-84G Thunderjets of the Portuguese Air Force took off from Ota on a night navigation exercise. Leading them was Capt. José Lemos Ferreira.

August 1, 1952. A Friday morning in Ohio. On Campbell Hill, radar operators at Bellefontaine Air Force Station caught a target just north of Dayton. It was moving at about 500 mph. Against the wind.

28 June 1952. A Saturday newspaper in Saarbrücken carried a startling headline. A flying saucer had landed on Spitsbergen. The story said Norwegian jets on manoeuvres over the Arctic had seen it from the air. It was a metallic, glittering disc, sunk into the snow and ice near the Hinlopen Strait. It was unmanned, and its gauges carried Russian symbols.

21 October 1952. An RAF Meteor trainer climbed out of Little Rissington in Gloucestershire on a routine navigation exercise. At about 12,000 feet it broke through the cloud. Ahead and above were three white objects. The instructor, Flt Lt Michael Swiney, first took them for parachutes. Two sat on a level keel. One was canted at a slight angle. They left no contrail.

Lake Baikal. 1982. Seven Soviet military divers, fifty meters down in the deepest lake on Earth. Around them, figures that should not be there. Almost three meters tall. Sealed in tight silvery suits. Round helmets over their heads, and no aqualungs at all. They moved very quickly. When the divers closed in with a net, a powerful force threw all seven to the surface. Three died of the bends. Four were left as grave invalids.

4 June 1965. Gemini 4 is on its 20th revolution, crossing the Hawaiian Islands in daylight. Ed White is asleep. Command pilot James McDivitt looks out the window and sees something he cannot identify.

October 27, 1974. A Sunday night in Essex. A family of five was driving home from Harold Hill to Aveley. The trip normally took 22 minutes.

January 5, 2009. A Monday night in Morris County, New Jersey. At about 8:15 pm, five red lights appeared over Cedar Knolls and drifted toward Madison. They rose and dipped in sequence. They held formation. Then, one by one, they went out.

May 7, 1952. Late afternoon at Barra da Tijuca, then a remote beach district of Rio de Janeiro. Reporter João Martins and photographer Ed Keffel of O Cruzeiro stood on a cliff above the coast. Something came in from the sea at high speed. Martins took it for a plane. Then he saw it was flying sideways. Keffel raised his Rolleiflex and took five frames in about a minute. A gray-blue disc. Silent. No smoke, no flames.

November 1957. Three Scarborough men were driving home over the moor at night. On Reasty Hill, near the village of Silpho, they saw a glowing object in the sky. It appeared to fall to the ground on a ridge above Broxa Forest. The car stalled.

July 23, 1992. A Sydney suburban home. Peter Khoury had driven his wife Vivian to a train station, come back feeling unwell and lain down to sleep. He woke with a start. Something was alighting on the bed. Two naked women knelt at its end. One appeared Nordic, over 6 feet tall, with blue eyes 2 to 3 times larger than normal. The other appeared Asian. The Nordic woman pulled his head to her breast. He bit. Moments later, both were gone.

August 2012. A remote border post on the south bank of Pangong Tso, high in eastern Ladakh. Indian border police began to log something they could not name. Yellowish spheres lifted off the horizon on the Chinese side. They drifted slowly across the sky for hours. Then they were gone.

January 25, 2010. Harbour Mille, a small fishing community on Newfoundland's south coast. Darlene Stewart was outside photographing the sunset. Something flew overhead.

May 24, 1949. A clear afternoon on the Rogue River near Gold Beach, Oregon. Five people are out in a small boat. Two of them work at the NACA Ames Aeronautical Laboratory.

Petare, on the eastern edge of Caracas. The small hours of 29 November 1954. Gustavo González and his helper José Ponce were driving their van to collect a load when they found the street blocked by a glowing sphere, hovering just above the road.

August 26, 1975. About 4:00 a.m. on Interstate 94, some 45 miles west of Fargo, North Dakota. Sandy Larson was on the road to Bismarck with her 15-year-old daughter Jackie and a boyfriend named Terry. A flash. A rumble like distant thunder. Then eight to ten glowing objects, wrapped in smoke, descending ahead of the car.

March 1993. Kadima, a small local council in Israel's Sharon region. At about 6:30 in the morning, Ziporet Carmel found her kitchen bathed in light. In the field outside stood a silver, square object she took for a new fruit silo. Then it added a second storey to itself.

March 1962. A grey Sunday morning in a field near the British Oak pub at Mosborough, five miles from Sheffield City Centre. Three boys were there. One of them, Alex Birch, had a Box Brownie camera. Above them hung five dark, saucer shaped objects, with dazzling white blobs emerging from their fuselages. He got his camera up and took one shot. A second or so later, they were gone. At terrific speed. Towards Sheffield.

Autumn, 1933. In the far north of Norway, Sweden and Finland, engines droned in the dark over land with no airbases. Unmarked aircraft flew low. Many came in snowstorms. Lakes and fjords lit up as if under searchlights. One plane was so brightly lit that witnesses could see the pilot.

October 1950. Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Home of the Atomic Energy Commission's K-25, X-10 and Y-12 plants. Late on the night of October 12, the Air Force radar at Knoxville picked up eleven objects, perhaps more, crossing the restricted airspace. An F-82 fighter went up. Its crew saw nothing.

Friday, 24 April 1964. Shortly after 10 a.m. Dairy farmer Gary Wilcox was spreading fertilizer on his farm at Newark Valley, New York. Something sat at the edge of the woods. It was shaped like an egg. Smooth and aluminium coloured, with no rivets or seams, it hung just off the ground.

Mount Etna. The night of 30 April 1962. Eugenio Siragusa, a customs employee from Catania, felt an inner call. From his window he saw an object flying over the volcano. He drove his Fiat 600 up the mountain, stopped near the extinct crater of Monte Manfrè and went on foot toward the top.

Ireland, the eighth century. An Irish chronicle set down a single line. Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Cluain Moccu Nóis. Clonmacnoise, the monastery on the Shannon.

October 14, 1949. Palomar Mountain, California. The great observatory had opened that same year. At about 1:15 p.m., public relations manager Harley C. Marshall looked up and saw a perfect "V of V's." Sixteen to eighteen silver objects. No tails. No wings. They crossed overhead at high speed toward the northwest, with a sound like jets.

September 10, 1951. Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. A student radar operator was showing his set to visiting officers. Then he picked up a low-flying target moving faster than the automatic tracking could follow.

4 April 1957. A Thursday morning on the coast of south-west Scotland. At Balscalloch, near Corsewall Point, a Ministry of Supply radar crew never received the order to switch off. So they were still watching when a huge echo appeared over the sea north of Stranraer.

12 August 1983. Just after midnight, Alfred Burtoo walked to the Basingstoke Canal at Aldershot with his dog Tiny and his fishing gear. He was 77. He was pouring tea when a vivid light came down over the railway line and seemed to land on the embankment.

Sunday, 21 February 2021. American Airlines Flight 2292 was cruising at 36,000 feet over the northeast corner of New Mexico, bound from Cincinnati to Phoenix. Shortly after noon, a pilot called Albuquerque Center. "Do you have any targets up here?" Something had just gone right over the top of the Airbus. "I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing."

November 23, 1948. A US air base near Munich. About ten at night. An F-80 pilot looked east and saw something that looked like a reddish star. It was moving. It crossed Munich heading south. It turned slightly to the southwest, then to the southeast.

April 18, 1962. Evening across the American West. Over central Utah, a pilot saw his cockpit lit up from above. Near Eureka, a flaming object passed low overhead. A truck engine sputtered and its headlights dimmed. In Las Vegas, a newspaper photographer watched "a tremendous flaming sword" cross the sky almost horizontally and break into bright explosions toward Mesquite. At Nellis Air Force Base, radar tracked something for 32 minutes.

September 4, 1995. Gapyeong County, South Korea. Munhwa Ilbo photographer Kim Seon-gyu was in a remote farming village, photographing an elderly couple threshing sesame ahead of Chuseok. He shot three frames during one stroke of the grandmother's threshing. By every account, nobody saw anything in the sky.

11 August 2000. Night over Brighton. A Sussex Police helicopter was flying about 1,000 feet above the town. Then something began to approach from the crew's left.

Wednesday, 28 November 2007. About seven in the evening. Over Halesowen, in the West Midlands, a silent triangle crossed the sky towards Stourbridge. One witness said it looked like a huge Dorito. Red lights glowed on its underside, and they moved position while the craft was flying. At the same time, an observer on the Lickey Hills watched it over Birmingham through binoculars.

March 2, 2025. Alto Bonito, a rural corner of Guadalajara de Buga in western Colombia. Two people, María and José, pointed a phone at the sky. A metallic sphere was floating there, zigzagging, giving off colored lights. Then it came down. It touched a 10,000-volt power line. A spark flared. The sphere was left with a small hole.

Araçariguama, São Paulo state. Carnival week, 1946. João Prestes Filho, a 44-year-old farmer, came home from a day of fishing on the Rio Tietê to an empty house. His family was away at the Carnival in São Roque.

August 1967. A night of heavy rain had just passed over the Schielke farm near Duhamel, Alberta. The cows did not come home from the pasture. That rarely happened. So Mr. Schielke walked out to fetch them, into a field he had not visited in weeks.

December 16, 1953. Just before five in the afternoon. A Lockheed WV-2 Super Constellation was climbing over the California coast on a test flight. Test pilot Roy E. Wimmer noticed a dark shape ahead, at about their altitude. It was not moving. "Look out, there's a flying saucer," he joked. The crew turned toward it. For about five minutes they never got closer.

In the year 22, third month of winter, sixth hour of the day. The scribes of the House of Life saw a circle of fire coming in the sky. It had no voice. Its breath smelled foul. Days later the fire circles returned, more numerous than anything, shining more than the sun while the army of the king looked on. Then they rose toward the south, and fish and birds fell from the sky.

May 29, 1950. An American Airlines DC-6 had just climbed out of Washington National Airport, bound for Nashville. The moon was high. Then the copilot shouted a warning. A brilliant bluish light was rushing at them from dead ahead.

Dawn, 28 February 1904. The USS Supply was steaming for San Francisco, about 300 miles out in the Pacific. On deck, the officer of the watch and two crewmen saw three bright red objects low on the horizon. One was egg-shaped and led the way. Two round ones followed.

December 11, 1996. A winter evening on the Klondike Highway, north of Whitehorse. At Fox Lake, two cousins in separate vehicles watched a huge object with a row of lights drift slowly over the water. One of them ended up almost directly beneath it. He saw a solid, smooth surface and a large white light at its centre. There was no sound.

October 8, 1981. About eleven in the morning. Hannah McRoberts, 25, of Campbell River, had stopped with her family at a rest area on Vancouver Island's east coast. A cloud sat on a wooded mountain peak. It looked like "a volcano issuing steam." She raised her 35 mm camera and took the picture.

Santiago, Chile. November 5, 2010. The Chilean Air Force was changing command at El Bosque Air Base, and President Sebastián Piñera led the ceremony. The jets flew past. Nobody on the ground saw anything strange.

Sunday 14 November 1976. About 9 p.m. on the eastern edge of Winchester. Joyce Bowles was driving her white Mini Clubman to Chilcomb, with her neighbour Ted Pratt beside her. The car shook. The steering locked. The Mini slid sideways onto the grass verge.

December 2018. An uncrewed U.S. Air Force platform was flying over the Mediterranean Sea. Its infrared camera was trained on Mount Etna, erupting in Sicily. Then something round crossed the frame. The operators reported it at 345 mph. It seemed to pass straight through the volcano's plume of superheated gas and ash. No change in altitude. No change in bearing.

April 2004. Across Iran, thousands looked up. Over Tehran, state television showed a sparkling white disc. Over Tabriz, Ardebil and Golestan, objects were seen beaming out green, red, blue and purple rays. Farmers, villagers and pilots all had something to report.

Parramatta, New South Wales. The night of 25 July 1868. Frederick William Birmingham, engineer to the council, stood on the veranda of his cottage in Duck's Lane. Heads appeared in the air. First the Lord Bishop of Sydney, looking intently at him. Then the Premier, twice.

18 August 1991. About 11 p.m. From an upstairs window near Carp, Ontario, Diane Labanek saw what looked like flares burning at the far end of her field. Then a craft landed beside them. Its bright lights shone for a few minutes. Then they went out, like a light-bulb switched off.

One night in the mountains of southern Albania. 1907, or perhaps 1908. The guerrilla band of Çerçiz Topulli had set up a hideout on the top of a high mountain pasture. Then something shining flew in front of them. It hung in the air for several minutes. And then it was gone.

November 9, 1974. Carbondale, Pennsylvania. Three teenage boys called the police with a story nobody wanted to believe. A glowing object had streaked across the sky from east to west. It descended in an arc and crashed into an old coal-silt pond behind Russell Park. It sizzled when it hit the water. Then the pond began to glow.

March 8, 1967. Just after one in the morning. William and Joan Wallace were driving back into Leominster, Massachusetts, after a night out looking at the snowy woods. Near St. Leo's Cemetery the fog grew thick. Inside it hung a large, bright light.

August 20, 1949. Las Cruces, New Mexico. The man who discovered Pluto stood in his backyard, looking up at what he called a "beautiful transparent sky of stars." Then Clyde Tombaugh saw them. A geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light, locked in place as if part of one solid object. They glided silently toward the south-southeast, shrinking and dimming. In about three seconds they were gone.

February 8, 1982. VASP Flight 169 was cruising south over Bahia in the dark, bound from Fortaleza for Rio de Janeiro. At 03:12, Captain Gerson Maciel de Britto saw a light off the left side of his Boeing 727. He made an announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen passengers, we are observing possibly an unidentified object of great luminosity, on the left side of the aircraft."

October 19, 1998. Night over Cangzhou, in China's Hebei Province. At a People's Liberation Army Air Force flight test and training base, four radars sounded the alarm. Something was moving directly above the airfield.

February 24, 2018. Mid-afternoon, high over the Arizona desert. A Learjet flying east at about 37,000 feet called Albuquerque Center with an odd question. Had anybody just passed above them? The controller said no. "Somethin' did," came the reply.

Sunday, 23 August 1953. Port Moresby. The sky was cloudless, except for one cloud that seemed to build itself out of nothing. Tom Drury, Deputy Director of Civil Aviation for Papua New Guinea, raised his 8mm movie camera. Then a silver object shot out of the side of the cloud. It climbed in a dead straight line towards the north-west, trailing dense white vapour, and made no sound at all. His wife Marjorie and their young son Paul watched it go.

May 20, 1950. Midday on Mars Hill, above Flagstaff, Arizona. Seymour Hess, a meteorologist who studied the atmosphere of Mars at Lowell Observatory, looked up and saw something bright crossing the sky. It moved from the southeast toward the northwest. Then it passed in front of a small, bright cumulus cloud. Against it, the object turned dark.

August 13, 1947. About one in the afternoon. At the Auger Falls Trout Farm in Idaho's Snake River Canyon, ten-year-old Billy Urie saw something coming down the canyon. His father, A.C. Urie, looked up. A pale blue object shaped like an inverted pie-plate, about 20 feet long, skimmed along 75 feet above the canyon floor. A red, tubular glow burned at its side. It rode up and down over the hills and hollows. The poplars beneath it spun around on top. Then it was gone, with just a swish.

1933. Near Magenta, a town west of Milan, something came down from the sky. Or so say the papers that surfaced by post in 1996, sent by an anonymous man known only as "Mr. X."

8 September 1970. Night over the North Sea. Capt. William Schaffner, a USAF exchange pilot flying an RAF Lightning out of RAF Binbrook, was vectored toward a target off the Yorkshire coast. He called in a set of lights. He said he was slowing down. Then the radio went quiet.

January 2025. A NewsNation special promised something rarely seen. Footage from a crash retrieval.

Hertfordshire, England. June 2009. Kim Wilde had spent the evening at A&E with a son. Back home, the pop singer sat in the garden with a glass of wine. Fields lay at the bottom of the lawn. Helicopters passed over the roof and were gone. Then it all fell quiet.

August 1972. Taizé, Saône-et-Loire. About 35 young people sat talking on a grassy hilltop beside the monastery long after midnight. At about 2 a.m., Renata de Faa saw a star come down from the sky. By the time the others turned round, it had landed on the facing slope.

Sunday, 17 April 1966. About 5:00 a.m. On State Route 224 in Portage County, Ohio, Deputy Dale Spaur and Wilbur "Barney" Neff stopped to check what looked like an abandoned car. Behind them, something rose over the trees. It grew brighter. It lit up both men and the whole area, humming like a transformer.

June 29, 1954. A BOAC Stratocruiser named Centaurus is flying from New York to London, with a fuel stop at Goose Bay. The sun is going down. At 19,000 feet, some 150 nautical miles southwest of Goose Bay, Captain James Howard looks out to port. Something is keeping pace with his airliner.

13 July 1959. Just before dawn at Blenheim, New Zealand. Eileen Moreland was halfway across her paddock, on her way to bring in the cows. Then she noticed an odd green glow in the clouds directly above her.

September 7, 1984. Before dawn, high over Byelorussia. An Aeroflot Tu-134A was flying from Minsk toward Tallinn when co-pilot Gennady Lazurin saw a bright yellow light in the sky. A thin beam dropped from it to the ground. The beam became a cone. Then came rings, red at the centre and dark violet at the edge. Then a green flash, and a sky-blue cloud that seemed to pace the airliner.

May 31, 1974. About 2:30 in the morning. A young couple, known only as Peter and Frances, were driving south from Salisbury, Rhodesia, toward Durban. South of Umvuma, Frances saw a light off to the left. It kept pace with the car.

October 1958. Late at night, north of Baltimore. Philip Small and Alvin Cohen were driving toward a bridge over Loch Raven Reservoir. Above the superstructure hung a large, flat, egg-shaped object, glowing a dim white. About 80 feet from the bridge, their car went completely dead. Dash lights. Headlights. Motor. The two men took cover behind it and watched.

24 July 1981. A clear, moonless summer night over western China. At 22:38 a strange star-shaped bright spot appeared in the sky. It grew brighter. It began to oscillate. Then a cloud-like band of light formed around it, and the whole thing wound itself into a bright, spinning spiral.

August 6, 1997. Bosques de las Lomas, Mexico City. Broad daylight. A handheld camera follows a metallic disc hanging among the buildings of the city's west side. It wobbles. It turns. It slips behind a high-rise and comes back out. Two men talk as they film.

December 1958. Around 3 a.m. Two young men stopped their car on the road between Helsingborg and Domsten, near the Swedish coast. In a clearing among the trees, something glowed. Stig Rydberg and Hans Gustafsson walked toward it. They found a disc resting on three legs, and around it, bluish-grey shapes hopping like globs of animated jelly. The creatures seized them. Gustafsson clung to a signpost as he was lifted off the ground. Rydberg ran for the car and kept sounding the horn.

September 1964. Indonesia is at the height of its Confrontation with Malaysia and Britain. Over East Java, something arrives every night for a week. Black shapes trailing a fiery tail. A greenish-blue ellipsoid. A round light glowing deep red, drifting toward Surabaya without a sound. The radar at Ngliyep picks up targets circling over the coast.

Sunday, 21 April 1991. An Alitalia MD-80 from Milan was bound for London Heathrow. Over Lydd, on the Kent coast, at 22,000 feet, Captain Achille Zaghetti saw something coming. A small brown object, shaped like a cigar, shot past the airliner. He told his co-pilot to look out. The co-pilot saw it too.

September 24, 1959. Shortly before dawn in Redmond, Oregon, police officer Robert Dickerson watched a bright light fall like a meteor. It did not burn out. It stopped and hovered about 200 feet above the ground.

October 15, 1948. 11:05 p.m. A USAF F-61 Black Widow night fighter flew over the strait northwest of Fukuoka, Japan, on a clear moonlit night. In the back seat, radar observer 2nd Lt. Barton Halter found a target. Pilot 1st Lt. Oliver "Bud" Hemphill Jr. went after it.

Rhododendron Spur, Gallipoli. August 1915. A section of New Zealand Engineers watched six or eight identical grey clouds, shaped like loaves of bread, hang motionless over Hill 60. A larger cloud sat on the ground. Dense. Almost solid looking. A column of British troops marched up a sunken road and straight into it. No one came out. Then the cloud rose, joined the others, and drifted north towards Thrace.

July 31, 1966. Beach 6, Presque Isle State Park, on the shore of Lake Erie. A car is stuck in the sand after dark. Inside are Betty Jean Klem, Anita Haifley and Haifley's two small children.

September 23, 1996. Mary Morrison was driving through the farmland below Falkland Hill in Fife, heading out to buy coffee. A huge white light hung in the sky. It did not move. Then it split in two. Overhead, a black triangular craft slid past in silence.

August 13, 1975. The desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. Sergeant Charles L. Moody of Holloman Air Force Base had driven out alone to watch the Perseid meteor shower. Around 1:15 in the morning, one of the meteors seemed odd. A faintly glowing metallic craft dropped toward the ground, wobbled on its own axis and moved slowly toward him. His car would not start.

24 August 1990. A Friday evening on the Baltic coast of the GDR, six weeks before German reunification. Over the Greifswalder Bodden, seven glowing spheres appeared in the sky. Brilliant white to reddish-white. Some witnesses saw a Y-shape. Others saw a cluster hanging "like a bunch of grapes."

April 11, 1991. Evening in Sasovo, a town in Ryazan Oblast. At 21:20 a bright white glowing sphere appeared over the railway station. It moved slowly toward the northeast. As the night went on, townspeople reported large glowing spheres of blue and red. Half an hour before the explosion, people on the outskirts saw two bright-red spheres.

Friday, 30 November 1973. Turin-Caselle Airport, shortly before 7:00 p.m. The sky over Piedmont was clear and cold. Toward the Susa Valley, pilots coming in to land saw a light that would not behave. It was a pulsating luminous globe, flashing violet, blue and red. It seemed to rise as it brightened and sink as it dimmed.

October 2014. Night after night, small lights crossed the sky above France's nuclear power plants. Steady white. Sometimes blinking red or green. The gendarmes guarding the sites watched them pass. No one could say who was flying them.

July 2, 1954. An F-94C Starfire took off from Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, on a training flight. The ground controller diverted it. An unidentified aircraft at 10,000 ft. The pilot had trouble finding it. A second unknown turned out to be an Air Force C-47.

December 21, 1964. The winter solstice. Around 5 p.m., Horace Burns, a gunsmith from Harrisonburg, was driving east on US Route 250 toward Fishersville, Virginia. Then something came out of the sky to the north. A huge cone, shaped like an upside down spinning top, descended in a slow slant. It crossed the highway about 200 feet ahead of him. His engine died. The object settled into a field beside the road, a bluish glow beneath it. Then it rose straight up and was gone.

August 1962. An isolated hut at Duas Pontes, in the rural area of Diamantina, Brazil. One night, a diamond prospector named Rivalino Mafra da Silva and his son heard thick, dragging voices threatening him. Early the next morning, his 12-year-old son Raimundo saw two small objects hovering just above the ground. One was matte black. The other was striped black and white.

January 1976. A couple drives out of Rio de Janeiro, bound for Belo Horizonte to sell or trade their 1965 Karmann-Ghia. Near Matias Barbosa, Hermínio Reis pulls onto the shoulder and falls asleep. His wife Bianca stays awake, watching the sky.

March 5, 1979. The sun set over the Canary Islands at 19:10. Then the sky to the west began to change. Thousands of people on Tenerife, Gran Canaria, La Gomera and La Palma watched something seem to rise from the sea. It climbed at enormous speed and left a zigzagging trail. Iridescent rings spread across the twilight. Later a vast dome of orange-yellow light appeared. Soldiers saw it. Crews on ten airliners saw it. Photographers caught it on film.

August 12, 1942. Tulagi Island, in the southern Solomons. The Guadalcanal campaign is days old, and an air raid alert is sounding. Sergeant Stephen J. Brickner of the 1st Marine Division hears a mighty roar that seems to echo in the heavens. It is nothing like the drone of Japanese bombers.

Vilvoorde, Belgium. Mid-December 1973. About 2 a.m. A 28-year-old man got up in his dark house and made his way to the kitchen with a torch. Outside, something sounded like a shovel striking the ground. Through a gap in the curtain he saw a greenish light.

January 10, 2015. High over the Saskatchewan prairie, before dawn. Crews on several aircraft saw the same thing. A very large object. A small white light in the middle. Around it, a halo.

Dundy County, Nebraska. June 1884. Rancher John W. Ellis and his cowboys were working the range when they saw "a blazing meteor of immense size falling at an angle to the earth." A terrific rushing, roaring sound passed overhead. Then it hit the ground somewhere out of sight in a draw.

Saturday 24 April 1965. Late afternoon on the edge of Dartmoor. Near the village of Scoriton, Ernest Arthur Bryant watched a saucer come out of nothing. It swung like a pendulum. Then it hovered a metre above the grass beside a low hedge. A door opened.

Galisteo Junction, New Mexico Territory. 26 March 1880. The railroad had reached Santa Fe only six weeks before. That evening the station agent and a few friends went out for a walk before retiring for the night. Then they heard voices above them.