Archive / search
The people, organisations, programmes and places that keep turning up. Each page gathers every case that mentions them.
People45
A ufology cataloguer and archivist, Patrick Gross compiled case sources online and gave many of them a verdict.
A folklorist and senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr David Clarke advised The National Archives on the Ministry of Defence UFO files released from 2008 to 2013.
A naturalist and writer, Ivan T.
Aimé Michel was a French writer and ufologist.
A British ufologist, Jenny Randles turns up across the archive's home-grown cases as an author, an investigator and a sceptical voice.
An author who returns again and again to British cases, often working from official files.
A sceptic who writes in SUNlite, Tim Printy has offered his own readings of several classic cases.
John Greenewald runs The Black Vault.
A researcher and podcast UFO host whose name turns up behind several of the archive's cases.
A historian at the University of Caen.
A 23 year old farmer near São Francisco de Sales, Brazil.
A researcher and author of strange Midwestern encounters.
A sceptic of the Cercle Zététique, Éric Maillot spent decades looking for ordinary answers to France's strangest cases.
A NASA scientist who later studied encounters between aircraft and UFOs.
A Spanish ufologist and author whose name runs through some of the country's best known cases.
George Van Tassel was a former aircraft mechanic and flight inspector for Douglas, Hughes and Lockheed.
Friday, April 24, 1964.
A writer whose retellings carry older cases to new readers.
A Navy F/A-18F pilot with VFA-11, the Red Rippers, flying out of Naval Air Station Oceana.
A shipyard foreman from Gautier, Mississippi.
A former intelligence officer turned whistleblower.
A cataloguer of cars that stopped in the presence of the unknown.
An encyclopedist of the strange, Rosemary Ellen Guiley turns up wherever old cases get retold.
An author of Irish ghost lore.
Tyler Rogoway was a journalist at The War Zone who kept turning up the records behind strange aviation encounters.
British statesman, First Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister.
A journalist who reported for Earthfiles, Linda Moulton Howe turns up across decades of strange cases.
Martin Kottmeyer is a sceptical writer who looks for ordinary sources behind famous encounters.
The surname Turner belongs to two different men in this archive.
A ghost hunter known as "the Spectre Inspector." Andrew Green wrote Our Haunted Kingdom (1973), and his accounts surface across several British hauntings.
A former FBI agent turned television investigator.
A crop-circle researcher whose name runs through several cases in the archive.
Brett Holman is a historian who keeps returning to the archive's oldest airship scares and wartime rumours.
A Wisconsin writer who keeps returning to the state's strangest stories.
Daniel Loxton, a skeptic writer and editor of Junior Skeptic, went back to old monster stories to find out what really happened.
A journalist at France 3 Paris Île-de-France.
Ross Coulthart is a journalist and commentator with NewsNation.
Three different men named Thompson appear in the archive.
Vladimír Šiška founded Projekt Záře, a Czech group that keeps files on the country's unexplained cases.
An illustrator with a recurring role in Italian sightings.
Two different men share this surname in the archive.
A researcher who looked for the source of French sightings on the television screen.
A French journalist and author whose name runs through two of the country's notable cases.
A researcher with UFOCUS NZ, Suzy Hansen wrote up some of New Zealand's most striking encounters.
He says he worked a handful of days at a hidden site called S-4.
Organisations21
Kew is home to the files.
Britain's Air Ministry turns up again and again in the archive's RAF cases.
America's space agency appears across the archive in two roles.
Australia's civil aviation authority turns up again and again in the archive's sightings, usually as the office that checked the skies and found nothing there.
Air Materiel Command operated from Wright Field, which is now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
An Afrikaans daily newspaper, and the first stop for many South African sightings.
A national newspaper that keeps turning up when a strange story breaks out of the local press.
Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science ran a hotline and looked into strange reports.
A British university, it appears in the archive mainly as the academic home of Dr David Clarke.
The Center for UFO Studies published the International UFO Reporter, and its pages carried several cases in this archive.
Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science, known as NIDS, investigated some of the strangest cases in the archive.
The War Zone is a news outlet that kept turning up in airline sighting cases.
An air traffic control centre, and the voice on the other end of the radio for crews who saw something they could not name.
Peru's Air Force runs its own UFO office.
Again and again, the first call went to the gendarmerie.
Britain's elected chamber, where strange sightings sometimes became questions for ministers.
A website that retells strange encounters, and in 2018 it turned to South Africa.
NATO is the Western military alliance.
Farnborough.
Canada's aviation authority turns up across four decades of these cases.
Britain's Ministry of Defence no longer investigates UFOs.
Programmes and projects5
In the early years, the US Air Force ran its UFO investigations through Project Grudge.
January 1953.
The Flying Saucer Working Party was a British official study set up to look into reports of flying saucers.
A BBC1 programme that kept turning up where the strange stories were.
Brazil's military kept its own UFO files.
Places18
A small town in the Falkirk council area of Central Scotland, home to about 6,000 people.
A stretch of Suffolk woodland between two twin bases, RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters.
A small coast village in Pembrokeshire, then the county of Dyfed, near St Brides Bay.
Lakenheath was an RAF base in Suffolk used by the United States Air Force in the summer of 1956.
An air base in New Mexico, and a launch point for things that later filled the sky.
An air force base in the Florida Panhandle, and a name that keeps surfacing in the archive.
Giant Rock rises seven stories out of the Mojave Desert near Landers, California.
A town on Cape Ann, Massachusetts.
An Anglican mission on Goodenough Bay, in the Territory of Papua.
Eglin Air Force Base sits on the Florida Panhandle.
An air-minded district in southern England, home to the Royal Aircraft Establishment.
A name that turns up in two hemispheres.
Sydney's airport at Mascot had a tower, an airfield and radar screens that kept turning up in the archive's Australian cases.
A courtroom where the archive's strange stories sometimes ended.
Two places share this name in the archive.
An RAF station in north Wales, on the island of Anglesey.
An island of the Canaries, and a recurring landmark at sea.
Washington National Airport sits at the heart of the capital's most famous radar mystery.
Craft and objects3
A rumoured spy plane, whispered about but never shown.
A jump jet that can hover.
An uncrewed drone, filming with its sensors.
Events5
May 20, 1967.
June 21, 1947.
September 1952.
October 13, 1973.
The Flatwoods Monster belongs to 1952.
Terms5
Silent.
Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
A wartime name for lights that would not explain themselves.
A deep-sea cephalopod, and a recurring suspect in the archive's sea monster cases.
In the field, a mothership is a large craft that seems to carry or command smaller ones.