The Kallamishtëz luminous object, Kurvelesh, Albania (1963)

Albania, the early 1960s. Under Enver Hoxha, the country broke with the USSR in 1961 and 1962 and aligned itself with China. It was one of the most closed states in Europe. Nothing could be published freely.

The Kurvelesh highlands lie in the Tepelenë district of southern Albania. Somewhere among them is a village the sources call Kallamishtëz. Its exact location has never been pinned down on a modern map. The name may belong to a small hamlet, an old local form, or a misspelling.

January 1963. Residents of Kallamishtëz saw something in the sky. It was luminous. In Albanian, i shndritshëm, meaning shining. English retellings call it bright, or bright and glowing.

That is the whole description. No shape was recorded. No size, no sound, no movement, no duration. No beings, and no effects on the people who watched. The sources speak only of "residents", plural, without a number and without a single name.

The earliest surviving text, published by Top Channel on 22 October 2013, says the authorities never accepted that it was an unidentified object. It offers no explanation of what else it might have been. Later retellings go further. Wikipedia's account says the authorities "attempted to calm the population by telling them that what they had seen was not a UFO, but rather a new model of a jet plane being used by the Albanian Air Force." Vision Times wrote in 2026 that "Albanian officials said residents had actually seen a new model of Air Force jet." That version is credited to Gazeta Tema in 2016. No document from 1963 has been found to support it.

The jet story has a twin. A 2017 Shqiptarja.com article about Ben Shehu's novel Ata nuk duhet ta dinë ("They Must Not Know") describes almost the same cover story, but attaches it to Cërrik. There, residents were reportedly told the object was "a new-type aeroplane launched into the air by Albania". The article also claims the Sigurimi, the state security service, had assigned specialised personnel to investigate suspected ufological phenomena, with the files kept top secret. Shehu's book is a hybrid novel that mixes real events with fiction.

Whether the Kallamishtëz explanation stands on its own, or drifted over from Cërrik, remains unresolved. Other details have drifted too. Online summaries sometimes give this object a disappearance around 10:00 PM and the shape of a satellite. Those belong to other Albanian cases, Cërrik in 1993 and Vlorë in 2009.

No source proposes a conventional explanation beyond the official jet. Possibilities worth checking against the records of January 1963 include a bright meteor, a bright planet, or genuine Albanian Air Force activity. Accounts of the separate Mount Tomorr case place MiG-19s in Albanian service in the same period.

The oldest known source may be a page of the newspaper Koha Jonë from 13 July 1993, said to cover both Cërrik and Kallamishtëz. Thirty years after the event. The scan has not been verified.

Today Kallamishtëz lives on in Albanian roundups of UFOs in Albania and in encyclopedia lists. One village. One shining object. And authorities who never accepted that it was unidentified.