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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 1924. Five prospectors from Kelso, Washington, were working a gold claim on the shoulder of Mount St. Helens. For a week the evenings brought a shrill whistling. Then a booming sound, like something hitting its own chest. Then came the night of the siege. Rocks rained on the cabin. Feet trampled outside. Something pushed on the door until the whole door shook.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

August 27, 1958. Morning on Bluff Creek Road, a timber road being cut into the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found footprints around his machine. Big and manlike. Almost 16 inches long. Pressed deeply into the graded dirt.

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.

February 3, 1958. Mid-afternoon in Seaford, Long Island. The Herrmann children found a bottle of holy water on their mother's dresser. It stood open, its contents spilled. Then the shampoo. Then the starch. Then the bleach in the basement.

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 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.

1 May 1983. Lake Tele, deep in the swamps of northern Congo. At approximately 2:30 PM, zoologist Marcellin Agnagna and his guides from the village of Boha saw something in the water. A wide back. A long neck. A small head that turned from side to side, almost as if it was watching them.

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.

Lawndale, Illinois. Monday, 25 July 1977. About 8:30 in the evening. Three boys were playing hide-and-seek in a backyard near Kickapoo Creek. Two large black birds came in from the south. They swooped at Travis Goodwin, who ran and jumped into a plastic swimming pool. Then one went for 10-year-old Marlon Lowe.

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.

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.

Sumatra. September 1994. British journalist Debbie Martyr had been out in the forests of Kerinci Seblat National Park for four months, on the trail of a creature known as the orang pendek. Then she saw it herself.

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.

April 25, 1973. About 10 p.m. in Enfield, a village of some 750 people in southern Illinois. Henry McDaniel heard scratching at his door. He picked up a gun and a flashlight, thinking it might be a bear. What he saw instead had three legs, a short body, two little short arms and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half feet tall. It was grayish.

Miami, January 1967. In the storeroom of Tropication Arts, a wholesaler of Florida souvenirs, the stock would not stay on the shelves. Beer mugs fell. Glasses shattered. Alligator ashtrays crashed to the floor.

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.

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.

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.

January 1922. From Esquel, in the Andes of Chubut, an American prospector wrote to the director of the Buenos Aires Zoo. Martin Sheffield had followed tracks so deep that only something of ponderous weight could have made them. They led to a lagoon. In the middle of the water, he saw the head of an animal, with a huge neck like that of a swan. The swirls made him think its body must resemble a crocodile's.

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.

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.

20 September 1977. Around 4 a.m. in Petrozavodsk, on the shore of Lake Onega. A huge "star" flared up in the dark sky and sent shafts of light down to the earth. Slowly, it drifted toward the city. Then it spread out above the rooftops like a jellyfish and hung there. It showered the streets with fine rays that looked like pouring rain.

April 11, 1980. Morning at La Joya Air Base in southern Peru. About 1,800 personnel were on parade in formation. Near the runway, an object hung motionless in the sky. It looked like a balloon.