Listen

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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 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.

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.