Updated 12.1.2014 This article gives a general layout of the emergence of astronomy, of space exploration and research in ufos, crop circles etc - all in order to discern the social ramifications of the extraterrestrial issue. Historical sightings of ufos or other phenomena are presented here below, but the blog list of ufo sightings you can find here and here. The list below is given as "year-month-day".
1671 The French astronomer Giovanni Cassini reports seeing a white cloud hovering over the lunar surface.
1781-03 The German astronomer William Herschel discovers Uranus.
1787- William Herschel claims to have observed several bright lights traversing across the lunar surface.
1787- Two astronomers report seeing lightning above the lunar surface.
1877-02 A streak of white light across the Moon is observed for more than one hour - YouTube(at3m30s) -
1915-0423 A beam of light is seen inside the Clavius Crater on the Moon - YouTube(at3m40s)
1930-0218 Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto - demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006.
1938-1030 Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio drama created widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners. In the atmosphere of tension and anxiety prior to WWII, they took it to be an actual news broadcast. -Wiki
1942-0225 US Army fires 1400 rounds at 6 to 9 UFOs over Los Angeles, California. Six civilians were killed by falling debris and heart attacks.The UFO did not fire back. Dan Aykroyd: Unplugged on UFOs(at1h08m10s) -
1944-1213 New York Times: Silver Balls Floating in Air Nazi's Newest War Device (Foo Fighters)
1947-0624 Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, saw during a flight in Washington state "some 25 miles away, nine saucerlike things, flying like geese in a diagonal formation".
1947-0707 The Roswell Incident - The Roswell Files - Wiki
1947-0709 Los Angeles Times: Disks Baffle Science as Reports Pour In. Saucers Seen by Hundreds in 28 States.
1947-0709 New York Times: "Disk"Near Bomb Test Site Is Just a Weather Balloon.
1947-0715 J. Edgar Hoover: We must insist upon full access to discs recovered. ...the army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination.
1947-0923 US military secret report: The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.
1947-0924 Memorandum from Harry Truman to the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal: "As per our recent conversation on this matter, you are hereby authorised to proceed with all due speed and caution upon your undertaking. Hereafter this matter shall be referred to only as Operation Majestic Twelve. It continues to be my feeling that any future considerations relative to the ultimate disposition of this matter should rest solely with the Office of the President following appropriate discussions with yourself, Dr. Bush and the Director or Central Intelligence."
1948-0122 Project Sign formally begins its work - a week after the Air Force was officially separated from the Army. By late 1948, Project Sign was discontinued in name and replaced by a much more negatively oriented Project Grudge.
1949-02 Project Grudge was a short-lived project by the U.S. Air Force to investigate UFOs. Unlike Sign which thought some UFOs might have an extraordinary answer, Grudge's personnel thought the remaining minority of reports could be explained away as normal phenomena. Grudge began a PR campaign to explain their conclusions to the general public.
1949-0430 Saturday Evening Post article by Sidney Shallet appears, with gross misrepresentations of the facts on UFO sightings and conclusions of Project Grudge. Shallet asserted that the Air Force thought the subject was nonsense, and was more or less forced to investigate flying saucers due to public interest. This was manifestly false, as the Air Force took the UFO subject seriously nearly from the beginning. Shallet, of course, did not have access to some secret information, such as the 1947 memorandum by Gen. Nathan Twining that had declared flying saucers a "real and not visionary" phenomenon and had kickstarted Project Sign.
1949-0522 Secretary of Defense, MJ-12 member James Forrestal's alleged suicide - but perhaps certain people just wanted to quiet him down.
1949-0924 MJ-12 Group is established by special classified executive order of President Truman.
1950- UFO sighting in McMinville, Oregon by the Trents:
1950-0404 U.S. President Harry Truman: "I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth."
1950-1124 Canadian secret government memorandum: the matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb. Flying saucers do exist. Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.
1951-02 US Navy flight spots a group of lights (Lt.Bethune)
1951- Gordon Cooper witnesses a UFO in Germany and films it.
1952-03 Project Blue Book. Thousands of UFO reports were collected, analyzed and filed. As the result of the Condon Report (1968), which concluded there was nothing anomalous about UFOs, Project Blue Book was ordered shut down in December 1969.
1952-0407 Life Magazine headline: Have we visitors from space?
1952-0720 UFO sightings over Washington D.C. makes headlines: "Flying objects near Washington spotted by both pilots and radar" - with the speed of 7000 miles/h.
1953- A science editor of the New York Herald Tribune reports having seen a 12 mile long structure, possibly a bridge, on the edge of the Mare Crisium Crater - YouTube(at6m40s) -
1957-1103 Soviet space rocket Sputnik 2 is launched with Laika the dog onboard.
1957-1111 Four top missile designers or engineers at one of the big plants in the U.S. see an elliptical shaped object and two small round disk shaped objects flying with it over California at the speed of at least 5000 miles an hour. Youtube(at ca19:00)
1958-0308 Major Donald Keyhoe appears on The Mike Wallace Interview on ABC, and spoke about flying saucers, contactees and the details of the Armstrong Circle Theatre censorship (in an earlier show), which he blamed on the Air Force rather than CBS.
1959-0913 Russian Luna 2 lands on Moon - Wiki -
1961-0117 in President Eisenhower's farewell speech: the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist (about the power of the military industrial complex)
1961-0919 Betty & Barney Hill abduction case - Youtube - Debunking effort -
1962-1126 Young Carl Sagan writes in Stars and Stripes: ..."It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist or even that some kind of base is maintained, possibly automatically, within the solar system, to provide continuity for successive expeditions. Because of weathering and the possibility of detection and interference by the inhabitants of earth, it would be preferable not to erect such a base on the earth's surface. The moon seems one reasonable alternative."
1963-1112 John F Kennedy writes a letter to the head of the CIA demanding to be shown highly confidential documents about UFOs - 10 days before his assassination. Was the president shot to stop him discovering the truth about UFOs, and developing cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space? - Veterans Today
1964- Photo Squadron films a missile: UFO slicing off the dumb war head erased.
1965- NASA launches Project Moon-Blink involving top observatories all over planet Earth in an effort to collect data on a large number of luminosities seen flying over the lunar surface. It also investigated various large structures which had been photographed by unmanned NASA satellites. (YouTube:at6m)
1965-0714 - NASA's Mariner 4 flew past Mars, providing the first close-up photographs of another planet.
1965-0903 The Exeter UFO sighting - About.com - Youtube-10min - Wiki
1966-0510 Michigan sighting
1966-06 at 9.45pm. UFO-incident in Nha Trang, Vietnam. "It came from the north and was moving from real slow to real fast...Some of the jet fighter pilots which were here...said it looked to be about 25,000 feet (in altitude)... then the panic broke loose. It dropped right towards us and stopped dead still about 300 to 500 feet up. It made this little valley and the mountains around look like it was the middle of the day; it lit up everything. " UFO Casebook
1967-0316 UFO hovering above a nuclear missile site (minute man missiles) at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. Missiles go into no-go condition - UFO Conversations(6m24s) -
1968-0514 LOOK article: "Flying saucer fiasco" about the Condon report and the "researcher" with bias "My attitude right now is that there's nothing to it"
1969-0108 Wed NYT: U.F.O. Finding: No Visits From Afar
1969-0531 The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), an American non-profit organization that investigates cases of reported UFO sightings was established (originally Midwest UFO Network). Homepage - Wiki
1969-0720 Moon landing by Apollo 11. Moonwalk on July 21st. - Wiki -
1969-10 Governor Jimmy Carter reports his UFO experience.
1971-1114 The Soviet Mariner 9 became the first space probe to orbit another planet when it entered into orbit around Mars.
1976-0919-morning. Iranian military flight has contact with UFO. Remains one of the most well-documented military encounters with anomalous phenomena in history -Wiki
1977-0624 The First International UFO Congress in Chicago, which marked the 30th anniversary of the "birth" of the modern UFO age (Kenneth Arnold's sighting). Some of Arnold's comments at the event reflected his displeasure at the general ignorance concerning the matter: "… well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something … in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem … seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned."
1979 Maurice Chatelain, former chief of NASA Communications Systems confirms that Neil Armstrong had indeed reported seeing two UFOs on the rim of a crater. "The encounter was common knowledge in NASA," he revealed, "but nobody has talked about it until now."
1979-0709 Flyby of Jupiter by Voyager 2 - it comes within 570,000 km (350,000 mi) of the planet's cloud tops.
1980-1229 UFO sighting in US military base at Bentwaters, England. Liftoff 02.45. Known as the Rendlesham Forest Incident. Halt's memo - Youtube - Wiki -
1980-1229 Cash-Landrum Incident in Dayton, Texas. A reported UFO sighting, which witnesses insist was responsible for damage to their health - one of very few UFO cases to result in civil court proceedings.
1981-0113 US Air Force report about the Rendlesham Forest Incident: nothing of military interest.
1981-0825 Flyby of Saturn by Voyager 2 - closest approach occurs on August 26th.
1983-0324 UFO sightings all over Hudson Valley area. UFO Casebook
1983-0326 An article about Hudson Valley sightings appeared on the front page of the Westchester-Rockland Daily Item. The press coverage drew the attention of a group of UFO investigators who were associated with Dr. Allen Hynek. A thorough investigation followed, and ultimately a book, "Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings."
1984-0724-2220 UFO sighting in Brewster, NY. Video by Bob Possuoli.
1986-0124 First flyby of Uranus, by Voyager 2 - it comes within 81,500 kilometers (50,600 mi) of the planet's cloud tops.
1986-0821 The Cash-Landrum Incident in Dayton, Texas results in a bizarre court resolution: a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the case, noting that the plaintiffs had not proved that the (CH-47 Chinook) helicopters (that flew around the UFO they witnessed) were associated with the U.S. Government, and that military officials had testified that the United States Armed Forces did not have a large, diamond shaped aircraft in their possession.
1987 - UFO sighting - "the HudsonValley UFO" - near Southbury, Connecticut, videoed by a state trooper.
1987-0712 Article in Sunday Express, London, UK: Did the aliens warn Neil Armstrong off the Moon?
1989-0824 First flyby of Neptune, by Voyager 2. Also its moon Triton. With the decision of the International Astronomical Union to reclassify Pluto as a "plutoid" in 2008, the flyby of Neptune became the point when every known planet in the Solar System had been visited at least once by a space probe.
1993- The Disclosure Project is founded by Steven Greer
1997-0313 Phoenix Lights - Youtube - Wiki
1997-0619 Governor Fyfe Symington holds a press conference in Phoenix, trying to calm down Phoenix with his "alien stunt" - upsetting a lot of witnesses.
1997-0723 Interview with Col. Philip Corso on Coast to Coast Am(Art Bell) in YouTube(12 parts).
1997-1015 Cassini-Huygens space probe is launched. Mission: to study Saturn.
1998-0407 UFO filmed by Rob Dickinson in England
1999- French UFO report by Cometa, pro-UFO document
2001-0509 The Disclosure Project conference in National Press Club in Washington D.C. YouTube(1h55m)
2002- The feature-length documentary on the UFO phenomenon Out of the Blue is shown in theaters. Wiki
2005-0114 Cassini-Huygens space probe's atmospheric probe/lander Huygens enters and lands on Saturn's largest moon Titan.
2006- NASA reports that Cassini had found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus.
2007-0707 Garry King witnesses a crop circle being made in approximately 7 minutes - Crop Circles - The Arecibo Reply (at1m40m)
2007-1112 The Disclosure Project conference in Washington.
2007-1130 Michio Kaku reaffirms on Coast to Coast AM his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.
2009-0210 First crash in space by two articificial satellites, above Siberia. This collision and numerous near-misses have renewed calls for mandatory disposal of defunct satellites (typically by deorbiting them), but no such international law exists yet (Dec2013). - YouTube(at5m30s) -
2009-0618 Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is launched. Mission: to detect water on the Moon. Impact on Cabeus Crater occurs on Oct 9th, and on Nov 13th NASA confirms that water was detected after the Centaur impacted the crater. YouTube:NASABombsTheMoon!(5m27s) -
2009-0618 Also launched: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) - currently orbiting the Moon in a low 50 km polar mapping orbit and sending photo data back to Earth. The LRO mission is a precursor to future manned missions to the Moon by NASA. - NASA: LRO - Wiki -
2009-0722 The US astronaut Buzz Aldrin refers in his interview in C-SPAN to a "Phobos monolith", and says "We should go boldly where man has not gone before. Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there. A very unusual structure on this potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that they're going to say 'Who put that there? Who put that there?' The universe put it there. If you choose, God put it there."
2009-1111 Carl Mantell of the RAF’s Air Command recomments in a briefing the UFO desk closure to Defence Minister Bob Ainsworth.
2009-12 Britain's Ministry of Defense UFO desk is closed because it served "no defence purpose" and was taking staff away from "more valuable defence-related activities".
2010-0807 2nd Annual British Exopolitics, in Leeds. YouTube(2h2m)
2011- Documentary "I Know What I Saw" is released. Youtube(1h30m)
2011-05 NASA scientists at an Enceladus Focus Group Conference report that Enceladus - the sixth largest of the moons of Saturn - "is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it".
2012-0806 Two scientific rovers on the surface of Mars start beaming signals back to Earth (Opportunity and Curiosity).
2013-0429 The Citizen Hearing On Disclosure in Washington, D.C. Lasts until May 3rd.
2013-0621 The final tranche of UFO files is released by the National Archives in Britain. Question remains though: is the best photographic evidence removed from the files before they went public?
2013-0928 5th Annual British Exopolitics, in Huddersfield.
2013
2014
