A newly released transcript puts Edward Teller, Norris Bradbury and meteor expert Lincoln LaPaz in a Los Alamos conference room, arguing about lights over the nuclear stockpile — and failing to agree on what they were.
In November 2004, US Navy fighter pilots intercepted a wingless white object off California — with radar, a gun-camera video and an eventual Pentagon acknowledgement to back them up. How much of the Tic Tac actually holds up?
In December 1980, US airmen at a nuclear-armed airbase in Suffolk reported a landed craft, pulsing lights and radiation traces — and their deputy commander wrote it all down. Forty-odd years on, how much of Rendlesham actually holds up?
In September 1976 the Imperial Iranian Air Force scrambled F-4 Phantoms at a brilliant object over Tehran. Both jets reported instruments and weapons failing as they closed — and a US intelligence memo called the case 'outstanding.'
For more than a year, tens of thousands of Belgians reported silent black triangles overhead. Their air force scrambled F-16s, released the radar data, and admitted it was stumped — even as the wave's most famous photograph turned out to be a fake.
A rancher found strange debris in the New Mexico desert, an army airfield announced it had a 'flying disc,' and then took it back within hours. Everything else — the bodies, the memory metal, the cover-up — came decades later.
On one night in March 1997, thousands of Arizonans watched lights over the desert. It was really two separate events — a silent V that crossed the state, and a set of hovering lights later pinned on flares. Even the governor came round.
For two weekends in July 1952, unidentified blips appeared on radar over Washington D.C., jets were scrambled, and the Air Force held its largest press conference since the war. The official answer — a heat haze on the radar — has never fully satisfied.
A fireball crossed six US states one December afternoon in 1965. In one Pennsylvania town, witnesses say an acorn-shaped object came down in the forest — and that the military hauled something away and told everyone there was nothing to see.
A civilian photographer aboard a Brazilian Navy vessel snapped a Saturn-shaped object over a remote South Atlantic island — and the government stood behind the pictures. The trouble is who was holding the camera.
In 1986 the crew of a Japan Airlines 747 reported being paced by lights — and then by something enormous — for the better part of an hour over Alaska. The FAA investigated, the radar was ambiguous, and two bright planets were hanging in exactly the wrong place.
For years in the 1980s, huge silent V-shaped craft drifted over the New York suburbs, watched by thousands and investigated by a founding father of UFO study. Some of it was a stunt by a handful of pilots. Not all of it fits.
Dozens of people around a small Texas town — a police officer and a pilot among them — reported a huge, fast, silent object. Then investigators pulled the FAA radar, and found unexplained tracks the military's shifting story couldn't quite cover.
In 2006, a dozen United Airlines employees at Chicago's O'Hare said a metallic disc hovered over a gate, then shot straight up and left a clean hole in the overcast. The FAA's answer was a 'weather phenomenon' it declined to investigate.
One autumn morning in suburban Melbourne, students and teachers at Westall High poured onto the oval to watch a silver craft descend near their school. It remains one of the largest mass sightings on record — and one of the least explained.
A French farmer said a grey disc landed in his field for a moment and flew off. What makes the 1981 case unusual is what happened next: a government scientific body arrived, took samples, and found the soil and plants had changed.
In a few hours one November night, driver after driver around a small Texas town reported the same thing: a glowing egg-shaped object, and engines and headlights that died as it neared. It's one of the best vehicle-interference cases on record.
In 2013, a US Customs and Border Protection plane filmed a small object skimming over Puerto Rico, dropping into the sea, and apparently splitting in two — all on thermal infrared. It is one of the best-documented modern videos, and one of the most argued-over.
In October 1967, villagers on the Nova Scotia coast watched an object with lights descend and strike the water. The RCMP and the Navy searched for days. Canada's own files still list it as an unsolved UFO case — one of the best-documented on record.
On a March morning in 1967, a flight of nuclear Minuteman missiles at a Montana air base dropped offline within seconds — while security guards reported a glowing object over the site. The officers who were there have talked ever since. The Air Force says the two things aren't connected.
In January 1996, a Brazilian town convulsed with reports of a strange creature loose in the streets — and rumours the military had captured it. It is one of the most beloved cases in South America, and one of the thinnest on hard evidence. Here's why it's both.
One September morning in 1994, dozens of schoolchildren in Zimbabwe said a craft landed beyond their playground and a being looked at them. They drew the same thing, separately, and told a Harvard psychiatrist the same thing, for years. It remains deeply unsettling.
In 1980, two women and a boy on a dark Texas road said they met a diamond-shaped craft belching fire, ringed by military helicopters. Then they got sick — burns, hair loss, illness that looked like radiation. It's the rare UFO case with a medical record.