The Best Evidence for Aliens Existing

Space – the final frontier. A vast, unmapped, and, as far as we know, unpopulated territory, ripe for exploration and possibly even colonization somewhere down the line. However, is it really as empty as we might think? While we humans are still relatively new to space exploration, and we haven’t bumped into anything yet, tales of beings from other worlds visiting us have been around for centuries.

Religious portraits, Egyptian hieroglyphics and even Neolithic cave art show images suggesting that humans have been seeing bright lights and weird things in the skies for thousands of years. In France, back in 776, a siege was interrupted when two large, flaming shields appeared in the sky above a church. The Saxons, fearing divine intervention, fled the scene, and let’s not forget Nuremberg.

While the city would get an infamous reputation in the 20th century, on April 4th, 1561, a whole bunch of coloured globes, floating across the sky, suddenly turned on each other and the battle only ended when another, even bigger, object appeared overhead. It seems that Nuremberg was always marked for notoriety.

However, as interesting as these ancient tales are, it’s possible that these sights were simple atmospheric phenomena that our ancestors just couldn’t explain in any other way. These days, we have a much better understanding of our skies, and most people aren’t fooled by bright stars. Unfortunately, technology has made hoaxes a lot easier, but there are a few cases of alien visitation that just aren’t that easy to explain that might prove, even to the biggest sceptic, that aliens are, in fact, keeping an eye on our blue planet.

Foo Fighters – UFOs in World War II

It was a dark night in 1944. The war was slowly drawing to a close, and things weren’t looking too good for Germany. However, for the crew of a Bristol Beaufighter, this night was no different than any other as they took off from Dijon, France, on what should’ve been just another routine mission. As part of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, their mission was to find, and ideally destroy, targets of opportunity, like supply trains, military convoys, communication centres and barracks.

The aircraft was flying along the Rhine, north of Strasbourg, when their routine mission suddenly went in a whole new direction.

Sitting in the rear of the plane, it was Lt. Fred Ringwald who first noticed the strange lights. There were between eight and ten bright orange lights in the hills, just a few kilometres off the plane’s left wing.

At first he thought it was an enemy convoy, but the pilot, Edward Schlueter, wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t see anything on the ground and he knew from years of experience that, in the dark, stars hanging just above the horizon were often mistaken for lights on the ground. In complete darkness, it’s not always easy to tell just where the sky ends and earth begins.

Ringwald inspected the navigation charts, but they didn’t help much. There weren’t any hills in the area, but the lights were clearly elevated so they had to be airborne, and they were moving really fast. The radar operator, Donald J.

Meiers, was even more confused because the radar wasn’t picking up anything. Since calling tech support wasn’t really an option, they did the next best thing – they called ground support to check if anyone was seeing what they were seeing, but the ground radar wasn’t picking up any aircraft in their vicinity either. Whatever they were seeing up there, it was only them.

Schlueter, upon seeing the lights off his right wing, decided that it might be some new German weapon they haven’t seen before, and since he wasn’t about to be taken down by some new-fangled Nazi tech, he turned the plane, ready to fight. In response, the lights suddenly vanished. The three men in the plane were now frantically scanning the skies, trying to figure out what made the lights and where it went.

However, just moments later, the lights reappeared, much further away, and moving at incredible speed, still shining a bright orange. Schlueter started following the lights, wisely keeping his distance this time. After another five minutes, the lights flickered out and vanished again, for good this time.

The lights were gone, but the war wasn’t over yet, so the crew continued on with their mission, bombing a few targets before returning to base. After the mission, they chatted a bit about what they saw but despite all three men knowing their way around aircraft, both Allied and German, they simply couldn’t figure it out. The lights hadn’t behaved in a way they’d ever seen before.

It was actually Meiers who first referred to these lights as Foo Fighters, and it’s a name that stuck. In the end, they decided to keep the story to themselves; they didn’t want to risk being grounded for combat fatigue. There was a war on, and they wanted to fly.

However, as it turned out, this wouldn’t be a one-off event – more reports about strange objects flying alongside aircraft, travelling as much as 200 miles per hour, kept coming in. On November 27th, Lt Henry Giblin and his radar man, Lt. Walter Cleary, were flying around the same region of Germany, north of the Rhine, at an altitude of around 10,000 feet.

They reported a huge red light moving through the sky another thousand feet above them. On December 17th, a pilot flying at 8,000 feet near Breisach in Germany reported five or six flashing green lights flying in a T-formation. He claimed that the lights seemed to follow him, closing in to around 1,000 feet before simply vanishing as suddenly as they appeared.

A few nights later, Lt. David McFalls and Lt. Ned Baker reported seeing a glowing red object shooting straight up, making what appeared to be a controlled inverted turn before going back down, making a steep descent.

This simply wasn’t possible for an aircraft of the day because a 1944 aircraft trying a stunt like that would stall and crash horribly. During another sighting, Lt. Samuel A.

Krasney reported a wingless, cigar-shaped object, glowing red, just a few yards off the plane’s wingtip. Somewhat surprised by what he was seeing, he instructed the pilot to attempt evasive manoeuvres, but no luck. The strange glowing object stayed right next to the jet for several minutes before finally vanishing.

Krasney’s son later insisted that his father wasn’t some UFO nut; in fact, he never even suggested a possible extra-terrestrial origin for the strange object he saw. He also wasn’t into conspiracy theories, but thought the Germans might have something to do with it. The pilot of an American P47 reported seeing a gold coloured ball with a metallic finish, and another pilot in the same area reported a phosphorescent golden sphere, around three to five feet in diameter, flying at 2,000 feet.

Bomber crews reported objects they described as silver Christmas ornaments floating through the air. Ringwald sent a report listing at least 14 separate incidents in December 1944 and January 1945 to Tactical Command, most involving the 415th Night Squadron. However, what happens in the skies stays in the skies and it wasn’t until an Associated Press war correspondent, Robert C.

Wilson, heard the story while celebrating New Year’s Eve with the 415th that the Foo Fighters hit the New York Times, and by 1945, another reporter did a series of interviews with the men who reported seeing strange flying objects. He described the pilots to be of sound mind, just normal airmen whose primary interest was combat, followed by pinup girls, poker, donuts and the derivatives of the grape.

Initially, it was only the allied pilots flying night time missions over Europe who saw these Foo Fighters, and they seemed to favour the 415th, or perhaps they just operated in the same area as the 415th. According to Meiers, the man who gave them the nickname, there were three kinds of lights. One was red balls of fire which would appear off the wingtips and fly with the plane. The second was a vertical row of three balls of fire or lights, which would fly in front of the plane.

The third was usually a group of around fifteen lights that would appear off in the distance, sometimes blinking on and off. However, after the Nazi surrender in May 1945, the Foo Fighter activity in Europe seemed to stop.

The war in Europe was over, but the US and its allies were still slugging it out in the Pacific, and suddenly the men fighting in the skies over the Pacific started reporting encounters of their own; the Foo Fighters had relocated. Bomber crews reported balls of fire during raids over mainland Japan, behaving in a similar fashion to the Foo Fighters encountered in the skies of Europe not long before. The objects would follow the American bombers along their flight path, sometimes coming close enough to almost sit on the aircraft’s wing tips.

Sometimes, the lights would change colours, flashing from orange to red to white and back to orange. In one instance, a pilot ducked into a cloud to escape the lights but when they emerged, the ball of light was still there, tailing them. According to one crew member, it was as if the lights were tied to the aircraft with an invisible piece of string.

A B24 Liberator bomber reported two bright lights closing in from below while flying at 11,000 feet. The crew prepared to fight, but the lights didn’t make any aggressive moves, it just followed them for almost an hour. One of the lights then peeled off, but the other remained with the bomber for a while before it suddenly shot forward with incredible speed, overtook the bomber, and, when dawn broke, climbed around 15,000 feet, disappearing into the morning sun.

This unnerved the crew somewhat as climbing into the sun before turning to attack was a favourite tactic of Japanese fighters. However, the lights were gone. They checked with ground radar stations, but, once again, the radar stations didn’t pick up anything.

Finally, when Japan surrendered on September 2nd, 1945, the Foo Fighter sightings in the Pacific also stopped.

There have been many suggestions over the years to explain what exactly the pilots were encountering in the skies over Europe and the Pacific. Some suggested battle fatigue or St. Elmo’s Fire – a phenomenon where lights are sometimes seen on the tips of church steeples, tall trees or ship masts during stormy weather; this really freaked out the early sailors.

However, the pilots were experienced airmen. They knew what St. Elmo’s Fire looked like and insisted that the lights were way too manoeuvrable to be St.

Elmo’s Fire. Another plausible explanation was some new weapon developed by the Nazis. The fact that the sightings stopped over Europe when the Nazis surrendered seemed to support this.

They likely shared their tech with their new bestie, Japan, which is why the sightings continued in the Pacific until the surrender of Japan. However, the lights never attacked or interfered with the planes in any way. Sure, they messed with the radar, but a weapon that avoids radar, but doesn’t do anything else other than fly around doesn’t seem like a very effective weapon and, let’s be honest, Germans are known for efficiency.

Considering how the war was going for Germany, you’d expect them to invest money into something a bit more explosive. Some sceptics think the pilots encountered the newly-developed V-2 rockets but, once again, while a rocket certainly looks like a cigar-shaped, wingless plane, they didn’t have the same manoeuvrability described by the pilots. In fact, there’s nothing in Nazi Germany’s World War II military arsenal that can explain the Foo Fighters.

However, while the pilots insisted that the lights were clearly some kind of craft or weapon under intelligent control, they never suggested that these were UFOs from another world. It was only years later, with the Roswell incident, that people started wondering if, perhaps, these strange lights came from slightly further afield than Berlin.

At the end of the day, new German technology does probably seem a little more plausible than UFOs, but if the Germans had some space-age level advance technologies, they didn’t bother to upgrade their tanks and planes, which seems a bit silly considering they were rapidly losing the war, and no real proof of these extremely advanced, sci-fi level technologies have ever been found. So, who knows, perhaps the Foo Fighters were visitors from another world, keeping an eye on earth and when the war ended without the human race turning the planet into a crater, the Foo Fighters moved on to the next world threating self-annihilation, like an intergalactic Security Council.

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill

Betty and Barney Hill was just another respectable, middle-class couple living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Barney was a postal worker for the Portsmouth Postal Annex while Betty was a social worker, working with families and children, and an active member of the Unitarian Church. The only remarkable thing about the Hills was that they were a mixed race couple – Betty was white and Barney was African-American – which raised a few eyebrows in the 1950s and 1960s. However, other than this little detail, there was nothing strange about the Hills.

They were just hard-working people, paying their taxes and living a quiet life. This all changed on September 19th, 1961.

The Hills had decided to take a short, impromptu vacation to Canada in September of 1961. On the 19th of September, the couple was on their way home after hearing reports of a hurricane making its way up the coast. The plan was to just drive through the night and make it home before the hurricane made landfall.

They were travelling along Route 3 and estimated that they should reach home by 3am at the latest. Even though there was a storm coming, the night sky was clear and the road was very quiet; no cars had passed them for hours. At around 10h30, they were travelling through a rural area with lots of forests and mountains.

They weren’t out in the sticks, not completely, but suffice to say you probably wouldn’t be able to catch a bus here. Betty was the first to notice something odd. Just south of Lancaster, Betty saw a bright light appear in the sky to the southwest, near the moon.

At first she thought it was Jupiter or perhaps a shooting star. Barney, on the other hand, figured that it was probably just a satellite that had gone off course. However, the light kept growing larger and brighter, and it was moving erratically, suddenly changing direction, so it clearly wasn’t a shooting star.

Barney started thinking that it might be a plane or a helicopter. They’d been on the road for a while and it was time for the third passenger in the car, a Dachshund name Delsey, to take a bathroom break, so the couple stopped by the side of the road and took turns studying the strange lights through Barney’s binoculars while Delsey went about doing what Dachshunds do when they get the chance to take a break during a long trip. Apparently, Barney was into bird-watching and those folks always have binoculars on them, so if you think you might encounter an unidentified flying object, make sure you take a bird watcher along – they can be quite useful.

They watched the light moving in unpredictable patterns, zig-zagging across the sky, and while Barney still wasn’t convinced that it was anything other than a lost satellite or a flying craft of human design, Betty was having her doubts. They hopped back in the car and resumed their journey. According to some reports, Barney grabbed a pistol from the trunk of his car at this point, because this is America and everyone’s armed to the teeth.

Not sure what a .32 calibre was going to do to a UFO, but I appreciate the optimism. Betty was keeping an eye on the strange light, telling Barney every time it changed direction, and soon it became clear that the light was following them. A little before midnight, the couple parked in a picnic area around Cannon Mountain, and Barney got out of the car with his binoculars to take another look at this strange light.

At first it was just zipping across the sky, but it suddenly changed direction and started heading straight for them. Barney realized it was an aircraft of some kind. It looked like an enormous metallic disc, larger than an airliner, with two fin-like wings on either side, flashing red.

The craft had windows, lit from inside with a bright white light. A little freaked out, Barney yelled to Betty to get back in the car and the two of them took off with Delsey whimpering and cowering. Suddenly, they heard strange electronic beeping noises that seemed to be bouncing off the trunk, almost like someone was dropping a tuning fork, and felt vibrations shaking their car.

A strange tingling sensation spread through their bodies and they fell into a daze. Sometime later, they had no idea how much time actually passed, they heard the strange beeping noise again. They both had that odd sensation of waking up from a bad dream; however, they were still cruising along the highway, and saw a sign for Ashland.

They realized that they had travelled 35 miles but had no idea how they got there. Unnerved and tired, and feeling a bit groggy, they decided to push on and finally made it home, but the weirdness wasn’t over yet.

By the time the exhausted Hills pulled up in their driveway, it was already dawn. It was 5am, not 3am as they initially planned; they’d manage to lose two whole hours. There were other odd details.

Both their watches had stopped and they both felt disturbed and uncomfortable in a vague way they couldn’t really explain. The strap on Barney’s binoculars was broken, and the tops of his shoes were scuffed; he couldn’t remember how any of that happened. Betty felt like she needed to throw away any food they took on the trip and even felt a weird compulsion to leave her luggage out in the car like she just didn’t want it in the house.

She also noticed that her dress, which was brand new, was stained and torn. She took off the dress, put it away and didn’t touch it again for three years. The next day, Betty would discover over a dozen shiny spots, about the size of a half-dollar, on the trunk of the car where those strange beeping noises had come from.

It even looked like the trunk of the car had been polished. The couple sat down and tried to figure out what exactly they’d seen and what had happened. Betty remembered that Barney had made a sharp turn and Barney claimed that he remembered a roadblock somewhere along the way.

They both remembered the large, glowing object, but it still didn’t make a lot of sense. In the end, they decided to keep the story to themselves. However, they were later advised to report the incident to the Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Betty left out some of the more bizarre details, and to her surprise, her story was taken seriously. It turned out that they weren’t alone, half a dozen people had reported something strange in the night sky on September 19 and the Air Force radars picked up a shimmering disturbance around the same location where Betty and Barney had their encounter. While Betty was learning everything she could about UFOs, Barney was trying to just forget the whole thing.

It might all have blown over eventually if it wasn’t for the dreams.

Around ten days after their encounter, Betty started having vivid, terrifying nightmares of an alien spaceship, with intelligent beings, doing experiments on her. She told a colleague about the dreams who suggested that these might be more than dreams; it might be repressed memories. The dreams only lasted for around five days, but left Betty with severe anxiety, and by the summer of 1962, Barney was also diagnosed with high blood pressure, ulcers and severe anxiety.

After visiting multiple doctors and a therapist, Barney mentioned the strange encounter. Two people sharing the same hallucination is fairly unusual, so the therapist referred the couple to a psychiatrist in Boston, Dr Benjamin Simon. When the Hills arrived on his doorstep, towards the end of 1963, he agreed to help them get to the bottom of the mystery.

Every Saturday for six months he would see the Hills separately, recording the sessions, and then making them forget what they had remembered so they wouldn’t influence each other. Very sound practice. It was under hypnosis that the full story finally came to light.

Barney remembered stopping for the second time and seeing figures in the strange craft, looking at him through the window and communicating telepathically, telling him not to be afraid. They were dressed in shiny black uniforms and one of them was wearing a military-style peaked hat. The leader always gets to wear the big hat, that’s just a universal rule.

Understandably terrified, Barney yanked away his binoculars, which is probably when he broke the strap, and called to Betty to get back in the car and they sped off. However, they didn’t get very far before he felt a strange compulsion to turn off the highway, driving down a forested road. This might be the sharp turn Betty remembered.

Eventually, they came across a traffic stop with around six to twelve figures, hovering suspiciously in the shadows. The highway was suddenly lit up, so bright it seemed like daylight, the car stalled, and the figures came towards them. Both Betty and Barney described the figures as short men, with a large chest, slender hips and an oddly shaped head – a large forehead and a pointy chin.

They had long slanted eyes, wrapping around the sides of their heads, and Betty claimed they reminded her of a cat’s eyes. They also had metallic looking grey skin. Betty thought the leader was slightly taller with a different skin tone, but Barney insisted they all looked identical.

They had no hair, and their mouths were thin and lipless.

Barney remembered feeling weak and confused, but no longer afraid, as the figures first helped him out of the car and then basically dragged him onto the ship which is probably when he scuffed the tops of his shoes. At this point, he closed his eyes and kept them shut for most of the ordeal. Betty, on the other hand, wasn’t going to give in that easily. She called out to Barney, who looked like he was sleepwalking, but he didn’t reply.

The leader assured her, in a strange accent, that they won’t be harmed. As they tried to lead her onto the ship, Betty put up fight, kicking one of the figures which might be when she tore her dress.

The inside of the craft was lit up by a blue fluorescent light, and the couple were taken to separate rooms which looked like hospital rooms. Barney opened his eyes briefly when they placed him on a metallic table which looked a bit like an operating table, and described the walls of the room as sky blue and said the room was mostly empty other than the table and a cabinet. He squeezed his eyes shut again as the figures, he thought there were around three of them, poked and prodded at him, taking skin samples, sperm samples and doing an anal probe. This is a video about UFO encounters; someone was going to get probed, which is unfortunate for Barney.

Betty was able to give more detail. She described a white metallic stool and unfamiliar equipment and gadgets in the room. Everything was made of something that looked like metal or plastic.

Like Barney, she was examined by a figure she named the examiner and he also collected skin, hair, nail and ear wax samples and seemed particularly interested in her nervous system. However, they struggled with the zip of her dress which tore the dress even further. Imagine having the technology to build a space ship and travel to earth only to be tripped up by a zipper.

They used a device that looked a bit like a cluster of needles with a wire attached to each needle which they moved around her body, and she claimed she could even feel it inside her head. Everything was going fine until the examiner stepped up with an intimidatingly large needle. She nervously asked what he intended to do with that thing, and he assured her that he was just going to insert it into her navel to do a simple pregnancy test.

She told him no, that’s going to hurt like a mother, don’t do that, but he ignored her and did it anyway. No surprise, it hurt. The leader came over, waved his hand over her eyes and suddenly the pain was gone.

He even apologized. It was still a bit sore where the needle went in because really long needles will do that.

Once the examiner had done his thing and left, Betty and the leader got to chatting. She asked him where they were from and he showed her a star map, but Betty didn’t recognize any of the planets; however, she was able to draw the map under hypnosis. He also showed her a book with some strange symbols and unfamiliar writing she’d never seen before and would never see again – all sharp lines, curved lines and dots.

During their conversation, some of his colleagues returned, holding Barney’s dentures, trying to figure out why his teeth came out but hers didn’t. She explained that he lost his teeth because of an accident and a lot of people lose their teeth as they got older which seemed to confuse them somewhat. Made it all the way to earth; foiled by zippers and dentures.

They asked her some more questions and seemed puzzled by concepts like aging, vegetables and yellow, so perhaps they weren’t all that smart.

By now, Barney was done, hopefully they returned his dentures, those things are expensive, and the two were escorted off the ship. Initially, the leader was willing to let Betty keep the book as proof of what happened, but, as they left the ship, he changed his mind, saying it would be better if she forgot everything that happened. She was upset, understandably, you take a book from me at your peril, and insisted that she would never forget what happened that night.

However, the leader didn’t seem bothered and just pointed out that no-one would believe the story anyway. The aliens got back in their ship, the Hills went back to their car where they found the dog curled up and terrified under the car seat, and together they watched the UFO become a glowing orange ball of light again and fly off. Barney was eager to get home and examine himself for any evidence of what happened but, by the time they got home, he couldn’t remember anything other than seeing a strange object fly over Cannon Mountain.

After hearing the recordings of their sessions, the couple decided that they had been abducted by aliens; however, Dr Simon wasn’t convinced. He ruled out mental illness and didn’t believe it to be a hoax. Something traumatic happened, of that he was sure, but abducted by aliens was a bit of a stretch for the good doctor. Hypnosis does have the risk of creating false memories, and Dr Simon also thought that Betty’s nightmares might have influenced Barney’s memories.

However, the anxiety was gone so the therapy had the desired outcome and Dr Simon sent the couple on their way.

Unlike most other abduction cases, this case also had some physical evidence - the shiny spots on the car, the broken strap and scuffed shoes, and of course, Betty’s dress. The dress had been sent for testing to five different laboratories and the stain was definitely organic but has never been identified. There were also stains on the inside of the dress, confirmed to match Betty, consistent with Betty’s story of being stabbed with a big needle.

If you stab people with big needles, they tend to leak. The journalist who first broke the story also spoke to around 12 to 14 people in the White Mountains area, where the abduction took place, and they all had UFO stories of their own, apparently seeing the same craft, or something very similar, on the very same night. When he left the paper, he gave the file with all the witness statements to his editor.

Of course, this file has since vanished.

So, alien abduction or is there a more mundane explanation? The Hills had been on the road for hours, so could they have been sleep deprived, mistaking the planet Jupiter for a UFO? Of course, some theorize it was a hoax or a lie told for fame and fortune. However, the Hills had a good standing in the community, Barney was very active within the Civil Rights movement, so they had a lot to lose.

They also never intended to share the story with the public. They only wrote a book about the experience after their story got leaked to the press, and the press, of course, got most of the details wrong. Barney passed away in 1969, but Betty lived until the age of 85, only passing on in 2004, and she remained consistent, sticking to her story to the very end.

Japan Air 1628

On November 17th, 1986, the three-man crew of Japan Airlines Flight 1628, or JAL 1628, had a most unusual encounter in the dark skies over Alaska. The Boeing 747 cargo plane was carrying a load of French wine to Tokyo and had a schedule stop-over in Anchorage, Alaska, on their return journey to Narita International Airport near Tokyo. On board were Captain Kenju Terauchi, and ex-fighter pilot with more than 10,000 flight hours under his belt, his co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji and the flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba. What should’ve been just a routine flight became a spectacle as astounding as the Northern Lights itself.

JAL 1628 entered Alaskan airspace just after 5pm local time and was directed to fly to Talkeetna airport, around 70 miles north of Anchorage, by the Air Traffic Control Centre. It was round about this time that the crew first noticed the lights, at eleven o’clock, flying at an altitude of around 35,000 feet, just below their plane, and travelling at around 660 mph (900 km/h), so it probably wasn’t a bird with a nightlight, heading in the same direction. A wee bit puzzled, co-pilot Tamefuji contacted the Anchorage Air Traffic Control Centre to find out who they were sharing the skies with; however, according to the centre, there wasn’t supposed to be anyone with them up there, and they weren’t seeing anything on their radars either.

Ground radar may not have picked up anything, but flight engineer Tsukuba reported an irregular return on his own radar which he described as a stream. The captain, Terauchi, noted that the lights began moving and behaving in a way most unusual for an ordinary aircraft – he described it as two bear cubs playing.

While many UFO spotters are often paralyzed by fear and astonishment, Terauchi was surprised, but he was an experienced fighter pilot so weird lights in the sky isn’t going to freak him out. Instead of panicking, he grabbed his camera to snap a picture of these unusual lights. This was well before digital cameras became a thing so our man was working with a manual camera. On auto-focus, the lens wouldn’t stop adjusting so he switched to manual focus, but the shutter wouldn’t close, so no luck on the photo front.

Go figure that one of the few times we have someone with the clarity of thought to take a photo, the camera won’t co-operate. That’s technology for you.

Around seven to ten minutes after the crew first spotted the strange lights, two objects which Terauchi later described as spaceships, appeared right in front of the plane. At first the one was flying on top of the other, but after a while, they changed positions and were flying side by side. From the crew’s perspective, they appeared to be square; however, this is probably because the crew was only seeing the rear of the craft.

Terauchi believed that, if seen from the side, the craft were more likely cylindrical in shape. A wide, vertical, see-through strip ran down the centre of each craft with a stream of light coming from it. Terauchi later compared the lights to the sparks of a charcoal fire that spewed from side to side.

The craft was around the size of a DC-8 Airliner fuselage and had a rectangular array of what seemed like exhaust pipes or ports around the circumference. The ports all had rounded corners, like you’d expect to see on the windows of a passenger plane, and the ports were lit up with a white light. The ports also weren’t static but seemed to be rotating around the cylindrical craft.

For about three to seven second intervals, the ports shot out a fiery light which Terauchi compared to the exhaust from a jet engine. However, different ports would flare up at different times in a way that made it seem like these flares were probably controlled automatically. The light coming from these craft lit up the cockpit of JAL 1628 like daylight and Terauchi even claimed that he could feel the warmth of the light on his skin.

He also stated that, from his perspective, it looked like the two craft shared a common centre of gravity with each object rotating back and forth along its own axis while the lights moved around the cylinder. According to the flight engineer, almost immediately upon making visual contact, the target appeared on the radar, and he wasn’t the only one seeing it. Radar operators at Elmendorf Regional Operation Control Centre, at the Elmendorf Air Force base in Anchorage, also reported picking something ahead of the plane.

At this point, the UFOs have changed position again; they were no longer just below the plane but actually flying at a higher altitude, keeping pace with JAL 1628, while sticking to their side by side formation. After about three to five minutes of this, the UFOs shifted into a line at 40 degrees to the left of the plane. During the time that the UFOs were either in front of the plane or off to the left side of the plane, which lasted for around fifteen minutes, the crew had a really hard time communicating with the ground teams below.

However, when the UFOs finally left, flying off into the sunset, or wherever UFOs go when they dramatically fly away, communication was restored. Needless to say, the plane underwent a very thorough inspection when she finally landed, but there were no abnormalities or problems with any of the equipment to explain the loss of communication.

You’d imagine that seeing two UFOs would be nerve-wrecking enough but, as it turned out, our alien visitors weren’t done with JAL 1628 just yet. Flying over Fairbanks, the crew, for some strange reason, looked behind them and spotted the silhouette of yet another object, this time shaped like a walnut, with two pale, flat lights at the outer tips. On top it was lit by silver lights that flashed in an irregular pattern.

Terauchi eloquently described this craft as a gigantic spaceship or the mothership, the size of two aircraft carriers, so that’s pretty big. The crew requested permission to turn off course from Anchorage to try and shake this new walnut shaped mothership, but the ship simply seemed to follow them no matter what they did. This time, the Anchorage radar operator noted something around 5 miles (8km) directly behind JAL and, once again, the Elmendorf Control Centre radar also picked up something that seemed to be following the aircraft through their manoeuvres to try and shake their tail.

It seemed that this rather gigantic UFO was still behind them and had every intention of following them all the way to Talkeetna. Around this time, a United Airlines passenger plane entered the same airspace, so Anchorage asked them to just swing by JAL 1628 to get a visual confirmation on what the heck was going on up there. However, the United Airlines plane complied and when the two planes finally caught sight of each other, they flashed their landing lights.

However, by this time, the gigantic mothership had disappeared and JAL 1628 was all alone, so the United Airlines flight missed out on the show. JAL 1628 finally landed safely at around 6:20pm and Terauchi estimated that the entire encounter probably lasted around 50 minutes. That’s quite a long encounter compared to most other encounters.

Of course, the minute the plane hit the runway, the Federal Aviation Administration was on the scene to interview the crew. There was apparently an investigation, but things just weren’t happening fast enough for Terauchi so, in December 1986, Terauchi started sharing his UFO encounter with the media. Not long after this, he was grounded by Japan Airlines and spent several years behind a desk before he was finally allowed back in the skies and reinstated as a pilot.

Some believe that this was punishment for going public with his story; however, Japan Airlines insisted that it was just a routine rotation. Punishment or not, Terauchi got the message and never spoke about the event again though he never changed or recanted his story.

Of course, there were the usual conspiracy theories about the government and the FAA trying to hide the incident and even the CIA supposedly got involved. Apparently, a meeting about the incident after the investigations were complete were concluded by someone from the CIA dramatically stating that “this never happened and we were never here” after which they confiscated all the data and everyone in the room was sworn to secrecy. The final FAA report was released on March 5th, 1987, and concluded that the radar returns was the result of an uncorrelated primary and beacon target which coincided with the manoeuvres of the flight crew.

However, all the radar controllers who were involved with this thing gave statements that contradict the conclusions of the FAA report. Were JAL 1628 in the lucky, or unlucky, position to have a UFO encounter, or did something else go down in the dark skies above Alaska?

Back to School

The 16th of September, 1994, started out like any other day for the kids of Ariel School, an expensive private school just outside the small town of Ruwa in rural Zimbabwe. However, what seemed like any other day unexpectedly turned into a day no-one would soon forget. Considered one of the most reliable UFO sightings by many believers, perhaps this event will convince even the most sceptical presenter and viewer.

The town of Ruwa is a small, agricultural area, mostly associated with farming, around 22km (13.6 miles) away from Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. However, the students weren’t rural kids who had never seen a TV or heard about aliens, the majority of the students were from wealthy or middle-class white families living in Harare, and something remarkable happened in 1994 - a slew of UFO sightings all across the southern side of the African continent. People reported seeing fireballs streaking across the night sky.

Some of it may have been the Zenit 2 rocket re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, but there were a lot of fireballs, so most people believed they were seeing UFOs. This may not sound strange in America, but generally speaking, people in Africa have more pressing concerns like civil wars, racial tensions and droughts, so reports about UFOs from Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Republic of Zambia, to name a few, is actually rather unusual. That doesn’t happen a lot in this particular neighbourhood.

On Friday, September 16th, 1994, the kids of Ariel School were outside, enjoying their mid-morning break while the faculty was inside suffering through a staff meeting. According to one of the kids interviewed many years later, this was actually a bit out of the ordinary; usually, there would be at least one or two adults outside to supervise the kids. The only adult not in the meeting at the time was the tuck shop attendant, Alyson Kirkman, a volunteer and the mother of one of the students; however, when kids ran into the shop reporting something strange happening, she thought the kids were just trying to trick her, so she refused to leave the shop.

When the break was over, the kids returned to class with an extraordinary tale to tell. Some of the teachers went to check it out, but couldn’t find anything suspicious, so they didn’t take the kids that seriously. However, some of the kids were terrified and downright hysterical, so what the heck happened?

According to interviews done by three professionals, around 62 children, ranging from the age of nine to twelve, came forward, all telling the same remarkable tale. While playing outside, they saw a silver object, shaped like a disc, appear in the sky and slowly float down and land in the tall grass around 100m away from the school yard. Some kids only saw it once it was on the ground; they didn’t actually see it land.

The land beyond the school boundary was mostly African bush, so brush and short trees, nothing that remotely looked like a UFO or an alien, no matter how imaginative you were. Some kids didn’t hear anything but others claimed they heard something that sounded like a swarm of bees or a loud whistle, like a flute. The children, being the curious little creatures they are, approached the edge of the school yard to get a closer look.

Despite the fact that there were no fences around the school, the kids didn’t go past the fallen tree trunks that marked the edge of the playground. Two figures, identical in every way, described to be short, closer to the size of older children, exited the craft, dressed in black, and one of them slowly approached the kids but didn’t cross the boundary into the school grounds. The other figured paced back and forth.

Some kids said the beings walked while, according to others, they seem to hover or flickered in and out of existence. One kid compared their tight black suits to scuba diving suits while others thought that it was their skin that was black. They had large heads and strange, big, black eyes slanted inward which one kid compared to rugby balls or American footballs for those of you unfamiliar with rugby.

Two witnesses claimed that it was impossible not to look at the eyes and once you looked into them, everything else just kind of disappeared. One kid claimed that while the being didn’t touch her physically, it felt as if he was touching every inch of her body with that stare which is a little disturbing. Most of the kids also described the aliens as having white or pale faces, and their skin was smooth and perfect, almost like porcelain.

The one approaching them had a very stoic expression, not showing any emotion. One student recalled a nose and mouth but most kids couldn’t recall any details about the faces other than those hypnotic eyes. Many years later, as an adult, one student described the whole thing like an out of body experience and time seemed to slow down, or rather, she had no concept of time.

One kid later claimed that in the spot the ship had landed all the insects and ants were dead and there was a huge black mark which his mother said might’ve just been a fire – not an uncommon sight in the African bush, especially that time of year.

The entire encounter apparently lasted around 15min. Some kids claimed that they saw the aliens get back in their ship and take off while others said that the ship and the aliens simply vanished when the bell rang to indicate the end of recess. One girl claimed that her sense of reality immediately returned to normal when the bell rang. The teachers may not have taken them seriously, but it was Friday.

The kids went home and told their parents and by Monday, a whole lot of parents came knocking to find out why their kids came home so distressed. Some kids were so scared, they didn’t return to school for a couple of days. The school officials didn’t have a good answer.

With UFO fever in the air, thanks to all those sightings, it didn’t take long for the story to reach ZBC radio, and the first reporter on the scene was Tim Leach, a war correspondent for the BBC who arrived at the school three days later. In later interviews, he claimed that he was rather shaken by the story the kids had to tell. He apparently said he could handle warzones, but this was a bit much.

A day or so after Leach arrived at the school, a local UFO researcher, Cynthia Hind and a photographer, Gunter Hofer, also arrived at the school. Another two and half months later, a Harvard Professor of Psychiatry, John Mack, arrived at the school and did some more interviews. These may have been supposed experts, but all they really did was muddy the waters.

Cynthia Hind, for example, interviewed the children in groups instead of individually. This of course meant that the kids heard each other’s stories and they could see what excited the adults the most, and what stories got the most attention, so they probably influenced each other as kids like to please their elders. Hind also claimed that, since the school was in a rural area, the kids didn’t have access to TV shows and weren’t influenced by the UFO and alien fad sweeping the world, but that’s just ridiculous.

It was 1994, everyone and their canary had a TV, and UFOs were everywhere; they were even discussed in class. Photographer Gunter Hofer was the first to document the scene. He couldn’t find anything at the spot the craft supposedly landed, but some kids told him they saw a second craft at a different location the day before.

Two boys told Hofer that they saw a craft with flashing lights flying over the power lines at the other end of the playground; it moved in a very strange way, disappearing and then instantly reappearing somewhere else until it vanished. Hofer followed these tales and visited a second location where he found two oval shaped impressions in the grass – one small and one large. He also came across what seemed to be wedge-shaped markings, like something heavy had pushed into the ground.

The spot was inaccessible to vehicles, only cows could reach it, and they don’t usually leave markings like that. Hofer was also an electronics enthusiast and he swept the school yard with a Geiger counter, a metal detector and a magnetometer, though he didn’t find anything. Soil samples were sent to the University of Zimbabwe, but they didn’t find anything out of the ordinary either.

According to Professor John Mack, some of the students he interviewed claimed that the aliens communicated with them telepathically, warning them that humans were ruining the planet with all their pollution and technology and, if they didn’t stop, the world would come to a rather disastrous end. However, no-one mentioned these supposed telepathic messages to Cynthia Hind, or if they did, she didn’t record it. She only added it much later when talking about her interpretation of what went down that day. Mack also had a bit of a reputation for asking leading questions to get the answers he wanted. It’s generally believed that the stories about telepathic messages started with him. He also only showed up about two and a half months after it all happened, so by then the kids’ memories probably weren’t that clear anymore and they’d shared their stories with each other and other adults, so there’s no doubt that the stories had changed by then. Mack also had a vested interest in finding aliens. He was a professor of psychiatry but had recently changed his field of study to UFO phenomena. He even wrote a book about UFOs titled Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens which was released later the same year. Unsurprisingly, this sudden change in direction damaged his career and credibility, but he insisted that the kids weren’t lying and, to his credit, he stuck with the story.

In this case, it seems like it was the supposed experts who got carried away, so let’s get back to the actual witnesses – the kids. Hind asked the kids to draw what they had seen, and many of the drawings showed the UFO and aliens in a patch of long grass, among some trees, between the school and a nearby road. There were some differences – some kids drew windows and doors, one kid coloured her craft red, and other kids saw a cluster of smaller ships hovering around the bigger ship.

There were also some differences in description – some kids said the figures had long black hair, others said they had no hair and a few described them as greenish rather than white or pale. Since some of the kids also came from different backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs, they interpreted what they saw in a context they’re familiar with describing the creatures as Zvikwambo, human spirits raised by magic, or the tokoloshe, an evil little goblin creature from Shona and Ndebele folklore. A lot of critics insist that these inconsistencies prove that the kids were making up stories.

However, eyewitnesses generally aren’t that accurate. Adult eyewitnesses to crimes will often disagree on the details even if they witnessed the exact same crime. That doesn’t mean anyone is lying.

That’s just how the human mind works, so expecting children to all tell the exact same story if even adults can’t do that seems a bit unfair. Cynthia Hind believed that the fact that the stories weren’t identical was actually proof that the kids saw something, and I think she has a point. If it was a hoax or an intentional lie to get attention, the kids probably would’ve taken the time to get their story straight so that everyone was telling the same story.

Only 62 kids saw the aliens; far more children said they saw nothing at all. However, Ariel School wasn’t a big school, so we’re not talking about thousands of students. There were also two different playgrounds - one for the younger kids, from Grade one to Grade four, located away from where the whole thing went down, so obviously, they didn’t see anything.

The Grade seven students were writing an exam. That means that only the Grade five and Grade six students were on the playground when this happened. Investigators also didn’t take the time to interview every student, so it’s possible that more kids saw something but didn’t come forward because they were afraid or shy.

Many years later, as an adult, one former student came forward claiming it was just a prank, but his story didn’t make any more sense than the aliens. He said that he just wanted to get out of class, so he claimed a shiny rock, probably reflecting sunlight, was a spaceship and everyone just fell for it. However, the other 62 witnesses all insisted that they were already outside for recess when it happened, and while they were children, they knew the difference between a shiny rock and a ship with lights and beings walking out of it.

However, the kids weren’t the only ones who saw something strange. A woman who owned a farm near the school claimed to have seen a ball of orange light outside her chicken coop the same day. The day before, a mother and her son saw a craft hovering ahead of their car at round about the same time some other Ariel students saw a cigarette shaped object above the school yard.

Many years later, a documentary maker, Randall Nickerson, discovered two reports of UFOs being tracked on the 16th of September. A Mexican radar array picked up one unidentified flying object flying at a high speed over the Atlantic, and commercial radar operators in Johannesburg, South Africa, Zimbabwe’s neighbour, also spotted something they couldn’t identify somewhere near the Zimbabwe-Botswana border.

For many kids, this experience was traumatic. One student claimed the beings looked evil and like they wanted to take the kids away. Some of the younger kids were even afraid that the little men were coming to eat them.

Many of the interviews with the kids, both as children and as adults, are still available on YouTube, and some of the kids look genuinely scared. One little girl looks like she’s about to cry when she talks about the nightmares she had afterwards. She was afraid that the man was still looking at her and planning to kill her.

It’s been 30 years, and the kids, all grown up now, still insist that they were telling the truth about what happened that day. While the adults in this encounter really aren’t reliable, I believe the kids saw something. Did they see aliens, or did they see something so traumatic, they told themselves it was an alien because the truth was just too horrific to contemplate?

Flir, Gofast, and Gimble

In 2017, the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science posted three videos taken by military pilots titled FLIR, GOFAST and GIMBLE. The videos appeared to be footage showing unidentified flying objects, defying the laws of gravity, and confusing the living daylights out of the pilots. Pilots and astronauts actually see strange things quite lot but rarely report what their seeing for fear of being ridiculed or grounded, like our Japanese pilot, and there’s very little footage. At least, there’s no real footage available to the general public, so these videos caused quite a stir.

It all started in November 2004. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group set off on a routine training mission near San Diego. Gary Voorhis was serving on the USS Princeton, which formed part of the carrier group, as a system technician for the Cooperative Engagement Capability and AEGIS Combat System.

While chatting with some of the radar techs, one of them mentioned that they’d been getting ghost tracks and clutter on the radars which is a bit concerning. It was only a training exercise, but there would be planes in the air so, ideally, you want the radar to work properly. After following the standard procedure of turning it all off and on again, and doing some calibrations, the tracks were still there, but instead of vague clutter, the radar techs found the image sharper and clearer.

They could sometimes see something at an altitude of around 80,000 or 60,000 feet, other times the blips would be at 30,000 feet, going at around 115 miles per hour. The problem was that the signatures didn’t match any known aircraft. This was a bit concerning to say the least.

Curious about what was going on here, Voorhis decided to find out the old-fashioned way. Every time the blips showed up, he’d get the bearings, grab some powerful binoculars and run up to the bridge to study the skies. He saw something moving erratically, but it was simply too far away to see what the hell it was.

The objects would hover and suddenly dart off in a random direction just to stop again. Seeing them during the day was nearly impossible, but luckily, they also showed up at night a few times and very considerately turned on their phosphorus glow which made them somewhat easier to spot.

While Voorhis was improving his fitness levels by running up to the bridge a few times every day, on November 10th, 2004, Operations Specialist Senior Chief Kevin Day was working in the Combat Information Centre. It was his job to protect the airspace around the strike group by identifying anything up there that wasn’t theirs. The carrier group was around 100 miles off the coast of San Diego when Day noticed some strange radar tracks out near San Clemente Island.

The tracks were clustered together in groups of five or ten at a time, and they were very close to each other. They were headed south, travelling at a speed of around 100 knots and an altitude of 28,000 feet. Most important to Day though, whatever it was, it wasn’t theirs.

By November 14th, these strange readings had been showing up for almost a week. Since there was some air defence exercises already scheduled for that day, Day managed to convince his commanding officer to direct the aircraft in the direction of these strange blips to figure out what the origin of these strange readings were.

The first pilots to take to the skies were VFA-41 Squadron Commander, David Fravor, and his wingman. Flying one of the new Super Hornets, he first spotted what he thought was a sunken plane or a submerging submarine moving somewhat erratically under the water. Trying to get a closer look, Fravor descended but the craft suddenly resurfaced and ascended rapidly, mirroring Fravor’s flight pattern.

Then it zipped past the Hornet and vanished. Fravor described the objects as a Tic Tac shaped object. The midline horizontal axis was around 46 feet long.

Unfortunately, this all happened too far away from the Princeton for even Voorhis’s powerful binoculars, so the crew of the carrier group could only listen to the communications chatter and heard Fravor report that the craft effortlessly evaded two of the most advanced fighter jets. The objects seemed to have acceleration, aerodynamics and propulsion capabilities that far outstripped that of the Hornets. However, the pilots had no idea who or what they were actually seeing and returned to the USS Nimitz without any good answers.

Of course, the navy has this thing about not being left in the dark, so a second intercept attempt was made by Lt. Chad Underwood. Using the ATFLIR targeting pod on his aircraft, Underwood was finally able to capture some footage of the Anomalous Aerial Vehicle because no-one wanted to say UFO out loud.

According to Underwood, he couldn’t see any wings or means of propulsion. Usually, you would see engine exhausts coming out of at least one end of an aircraft, but Underwood couldn’t spot anything. The object was also rapidly changing altitude and air speed, making it difficult to track.

The black and white footage shows the strange object, shaped like a disc, initially floating still in mid-air, at around 30,000 feet. When the object finally starts to move, it rapidly darts around the pilot’s screen, so fast it’s almost impossible to follow. This is followed by a bright light and then the object just vanished.

Multiple crew members saw the footage Underwood managed to take of the Tic Tac. One Petty Officer described the thing as going berserk, making incredibly tight angle turns, unlike any aircraft in service at the time, pulling G-Forces that would completely incapacitate a human pilot. He also claimed that the video that eventually showed up on YouTube was just a short snippet of what went down – the original was around 8 to 10 minutes long and much clearer than the grainy footage online.

This was confirmed by Voorhis and another crew member who also saw the original footage, and apparently by Underwood who filmed the footage in the first place. This had been a very strange day for everyone involved, but we’re not done just yet.

Miles away from the excitement, Petty Officer Patrick Hughes, an aviation technician was securing the hard drive data recorders from the E-2 Hawkeye, the one that was sent on the second intercept run. He was just doing his job, minding his own business, when he got a surprise visit from his commanding officer and two unknown individuals, who helped themselves to the Hawkeye’s data recordings and left; that’s not suspicious at all. Over on the Princeton, Voorhis had a similar experience when two unidentified men arrived by helicopter simply to seize all the data recordings for the AEGIS system.

He was also told to reload the recorders for the ship’s Combat Engagement Centre because all the drives had been wiped clean. Whatever was on those recordings, someone didn’t want it to see the light of day. In a later interview, David Fravor also confirmed that the recordings of the squadron’s encounter had vanished.

However, he believed it was simply a case of someone accidentally recording over it which does happen on ships more often than you’d think. Of course, the communication room wasn’t exactly Fort Knox so anyone could’ve made off with the recordings. Fravor also insisted that other than the pilots involved, no-one else saw the Tic Tac object or the recordings, there’s no 10 minute long video, no-one was asked to sign an NDA as claimed by one of the witnesses, and no shady men showed up to squirrel away the footage in a most suspicious fashion.

He also insisted that there was no investigation because, as a senior pilot, no-one ever questioned him about the event. Either he didn’t like sharing the spotlight, or perhaps he was part of the conspiracy covering up the events, as some believe.

There are a lot of detailed accounts out there of the 2004 incident, but not so much of the 2015 incident. During naval exercises carried out by the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, an admiral serving on the Roosevelt received a very strange email on the Navy’s secure network. The sender was asking for help to identify some strange aerial phenomena that was actually posing a flight risk after several pilots had near mid-air collisions with some strange flying objects.

Since the exercises were being carried out in restricted airspace, just off the East Coast, there shouldn’t have been anything there. As with the 2004 incident, the F/A-18 aircraft that encountered these strange craft had managed to capture some footage of this strange object, named GOFAST and GIMBLE, zipping about erratically, while showing flight and structural characteristics that was completely unfamiliar to the pilots. Most fighter jets, of human make anyway, have obvious wings, tails and exhaust plumes, but these unidentified aerial phenomena lacked all of these things.

On April 27th, 2020, the Navy finally released the three videos on its Freedom of Information Act page. The footage actually wasn’t supposed to be seen by the general public but since the videos were already out there, the damage was done and the alien was out of the bag. The Navy did the only thing they could and declassified the videos and officially released them to clear up any misconceptions the public might have, according to a DOD spokesman.

The Navy admitted that the videos clearly showed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP. Six years later, there’s still no explanation as to what exactly the pilots saw that day.

Conclusion

Governments and scientists usually insist that UFOs are nothing more than weather phenomena or new, often classified technologies, under development. Stories of alien abductions and UFOs cruising along aircraft or visiting schools in rural Zimbabwe is just wild imagination – aliens and spacecraft simply aren’t real. However, pilots, astronomers and astronauts, professionals trained in observing their surroundings like their lives depend on it, all have tales of seeing things in the skies that simply shouldn’t be there. Things they just can’t explain.

Since the late 90s though, it seems like the official attitude might be changing. In 1997, the Chilean government formed their own organization to study UFOs and, in 2017, released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted infrared camera. The late 90s also saw the release of the COMETA report, an unofficial French UFO study group consisting of high-ranking scientists and other military officials which claimed that around 5% of encounters simply can’t be explained and might be extra-terrestrial.

Iran has been chasing UFOs away from their nuclear power facilities since the 70s, describing objects of around 30 feet in diameter, reaching speeds of up to Mach 10 which is pretty darn fast for an object without obvious propulsion mechanisms. Of course, they blame the CIA. As recently as 2023, the US government had a hearing on UAPs and a government report in 2021 claimed that there had been 144 reported UAP encounters, and only one was identified as a large, deflating balloon.

The rest remain unexplained. That’s 143 cases of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena between 2019 and 2020 just in the US. Not thousands, but certainly more than I’m comfortable with.

However, despite these great strides made by governments everywhere, and the number of tales of alien abduction and alien visitation that show up online every day, the majority of the world population remain unconvinced. UFOs generally isn’t considered a topic worthy of scientific study, so the only people looking into it are the pseudoscientists who are often more interested in conspiracy theories than facts which really doesn’t help. However, perhaps our alien visitors prefer it that way – after all, I can’t think of a better place to hide than in plain sight.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Foo Fighters?

Foo Fighters were strange lights seen by pilots during World War II, particularly by the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. These lights exhibited unusual behavior, such as moving at incredible speeds and vanishing suddenly, and were not detected by radar.

What happened to Betty and Barney Hill?

Betty and Barney Hill reported being abducted by aliens on September 19, 1961, while driving through rural New Hampshire. They experienced missing time, strange lights, and later recalled under hypnosis being examined by extraterrestrial beings.

What was the Japan Air 1628 incident?

On November 17, 1986, the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 1628 reported encountering two UFOs and later a large mothership-like object while flying over Alaska. The objects exhibited unusual flight characteristics and were detected by both the plane’s radar and ground radar.

What did the students of Ariel School in Zimbabwe report seeing?

On September 16, 1994, around 62 students at Ariel School in Zimbabwe reported seeing a disc-shaped object land near the school and two short figures with large, black eyes exiting the craft. The students described feeling a sense of fear and being communicated with telepathically.

What are the FLIR, GOFAST, and GIMBLE videos?

These are videos taken by military pilots in 2004 and 2015, showing unidentified flying objects exhibiting unusual flight characteristics. The videos were released by the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science in 2017 and later declassified by the U.S. Navy.

What did the Chilean government do regarding UFOs in 1997?

The Chilean government formed an organization to study UFOs and in 2017 released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted infrared camera.

What is the COMETA report?

The COMETA report is an unofficial French UFO study group consisting of high-ranking scientists and military officials. Released in the late 90s, it claimed that around 5% of UFO encounters can’t be explained and might be extraterrestrial.

What did the U.S. government report in 2021 about UAPs?

The U.S. government reported 144 UAP encounters between 2019 and 2020, with only one identified as a large, deflating balloon. The rest remain unexplained.

What did the crew of the USS Nimitz encounter in 2004?

The crew of the USS Nimitz encountered unidentified aerial phenomena, including a Tic Tac-shaped object that exhibited extraordinary flight capabilities, such as rapid acceleration and sudden changes in direction.

What did the pilots of the USS Theodore Roosevelt encounter in 2015?

Pilots of the USS Theodore Roosevelt encountered unidentified aerial phenomena, named GOFAST and GIMBLE, that exhibited unusual flight characteristics and posed a flight risk during naval exercises off the East Coast.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Best Evidence for Aliens Existing
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.