Sightings from the 1930s to today, and the science of whether anyone is out there. Sourced, attributed, and honest about what nobody knows.
9 cases across 6 continents · 4 science entries
Cases where an official body released or confirmed the material and then offered no conventional explanation for it.
Two F/A-18F crews were vectored to an object detected by a cruiser's radar. The Pentagon later confirmed the infrared video that came out of the encounter was genuine Navy footage.
Pacific Ocean, off southern California, United States · 14 November 2004
A gardener reported an object landing briefly in his field. The French space agency's UAP unit collected soil and plant samples the next day and its file remains open and unexplained.
Trans-en-Provence, Var, France · 8 January 1981
Airmen stationed at two US bases in Suffolk reported lights and a structured object in the forest between them. A deputy base commander's memo to the Ministry of Defence survives as an official record.
Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, United Kingdom · 26 December 1980
9 cases across 8 countries, plotted where they were reported. Filter by classification, region or decade, and zoom in until the events separate.
Open the mapPublished findings, explained plainly and never oversold. Kept separate from the case archive on purpose.
An object called 3I/ATLAS is crossing our neighbourhood on a path that shows it formed somewhere else. It is only the third such visitor astronomers have caught.
ATLAS survey · NASA
A team reported a gas on the planet K2-18b that on Earth is made almost entirely by living things. Several independent reanalyses of the same data found the signal was not strong enough to claim.
University of Cambridge · NASA
The TRAPPIST-1 system holds seven rocky planets around a star barely larger than Jupiter. Whether any of them kept an atmosphere is the question now being tested.
NASA · European Southern Observatory
We are not here to tell you it was aliens, and we are not here to tell you it was a weather balloon. Some of these cases have ordinary explanations, and we say so plainly. Others have been examined by governments, pilots and scientists, and nobody has explained them. That is worth recording carefully.
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