UFO sightings — United States
UFO sightings — United States. 55 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
Coyote Canyon and the Coyote Springs tract
Coyote Canyon and the Coyote Springs tract form a rugged canyon featuring natural mineral springs nestled at the foot of the Manzanita Mountains southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. In the late 19th century, it was a quiet destination for wilderness camping and convalescence; in modern history, it became one of America’s most secretive and anomalous military corridors, absorbed into the restricted perimeter of Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories—nearly a century before the Paul Bennewitz affair made it globally famous.
Mount Adams and the Watchers' Ranch
A volcano in southern Washington at whose foot the ECETI ranch has operated since the 1980s — a site people come to specifically in order to watch the sky. In summer dozens camp here with binoculars and cameras, and reports of lights come in every night. It is a rare case on this list of a place known not for one incident but for a continuous practice of watching. The explanation is simple and takes nothing away: the mountain stands well clear of any town, the sky is dark, and low-orbit satellites are visible to the naked eye in their hundreds after sunset. That suits the people who come: there genuinely is a great deal to look at.
Holloman and the Landing That Is Not on Film
In the 1970s a story spread through the subject that in April 1964 an unidentified craft had landed at this New Mexico base and that a meeting with its crew had been filmed. The source was a producer, Robert Emenegger, preparing a documentary; he was never able to show the film. The base is genuinely associated with the unusual: high-altitude balloon programmes ran here and rocket sleds were tested, and things that fly nowhere else were regularly seen overhead. It is a good example of how a real closed site attracts stories. Nothing in this one is checkable except that the account exists, with a precise date and not one document.
Edwards and the Night on Tape
On the night of 3 October 1965 controllers and aircrew at this California base and the range next to it spent several hours tracking unidentified objects that hovered, separated and closed again. The radio recordings survive and were later declassified — officers can be heard discussing the sighting in real time. Dozens of people saw the objects from the ground, base command among them. An aircraft was sent up and found nothing. Edwards is a test base where things that were not reported were being flown in those years, and that is the main explanation. It does not settle the central question: why the base's own staff could not identify what was happening.
Minot and the Night on the Missile Field
On the night of 24 October 1968 several security patrols on the missile field of this North Dakota base reported a glowing object hanging over the silos. Ground radar held a return, and the crew of a B-52 on approach saw it both on their own radar and with their eyes. The episode entered the Project Blue Book files with an unusually full set of documents: statements from sixteen men, radar film and duty reports. The official explanation is plasma and the star Sirius. It does not account for the agreement between ground and airborne radar, and the case remains one of the most cited military files in the archive.
Fort Yukon and JAL Flight 1628
On 17 November 1986 a Japan Airlines cargo 747 was over Alaska when the crew saw two small objects alongside and then — in the description of Captain Kenju Terauchi — something far larger, "the size of two aircraft carriers". The escort lasted about fifty minutes. The controller at Anchorage saw an extra return beside the aircraft on radar; military radar did not confirm it. The Federal Aviation Administration investigated and concluded that the return was an artefact and that what was seen was probably Jupiter and Mars, both low on the horizon that night. Terauchi rejected the explanation and was moved to a ground job.
White Sands and the Green Fireballs
From December 1948 bright green spheres began to be seen regularly over New Mexico, moving horizontally and without sound. Most of them were seen over closed installations — this range, Los Alamos, Kirtland base — and the witnesses were guards, pilots and scientists. The Air Force took it seriously: Lincoln La Paz, an astronomer and meteor specialist, ran an observation programme called Twinkle that set cameras and theodolites across the state. La Paz insisted these were not meteors: the trajectory was too horizontal, the colour too uniform, and no fragment was ever found. The programme closed in 1951 without a result. Reports of green fireballs in the region continue.
Allagash and the Four Men on the Lake
In August 1976 four men — two artist brothers and two friends — were night fishing from a boat on a lake in the north Maine woods when, by their account, a bright sphere over the water put a beam on them. After that there was a gap: the campfire they had built before going out had burned to ash. Twelve years later all four went under hypnosis separately and described an examination inside a craft. One of the brothers drew what he had seen, and the drawings became the well-known part of the story. It is one of very few abduction cases with several witnesses at once, and simultaneously the sceptics' main exhibit: hypnosis recovers suggested images as readily as memories.
Desert Center and Adamski's Meeting
On 20 November 1952 the Polish-American author George Adamski drove into the desert near this hamlet with six companions and, by his account, met a man from Venus called Orthon — fair-haired, in a one-piece suit, communicating by gesture and telepathy. His companions, he said, watched from a distance and signed a statement. The book Flying Saucers Have Landed appeared in 1953 and became an international bestseller; the whole contactee genre begins with it. Adamski's photographs of the Venusian craft were later matched against domestic hardware of the period — in particular the hood of a chicken brooder lamp. He maintained the account to the end.
Giant Rock and the Contactee Conventions
A free-standing granite boulder in the Mojave — by some counts the largest in the world, about seven storeys high. From 1947 a former aircraft engineer named George Van Tassel lived beside it, having built a café and an airstrip under the rock. Van Tassel said that in 1953 visitors from Venus arrived and dictated the design of a machine for rejuvenation. He built it seven kilometres away — the wooden dome called the Integratron, which is still standing. From 1954 to 1978 he held annual contactee conventions at the rock; in the best years up to eleven thousand people came. In 2000 a third of the rock split off.
Yakima and the Lights over the Fire Towers
From 1964 into the 1980s the fire lookouts of the Yakama reservation in southern Washington kept a log of night lights over the Toppenish Ridge: orange spheres that rose from the crest, hung, and went away. The records were kept by people whose job is to watch the same ground all night and tell a campfire from lightning. The material reached the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and Yakima became one of the few cases with a long, disciplined run of observations by the same observers. The leading hypothesis is earthquake lights: the area is heavily faulted, and glows over moving faults are described elsewhere in the world too. It could not be proved on this material.
The Hudson Valley and the Silent Triangle
Between 1982 and 1986 the Hudson Valley north of New York City produced several thousand reports of the same thing: a very large triangular or boomerang-shaped object with lights along its edge, moving low, slowly and almost silently. The witnesses were suburban residents, police, and staff at the Indian Point nuclear station. Part of the wave is explained and undisputed: a group of amateur pilots from Stormville airfield flew in formation at night with their lights on as a prank, and never denied it. The argument is whether that covers all of it: several reports describe an object blocking hundreds of metres of sky, which is large for a formation of light aircraft.
Los Angeles and the Barrage of 1942
On the night of 24–25 February 1942, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, an air raid alert was sounded over Los Angeles and the anti-aircraft batteries opened fire. The shooting went on for over an hour: some 1,400 shells were fired and five people died — three in traffic accidents in the blackout, two of heart attacks. No aircraft was brought down and no wreckage was found. The next day the Los Angeles Times printed a photograph of the night sky with searchlight beams converging on a bright patch. The frame has been reprinted as evidence ever since, though the retouching on it was ordinary newspaper practice of the period. The official explanation is a weather balloon and wartime nerves.
Loring and the Nights over the Weapons Store
In late October 1975 an unidentified object appeared for several nights running over this Maine base, where nuclear weapons were stored: it hovered a few dozen metres above the weapons store, descended, and left when helicopters were sent up. The base went to heightened alert, and dozens of servicemen including the command staff saw it. Radar tracked it. The same weeks produced similar reports from several other bases along the Canadian border — Wurtsmith, Malmstrom, Minot. The documents on that series are declassified and published; they contain no explanation, and the wording in the summaries is "unidentified helicopter", though no unit ever claimed one.
Malmstrom and the Ten Missiles That Went Down
On 24 March 1967 ten Minuteman intercontinental missiles at this Montana base's Echo flight went off alert within minutes of each other, one after another. At the same time the guards on the surface were reporting a glowing object hanging over the gate. For years the case was known only from the account of the duty officer, Robert Salas, who spoke publicly from the 1990s. Declassified documents later confirmed both the mass failure and that its cause was never established; the official reading attributes it to electromagnetic interference from work on the complex. A similar episode was described in the same period at Minot base.
Off San Diego and the Tic Tac
On 14 November 2004 the Nimitz carrier group, a hundred-odd kilometres south-west of San Diego, spent several days tracking returns that dropped from twenty-five kilometres to sea level in seconds. A pair of F/A-18s was sent to look; the squadron commander, David Fravor, reported a white object with no wings and no exhaust, shaped like a breath mint, moving over the water in sharp jumps. The second aircraft filmed it on an infrared camera. That recording, known as FLIR1, was published in 2017 and confirmed by the Pentagon in 2020 as genuine and unidentified. It is the first case on this map where the defence ministry itself vouched for the document.
Elmwood and the Landing Pad That Was Never Built
A Wisconsin town of eight hundred where three sightings came one after another in 1975–76, one of them by a police officer. Patrolman George Wheeler radioed that an object with a row of windows was hanging over a hill, after which the radio cut out and his engine died. Wheeler died six months later, and the town connected the two. After the wave a resident proposed building a UFO landing pad outside the town — with a tower, lights and a reception centre — and put a committee together for it. The fifty-million-dollar project stayed on paper. Elmwood has held UFO Days at the end of July since 1978.
Fyffe, Alabama's UFO Capital
The town of Fyffe in DeKalb County, situated atop the Sand Mountain plateau in Alabama, USA, is a small agricultural community with a population of around one thousand, officially designated by the state legislature as the "UFO Capital of Alabama." The town gained national notoriety in 1989 following a widespread wave of unidentified flying object sightings and unusual occurrences on local farms.
Gulf Breeze and Ed Walters's Photographs
From November 1987 a contractor named Ed Walters brought a series of photographs of a glowing object with a row of ports along its underside to the local paper in this Florida town — anonymously at first, then under his own name. Within two years there were some forty pictures, and Gulf Breeze had become a place of pilgrimage. In 1990 the new occupants of the Walters house found a model made of foam and film in the attic, matching the object in the photographs. Walters said it had been planted. Meanwhile other residents, police officers among them, were reporting lights over the sound in those same years, and some of those reports have nothing to do with Walters. The case remains a classic of how one disputed witness drowns out everything else.
Wright-Patterson and Hangar 18
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, USA, is one of the largest research, development, and logistics installations of the United States Air Force. It gained global notoriety as the operational headquarters for Project Blue Book (1952–1969), the official U.S. military investigation into UFO phenomena, and the home of the Foreign Technology Division (FTD), responsible for analyzing adversary aerospace hardware.
Dulce and the Underground Base
A town on Jicarilla Apache land near the Colorado line, known in the subject for one story: that a seven-level underground laboratory operates beneath Archuleta Mesa, where humans and aliens run experiments together. The story has a single source — a businessman named Paul Bennewitz, who decided in the early 1980s that he was intercepting alien transmissions. It later emerged that officers at Kirtland base, worried that he was picking up real military signals, had spent years feeding him fabrications, until he was hospitalised. Half the modern mythology of underground bases descends from that. Dulce itself is a quiet town where nobody has ever found anything of the kind.
Rachel and the Extraterrestrial Highway
Rachel is a tiny desert settlement in Nevada with a population of fewer than 100 residents, situated along State Route 375, officially designated as the Extraterrestrial Highway. As the closest civilian community to the top-secret Area 51 military installation (Groom Lake), it has become a global pilgrimage site for UFO enthusiasts, aviation buffs, and paranormal researchers.
Aztec and the Second Crash
In 1948, a year after Roswell, another flying saucer is supposed to have come down at this town in northern New Mexico — thirty metres across, with sixteen bodies inside. The story was told by the writer Frank Scully in a 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, which became a bestseller. Two years later True magazine established that Scully's sources were two confidence men, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, who had been selling oilmen an "alien" device for finding deposits. Both were convicted of fraud. Aztec was not put off: from 1998 the town ran an annual UFO symposium, and it became a noticeable source of income for the local library.
O'Hare and the Hole in the Cloud
On 7 November 2006 a group of United Airlines staff at Gate C17 at Chicago O'Hare — mechanics, a supervisor, ramp crew — saw a dark disc hanging motionless above the terminal under a solid overcast. By their account it went up so sharply that it punched a round hole in the cloud, through which blue sky was visible for a couple of minutes. United and the Federal Aviation Administration at first denied receiving any report. After a Freedom of Information request from the Chicago Tribune, a recording surfaced of a controller discussing the sighting with a supervisor. The official explanation is a weather phenomenon. No flights were held, and no investigation followed.