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.
Kecksburg and the Acorn in the Woods
On 9 December 1965 a bright fireball crossed several states, and in the woods outside this Pennsylvania village, according to the people who live there, something came down. Witnesses described an object the size of a car, shaped like an acorn, with a band of markings around its base. By evening the military had cordoned the woods off; by morning they announced they had found nothing. The official answer is a meteor, and astronomers did track that fireball from Ontario into Pennsylvania. A meteor does not explain a cordon. In 2005 NASA acknowledged that its files on the episode were missing. A replica of the acorn has stood in the village since the 1990s — put up for a television programme, and never taken down.
The Brown Mountain Lights
Glows seen since the nineteenth century over a low ridge in North Carolina: they appear above the crest, rise, go out and appear again. The US Geological Survey studied them twice, in 1913 and 1922, and both times concluded they were reflections of train and settlement lights. The difficulty is that the earliest accounts date from before there was a railway or a settlement there. The ridge is accessible, there are marked viewing areas, and the lights are still being filmed.
The Hornet Spook Light
A ball of light the size of a basketball, seen for more than a century over a straight stretch of dirt road on the Missouri–Oklahoma line. It approaches, retreats, changes colour and is said to react to people. The US Army Corps of Engineers investigated in the 1940s and reached no conclusion. The most convincing explanation is atmospheric refraction of headlights from Route 66 a few miles off — but local memory of the light predates cars in the county.
The Kelly–Hopkinsville goblins
On the night of 21 August 1955 the Sutton family, from a farm outside Kelly, Kentucky, ran into the police station at Hopkinsville and said they had spent hours shooting at short creatures with large ears and glowing eyes that came up to the windows and did not fall when hit. Police went out to the farm, found shot-out windows and screens, and no trace of the creatures. There were eleven witnesses including children, there was no drink in the house, and the family had nothing to gain — they turned down money for interviews. The case remains one of the most argued-over in American ufology.
The Marfa Lights
East of this west Texas town, lights have been watched since 1883: basketball-sized spheres that hang over the desert, split, merge and go out. The cowboy Robert Ellison recorded the first, taking them for Apache campfires. University physicists showed in 2004 that a good share of them are headlights on Highway 67 refracted through layers of warm air. A share — but not all, and it cannot account for the sightings that predate cars.
Roswell
On 8 July 1947 the army airfield at Roswell issued a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc". Hours later the statement was withdrawn and the debris called a weather balloon. It would have been forgotten if participants had not started telling it differently in the late 1970s; by the 1990s Roswell was shorthand for cover-up. In 1994 the Air Force admitted the balloon was not meteorological but part of Project Mogul, listening for Soviet nuclear tests — a truth forty-seven years late, which by then convinced nobody.
Area 51
A closed US Air Force range in the Nevada desert that officially did not exist for decades. Secret aircraft testing and total secrecy made it the centre of global UFO mythology.