Unidentified flying objects and the places where sightings, encounters, and government interest cluster.
The Bureau of Land Management built a parking lot and a mile of walking to a patch of public land near Corona it officially calls the place where some people believe a craft came down in July 1947. The ranch where the debris was found is a separate property, private, and closed.
In 1922, the U.S. Geological Survey sent George R. Mansfield to Brown Mountain with a surveying telescope. Over about two weeks he took bearings on every light that appeared and plotted them against rail lines, roads, and homesteads. He attributed 47 percent to automobile headlights and 33 percent to locomotives.
Two men reported a diamond-shaped object hovering above the moors at Calvine on August 4, 1990, and the negatives that went to the Ministry of Defence are missing. In 2022, a retired RAF press officer donated the print he had kept, and Sheffield Hallam University's Andrew Robinson found no evidence that it was manipulated. The photographers have never been identified.
In 1977, the Brazilian Air Force sent intelligence officers to Colares island, where residents blamed a light they called the chupa-chupa for burns and a lasting weakness. The records, which Brazil's National Archives began receiving in 2008, document the investigation but do not establish what the lights were or what caused the injuries.
In 1967, a Winnipeg machinist prospecting for quartz said he touched a landed, disc-shaped craft in the Manitoba bush and was burned by it, leaving behind injuries doctors couldn't fully explain and what Canadian researchers still call the country's best-documented UFO case.
During a field investigation in early 1984, Project Hessdalen's instruments recorded 53 light events, some registered at the same moment by radar and magnetometers. An automated station built in 1998 still runs cameras, radar, and spectrum analyzers in the valley, and by 2010 it was logging 10 to 20 sightings a year.
On the night of August 21, 1955, the Sutton and Taylor families near Kelly said small, silver-eyed creatures kept appearing at their farmhouse windows and on the roof, and they fired on them for roughly 4 hours. Responding officers found bullet holes and shell casings but no creatures or footprints.
On the evening of October 27, 1975, by one account, a security policeman guarding the nuclear weapons storage area at Loring Air Force Base watched an aircraft with a red light and a white strobe cross the northern perimeter at about 300 feet. It came back the next night. A memo from the National Military Command Center recorded an unidentified helicopter "landing briefly in proximity to a weapons storage area," and the Air Force never identified it.
Local tradition traces the first sighting to rancher Robert Reed Ellison in 1883. Witnesses at the viewing area on U.S. 90 describe small colored lights toward the Chinati Mountains that hover, merge, and split, and skeptical studies attribute many of them to distant car headlights distorted by heat shimmer.
