Unidentified flying objects and the places where sightings, encounters, and government interest cluster.
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.
In 1977, hundreds of residents of this Amazon river island reported burns and blood loss from silent, glowing lights, prompting Brazil's Air Force to run its only known dedicated UFO investigation.
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.
Unexplained balls of light have appeared over a remote Norwegian valley since the 1930s, drawing one of the only continuously operating scientific monitoring stations ever built specifically to study an unidentified aerial phenomenon.
Eleven members of a Kentucky farm family said they spent a night under siege by small, glowing-eyed creatures in 1955, one of the most witnessed and most thoroughly investigated close-encounter cases in American UFO history.
A long-running West Texas ghost-light phenomenon seen near Marfa, where distant orbs are said to brighten, split, drift, and vanish across the desert beyond the official viewing area.
Three young women told police they saw a crouching creature with red eyes in a vacant lot on January 20, 1996. The Army investigated and concluded they had mistaken a local man in bad weather. The town built a water tower shaped like a flying saucer and, in 2022, a museum.
Every October, glowing orbs are said to rise from the Mekong River along the Thailand-Laos border, drawing crowds who credit a giant mythical serpent. Scientists have proposed explanations for decades, none fully satisfying everyone who has seen it.
A widely witnessed series of unidentified lights over Arizona and Nevada on the night of March 13, 1997, including a large V-shaped formation seen by thousands across the Phoenix metro area, one of the most famous mass UFO sightings in US history.
