Seven UFO Incidents in History

Mantell Incident, 1948
Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell crashed his P-51 fighter while in pursuit of an unusual object in the skies over Kentucky on January 7, 1948. Mantell flew without oxygen at high altitudes in pursuit of a silver disk shaped craft, until he blacked out when he tried to get closer to whatever the thing was, with tragic consequences. A later investigation suggests that what Mantell may have been chasing was actually a large Skyhook weather balloon, which can take on a disk-like appearance when seen from below and has a highly reflective silvery surface to boot.

JAL Flight 1628, 1986
On November 16, 1986 a UFO flew alongside Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 for 50 minutes as it flew over northeastern Alaska, with the objects even being intermittently picked up by both civilian and military ground radar. What makes this incident so impressive was the amount of time the object was seen, the creditability and sheer number of witnesses (the crew and all the passengers) and the fact that it was also picked up on radar, instantly rendering it one of the most impressive UFO sightings on record and one that remains inexplicable to this day.

Kenneth Arnold's Mount Rainier, Washington Sighting, 1947
Seattle pilot and businessman Kevin Arnold spotted a number of shapes flying over Mount Ranier one afternoon in May 1947, moving at speeds many times faster that the best aircraft of the day could achieve. He got the media's attention after he landed and declared that the objects seemed to "skip like saucers across a pond," inadvertently creating the term "flying saucer." Skeptics today continue to challenge Arnold's assessment of the craft's actual speed and distance or claim they were merely light reflections off his own cockpit window.

Washington, DC Sightings, 1952
In 1952 Washington, D.C. was all abuzz when ground controllers at Washington National Airport (now Reagan International Airport) spotted multiple targets on their radars as well as observed glowing orbs of light on the horizon, prompting the Air Force to launch fighters in a futile attempt to close with the objects. The incident, which took place on two consecutive weekends between July 13 and July 29, 1952, even got the President's attention and had almost immediate repercussions. Deciding the best defense was a strong offense, the government implemented something called the Robertson Panel. The Robertson Panel was a committee of prominent scientists appointed to spend two days examining the "best" UFO cases collected by Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was an eighteen year long Air Force study that was to look into more than 12,000 UFO reports before it was discontinued in 1969. The promptly concluded that the Air Force and Project Blue Book needed to spend less time analysing and studying UFO reports and more time publicly debunking them.

Tehran, Iran Incident, 1976
Up until 1976, the complaint had always been that UFOs seemed remarkably resistant to being spotted on radar, implying that they were more imaginary than extraterrestrial. That all changed when in the predawn hours of September 19, 1976, Iranian jet fighters were sent to chase after a wildly maneuvering UFO in the skies over Tehran after several radar stations picked the thing up. Even more impressive, the craft effected the jet's systems directly whenever they drew too close, rendering their electronics inoperable and, in one case, even causing one jet's weapons system to fail completely as it closed to fire. The incident is regarded as one of the premier UFO encounters ever recorded, not only due to the quality and preponderance of evidence (the craft may have even been picked up by the military satellite DSP-1) but because of the direct impact it had on the instrumentation and radars of several different aircraft involved in the pursuit.

Belgium Incident, 1990
In an incident similar to the Tehran case in 1976, NATO jets were again scrambled on the evening of March 30, 1990 to pursue a series of dark, triangular-shaped UFOs over the Belgian countryside. What was especially impressive about this sighting were the speeds and capabilities of the craft, which appeared capable of making maneuvers that would have killed a human pilot. Like the Tehran incident, not only were the craft seen by numerous ground witnesses, but they were also picked up by ground controllers and the aircraft's on board weapons radars and even photographed, making it hands down the best documented UFO sighting on record.

Roswell, New Mexico Crash and Recovery, 1947
No single incident did more to put allegedly crashed saucers and little green men into the public consciousness that what took place in July of 1947 some fifty miles north of the New Mexico city of Roswell when a farmer named Matt Brazell discovered a debris field strewn with tiny metallic strips and wooden sticks near his farm. Brazell wondered if he hadn't stumbled across his very own crashed flying saucer and immediately contacted local military authorities. At first, authorities agreed with the farmer's assessment and declared that a "crashed disk" had been recovered, only to recant hours later and claim the debris was part of a crashed weather balloon all along. That seemed to put an end to the story until the late seventies when the Army Air Force intelligence officer who was sent to pick the stuff up, Jesse Marcel, claimed the material he recovered was extraterrestrial after all, creating a conspiracy theory of epic proportions that refuses to die to this day.