Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, documented by the people trained hardest not to see things that aren't there: commercial pilots, air traffic controllers and military aircrew. These are real, publicly reported cases. We present the accounts, not conclusions.
Ten of the most well-documented sightings in aviation and military history, plotted where they were reported. Click a marker for the case name and year.
Before any of the cases below, there was the Lockheed U-2, and the CIA has officially confirmed, in its own declassified history, that this one classified spy plane accounted for more than half of all UFO reports filed in America between the late 1950s and 1960s. Built in secret in 88 days, flown by CIA officers who signed away their identities, shot down over the USSR in a Cold War incident that nearly derailed a superpower summit. This is the single best-documented case of a real aircraft causing a real UFO panic anywhere in the declassified record.
Read The Full U-2 Case FileCivilians in north Tehran phoned the airport tower after midnight about a light over the city. The Imperial Iranian Air Force scrambled two F-4 Phantoms, and both crews came home with the same account: the closer they got, the more of the aircraft stopped working, and everything returned the moment they turned away. Major Parviz Jafari reached to fire an AIM-9 at an object that had detached from the first and was closing head-on — and his weapons panel went dead in his hands. The US Defense Intelligence Agency wrote the night up and called it an outstanding report.
Read Our Full Case File →All three crew of a Japan Air Lines 747 freighter watched unidentified lights hold station with them at 35,000 feet over Alaska for close to fifty minutes. Anchorage Center saw returns it could not account for. Captain Terauchi reported it through the proper channel and was taken off flying — and the FAA division chief who ran the investigation says that after briefing the CIA, the FBI and the Reagan White House he was told the meeting had never happened.
Read Our Full Case File →Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished over the central Pacific attempting to circle the globe near the equator, still the most famous unsolved disappearance in aviation history. No confirmed wreckage has ever been recovered, and a Purdue-led expedition is still actively searching for the aircraft as of this writing.
Read Our Full Case File →Captain Thomas Mantell, a decorated WWII pilot with a Distinguished Flying Cross, climbed his P-51 Mustang toward a massive metallic object over Fort Knox without oxygen equipment rated for the altitude. His last radio words described “a metallic object of tremendous size.” He never leveled off.
Read Our Full Case File →Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from radar over the South China Sea with no distress call, then flew on for nearly seven more silent hours before its signal finally went dark somewhere over the Southern Indian Ocean. MH370 remains, first and foremost, an unsolved question of human action or mechanical failure.
Read Our Full Case File →TWA Flight 800 came apart twelve minutes out of New York on a clear evening, in front of one of the most populated coastlines in America. Of 736 witnesses, 258 described a streak of light and 38 said it rose vertically off the water. The NTSB concluded the centre fuel tank exploded but stated openly that it could not identify the ignition source with certainty. No UAP claim attaches to this case — but it is the most-witnessed object-in-the-sky dispute in aviation history, and it belongs in any honest file on what people report seeing.
Read Our Full Case File →Twenty-year-old Frederick Valentich radioed Melbourne air traffic control from his Cessna 182 to report an aircraft orbiting above him. Six minutes and forty-seven seconds later, mid-transmission, his radio call ends in a burst of metallic noise and goes silent. Neither Valentich nor his aircraft was ever found.
Read Our Full Case File →Navy fighter pilots training off the California coast were vectored toward a radar contact descending from 80,000 feet to sea level in seconds. Pilots described a smooth, white, tic-tac-shaped object that mirrored their aircraft's movements before accelerating away faster than their jet could track.
Read full report →Over three nights in late December 1980, U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at RAF Woodbridge reported strange lights and a craft on the ground in the surrounding forest. Deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt narrated the events in real time on a pocket tape recorder, since declassified.
Read Our Full Case File →Flight Crew Files reports on publicly documented UAP cases as they've been described by the pilots, crew and agencies involved. We don't claim to know what these objects are: only that trained aviation professionals, under oath and under scrutiny, have reported seeing something they could not identify. Draw your own conclusions.