Bizarre Details About UFO Sightings That Don't Add Up

Correction 03/04/22: A previous version of this article misstated the year of the Battle of Los Angeles. It was 1942, not 1944.

In 1947, Orson Welles was quoted in The Evening Observer, saying of the recent surge of UFO sightings, "People are imaginative and gullible. I'll bet 10 to 1 this will fizzle out." It's safe to say that Welles lost that bet.

Given the nature of unidentified flying objects — unidentified is right in the name — it's no surprise that aspects of the phenomenon don't quite add up and likely never will. Some of it can be chalked up to the unquestionable weirdness of seeing objects seemingly mock the laws of physics. Sometimes, however, it seems as though someone explicitly wants to make it harder for anyone to know what is going on. It can be hoaxers, happy to troll their neighbors, or government officials only too keen to tell you that you didn't see anything. And if you did see something, it was a cloud, balloon, bird, plane, or the planet Venus.

According to the Military Museum, the military was already on high alert when radar picked up unidentified objects 120 miles west of Los Angeles on February 24, 1942, and soon let loose on them. The objects, however, were indifferent to the assault of 1,440 anti-aircraft rounds. The Los Angeles Times reported that the battle killed five people on the ground via traffic accidents and heart attacks.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said the next morning that there was no evidence of planes, labeling it a false alarm, but he didn't help matters when he followed this up by saying that vital industries ought to move inland in case this was an attack. After speaking to witnesses, local Army commanders ruled that there had been between one and five unidentified objects in the sky. They guessed that it was either commercial planes in the hands of enemies or light planes launched from Japanese submarines.

Some said they saw a slow-moving silver disc. This was bolstered by a photograph of searchlights all fixed on a strange object. However, newspapers at the time tended to retouch photos to improve contrast. "UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age" noted that the object is less evident in the unretouched picture.

The Hudson Valley UFO Flap occurred between 1982 and 1986, according to Plane and Pilot Magazine, and involved sightings of one or more football field-sized, V-shaped objects, often compared to boomerangs, slowly drifting. The UFO caused a traffic jam on I-84, and according to "Unsolved Mysteries," over 5,000 residents witnessed it.

The UnMuseum explained that J. Allen Hynek officially studied the Hudson Valley sightings and pronounced that this was genuinely unidentified. It loosened his skepticism, eventually leading him to co-author the book "Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings" about the incidents.

On August 25, 1984, officials declared that it was a hoax caused by six people flying ultralight aircraft in a tight formation. This was not satisfying, as the objects were solid enough to block the stars, far too consistent to be disconnected, too large to be a contingent of ultralights, and too silent. Dr. Hynek would have at once debunked the sightings with so simple an answer.

According to The Times Union, the nearby town of Pine Bush has an annual UFO Fair and Parade in honor of the sightings.

KTAR News reports that, for hours on March 13, 1997, thousands in Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico witnessed strange lights, including a V-shaped object over Phoenix. One witness who watched it fly over Granite Mountain estimated that it had to have been a mile wide, adding, "I've never seen anything even close to the colors from the exhaust that propelled that thing."

At first, then-Governor Fife Symington made light of it, to the extent of having an aide dress as an alien for a press conference. Later, he admitted that he had seen the lights as well. As he was a pilot, he knew it was like nothing earthly, adding, "I don't know why people would ridicule it."

The Phoenix New Times reported that the lights were later explained as flares dropped by the military during a training exercise. The media outlet also interviewed Jim Dilettoso, a man who claimed he had done spectral analysis of footage of the lights and concluded that "these were not flares." The V remains unexplained to many, though some suspect it might have been planes flying in formation.

No one requested radar information from the Federal Aviation Administration within two weeks of the incident, so the records for that night were deleted per standard procedure, stymying believers and skeptics alike.

Perhaps the object was looking for a runway. The Chicago Tribune reported the "flying saucer-like" object seen above the United terminal's Concourse C in November 2006 stayed long enough to be seen by pilots, airline management, and mechanics — people who know what an airplane looks like and can identify aerial phenomena. 

Witnesses were inconsistent in their description, saying it was 6 to 24 feet in diameter, spinning or stationary. However, they all agreed that it was gray and silent — and that it shot off into the clouds, leaving a circular hole in them.

The Federal Aviation Administration and United Airlines expressed no interest in investigating. Center for UFO Studies scientific director Mark Rodeghier said, "It's an unknown object over O'Hare, and it's seen by official personnel, and does United or the FAA take it seriously? ... [H]ow can you not worry about something hovering over an airport after 9/11?" 

Dr. Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium, suggested that it was simply a weather condition called a "hole-punch cloud," which doesn't explain the hovering object. According to Wired, once the Chicago Tribune filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the FAA went from saying that they had no information to echoing claims of a weather phenomenon. FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said, "When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things."

The official website for Aurora, Texas, assures anyone looking for Ned's grave that what happened on April 17, 1897, was reportedly real. A slow airship crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill, and the pilot, burned and disfigured, was far too injured. The local paper wrote "that he was not an inhabitant of this world." Townsfolk gave him a Christian burial in the Aurora Cemetery — potential aliens are owed that sacrament, apparently.

The grave is enough of a tourist attraction that the headstone has been stolen more than once, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. Stratton Horres, a Dallas lawyer, offered a $1,000 reward for its return, but that may be too humble an offer for such a keepsake.

KERA News reported that researchers had tested the well where the wreckage was stored and dug metal out of trees as proof. In the 1970s, researchers pushed to exhume Ned, but, as Aurora city administrator Terri Wheeler said in 2016, "You cannot exhume a grave unless you notify the next of kin. And that's how the cemetery association got the court injunction in 1972 to keep them from exhuming the remains."

Was the crash only a homemade dirigible? A hoax? In the end, something was buried in the cemetery, though we may never know what.

According to History, the actual mystery may not be what happened on July 24, 1948, but why the United States government launched a top-secret investigation and then obliterated the final report, given the tepid title "Estimate of the Situation."

Clarence S. Chiles and his co-pilot John B. Whitted were flying an Eastern Air Lines DC-3 from Houston to Atlanta when they spotted the object. Though there were 20 passengers, 19 of them were asleep. Chiles described the object, seen 20 miles outside Montgomery, Alabama: "It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power, shooting flame from the rear some 50 feet. There were two rows of windows, which indicated an upper and lower deck, [and] from inside these windows a very bright light was glowing." The pilots saw it only ten seconds before it disappeared behind clouds.

The Atlanta Constitution went with the headline "Atlanta Pilots Report Wingless Sky Monster" when they reported it. Both Boeing Aircraft and the army made statements that it wasn't one of theirs. Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt said he had seen the report, writing, "The 'situation' was the UFOs. The 'estimate' was that they were interplanetary!"

History states that 13,500 people in Belgium admitted to having seen flying objects between November 1989 and April 1990. The Week tells of one November incident where 30 people, including three unrelated pairs of police officers, all witnessed the same object, of which a police dispatcher said, "It made no noise," but joked that it might be Santa Claus. Reuters explained this sighting as a Soviet satellite breaking up in the atmosphere. However, The Week reported that skeptic Brian Dunning said this same sighting was a helicopter.

The sightings tapered off after a March 30, 1990, incident in which two Belgian Air Force F-16s chased the objects. Chief of Operations of the Air Staff General Wilfried De Brouwer wrote, "The [Belgian] pilots tried to intercept the alleged crafts, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behavior, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity." The Belgians asked the UK's Ministry of Defence to investigate, but the Ministry stopped once it was clear that the objects were not a threat. 

The most famous photo of the sighting (not the one above), the so-called Petit-Rechain picture, was a hoax. "We managed to trick everyone with a piece of polystyrene," said one of the hoaxers.