1944 April 26 — Night. RAF pilot Arthur Horton of the 622 Squadron is returning from a bombing mission to Essen, Germany, when he is followed by four orange balls of light with “short stubby wings” and emitting sparks, two on each side of the aircraft. He takes evasive action with his Lancaster, but the objects follow all his maneuvers for 10 minutes. When they reach the coast of Holland, they seem to “burn themselves out.”

1945 April 26 — Gen. Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command’s Air Intelligence staff produces a 5-page report representing the most up-to-date information and theories on the balls of fire, but cannot find a good explanation for them.

1964 April 26 — Around 1:00 a.m. Orlando Gallegos steps outside his father’s ranch at La Madera, New Mexico, to chase away some horses in the yard. He sees a peculiar structure in the Rio Vallecitos creek bed some 900 feet away. It looks like a butane tank “as long as a telephone pole” about 14 feet in diameter, metallic, and shooting blue flames out of holes in the sides. As he watches over the next minute, the flames subside. It is still there when he goes inside, where no one else believes him. It is gone the next morning, but state police (including Capt. Martin E. Vigil, David Kingsbury, and Albert Vega) investigate and find the ground still smoldering and scorched with four depressions, one of them 8 by 12 inches in size. The charred area is in the shape of two overlapping circles and about 20 feet across. Hynek is refused authorization to go visit the site.

1969 April 26 — Condon speaks publicly for the first time after the end of the Colorado project in an address to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia on “UFOs I Have Loved and Lost.” He concludes by saying, “Let me say that where corruption of children’s minds is at stake, I do not believe in freedom of the press or freedom of speech. In my view, publishers who publish or teachers who teach any of the pseudosciences as established truth should, on being found guilty, be publicly horsewhipped, and forever banned from further activity in these usually honorable professions.”

1975 April 26 —2:00 a.m. Two young witnesses see a light descend briefly behind a school in Chomedey, Laval, Quebec, for a few seconds. They find a piece of metal and a hole in the ground.

1984 April 26 — 9:45 p.m. Terri West spots an odd light in the sky from her home on Belmont Lane, Stanmore, Greater London, UK. At 10:15 p.m., she joins her neighbors Ruth and Bruno Novelli to watch the light, which is moving back and forth and constantly changing colors from blue to green to pink. Soon it emits a large ball of light that shoots toward the ground. The witnesses call the police at 10:22 p.m. A team of police arrives and watches the object for about 2 hours. Police Constable Richard Milthorp says the light is originally at 45° but after 15 minutes it moves up and to the right. He draws a sketch of the object, which is circular in the middle with a dome above and below. It has different colored lights on the top and bottom. One of the officers takes photos, but they do not come out well. Some others chase the UFO by car, but it is already fading from view.

1986 April 26 — About 4:30 a.m. During the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Mikhail Varitsky and other technicians observe a fiery sphere, similar in color to brass, within 1,000 feet of the damaged Unit 4 reactor at the height of the fire. Two bright rays shoot out from the object, directed at the reactor. It hovers in the areas about 3 minutes, then the rays vanish as the UFO moves slowly away to the northwest. Radiation levels taken just before the UFO appears read 3,000 milliroentgens/hour; after the rays, the readings show 800 milliroentgens/hour. http://ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1005.htm ; https://www.pravdareport.com/news/russia/18024-n/ 

1990 April 26 — Mikhail Gorbachev is visiting the Uralmash plant in Sverdlovsk, Russia, when he is asked for the first time whether the USSR studies UFOs. He answers vaguely that “there are scientific organizations which study this problem.” However, he later tells a group of workers that the “UFO phenomenon is real and we should approach it seriously and study it.”