1952 May 1 — 9:10 a.m. Air intelligence officer Maj. Rudolph Pestalozzi and an airman standing outside the Davis-Monthan AFB base hospital, Tucson, Arizona, watch two shiny, round objects overtake a B-36 flying above. The objects slow down to match the plane’s speed and remain in formation with them for 20 seconds. Then they make a sharp, no-radius turn away from the B-36, moving away a bit. Then one of the objects stops and hovers. Both are silent, and the crew estimates they have a diameter of 20–25 feet and a thickness of 10–12 feet. http://www.nicap.org/520501davismonthan_dir.htm

1952 May 1 — 10:50 a.m. At George AFB [now Southern California Logistics Airport] near Victorville, California, five independent witnesses in the base control tower see a group of five white discs moving in formation for about 30 seconds. The objects appear very manoeuvrable, seem to almost collide, then break away in a right-angle turn. They are traveling an estimated 900–1,200 mph and are 1,000–1,200 feet in diameter. Four miles away at Apple Valley, California, the base’s wing director of personnel, playing on a golf course, sees one of the UFOs at the same time. http://www.nicap.org/520501george_dir.htm; Swords 147–148; Good Need 166

1952 May 1 — 1:45 p.m. Albuquerque Journal composing room employee Eugene Cline sees four silvery objects seemingly playing tag with a formation of 12 Air Force bombers—either B-29s or B-50s—flying west over the city. The round objects are keeping up with the planes at the same altitude, moving in a “tumbling or pitching manner.” One object shoots straight up and takes off in a southerly direction. About the same time, workmen (one of them Howard Burgess) erecting an antenna at nearby Sandia Base watch three UFOs pass directly overhead. One comes from the west and moves south; another comes from the north and moves south; and a third, tan-colored rather than silver like the others, passes low overhead and looks like a “cylinder tumbling end over end.” Burgess and the others are debriefed and sworn to secrecy about what they have witnessed. 

1956 May 1 — Air Force Manual section 190-4 goes into effect. It affects all USAF official press releases, statements to Congress and the public, and publications about UFOs. It requires the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information to “delete all evidence of UFO reality and intelligent control, which would, of course, contradict the Air Force stand that UFOs do not exist.” NICAP is made aware of the regulation in 1962 when former USAF information spokesman Maj. William T. Coleman admits to a NICAP member that Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker’s book Flying Saucers and the US Air Force was reviewed under AFM 190-4. 

1957 May 1 — 7:00 a.m. A man driving a motorcycle about 9 miles from Pajas Blancas International Airport in Córdoba, Argentina, sees a UFO shortly after his engine fails. It is 65 feet in diameter and 16 feet thick, hovering about 50 feet above the ground. He hides in a ditch and sees the craft come down, making a sound similar to air escaping from a valve. A lift descends from its base almost to the ground. In it is a man of average height who makes friendly gestures. He is dressed in a plastic diving suit. The witness enters the machine and sees several people inside seated in front of instrument panels, lit by an extraordinary light. He is then escorted out, and the disc rises to the northwest. During the next hour, there are 6 other sightings made by independent witnesses. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1957-Mar-23-May-25.pdf

1967 May 1 — The Colorado project issues a press release calling for photos of UFOs taken by private citizens and provides recommendations to the photographers and the information it should include. The release is basically a rewrite of a document prepared by NPIC staff and approved by Lundahl on March 24. 

1967 May 1 — Night. A man’s car engine fails while he is driving near Peeltree, West Virginia. He sees a 40-foot-long elliptical object emerge from behind a shed and hover 15 feet from his car. It tilts toward the car at a 30° angle. He hears static on the radio, and the dashboard temperature gauge goes off the dial. He feels an intense wave of heat when he puts his head out the window, and his hands burn when he touches the horn rim and dashboard. He also reports headaches and a partial loss of vision. 

1977 May 1 — The Groupe d’Etude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non Identifiés (GEPAN) is founded as a section of France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales on the initiative of CNES Director Yves Sillard. Its purpose is to quiet public fears about a flurry of UFO sightings, as well as to coordinate reports of the Gendarmerie, civil aviation, the Air Force, and the meteorological service. Its first director is aeronautical engineer Claude Poher. GEPAN sets up a Scientific Council of astronomers and other scientists and professionals to put in place data-collection systems for UFO reports from official agencies and investigate cases already reported. 

1979 May 1 — 4:00 a.m. YPF company engineers at the Vizcacheras oil fields in a remote area of Argentina’s Mendoza province accessible only to employees are awakened by goats bleating in a corral. When they go outside to investigate, they see a UFO hovering silently about 230 feet from the encampment and 65 feet above the ground. They wave a lantern, and the UFO seems to respond by blinking a light, then slowly lands nearby. More light signals are exchanged, then the UFO takes off and disappears toward the Andes mountains at 4:35 a.m. After the sighting, the goats (about 1,500) refuse to return to their corral. The engineers go to inspect the landing spot and find a large circle in which the sand has been petrified or hardened into chunks. Soil samples are taken to a Professor Corradi for analysis. Corradi, identified as director of the Institute for Extra human Studies, says the samples are being analysed by the Office of Mining. Corradi remarks that that the “permanent presence of the UFOs over the uranium mines of La Pintada and Cuesta de los Terneros in San Rafael and now in Vizcacheras, is not a coincidence.” (https://www.nicap.org/ncp/ncp-hall2.htm; MUFON UFO Journal, September 1979)

1987 May 1 — The Center for UFO Studies moves from Glenview, Illinois, to 2457 West Peterson Avenue in Chicago.

1991 May 1–7 — Wendelle C. Stevens holds the First World UFO Congress in Tucson, Arizona, which brings together UFO researchers, witnesses, and others from Spain, Italy, Japan, Russia, Germany, UK, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Canada, and the US.

1992 May 1 — University of Connecticut psychologist Kenneth Ring publishes The Omega Project, in which he argues that ostensible aliens, angels, and otherworldly entities exist in an imaginal realm, a “third kingdom” between reality and fantasy that is accessible through certain altered states of consciousness that undermine ordinary perception and conceptual thinking. Through extensive psychological testing, Ring finds that abductees and those who have near-death experiences are emotionally indistinguishable, with childhoods that typically involve episodes of abuse, trauma, and serious illness. One consequence is the development of a dissociative state as a means of coping with stress; it is the key to experiencing the imaginal realm, a shamanic journey through which symbolic language and images are expressed. (lark III 886; https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kenneth-ring/the-omega-project/