1880 March 26 — Night. The train depot operator and a few friends are walking at Galisteo, New Mexico, when they hear loud voices and laughter coming from a “large balloon” shaped like a fish approaching from the west. A flower is dropped from the car of the balloon to which is
attached a slip of silk-like paper on which Chinese characters are written. The next morning, searchers find a cup of peculiar workmanship, but both artifacts are purchased by a “wealthy young Chinaman” and a “collector of curiosities” who visits town on March 28, although this part of the tale seems facetious and racist. The yarn is typical of sensational newspaper hoaxes that have no basis in reality.

https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/ce3/1880-03-26-usa-lamy.htm

1950 March 26 — Vice-Admiral Louis Mountbatten, in a letter to his friend Charles Eade, editor of the London Sunday Dispatch, rejects the idea that flying saucers are secret weapons, admitting that “they do not come from our Earth…. Maybe it is the Shackletons or Scotts of Venus or Mars who are making their first exploration of our Earth.”

1974 March 26 — 2:00 a.m. Truck driver Maximiliano Iglesias sees a strange object like a plate placed above another large, round object hovering above the highway in Valdehijaderos, Salamanca, Spain, 650 feet away. Another object is 60 feet away. Two beings come out of the first UFO, point to the truck, then go in again. Both objects fly away. At 11:30 p.m., the same witness watches three silver ships parked on the highway with a floodlight. He stops his engine as some figures approach. He runs and they follow. They are about 6.5 feet tall, with arms and legs, but he cannot see their faces. On March 27, the Guardia Civil investigate and find a hole in the ground.

1976 March 26 — The CIA responds to the Ground Saucer Watch FOIA request, claiming that its only involvement with UFOs was with the 1953 Robertson Panel.

1982 March 26 — Leading investigators from UFO-Norge hold a town meeting in Ålen, Norway, near Hessdalen. Of the 130 residents who attend, 17 say they have seen a yellow spherical light, 12 a cigar-shaped object, and 6 an oblong object with one red and two yellow lights. Later in the week, two officers from Værnes Air Station in Trondheim interview some witnesses and conclude that Hessdalen residents have been seeing these lights since 1944 and their accounts
are credible.

1997 March 26 — 3:30 p.m. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office takes a 911 call from a man later identified as Richard Ford, reporting a group suicide in a house in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Two deputies find 39 bodies of identically dressed, androgynous-looking men and women. Autopsies establish that each had drunk a lethal combination of vodka and barbiturates then smothered themselves with a plastic bag. Videotaped statements left behind explain that the suicides, members of a religious millenarian cult called Heaven’s Gate, were leaving their “earthly vehicles” behind and expect to board a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp. It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles.

2014 March 26 — 4:30 p.m. An F/A-18E Super Hornet from Strike Fighter Squadron 106 (VFA-106, the “Gladiators”), flying out of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, detects a possible radar track at around 19,000 feet and with a speed of 0.1 Mach in the W-72 warning area. The pilot’s wingman does not have the object on radar and there is a debate about whether it might be a false track given high winds, gusting at over 100 knots at 18,000 feet. “The unknown aircraft appeared to be small in size, approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in color,” according to the report. The pilot is only able to pass within 1,000 feet of it and cannot identify it. After that pass, they lose sight of it and never regain visual contact. “I feel itmay only be a matter of time before one of our F/A-18 aircraft has a mid-air collision with an unidentified UAS [unmanned aerial system],” the head of VFA-106 comments. The report also says that “FACSFAC VACAPES has received multiple UAS sightings in the recent months,” but does not say how many of those sightings resulted in sending in hazard reports.
(https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-detailed-ufo-incident-reports-from-n
avy-pilots-flying-off-the-east-coast)

1897 March 27 — 8:30 p.m. A blood-red light appears in the western sky over Topeka, Kansas, moving northward parallel with the horizon until after 20 minutes it disappears “with a flicker.” Among the witnesses is Kansas Gov. John W. Leedy, who describes it as a “very strange light.” Harold T. Chase, editor of the Topeka Capitol, is on the StateHouse steps with Leedy and says the object is a large, oblong shape.

1950 March 27 — 10:30 a.m. USAF antiaircraft radar operator Cpl. Bolfango tracks a stationary target on radar over the Motobu Peninsula, Okinawa, Japan, at 18 miles range for 10 minutes at 13,000 feet. The object then moves on a 220° heading for 16.9 miles in 2 minutes (about 500 mph) to a point over a mountain, where it is lost.

1950 March 27 — Radio broadcaster Henry J. Taylor, on his syndicated radio program Your Land and Mine, announces the “wonderful news” that saucers are in fact US secret weapons, which will reassure the nation when the US Air Force confirms it. Within days, the story is twisted to specifically credit the Navy’s alleged “top secret” project the Flying Flapjack Vought XF5U. The story is is apparently disinformation planted by ex-Hollywood writers in the CIA Office of Policy Coordination’s Political and Psychological Warfare staff headed by Joseph Bryan III, a future president and board chairman of NICAP.

1967 March 27 — Day. The crew of a Brazilian Air Force C-47 and the crew of a Serviços Aéreos Cruzeiro do Sul photo-mapping aircraft see a UFO in the vicinity of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The BAF crew describes it as a “reddish-colored full moon” that is flying in circles. They report the sighting to the tower at Salgado Filho International Airport, which asks the mapping aircraft to identify the object. The Cruzeiro plane follows the UFO for 15 minutes before it disappears.

1974 March 27 — Antoine, Jerri, and Terry Betz investigate a small brush fire near their residence on Fort George Island, Florida, and come across a metal sphere the size of a bowling ball and weighing 22 pounds. They think the sphere could be a 16th-century cannonball and decide to take it home. Several days later, while Terry is playing the guitar, the sphere seems to react to the music and makes a throbbing noise. Later, the sphere rolls and stops on its own and changes direction. The sphere makes a noise when hit with a hammer, and Terry finds that it moves after being shaken and placed on the ground. In 2012, an analysis by Skeptoid indicates that the sphere is a ball check valve produced by the Bell & Howell company. Its size, weight, and metallurgical composition match those of the company’s check valves. The ball is almost perfectly balanced, and it takes only a small stimulus to make it move or change direction. New Mexico artist James Durling-Jones, who collects scrap metal for his sculptures, remembers loading ball check valves into the rooftop luggage rack of his Volkswagen van and driving through the Jacksonville area around Easter of 1971. A few of the balls rolled off the luggage rack and were not retrieved. Skeptoid concludes that this is the sphere’s origin. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz_mystery_sphere ; https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4334

1978 March 27 — Astronaut Gordon Cooper appears on the Merv Griffin Show and discusses UFO stories from government insiders. Merv Griffin asks him about occupant reports, and Cooper thinks they are credible. From what he has heard (although he has never been briefed on the matter), the aliens look no different from ordinary humans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/04/07/cooper-ufo-stories-from-credible-sources/8607ee62-1f41-4c66-b6c2-3ee9e848c6bc/

1949 March 28 — James Forrestal leaves office in a formal ceremony. He rides back to the Pentagon with his opponent Stuart Symington, who talks to him about something troubling. Forrestal appears traumatized. Forrestal sits in his office, dazed and incoherent, repeating, “You are a loyal fellow.”

1950 March 28 — In response to a request from J. Edgar Hoover to his aide D. Milton (“Mickey”) Ladd on “just what are the facts re ‘flying saucers,’ agent S. Wesley Reynolds interviews Maj. Boggs and Lieut. Col. John V. Hearn Jr. of Air Force Intelligence, who tell him that most UFOs are misidentifications and weather balloons. http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1950-Jan-Mar.pdf

1954 March 28 — Following the success of Flying Saucers Have Landed, George Adamski gives a talk to the Detroit Flying Saucer Club at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, which draws 4,700 people. https://www.the-adamski-case.nl/his-life/mount-palomar/

1966 March 28 — Gerald Ford writes to George P. Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee, and L. Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, saying he is dissatisfied with Hynek’s explanation of the Michigan sightings. He “strongly recommends” a House committee investigation into the “UFO phenomena.” https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0054/4525586.pdf

1967 March 28 — A second briefing for Robert Low by NORAD analysts effectively diverts researcher attention away from NORAD’s 500 defence radars and onto its useless handful of space defence satellite-tracking radars and cameras (referred to as “spacetrack” and are the least likely to detect UFOs). Low tries to find out if NORAD can help with identifying satellites that might be misreported as UFOs and whether NORAD can’t track a UFO entering the atmosphere from outer space (or just aren’t), but the analysts are evasive. NORAD says its satellite-tracking radars (with non-ballistic manoeuvring and erratic flight paths) can “see” UFOs, but no one will ever know because the data that does not fit satellite or ballistic trajectories are thrown out automatically by system computers. No mention is made of NORAD’s high priority for not ignoring unpredictable, UFO-like manoeuvrable cruise missiles or hypersonic space planes. This discussion is distributed as a briefing paper to all Colorado project members on June 6, including Condon.

1970 March 28 — 11:00 p.m. About 30 UFO spotters gathered on Cradle Hill, just outside Warminster, Wiltshire, UK, see a flashing purple light. One of their sensors buzzes, indicating a strong magnetic field, and one observer (Norman Foxwell) takes photos that appear on the cover of the July/August 1970 Flying Saucer Review. But the UFO is actually a light beam from a high-intensity purple spot-lamp operated by a group of UFO debunkers, among them physicist David I. Simpson. Foxwell himself is part of the group (having pre-exposed a spurious UFO image), as is the individual who operated the bogus magnetic-field sensor.

1962 March 29–30 — George Adamski claims to attend a Twelve Counsellors Meeting on Saturn that addresses the threat of nuclear war on Earth. In the report that he publishes in June, Adamski writes that the “present explosions of atomic energy are going in the wrong direction, and if these experiments do not stop, the only results will be a lost civilisation. This is even affecting their planets.” Ridiculed by many, some of Adamski’s descriptions in the report about his trip clearly show this was a deeply spiritual experience for him, which may have unbalanced him for some time. http://www.biblioteca-ga.info/50/toon/412/28

1966 March 29 — 4:15 p.m. A 10-year-old boy and his Dalmatian are walking familiar paths in a wood lot behind their home near Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. He notices something silver on a ridge and walks toward it. He sees an “L” shaped box, long side parallel to the ground, sitting on tripod legs. His dog runs ahead and sniffs the boxy structure, and then, appearing uninterested, the dog goes off into the woods. The boy stops about 24 feet away, not sure what he is seeing. The object makes intermittent sounds and movements in the following minutes. Then a blast of air from the object sends debris flying. A short high-pitched, then low-pitched, sound is heard as the object lifts off the ground about one foot, stops, swings in a clockwise motion, and settles back on the ground. Intermittent electric-like humming sounds are heard until the object again, with a blast of air stirring up debris and the same sounds as earlier, ascends vertically, this time to about 10 feet, where it pauses, moves horizontally, pauses and rotates clockwise again, then accelerates straight up. On the final ascent, the sound increases in pitch and loudness. The witness’s mother and sister who were at some distance from him also hear the sound. When the object moved horizontally, saplings directly under it swayed. Three elongated imprints are found in the form of a triangle. Reportedly plants do not grow in the area for the next 2 years.

1989 March 29 — Bob and Tracy Lazar, Gene Huff, John Lear, and Jim Tagliani drive to Tikaboo Mountain to observe another flight test. They videotape a moving light.

2020 March 29 — Night. A commercial Boeing 767 airliner is flying from Mexico City to Houston, Texas. At an approximate position somewhere west of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico, the plane is flying north at 37,000 feet at 575 mph when the first officer, looking across to the left side of the cockpit, sees a yellowish-white light descend into view from above. He first thinks that it is a meteor and begins to say so when it suddenly stops at nearly the same altitude as the aircraft. The UFO then projects an illuminating beam of bright white light on the aircraft and appears to take a collision heading. The captain takes a defensive attitude and prepares for evasive measures, but the beam of light illuminating the aircraft ceases, and the UFO suddenly accelerates to the same speed and heading of the aircraft, maintains separation, and begins pacing. The captain estimates that the UFO maintains a distance of 1,000–2,000 feet, near the minimum allowable separation of 1,000 feet. The copilot describes the UFO as a “brilliant yellow white plasma object, teardrop shaped.” There are no navigation lights or other features associated with airplanes, and the light seems to have a tail. During the following 30 minutes, the crew observes and takes 8 photographs and four video segments of the UFO, one of which is 4:47. The video documents that the Airborne Collision Avoidance System SSR radar does not detect anything while the crew is actively observing the object. As the aircraft and its attendant UFO approaches the Mexico/US border, the light begins to flicker, changes colors from yellow-white to pinkish-purple, and turns on a perpendicular heading away from the aircraft and parallel to the border without crossing into the US. https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20

1966 March 30 — 8:35 p.m. A woman and her four children watch an oval object crossing the road as they are driving south about 9 miles north of Lewisburg, Indiana. It comes close to the car and she hears a pulsating sound, but it seems to come through the car radio, not directly from the object. She drives away, but the UFO pursues her for 8 miles. It changes from reddish-orange to blue-white before it accelerates away.

1974 March 30 — 9:30 p.m. Motorists are blinded by a bright yellow-green object on or near the ground along a road near Ombreiro, Lugo, Spain. Car engines fail, headlights go out. After 3–4 minutes, the UFO rises silently and moves away horizontally. It makes a soft buzzing or whistling sound.

1981 March 30 — 10:00 p.m. A huge bright light hovers over trees for 10 minutes in Alton, Illinois. The UFO moves towards two witnesses at about 10 mph. Frogs stop croaking and dogs begin barking excitedly. The object appears oval and is black except for lights on the circumference. A large circular opening is visible in the bottom of the black disc. Inside the opening the witnesses see “this churning motion of bright white light with yellow and orange colors in it…like gases rolling around in there.” After about 20–30 minutes it takes off rapidly. Shortly thereafter a jet flies over. Another UFO is seen coming across the trees a good 5 minutes later with the same results.

1982 March 30 — 11:15 p.m. Nanette Morrison is driving home in Charlottesville, Virginia, when she spots a large, brilliant light in the sky hovering several hundred feet in the air and a quarter mile away. It approaches as she makes a turn and flies right over her car, later pacing her as she drives the remaining 15 blocks. She pulls up to the curb, and the UFO stops and hovers above a house across the street less than 400 feet away. The object reverses direction and moves away as she runs up to her house.

1990 March 30–31 — 11:00 p.m. The Glons (Belgium) Control Reporting Center receives reports that three unusual lights are moving toward Thorembais-Gembloux, Belgium, constantly changing colour, in the shape of an equilateral triangle. It requests the Wavre gendarmerie to send a patrol car to investigate. Ten minutes later, a second formation moves toward the first. Traffic Center Control at Semmerzake tracks one object only on its radar, and an order to scramble two F-16 fighters from Beauvechain Air Base is given. Throughout this time, in reports after the event, some people claim that the phenomenon is visible from the ground, describing the whole formation as maintaining relative positions while moving slowly across the sky. Over the next hour, the two scrambled F-16s attempt 9 separate interceptions. On three occasions, they manage to obtain a radar lock for a few seconds, but these are later shown to be radar-locks on each other. The pilots never see any of the claimed visual sightings or the claimed manoeuvers, and they never get a lock on any objects apart from the other F-16. The other contacts are all the result of a well-known atmospheric interference called Bragg scattering. After 12:30 a.m., radar contact becomes much more sporadic and the final confirmed lock takes place at 12:40 a.m. Following several further unconfirmed contacts, the F-16s eventually return to base shortly after 1:00 a.m. Members of the Wavre gendarmerie sent to confirm the original report describe four lights as arranged in a square formation, all making short jerky movements, before gradually losing their luminosity and disappearing in four separate directions at around 1:30 a.m. They also hear a low engine noise and that it seems to have a stick coming out one end with a turbine on it, which many claim shows it was a helicopter.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave ; https://vdocuments.mx/mufon-ufo-journal-1990-8-august.html ; https://vdocuments.mx/mufon-ufo-journal-1991-1-january.html ; https://web.archive.org/web/20120128025219/http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite3_4.pdf ; https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/belrap01.htm ; https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/belrap02.htm

2000 March 30 — US District Court Judge Stephen M. McNamee dismisses the CAUS lawsuit seeking documents on the Phoenix Lights, concluding thet “a reasonable search was conducted” by the Department of Defense, even though no information was found.

1949 March 31 — Forrestal is flown to Hobe Beach, Florida, to stay with his friend Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett, where his wife is vacationing. He meets with psychiatrist William C. Menninger (who diagnoses “severe depression” of the type “seen in operational fatigue during the war”) and psychologist Capt. George N. Raines from the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland. Forrestal has several hysterical episodes when they are there, ranting about Communists following him, and perhaps one suicide attempt.

1952 March 31 — Battelle begins its UFO study (referred to as P-47S and nicknamed Little Stork) under the supervision of William T. Reid, folding it into Project Stork, an initiative to examine the Soviet Union’s technological warfare capabilities. Almost all the UFO analysis involves compiling IBM punch cards based on data forwarded by Project Blue Book files.

1952 March 31 — ATIC Chief Frank Dunn writes to Gen. Garland requesting that Project Blue Book be entirely declassified in order to make it easier to encourage civilian pilots to send in reports. That is a bit too much openness for Garland, who compromises by reclassifying certain case investigations as “Restricted,” a relatively low level.

1952 March 31 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #5. (https://www.slideshare.net/alexpituba/projects-grudge-and-bluebook-reports-1-12-nicap )

1976 March 31 — During a campaign stop in Appleton, Wisconsin, Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter is asked by Thomas Heiman, associate director of the UFO Education Centre, whether he would make public all the UFO files if he became president. Carter answers, “Yes, I would make these kinds of data available to the public, as President, to help resolve the mystery about it.”

1991 March 31 — For two nights in a row a couple in Palmarejo, Puerto Rico, hears their two Dobermans howling as if frightened, apparently upset by a peculiar sound like a phonograph record played at the wrong speed. It seems to move around the house, but the sound source cannot be located. Suddenly one of the dogs shrieks, and the husband runs outside to find two strange beings on his patio. They are 3–4 feet tall, gray, with big heads, big black eyes, and a slit for a mouth. The beings flee. The female Doberman is unharmed, but the male is found killed, with empty eye sockets and internal organs missing.

1993 March 31 — 1:10–1:15 a.m. Dozens of people across Devon, Cornwall, South Wales, Shropshire, UK, and central Ireland see triangular UFOs speeding across the sky. An MoD police patrol sees the lights from RAF Cosford in Shropshire. The UFO passes over the base “at great velocity … at an altitude of approximately 1,000 feet.” It looks like two white lights with a faint red glow at the rear, with no engine noise. The RAF police report also contains details on other civilian UFO sightings that they had learned about in the course of making enquiries with other military bases, civil airports, and local police. The police call ahead to alert the meteorological officer at nearby RAF Shawbury that the UFO is coming his way. The officer at Shawbury sees the object moving slowly across the countryside toward the base at a speed of no more than 30–40 mph. He sees the UFO fire a narrow beam of light (like a laser) at the ground and watches the light sweeping backwards and forwards across the field beyond the perimeter fence, as if it ia looking for something. He hears and feels the vibrations from an unpleasant low-frequency humming sound coming from the craft. He estimates its size as midway between a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and a Boeing 747. The light beam retracts in an unnatural way, then the object accelerates to the horizon many times faster than a military aircraft. Ministry of Defence UFO Officer Nick Pope says there are multiple sightings at different times that cannot be attributed to the re-entry, concluding on April 16 that “It seems that an unidentified object of unknown origin was operating in the UK Air Defence Region without being detected on radar; this would appear to be of considerable defence significance, and I recommend that we investigate further, within MoD or with the US authorities.” However, Jenny Randles suspects that the sightings are caused by the Soviet Tsyklon rocket booster 22586U, which launched the Kosmos 2238 radio satellite into orbit the previous day. Pope later comes around to that viewpoint after hearing about sightings at the same time in Ireland and France.