1943 April 1 — Los Alamos Laboratory is established in New Mexico and begins operations.

1950 April 1 — Project Twinkle officially begins.

1959 April 1 — An Air Force C-118 plane with four on board crashes between Sumner and Orting, Washington, about an hour after taking off from McChord AFB [now Joint Base Lewis-McChord] in Tacoma. Their last radio message indicates that they hit something or that something hit them. Bob Gribble and other UFO investigators find witnesses who claim to have seen two orange or yellow objects closing in on the plane. Best guess is that the plane hit a tree and the UFO observations are unrelated. (http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1959-Apr-Jun.pdf

April 1 — The UK Air Ministry, Admiralty, and War Office are consolidated into a new Ministry of Defence. The Air Ministry becomes the Air Force Department, within which is a secretariat called S4 (Air) that deals with, among other things, UFO reports from the public. Another office, Defense Secretariat 8, is created under the authority of the Secretary of State and also has authority over UFO reporting.

1972 April 1 — 11:00 p.m. Two students are driving between Cacuso and Lucala, Angola, when suddenly their vehicle’s engine and lights fail. They check the batteries and fuses, which are all normal. Then they see two bright lights. Shortly afterward, they hear a whistling noise coming from an object about 130 feet away. It is about 130 feet across, partly lit up, and has three legs hanging from it. It rise to a height of 40 feet, where it hovers briefly, retracts its legs, whistles again, and turns on edge as it moves away. As soon as it leaves, the vehicle’s lights come back on and the engine returns to normal.

1975 April 1 — The Federal Aviation Administration approves cooperation with the Center for UFO Studies, authorizing air traffic controllers and other personnel to report UFO sightings as their workload permits.

1998 April 1 British UFO investigator Rick Bishop published “Memoirs of a M.O.D tea boy.” In it he related a case he classified as “Devons Roswell”. Allegedly one of the strangest cases involving a crashed UFOs, occurred in 1958 near the village of Modbury, South Devon. Many people believe this to be one of many hoaxes started around this time. The story first appeared on 2nd April 1958, and claimed that a strange airship had appeared over the village of Modbury. The craft then apparently crashed into a barn and exploded. Some of the material recovered had strange hieroglyphic symbols on it. Also amongst the wreckage was that of an ‘alien’ life-form which apparently survived until confronted by local farmer Whitner “Peg-Leg” Bissel who ran the alien through with his pitch-fork. The village folk buried the unfortunate alien in the local cemetery. The only statement at the time Farmer Bissel would give was “Them critters did something to my bum.” Several UFO researchers have tried to uncover some supportive documentation with varying degrees of success. A few witnesses were still around when the incident was investigated around 1976 – 1987 and some of these gave evidence stating that the story was essentially true

1897 April 2 — Evening. People in Wesley, Iowa, view a cone-shaped object with windows in the side through which light is visible. It is traveling slowly toward the northwest.

1949 April 2 — Menninger and Raines fly James Forrestal to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, where he can be treated quietly. On the drive to the hospital from the airport, Forrestal attempts to jump out of the car but is restrained. Forrestal declares he does not expect to leave the hospital alive. He is admitted under the care of Raines, who diagnoses him with involutional melancholia and places him in a VIP suite on the 16th floor. Forrestal’s personal diaries are removed from his old office and taken to the White House, where they remain for a year.

1952 April 2 — On the eve of the release of the bombshell Life magazine article, Ruppelt and his boss, ATIC Technical Analysis Division Chief Col. Sanford H. Kirkland Jr., give an extraordinary briefing, technically unclassified but in fact quasi-classified, to a group of aerospace engineers and saucer buffs organised as Civilian Saucer Investigation of Los Angeles. These include aeronautical consultant Felix W. A. Knoll, technical writer Ed J. Sullivan, and North American Aviation project engineer Walther A. Riedel. The briefing takes place at the Mayfair Hotel in Los Angeles, along with national media reporters and the Life magazine reporters who give them advance copies of the Darrach/Ginna article in exchange.

April 2 — 2:02 p.m. James Kibel, a Melbourne businessman who is a member of the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society, sees a shiny, hemispherical object above his garden in Balwyn, Victoria. It looks to be 20–25 feet in diameter and 120 feet in the air. “It seemed to float down towards me,” he says. “It resembled a big mushroom with a stalk pointing towards the earth.” He snaps a Polaroid photo, after which the object takes off and disappears to the north. However, when B. Roy Frieden, professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona, examines the photo, he finds a jagged line of discontinuity running across the centre of the image suggesting there are separate photos joined together and rephotographed. In 2017, Canadian researcher François Beaulieu reexamines the original and noticed the reflection of the house below in the shiny object, and he finds that the discontinuity is actually caused by the Polaroid developing chemicals spreading unevenly across the photo. https://www.project1947.com/kbcat/fbbalwyn.htm

1999 April 2 — Two Chilean national police officers see a UFO hovering above Mount Balmaceda in Puerto Natales, Tierra del Fuego. They see red, green, and yellow lights on the object, which performs several side-to-side displacements as it hovers near the summit.

1945 April 3–4 — US B-29 bombers over Honshu, Japan, encounter numerous balls of light tagging along with them.

1949 April 3 — Broadcaster Walter Winchell announces on his radio program that the “flying saucers, never explained by anyone in authority are now definitely known to have been guided missiles shot all the way from Russia.” https://www.saturdaynightuforia.com/html/articles/articlehtml/anatomyofahoax-part2.html

1952 April 3 — The Air Force publicly announces that it has not stopped investigating and evaluating UFO reports.

1976 April 3 — 4:30 a.m. Several residents of Quixadá, Ceará, Brazil, during an outdoor physical education session, see a large disc-shaped object that glides silently a few feet from the ground emitting an intense light. At about the same time in another part of the city, Luis Barroso Fernandes is preparing to travel to a site a few kilometres away on his donkey cart. He soon hears a buzzing sound, and a flying object 10 feet in diameter positions itself above him. It slowly descends in front of his cart about 100 feet away. The device emits a beam of light that strikes the donkey and Barroso, who immediately become paralyzed. A door opens on the UFO and two small beings emerge. One holds something like a flashlight and aims a beam that strikes Barroso in the face, causing him to lose consciousness. He wakes up in a different spot, dizzy and suffering from a burning sensation on his face, and a headache. The left side of his body is reddish, and he has difficulty getting into his cart and getting it moving. He asks his wife to take him to Dr Antônio Moreira Magalhães, who prescribes a tranquilizer. He continues to feel sick, his eyes burn continuously, and the left side of his body is red. A few days later, his hair turns gray and he suffers memory lapses. After his symptoms worsen and other doctors fail to help, his family checks him into a psychiatric hospital in Fortaleza. His condition deteriorates, and he dies in April 1993. http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2012/04/brazil-barroso-case-1976.html 

1982 April 3 — 3:00 a.m. A woman schoolteacher in Bolingbrook, Illinois, is awakened by a high-pitched sound “like a blender running in a box.” She looks outside and sees a bright blue, domed, disc-shaped object land next to some power lines. It lifts off and then lands a second time. The UFO has blue lights around the rim and is only about 150 feet away. The blue lights illuminate the area as bright as day. A streetlight goes out. The police receive calls of power outages and blue flashes at the same time.

1897 April 4 — 12:15 a.m. Dairy farmer Dick Butler is returning to his farm in Wolf Creek Township, Iowa, after delivering milk in Sioux City when he notices an electric-like light on his right about 200 feet away in a cornfield. He can see a dark object with light coming through its windows. It appears to be a “long, narrow car, resembling a corset box in shape,” some 30–35 feet long and 6–7 feet high. Above the car floats a cigar-shaped bag about the same length and 8–10 feet thick. When his horses see the object, they bolt and tumble his wagon into the ditch. By the time Butler recovers, the object is moving briskly in a descent to the south. He watches it as it moves out of sight.

1954 April 4 — Keyhoe meets with Ruppelt at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and shares recent UFO reports. Ruppelt agrees to write a letter supporting the claim that Keyhoe has used genuine ATIC reports for his book.

1954April 4–5 — Contactee George Van Tassel holds the first Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention at Giant Rock, a huge boulder in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California. Speakers include Orfeo Angelucci, Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry, and George Hunt Williamson. It draws a crowd variously estimated at 2,500–6,000.

1957 April 4 — Five unusual radar contacts are detected simultaneously on three tracking radars of the Bombing Trials Unit based at RAF West Freugh [now MOD West Freugh], southeast of Stranraer, Scotland, and followed for 36 minutes. The three radars are located at two different sites near Luce Bay, Wigtownshire, Scotland. The object flashes across the sky at 60,000 feet, dives to 14,000 feet, circles, and speeds away. Wing Commander Walter Whitworth, in command at West Freugh, is ordered to say nothing about the object. http://www.martinshough.com/aerialphenomena/westfreugh.pdf

1967 April 4 — The Federal Aviation Agency issues N 7230.29, requiring air traffic controllers to forward UFO reports to the Colorado project. http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-f.htm

1990 April 4 — Patrick Maréchal, a young worker at Petit-Rechain, Belgium, takes a photo of a delta-shaped object on which three lights are visible at each corner. Maréchal admits the photo is a hoax in an interview for RTL on July 26, 2011. He and some friends take a sheet of styrofoam, cut it into a triangle, paint it black, embed a flashlight in each corner, then hang it from a string. Maréchal shows reporters many trial photos they had taken trying to get the perfect look. (IUR 34, no. 1 (Sept. 2011): 6; MUFON UFO Journal, August 1992; Kean 29–31; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave#Hoax_photograph ; https://web.archive.org/web/20110723211034/http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Ramillies.pdf

1935 April 5 — Dusk. A farmer named Mora sees a large, round, brilliant object descend and hover just above the ground near his property in Aznalcázar, Seville, Spain. Several small beings appear and stroll around it. https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/ce3/1935-04-05-spain-aznalcazar.htm

1948 April 5 — Afternoon. At Holloman AFB, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, three highly trained balloon observers (Joseph Olson, Johnson, and Chance) are working on a secret project for the Air Force’s Watson Laboratories. They see two objects. One observer follows one object, and the others follow the second as they diverge. All are certain that the objects aren’t balloons. They are large, whitish, roundish, very high, faster than any aircraft, and perform rapid, erratic motions. One object is lost at a low altitude. The other goes up quickly and seems to just disappear. The observation lasts about 30 seconds. The case is deemed important enough to send Loedding and one of Clingerman’s assistants, Lt. Col. James C. Beam (the head of Project Sign), to New Mexico to interview Project Mogul scientist James W. Peoples and the other witnesses. Unfortunately, they are gone when Sign arrives. (They are later interviewed at the USAF Watson Laboratory complex in Red Bank, New Jersey.) The witnesses are very sure of themselves and the case is classed as “Unidentified.” While at Holloman, Loedding and Beam talk with Lt. Herbert G. Markley, who has worked with the Watson team. Markley remembers one of them speaking of unusual radar returns from their equipment, but later the Watson personnel say that these were probably just “angels” (spurious echoes due to atmospheric microstructures, insects, equipment malfunction, or other stimuli). Markley does report that UFOs are seen around Holloman

1955 April 5 — 9:55–10:15 a.m. Three or four fireballs fall in various places in southern New Mexico. Air Force Sgt. Camilla Saenz is stationed on Sacramento Peak near Cloudcroft when she sees a yellow fireball with a red tail traveling fast from east to west on the south side of the peak. An airplane from Biggs Air Force Base [now Biggs Army Airfield] in El Paso, Texas, sees an apparent meteor strike near Weed, New Mexico, but USAF planes comb the area for 2 hours afterward without finding anything. Bill Watson sees a dark object smash into the earth near Oil Center, New Mexico, but he can find no fragments. Lincoln LaPaz reports that heavy shortwave and TV interference accompany the appearance of the fireballs.

1966 April 5 — The House Armed Services Committee conducts the first and only public hearing by the US Congress on the topic of UFOs. Air Force Secretary Harold Brown testifies that while USAF has done an excellent job on UFOs, perhaps there is room for “even stronger emphasis on the scientific aspects.” Hynek recommends that a “civilian panel of physical and social scientists … examine the UFO problem critically for the express purpose of determining whether a major problem exits.” Quintanilla is the only other witness. After Committee Chairman L. Mendel Rivers expresses some enthusiasm for the idea, Brown suddenly realizes that maybe he has found a way to get the Air Force out of UFO investigations. Shortly after the hearing, Brown tells the USAF Office of Scientific Research to accept the February 3 O’Brien recommendation to seek a university that will accept a
contract to study the 600 officially unidentified UFO sightings. https://ia600402.us.archive.org/1/items/UfoHearing19662/ufo_hearing1966%201.pdf

1989 April 5 — Robert Lazar, Tracy Lazar, her sister, Gene Huff, and John Lear make a third trip to view a flight

1990 April 5 — 8:15 p.m. A motorist driving near the shore at Gulf Breeze, Florida, sees what looks like a jet fighter about to crash. Two military jets approach from the north, and the original object immediately shoots laterally southward, halting 1–2 miles away. The man gets out of his car to watch. The object appears to be a white disc with red and green lights spaced evenly around the side and an unlit dome on top. Slowly, it begins to rise. He calls a friend and the sheriff’s office. Two deputies arrive on the scene, and for the next 2 hours all three witnesses watch a bright light continue to ascend slowly.

1665 April 8 — 6:00 p.m. Numerous wonders are seen in the sky over Stralsund, Germany, including ships, large flocks of birds, fire, and smoke, as well as a dark “round flat form like a plate and like a big man’s hat” that hovers above St. Nicholas Church for one hour. Witnesses include several fishermen who later complain of tremors in their hands and feet. (Eine abgebildete Beschreibung von dem wunderbarlichen Stralsundischen Lufft-Kriege und Schiff-streite.)

1913 April 8 — 8:23 p.m. An airship reappears over Cardiff, Wales, once again seen traveling at high speed to the southwest by Chief Constable Lionel Lindsay. https://airminded.org/2013/04/09/wednesday-9-april-1913/ 

1954 April 8 — 4:30–5:00 p.m. Lelah H. Stoker of 3121 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago, Illinois, sees a brilliant white round-topped disc, parachute-shaped, with a humanoid suspended beneath it, skim back and forth over the water of Lake Michigan. Stoker calls the Coast Guard. A cutter appears after 10 minutes, then the UFO approaches the shore. Stoker sees a short human-like occupant in a green, tight, one-piece suit suspended below the object. It gets out in undergrowth along the shore then walks around. When the cutter gives up searching, the occupant returns to the object which moves back over the lake then takes off at high speed to the east.

1956 April 8 — At 10:15 p.m., Capt. Raymond E. Ryan, First Officer William Neff, flight attendant Phyllis Reynolds, and many passengers take off on American Airlines Flight 715 from Albany, New York, heading north then nearly due west at 260 mph and 6,000 feet north of Schenectady, when a brilliant white light about 2–3 miles away is spotted about 90° to the left appearing like an airliner heading in to land at Albany. The white light moves about 90° to dead ahead position about 8–10 miles away at high speed, estimated at about 800–1,000 mph, where it changes color to orange and seems to block the airliner’s path or risk collision. It disappears briefly and reappears as an orange light again but standing still ahead of the airliner to the west. The Convair airliner contacts Griffiss AFB [now Griffiss International Airport], Rome, New York, where controllers ask Ryan to turn his lights off and on to help identify aircraft. He is told the airliner is seen and the orange UFO are to the south. The airliner is ordered to maintain course to follow the UFO to the west, skipping its scheduled landing at Syracuse after nearly 30 minutes of following the object. The promised fighter jet interception is never seen. The object disappears at high speed to the northwest towards Oswego, New York.

1960 April 8 — Project Ozma, set up only a few days earlier by Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, seems to hit paydirt. As he slews his antenna off Tau Ceti and onto Epsilon Eridani, Drake is greeted with a strong, periodic, pulsed signal on 1420 MHz, the hyperfine transition emission line of interstellar hydrogen atoms proposed for SETI by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, and still favoured as a promising hailing frequency for interstellar communications. Drake is ready with a second, low-gain antenna. The pulses are there as well, sadly disproving their extra-terrestrial origin. But they are not exactly terrestrial interference, either. The rate at which the phantom signal traverses the sky suggests that it is emanating from an aircraft cruising at unprecedented altitude—perhaps 80,000 feet. At the time, no known aircraft can reach the stratosphere. Such an aircraft, as it happens, doesn’t “come into existence” until the following month, when Francis Gary Powers is shot down over the Soviet Union. (Drake wisely decides to withhold publication of this positive result, so he never does receive proper credit for “discovering” the U-2.) The project only lasts through July. https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/early-seti-project-ozma-arecibo-message

1967 April 8 — Four college students on a double date in Banner Elk, North Carolina, notice a greenish fluorescent glow on the ground 180 feet away. Their car engine fails and the radio is flooded with static. An object passes near the car and disappears into the distance. The witnesses panic then push the car to a main road where they are able to restart it. They find three round imprints, about 6 inches in diameter and 2 inches deep, in the shape of an equilateral triangle.

1982 April 8 — 11:50 p.m. Angie Parrotta and Nancy Hanson, both 18, are driving south on County Road 533 west of Escanaba, Michigan. They notice a bright star to the southwest, which soon becomes two huge yellowish-white “headlights” attached to an object. It descends and moves toward them. They speed up but the object keeps pacing them on their right. They become frightened when they see a blinking red light on the craft. They watch the UFO move swiftly toward Escanaba in the east and quickly lose sight of it.

1897 April 9 — 8:30 p.m. Hundreds of people in Chicago, Evanston, Niles Centre, and Schermerville, Illinois, see an airship earing multi-coloured lights and swinging a huge white searchlight from side to side. Nearly 800 witnesses on Davis Street in Evanston watch the object, estimated to be 400 feet in length. Using binoculars, the outline of a structure can be seen behind the powerful light. By 9:30 p.m., the airship is last seen over South Chicago. Northwestern University astronomer George W. Hough, director of the Dearborn Observatory, tells the newspapers he is sure the airship is the star Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse).

1948 April 9 — Viola Johnson of Longview, Washington, and another witness see three “flying men” circling the town. She says they are “dressed in khaki-colored flying suits with helmets over their faces.”

1949 April 9 — James Forrestal has been treated for one week with narcosis through sodium amytal. For the next 30 days, he undergoes a regimen of insulin sub-shock combined with psycho-therapeutic interviews. Raines says the treatment occasionally throws Forrestal into a confused state with a great deal of agitation and confusion.

1960 April 9 — The U-2 spyplane piloted by Francis Gary Powers crosses into the Soviet Union from Pakistan and flies over the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan; the Dolon Air Base in Semey, Kazakhstan; a SAM test site near Saryshagan, Kazakhstan; and the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakhstan. The plane is detected by Soviet Air Defence Forces but avoids intercepts by a MiG-19 and a Su-9. Powers lands at an Iranian airstrip at Zahedan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident) A 1994 CIA monograph by Gerald K. Haines, “The CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” claims that “According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the Oxcart (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.”

1973 April 9 — Physicist Peter A. Sturrock mails questionnaires to all 1,175 members of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics asking their opinions on the UFO phenomenon. He receives 423 responses from scientists who have seen things they thought could be UFOs. http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc592.htm

1979 April 9 — Two Apache tribal officers on patrol near Dulce, New Mexico, see a round, silent craft hovering 50 feet above the ground, with a searchlight aimed downward on cattle below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation#Government_or_military_experimentation

1983 April 9 — Linda Moulton Howe flies to Albuquerque to interview Sgt. Richard Doty for an HBO series she is working on, UFOs: The ET Factor, but Doty does not show. She calls Jerry Miller, chief of reality weapons testing at Kirtland AFB, whom she knows from an earlier conversation about Paul Bennewitz’s claims. Miller drives her to his home and calls Doty, who arrives promptly. Doty’s attitude is defiant and nervous, but Howe asks him about the alleged 1971 Holloman AFB landing. Doty says Robert Emenegger got the date wrong and that it was actually April 25, 1964, shortly after the Socorro landing. Transferring to his office at Kirtland, Doty is reluctant to talk about the 1977 Ellsworth landing. He shows her a bogus, undated document, A Briefing Paper for the President of the United States on the Subject of Unidentified Flying Vehicles. The document lists UFO crash/retrievals and states that UFOs are piloted by extra-terrestrials from a nearby solar system and have been on earth for many thousands of years. Through genetic manipulation, they have influenced the course of human evolution and helped shape our religious beliefs. Roswell and the 1949 living alien are mentioned, as well as Projects Snowbird (retro engineering a crashed UFO), Aquarius (umbrella project involving all ET contacts), Sigma (an ongoing electronic communications effort with aliens), and the defunct Garnet (investigation of ETs on human evolution). Doty promises Howe thousands of feet of film of crashed discs, bodies, EBE-1, and the Holloman landing for her documentary. He says that a similar release of data through Emenegger and Allan Sandler was halted because “political conditions were not right.” When she tells her HBO contacts about this, they ask her to secure a letter of intent from the US government with a legally binding commitment to secure the promised film footage. HBO wants the film, but Doty now stalls. In June, Doty tells her he is officially off the project. Further contacts up to March 1984 are fewer. In 2008, Doty claims that the intelligence community targeted Howe to find out who her inside sources were

1897 April 10 — Evening. Witnesses in Marshfield, Wisconsin, see a cone-shaped airship with a bright headlight moving south of town.

April 10 — 10:00 p.m. A noise draws residents of Platte City, Missouri, outside where they can see a hovering object 100 feet long and 20 feet wide. Two immense wings on either side are moving up and down. Greenish light beams shine down on Main Street from its back and front. Suddenly there is a hissing sound and explosions and the object moves away to the northeast.

April 10 — 10:30 p.m. Policemen, firemen, and many other residents of Jacksonville, Illinois, see a bright light moving swiftly from east to west a few hundred feet in the air. The light sways from side to side and throws out beams several hundred feet in length. When it is above the city, the object the light is attached to can be seen as metallic and long with possible wings. Some witnesses can hear voices. The object reverses direction over Jacksonville, throwing its searchlight in all directions, and disappears to the east.

April 10 — 11:00 p.m. A bright white light with red and green lights on either side of it is observed by many residents of Quincy, Illinois, flying low above the Mississippi River on the city’s west side. At one point it is no more than 400–500 feet above the ground. The light is attached to a metallic cigar-shaped object. Two wings extend from the sides and on top is some kind of superstructure. Witnesses estimate its length to be 50–100 feet. The object ascends, moves east, then south, then west, hovers above South Park for a few minutes, then moves north and stops again. It reverses direction and leaves toward the south at “tremendous speed.”

1958 April 10 — A Danish fighter pilot reports seeing a formation of UFOs. They are also tracked on radar at Skrydstrup Airport in Vojens. The pilot attempts to overtake them, but they accelerate and disappear. The commander of Fighter Wing Skrydstrup appeals to the public to report any UFOs. (http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1958-Mar-Apr.pdf

1967 April 10–11 — A bright white object circles one Minuteman launch site near Malmstrom AFB, Great Falls, Montana, for prolonged periods. It eventually ascends to an altitude higher than the capabilities of Air Force interceptors. The local radio station is told to keep quiet about it.

1983 April 10 — 8:30 p.m. Two drivers near Ross, Ohio, see a large, bright, oval object that seems to land. The property owner at the location also sees a white light on a hillside behind his home and watches the object ascend slowly before moving away at speed. The drivers’ car lights flicker, and the engines nearly stall. The landowner reports flickering houselights and TV problems. Investigation of the landing site indicates that a heavy circular object about 50 feet in diameter has landed, producing a 3-foot burn mark in the center.

1990 April 14 — At least seven people report a red light to the north of Gulf Breeze, Florida. It approaches from the east at high speed and comes to a dead stop. It hovers, moves back and forth several times, then ascends out of sight. Other red lights appear and are seen in various locations around Pensacola by other groups of people. Some of these sightings are undoubtedly hoax balloons. MUFON UFO Journal, June 1990; August 1990, p. 21–22; https://vdocuments.mx/mufon-ufo-journal-1990-8-august.html 

1997 April 10 — Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, vice director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meets in a Pentagon conference room with former astronaut Edgar Mitchell and UFO Disclosure founder Steven M. Greer to discuss the rogue nature of certain “special access programs” connected to the study of alien technology that are dominated by private contractors. Others allegedly there are retired Cmdr. Will Miller, Adm. Mike Crawford, Gen. Patrick Hughes, Shari Adamiak (Greer’s assistant), and Stephen Lovekin. Greer claims he has extracted a pledge from Wilson during the meeting to investigate SAPs involving UFO technology. But Wilson soon reports that he doesn’t have the proper security clearance to inspect those files. As Greer informs a Portland, Oregon, audience in 2001, Wilson says, “‘I am horrified that this is true. I have been in plenty of black projects, but when we tried to get into this one,’ he was told, and I quote, ‘Sir, you do not have a need to know.’ The head of intelligence Joint Staffs. You don’t have a need to know. Neither did the CIA director, and neither did the president.” In a July 4, 2008, appearance on Larry King Live, Mitchell tells the audience he had learned the admiral “had found the people responsible for the cover-up and for the people who were in the know and were told, I’m sorry, admiral, you do not have need to know here and so, goodbye.” Shortly afterward, Wilson admits meeting with Mitchell but denies he was ever refused access. http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc788.htm ; http://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis1 ; http://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis2&nbsp

1897 April 11 — 12:30 a.m. John Peterson, E. K. Rowley, George Moody, Bayard Taylor French, and other residents of Hawarden, Iowa, see a conical object about 60 feet long with four sets of 15-foot wings. It is flying so low (about 600 feet) that they can hear machinery, voices, and laughter. Two red lights are positioned on the tail end and a large searchlight is in the front. After three minutes it moves off to the north.

April 11 — 5:30 a.m. An alleged photo of an airship is taken at 4356 East Ravenswood Park in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois, by an ex-policeman named Walter R. McCann and George A. Overrocker, who provide copies to several newspapers. The Chicago Tribune photo editor pronounces it a fake because it looks like it is taken by a Kodak with a small lens that cannot achieve a panoramic view. A later report claims that McCann has photographed a piece of canvas on which an airship is painted. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mystery_airship_1897.jpg

April 11 — 12:15 p.m. Gary Carlton Jr. watches a flat object looking like a “big piece of yellow canvas” pass over Bloomington, Illinois, at a high altitude toward the northeast.

April 11 — 7:45 p.m. John Lee and others in Benton Harbor, Michigan, watch an airship rapidly moving north-northwest for 15 minutes. With the naked eye it looks like a huge ball of fire, but through opera glasses it resembles a cluster of soft yellow lights.

April 11 — 8:00 p.m. R. G. Adams and his parents at 3126 Fourth Avenue South in Minneapolis, Minnesota, watch a lighted, cigar-shaped object flying low towards the southwest. Through binoculars it appears to be 18–20 feet long. A square light that changes from white to green to red, depending apparently on its speed, is on top. Hundreds of other people also see the object over the next four hours, maneuvering above Lake Minnetonka and eventually receding into the northeast.

April 11 — 9:00 p.m. An airship approaches Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the northeast over Lake Michigan and heads toward the southwest. It stops and hovers 1,000 feet above City Hall for 15 minutes.

April 11 — After 10:30 p.m. Stuart Mackroth is riding a bicycle just east of Minnetonka Mills, Minnesota, when a flying machine “shaped like an ordinary boat” passes overhead. It has red and green lights on each side and a powerful electric light in front. Inside he can see men, women, and children, all moving about “as if very busy.”

April 11 — 11:15 p.m. A bank clerk in Decatur, Illinois, sees an object “like two monster cigars with three bright headlights” moving to the north. (Decatur (Ill.) Evening Republican, April 12, 1897, p. 8)

1951 April 11 — Air Defense Command issues a memo on “Unconventional Aircraft” to all USAF facilities, encouraging them to report sightings in a timely manner. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1951.pdf, p. 25

1954 April 11 — Ruppelt’s letter to Keyhoe states that the request to clear classified UFO reports came from both AF Intelligence and the Office of Public Information, after which his superiors cleared them; Keyhoe has correctly quoted the ATIC material; the Utah film analysis is classified; a 1953 letter from Al Chop to Henry Holt & Co. attacking the “silence group” is quoted accurately; and except in a very few cases, ATIC rejects Donald Menzel’s explanations of halos, sundogs, and mirages for UFOs.

1978 April 11 — The crew of the HMAS Adroit, operating out of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, in the Timor Sea, watches a UFO hover and sink to the horizon several times before disappearing. It is large and bathed in bright red lights. At one point it seems to be close to the ship and at another point it flickers on and off.

1980 April 11 — 7:15 a.m. Personnel at the La Joya Air Base [part of the Mariano Melgar Airport], Arequipa, Peru, see a strange object flying in the vicinity. The base commander orders a Sukhoi Su-22 fighter-bomber to destroy the target, assumed to be a Chilean balloon. Lt. Oscar Santa María Huertas commands the scrambled aircraft. As soon as the object is in his sights some 1,800 feet above the ground, he fires 64 rounds from his 30mm guns at it. The bullets seem to hit the object without causing any damage. The UFO then hurls skyward at tremendous speed. Huertas follows, putting the Sukhoi into Mach 1.2. As he approaches, the object makes a sudden stop and the Sukhoi flies past it at 36,000 feet. Further maneuvering takes place, and Huertas finds the object chasing him at one point at 62,000 feet. He abandons the mission 52 miles away from the base. After he lands 22 minutes later, the object reappears at the base and remains visible nearly 2 hours. A Department of Defense information release gives an erroneous date of May 9, 1980. http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2016/11/peru-la-joya-afb-perfect-ufo-case-1980.html

1990 April 11 — Evening. Several residents of Gulf Breeze, Florida, watch a red light move toward the southwest and out into the Gulf of Mexico before winking out. Some think they can see clusters of balloons associated with the light, but others disagree.

1897 April 12 — Morning. F. L. Bullard, engineer on the Fast Mail train on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, says he caught sight of an airship moving parallel with the train shortly after his Engine 950 left downtown Chicago. The train is moving at 70 mph, and by the time it reaches Lisle, Illinois, the object is far ahead. Bullard estimates it is moving at 100–150 mph.

1897 April 12 — 8:00 p.m. During a rainstorm in Lincoln, Illinois, more than 50 people stand on Pulaski Street to watch a light moving to the northeast. John Fitzgerald sees a V-shaped object with a bright searchlight moving rapidly toward Lincoln. It changes course, the light changes from white to green, and the object disappears behind clouds.

1953 April 12 — 4:10 p.m. Ten round, flat, metallic objects changing formation are observed traveling at a high rate of speed at an estimated altitude of 7,500 feet over Sweetwater, Nevada. No trail, sound, or exhaust are noted. The objects pass under the right nacelle of the observers’ C-47 aircraft, which is en-route to Stead AFB [now Reno Stead Airport]. The co-pilot takes control of the aircraft and turns to the right in a tight 300° turn for a better view. The objects are then picked up unassisted by two more members of the crew. The objects are seen in a right turn of a greater radius than that of the C-47 and at a lower altitude. They are observed for approximately 120° of their turn and disappear on a heading of 300°. Observers are unable to estimate the speed of the objects because of the distance and the large turn radius.

1961 April 12 — Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to go into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completes an orbit of the earth.

1969 April 12 — During a Fouga Magister aircraft training mission at Pori Airport, Finland, a Finnish Defence Forces flight controller tells pilot-in-training Tarmo Tukeva to investigate seven air balloons that are floating at approximately 5,000–9,800 feet above the airport. Tukeva reports that the objects are ball or disc-shaped but cannot determine how far away they are. Tukeva sees the objects accelerate away from him “at great speed.” Indeterminate radar images are also later reported 125 miles away in Vaasa. A second pilot-in-training, Jouko Kuronen, overhears the radio communications between the flight controller and Tukeva and sees the UFOs as well. According to the Finnish Armed Forces magazine Ruotuväki, the reports are similar to other cases occurring over bodies of water during ongoing military exercises and may have been due to “transnational spy planes or aircraft.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Air_Force_sighting ; https://www.ufocasebook.com/2013/finland1969.html

1979 April 12 — Early evening. A family is driving home from the grocery store at Brockton, Massachusetts. They see a piano-shaped object with lights all over it. A spotlight is beaming down, and there is one red light on top. They lose sight of the object, but suddenly all four car windows go down and back up; then they go down halfway and back up. The same thing happens when they stop at a red light. They see the object again, which is now following them. They park near their house, and the UFO hovers across the street. The man shuts off the engine and the windows act up again as the UFO moves directly overhead. The father and son get out of the car, and the UFO shoots a beam down at each of them in turn. It then moves down the street and away.

1988 April 12 — Coral Lorenzen, founder of APRO, dies in Tucson, Arizona. CUFOS had been attempting to purchase the APRO archives, but is thwarted by someone who convinces Coral’s son, Larry Lorenzen, that this is a bad move and that the APRO board should reconsider. He wants the archive to stay in Arizona. Tina Choate and Brian Myers, with their dubious International Center for UFO Research, convince the APRO board that they are the most logical recipients. In 1989, the board gives them the archives free of charge. Former APRO board member Robert Dean later realizes Choate and Myers are scam artists. They immediately bar anyone from using the files and move them to a garage at an undisclosed location in Scottsdale or Sedona, Arizona. It is not known if the paper archives still exist, although fortunately APRO case files prior to 1957 have been preserved digitally. In 2010–2012, Choate and Myers are involved in a fraudulent scheme to acquire and illegally sell a valuable collection of fossils. http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/ufologia/Lorenzen,Coral,Obituary%201987,J.A.Harder,FSR88V33N3.pdf ; http://ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1145.htm ; https://www.courthousenews.com/collector-sues-over-25m-in-fossils/ 

1990 April 12–13 — Night. Two witnesses see a bright red light hovering above Little Sabine Island off Pensacola Beach, Florida. It stays there for several minutes before blinking out. It reappears the next night to the west of Gulf Breeze

1897 April 13 — Before sunrise. Augustus Rodgers, a farmer living two miles south of Louisville, Kentucky, goes outside to attend to his livestock. He sees an oblong object, some 40 feet long by 15 feet tall, flying about 400 feet in the air at 100 mph. His wife comes out to watch it with him, and they both see “a form like that of a man” standing in the front and directing its course.

1897 April 13 — Night. Mayor Charles Merritt Seely and other people in Canton, South Dakota, watch a winged airship passing to the north over the town with a red light in front and a green light in back.

1897 April 13 — 11:15 p.m. Frederick Chamberlain and O. L. Jones are riding one mile west of Lake Elmo, Minnesota, when they notice a figure in a clearing, walking around as if he is looking for something. They turn off the road to investigate and hear a cracking sound followed by a rushing noise. A moment later they notice a gray-white object that looks like the top of a covered wagon. It has two rows of four red or green lights. The object rises quickly at a sharp angle to clear the treetops. They can make out no machinery or wings or rudders or even an outline of the object. In the mud, Chamberlain finds 14 footprints, each 2 feet long, 6 inches wide, “arranged seven on each side, and in an oblong pattern.” Adam Thielen, a nearby farmer, independently sees a dark object with red and green lights flying overhead about the same time.

1917 April 13 — Early morning. Two National Guardsmen from Company L of the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry are stationed on the bridge linking Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine, when they hear the noise of an airplane. They see an unidentified aircraft circling near the bridge. When it descends, apparently to make a pass at the bridge, one of the guardsmen panics and fires his rifle at it. It moves off and disappears in the distance. Other vague reports continue through April 30.1992

April 13 — Gen. Alfredo Chamorro Chapinal signs a proposal for full UFO document disclosure to the Spanish Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. Ramón Fernández Sequieros.

1897 April 14 — Early morning. Marble merchant David W. Paul is traveling with a party of workmen from Burlington to Frankfort, Indiana. When they are at the middle fork of Wildcat Creek, they hear a “swishing, roaring sound” and see an object with a blinding white searchlight and smaller green and yellow lights. The object is cigar-shaped with wings or fins. It descends to just above the treetops, hovers there for a moment, then rises and noisily shoots off to the southwest. 

1897 April 14 — 4:30 a.m. Farmers see an airship land about 3 miles northwest of Howard City, Michigan, and some go to investigate. Inside the craft is a “strange man” dressed in heavy furs although he seems “to have no use for them, as he was almost naked and seemed to be suffering from the heat.” The man is 9.5 feet tall and speaks in a musical language that, however, sounds like bellowing. One farmer gets too close, and the giant kicks him severely enough to break his hip. 

1897 April 14 — 3:00 p.m. An airship looking like an “immense bird” approaches Gas City, Indiana, from the northwest. As it draws nearer, witnesses see that it is cigar-shaped and “propelled by broad canvas wings.” The object lands briefly one mile from town, terrifying some farm animals. As a crowd rushes toward it, it takes off and vanishes to the east. 

1897 April 14 — 3:00 p.m. A brownish cigar-shaped object with wings passes south of Marion, Indiana, coming from the northwest. Six passengers can be seen on board. 

1897 April 14 — 7:30 p.m. An airship 100 feet long and 20 feet high in the center lands in a meadow three-quarters of a mile west of Birmingham, Iowa. A large crowd of men and boys sets out to examine the object, but when they are within several hundred feet, it rises with a loud whirring sound and moves away to the northwest. Two men can be distinctly seen inside, one carrying a lantern that he waves as the airship 

1897 April 14 — 8:00 p.m. James McKensie is feeding hogs on his farm north of Casstown, Ohio, when he hears an odd noise like a flock of geese passing overhead. Looking up, he sees an object with wings and a rudder flying slowly along about 150 feet in the air, and he distinctly hears music. As it disappears, he thinks he hears a human voice, and something large and white is thrown overboard. 

1897 April 14 — Just after 9:00 p.m. Farmhand John Halley and vintner Adolf Wenke see an airship land on Jefferson Street three miles west of Springfield, Illinois. They supposedly converse with one of its occupants, a bearded scientist who is outside the craft. Inside, they can see another man and a woman. The scientist says little other than “as soon as Congress recognizes Cuban belligerency his air ship would be heard from.” 

1897 April 14 — Night. Many persons in Mount Vernon, Illinois, including Mayor Barton C. Wells, allegedly see an object “resembling the body of a huge man swimming through the air with an electric light on his back.” 

1897  April 14 — Night. A man in Denton, Texas, is watching the stars with binoculars when he notices a shadow crossing the Moon. It is caused by a large cigar-shaped object with wings moving slowly to the southeast. In the front it has a powerful searchlight, and along the side appear a row of lighted windows. It remains in sight for 20 minutes. A woman also sees possibly the same object “bounding along through space like a balloon.” 

1897 April 14 — Night. The Rio Grande Railroad operator at Cresson, Texas, sees an object about 60 feet long and “resembling the top of a passenger coach in shape” with a powerful searchlight in the front and several smaller lights on the sides. It is moving to the southwest at a “terrific rate of speed” and has wings “something like that of a bat.” It turns to the southeast after passing the station and disappears in the clouds after a few minutes. 

1953 April 14 — 9:23–11:50 p.m. A Navy P2V Neptune spy plane on an electronic intelligence (ELINT/ferret) mission over the Sea of Japan (about 200 miles southeast of Vladivostok, Russia) is paced and attacked by 10 agile and highly maneuverable UFOs. The encounter takes place with only 400 feet of distance between the aircraft and the sea. The objects make more than “70 aggressive non-firing passes” in “high-speed runs,” many just a few hundred feet directly underneath the Navy aircraft for just over an hour. The UFOs transmit Morse Code light signals (the letter “D”), an unprecedented occurrence in UFO history. The objects are tracked on radar and by the Navy’s ELINT systems (which pick up and analyze radar beams emitted from the objects) for almost two and a half hours.

1954 April 14 — Night. Capt. John M. Schidel of United Air Lines Flight 193 is forced to make a sharp climbing turn in order to avoid colliding with an unknown object over Long Beach, California. One passenger (Coles Barber) is thrown to the floor and suffers a knee fracture, and stewardess Naomi J. Penaat breaks an ankle. The object is only in sight for 2 seconds.

1990 April 14 — At least seven people report a red light to the north of Gulf Breeze, Florida. It approaches from the east at high speed and comes to a dead stop. It hovers, moves back and forth several times, then ascends out of sight. Other red lights appear and are seen in various locations around Pensacola by other groups of people. Some of these sightings are undoubtedly hoax balloons. (MUFON UFO Journal, June 1990; August 1990, p. 21–22; https://vdocuments.mx/mufon-ufo-journal-1990-8-august.html )

1897 April 15 — Late evening. Telegraph repairman Patrick C. Byrnes is operating a railroad handcar about 7 miles west of Cisco, Texas, when he sees a light a little distance from the track on the south side. Knowing there is no farmhouse in the area, he goes to investigate. It is a landed cigar-shaped airship about 200 feet long and 50 feet across at its widest point. Several men are repairing its searchlight, and they tell him that the craft is loaded with several tons of dynamite for bombing Spanish troops and ships in Cuba.

1897 April 15 — Night. An airship with red, green, and white lights lands on a farm near Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Five witnesses see an odd-looking man in a fur coat emerge and walk to a farmhouse belonging to Melvin Bannister, whose dogs are barking fiercely. The stranger points a lantern-like device at them and sends them running. Bannister answers the door and converses awkwardly with the man, who is speaking an odd language, but loans him a hammer,some nails, and a can of skim milk. The man returns the tools, along with a strange coin. The airship takes off with a whizzing sound.

1897 April 15 — 8:15 p.m. Willie Mahon, ex-Marshal French, and other residents of Dunkirk, Ohio, watch a winged object “as large as a wagon bed” pass over the town toward the east. It has propellers on each end, a red light in front, and a greenish-yellow light on the tail. Voices can be heard coming from the object.

1897 April 15 — 9:00 p.m. Residents of Farmersville, Texas, notice a dim light traveling toward the city from the south at 60–80 mph. Thinking it might be a meteor heading toward the Earth, more people gather outside to watch. City Marshal Brown is in the western part of town making his rounds, and the “ship or balloon” passes overhead about 200 feet in the air. Brown can see two men in the object and something like a large Newfoundland dog. He can hear them talking but cannot understand what they are saying.

1897 April 15 — Between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. A cigar-shaped airship with a row of red lights along the sides passes above Emerson, South Dakota.

1947 April 15 — The US Naval Attaché in Stockholm issues a secret intelligence report, “Sweden: Guided Missiles, Alleged Rockets over Sweden.” Both the naval and military attachés agree that there is nothing to the ghost rocket
episode. No foreign missiles have overflown or landed in Sweden, according to the evidence available. “Swedish officials prefer to dismiss it as an unexplained press sensation.” http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1947-Jan-Jun-23-SN.pdf

1974 April 15 — Passengers on a ferry on the Strait of Gibraltar between Ceuta and Algeciras, Spain, see a round, intense torch-like light rise out of the water near a huge rock, travel at low altitude, then fall into the water again. This happens once

1974 April 15 — A photojournalist takes four photos of a round object over A Coruña, Galicia, Spain.

1974 April 15 — 4:30 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. George Torres observe a flat, round object moving to the north over the low hills in back of their home in Tijeras Canyon, New Mexico. It is in the apparent area of the Monzano Nuclear Weapons Storage facility attached to Kirtland AFB. The object changes course to the east at an altitude of 2,000 feet and appears to be 50–75 feet in diameter. It is rotating silently on a central axis. The object turns abruptly to the south, passes behind a small mountain peak, turns east again, and vanishes over the Manzano Mountains. http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/APRO%20Bulletin/APRO%20Bulletin%20-%201974%2009%2000%20-%20September-October.pdf

1984 April 15 — 12:00 midnight. Some 20 witnesses (farm workers, a police officer, venture scouts) at Llangernyw, North Wales, see a pink-orange ball that drifts to the ground and explodes in a shower of purple sparks. Out of the shower emerges a white disc that appears to land out of sight behind a ridge. A large army helicopter and two military trucks apparently perform a search of the area beginning at daylight.

1989 April 15 — 5:30 p.m. A father and his 16-year-old son watch from their front lawn in Novato, California, a slowly descending object shaped like “two spheres connected by together like a stem.” They are golden with a white halo around them. Through binoculars, they can see four smaller objects, golden discs, maneuvering near the original dumbbell-shaped UFO. The father notes a “strange absence of kids and dogs at the time.”

2004 April 15 — Ademar José Gevaerd’s Brazilian Ufologists Commission launches a campaign called “Freedom of Information Now!” with the goal of convincing the Brazilian government to publicly release official information on the Varginha case, the Official Night of the UFOs, and the Trindade Island photos.

1897 April 16 — 12:03 a.m. An airship and a smaller “trailer which followed it very closely” are seen by residents of Danvers, Illinois. The objects are made of aluminum-like material, and its “occupants were dressed in western style.”

1897 April 16 — 12:30 a.m. A group of people returning home from a lodge meeting in Bay City, Michigan, notice a large conical object approaching from the south and slowly descending to about 50 feet altitude above Center Avenue. A red light appears at either end of a body that is apparently 50–75 feet long. It shines with a dull red glow, as if there are lights on its upper side. The object moves away to the northeast.

1897 April 16 — Morning. A large object passes slowly over Linn Grove, Iowa, heading north. Five men—James Evans, F. G. Ellis, Ben Buland, David Evans, and Joe Croskey—jump into a rig and follow it 4 miles north of town where it has landed. But when the pursuers get within 2,100 feet of the airship, it spreads out four massive wings and ascends again. The two occupants have extremely long beards and make desperate efforts to conceal themselves. They toss two enormous boulders “of unknown composition” out of the airship.

1897 April 16 — While wandering in the hills east of Springfield, Missouri, W. H. Hopkins, a traveling insurance agent, spots a landed airship in a clearing. Next to it is a nude female with hair down to her waist. As she picks flowers, she speaks in an unknown language with a musical voice and fans herself as if the day is hot. In the shade cast by the craft lies a naked man with shoulder-length hair and a long beard. After a few minutes, Hopkins approaches the woman, who shrieks and runs toward the man. Hopkins speaks soothingly and the two aeronauts relax. Hopkins asks where they come from, and they point upward, pronouncing a word that sounds like “Mars.” The two examine Hopkins’s clothing, hair, and watch with great curiosity. They show him the interior of the ship but take off shortly afterward, “laughing and waving their hands.” (St. Louis (Mo.) Post-Dispatch, April 17, 1897, p. 1)

April 16 — 8:00 p.m. Howard R. Bolander, superintendent of the Ohio Bicycle Works in Marion, Ohio, is looking at the night sky when he sees the light from a cigar-shaped object moving to the southwest. Its light looks like an incandescent lamp.

1897 April 16 — Night. Judge John Spencer Bounds is riding in a buggy in Hillsboro, Texas, when his horse whirls around in fright. A brilliant light as if from an arc lamp shines on him for less than a minute and then moves over to a nearby field. The light suddenly ascends to an altitude of 1,000 feet. As he watches, the searchlight blinks out and smaller lights surrounding a dark object become visible. The object moves slowly to the south and disappears.

1897 April 16 — 12:00 midnight. C. G. Williams is walking across a field two miles south of Greenville, Texas, when he comes across a brilliant light and a large, cigar-shaped object resting on the ground. Three aeronauts emerge from it; two go to work on the ship, and the third approaches Williams and asks him to mail some letters. The man tells him that the airship runs on electricity and that his invention was perfected in a small town in New York State.

1974 April 16 — 12:50 a.m. Mauro Bellingeri, 26, and his wife Carla Farè, 23, are returning to their villa in Santa Maria del Tempio, Alessandrino, Italy, when they notice a bright object that dives abruptly toward them, stopping at a height of 40 feet above the villa. The Bellingeris get out of the car to look at the motionless object. It has a transparent dome and a central ring of revolving red, green, and yellow lights. Inside the dome are three human-like beings with large, round, opaque, greyish helmets. At the base of the headgear is a hose-like apparatus. One being turns in their direction, then moves back. All three beings then rotate in unison. At this point, 3–4 jets of flame appear beneath the craft, the central portion begins to revolve rapidly, and they hear a whistling sound and feel a blast of air. The UFO speeds away, continuing to whistle.

1897 April 17 — 1:30 a.m. R. E. Draughon, a night watchman at a lumber plant in Beaumont, Texas, sees a “globular” object with a bright light the size of a star in one end. It is moving to the northwest at a high altitude.

1897 April 17 — 6:00 a.m. An airship is said to collide with the tower of Judge James Spencer Proctor’s windmill in Aurora, Texas, causing it to explode and strew debris over several acres. The pilot (reportedly “not of this world,” or a “Martian” according to an alleged Army Signal Service officer named Thomas Jefferson Weems from nearby Fort Worth), does not survive the crash and is buried “with Christian rites” at the Aurora Cemetery. Wreckage from the crash site is either dumped into a nearby well located under the damaged windmill or ends up with the alien in the grave. Adding to the mystery is the story of Brawley Oates, who purchases Judge Proctor’s property around 1935. Oates cleans out the debris from the well in order to use it as a water source, but later develops an extremely severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, which he claims is the result of contaminated water from the wreckage dumped into the well. As a result, Oates seals up the well with a concrete slab and places an outbuilding on the spot in 1945. The entire yarn is widely regarded as a hoax, although Proctor’s windmill apparently did exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora,_Texas,_UFO_incident

1897 April 17 — 8:30 p.m. A large white light attached to a cigar-shaped object passes over Trenton, Tennessee, at an altitude of about 1,500 feet. It has a red light on the left side and a green light on the right. The object remains in sight for 5 minutes then disappears to the east.

1897 April 17 — 9:00 p.m. George Alverson, Alex Oxford, and Charley Hunter are walking on Manchester Street near the Cincinnati Southern Railway trestle bridge in Lexington, Kentucky. An airship lands and settles in a vacant lot about 600 feet away. They hurry forward but are stopped by a man who has just emerged from the machine. He is carrying a bucket, which he fills with water from a nearby spring. He declines to answer any of their questions, reenters the airship, and flies away to the southeast.

1945 April 17 — Maj. Gen. James P. Hodges writes a memorandum to Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, saying that infrared devices are now available to take photographs of “balls of fire” in the Pacific. http://www.project1947.com/fig/1945a.htm

April 17 — 11:00 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. James L. Hendry see a “beautiful light” in the eastern sky from their house in Fisherville, Kentucky. It glows and recedes in brilliance as it approaches, casting a light downward. After 10 minutes, it goes out like a snuffed candle.

1950 April 17 — Newsweek publishes an article, “Flying Saucers Again,” on crashed saucers.

1950 April 17 — More than 15 people report seeing a UFO for 20 minutes at 2,000 feet on the eastern horizon at Los Alamos, New Mexico. One scientist watches the object through a telescope and says it looks flat, circular, metallic, and roughly 9 feet in diameter. It moves faster than any conventional aircraft. http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1950-Apr-July.pdf 

1952 April 17 — 12:58 a.m. Four high-altitude contrails heading east-southeast toward Alaska are seen by NORAD defense observers at Nunivak Island, Alaska.

1952 April 17 — 5:10 a.m. Radar at Caswell Air Force Station [now closed] in Limestone, Maine, tracks five unknown targets headed southwest into the US. Three are later identified as off-course civilian airliners, while two remain unidentified. A nationwide Air Defense Readiness Alert is declared at 5:11 a.m. SAC is notified to prepare launch of nuclear missiles. The alert is canceled at 7:40 a.m.

1952 April 17 — 12:05 p.m. Air Force T/S Orville Lawson, Rudy Toncer (sheet metal shop foreman), and sheet metal shop workers R. K. Van Houtin, Edward Gregory, and Charles Ruliffson at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, see 18 circular objects flying an easterly course that carry them over or very close to the Nevada Test Site. They watch the objects for about 30 seconds.

1952 April 17 — Dewey Fournet Jr. responds to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun who has asked about details of the Blue Book investigation with a two-and-a-half-page memo, vagued up a bit, but essentially saying that “nothing detrimental to our national security has materialized from these incidents.”

1959 April 17 — George Adamski meets with Sisir Kumar Maitra, head of the Department of Philosophy and dean of the Faculty of Arts of Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi during a stopover in Kolkata, India. https://www.the-adamski-case.nl/his-mission/global-reach/world-tour/

1966 April 17 — 5:00 a.m. Portage County (Ohio) Deputy Sheriff Dale F. Spaur and Deputy Wilbur Neff are 4 miles east of Randolph, Ohio, when they see a moving light through some trees at the top of a small hill along the road. The light is headed in their direction. They have heard of a UFO reported over police radio that night and figure this must be what was seen. The object hovers 50–100 feet in the air, bathing the two officers in a bright light. Spaur’s eyes water up. They rush to the cruiser and radio the station; the dispatcher says to wait there until a car with a camera arrives. The object makes some sharp maneuvers, and Spaur drives toward it cautiously. The UFO is 18–24 feet thick and about 35–45 feet in diameter. The object is so bright he hardly needs his headlights to drive. It speeds up whenever Spaur accelerates, and soon he is driving at 80 mph. As the UFO reaches Mahoning County, the pursuit is being broadcast over police radios in three counties. As they reach East Palestine, Ohio, Patrolman H. Wayne Huston sees the UFO and follows Spaur and Neff, at times reaching 100 mph. Just before 5:30 a.m., two police officers in Salem, Ohio, see the UFO as a “bright ball” much larger than a jet. They also see three jets following it, apparently Air Force Reserve planes from Youngstown, Ohio. Police officer Frank Panzarella in Conway, Pennsylvania, sees the UFO, very bright and in the “shape of a half of a football.” He hears on his radio that a jet interception is in progress. Now in Pennsylvania, Spaur and Neff are given orders to abandon the chase. For most of the event, the object has remained at 1,000 feet, but now it rises to 3,500 feet and hovers. Then it shoots even higher and disappears. In 30 minutes, many police and civilians have seen the UFO. Panzarella alerts the Rochester, Pennsylvania, police operator, John Beighey, and asks him to contact the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. Beighey calls Panzarella and says the Air Force wants to talk to the police witnesses. Spaur, Neff, and Huston go to the Rochester, Pennsylvania, police station and Spaur phones the USAF station at Pittsburgh. Spaur speaks to some colonel who tries to convince him he has seen something conventional. NICAP’s William B. Weitzel, a philosophy professor, begins his own investigation, tracking down witnesses. Within a few weeks, he or his NICAP associates have interviewed all the police officers, as well as several others who have figured in the UFO chase, either as dispatchers or as those who overheard the radio communications. NICAP members also interview some civilians who claim to have seen a UFO at the same time of the chase and/or had monitored police scanners.

1977 April 17–23 — An International Congress on the UFO Phenomenon is held in Acapulco, Mexico, organized by Mexico City businessman Guillermo Bravo. Speakers include J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée, John A. Keel, William Spaulding, Walt Andrus, and Dennis Hauck. Prime Minister Eric Gairy makes a strong plea for a United Nations program to investigate UFOs.

1897 April 18 — 8:30 p.m. W. E. Roe, captain of the Ohio River packet T. M. Barnsdall, as well as watchman Elmer Hardy and engineer Litus Kinnard, sees a light high in the air above the river as the riverboat is lying at Sistersville, West Virginia. It seems to be moving to the northwest but at other times it retraces its course. Around 12:00 midnight it disappears over a hill to the west.

1897 April 18 — 9:30 p.m. An object with lights on both ends is seen southeast of Lyons, Nebraska, traveling to the northwest. Some young observers estimate it is moving at 4–6 mph. When the object is south of Bancroft it makes 2–3 large circles and then moves to the southwest.

1954 April 18 — Colin McCarthy and two other men are driving an Austin sedan in the Australian outback near the border of Western Australia and South Australia when a UFO begins pacing them. They snap some 200 photos and take some ciné film of the object. Shortly after they report the incident, a helicopter suddenly appears and lands in front of their car. An RAAF officer gets out, walks over to their car, and confiscates the photos and film. They are never returned. (
http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/ufologia/FSR%201983%20V%2029%20N%201.pdf

1954 April 18 — Airline pilot William B. Nash writes to his friend Capt. William Joseph Hull about the emphatic denials of UFO reality issued by the Air Force shortly after his March 23 speech. He reveals that in August 1952 he was participating in a TV panel in New York City when someone in the WJZ-TV studio said he had just gotten back from Washington, D.C., where he has been given the “whole story” about the National Airport sightings. He claims the Air Force had operated a radio found in a retrieved saucer and that had caused the flurry of sightings. Nash also admits hearing rumors, especially one from syndicated aviation columnist Robert S. Allen, about a pro-UFO report that USAF was going to release in the fall of 1952 but never did.

1959 April 18–May 14 — Adamski arrives in London and appears on the TV show In Town Tonight on April 18 and on the BBC program Panorama on April 20 where he debates with astronomer Patrick Moore, a show that is seen by 9 million viewers. He gives further lectures in Tunbridge Wells, Weston-super-Mare, Bournemouth, at Caxton Hall
in London (on April 28), Birmingham University (April 29), Manchester (May 1), and several more around the British Isles. https://www.the-adamski-case.nl/his-mission/global-reach/world-tour/

1961 April 18 — 11:00 a.m. Joe Simonton hears a whining sound on his farm four miles from Eagle River, Wisconsin, and sees an object, 30 feet in diameter and 12 feet high, with exhaust pipes around the periphery, land nearby. A door opens and a man appears, about 5 feet tall and wearing a black, turtle-neck pullover with a white band at the belt, and black trousers with a vertical white band along the side. Two other figures are visible inside. The creature is holding a metallic jug and making gestures suggesting he wants a drink. Simonton takes the jug into his basement, fills it with water, and returns it to the man. Simonton notices one man frying on a flameless grill and motions for some food. Simonton receives three ordinary pancakes or cookies, 3 inches in diameter, perforated with small holes. The object takes off. http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1961-Jan-Jun.pdf

1962 April 18 — Evening. A red, glowing object is first seen at a great height over Oneida, New York, heading west silently. There are reports from Kansas and Colorado. NORAD radar picks up the object; ADC alerts several bases, including Nellis AFB near Las Vegas. Fighters are scrambled from Luke AFB near Phoenix and the jets are possibly heard over Nephi, Utah, after the object passes overhead. Capt. Herman Gordon Shields, flying a C-119 two miles west of Levan, Utah, sees it as a slender object. A man in Silver City, Utah, claims that the object is a glowing ball of light about the size of a soccer ball. He says it is white with a yellowish tint and a bright yellow jagged flame coming from the rear: “As the object passed over Robinson [in Ogden, Utah?], it slowed down in [the] air, and after, [a] gasping sound was heard, the object spurted ahead again. After this procedure was repeated three or four times, the object arched over and began descending to earth after which the object turned bluish color and then burned out or went dark. After the object began to slow down it began to wobble or fishtail in its path.” Several people see the object over Eureka, Utah, apparently crashing and interrupting electrical service from a power plant close to the landing site. It is described as a “glowing, orange oval which emitted a low, whirring sound.” It takes off a few minutes later, continuing to the west. The object lights up the streets of Reno, Nevada, and then turns to Las Vegas. It blares brightly like a “tremendous, flaming sword” over Nellis AFB and then disappears from their radar scopes at 10,000 feet. Witnesses say the object is traveling almost horizontally northeast of Las Vegas until a final explosion occurs from the direction of Mesquite, Nevada. Sheriff’s deputy Walter Bun, who leads the search and rescue unit, moves the unit into the Spring Mountain area in jeeps to search for wreckage. They search through the night, and when the sun comes up they continue using aircraft. They do not find anything of importance except some ashes that might easily be the remains of a campfire started by a hunter some weeks earlier. When no one reports a downed or missing aircraft, Bun and the other deputies call off the search. The object seems to have changed direction, because at Reno it passes west to east, in Utah it is seem going southeast to northwest, and at Nephi it travels west. The duration of the sighting, from New York to Nevada, is only 32 minutes, giving a speed of 4,500 mph, below the speed of meteors. On May 8, the Air Force sends Hynek and Lt. Col. Robert Friend to Utah with Douglas M. Crouch, chief of criminal investigation at Hill AFB, south of Ogden, Utah. They determine it is a bolide. Blue Book lists it as two sightings: a multiple radar sighting at Nellis on April 18 with no visual (despite hundreds of observers in Las Vegas), and a bolide over Utah that it claims occurs on April 19. In reality, the Utah and Nevada sightings are only minutes apart (8:15 p.m. Mountain Time). However, there is quite a bit of information from numerous sources concerning this major incident, including Project Blue Book documents, and now possible confirmation by a radar man at ATIC. The case is also not explained in a Blue Book monthly sighting listing for April 1962. It is interesting that every one of these states except Utah has or was in the process of obtaining ICBM Bases: New York, Plattsburg AFB; Kansas, Forbes AFB, McConnell AFB; Utah, Minuteman production at Air Force Plant 77 at Hill AFB; Idaho, Mountain Home AFB; Montana, Malmstrom AFB; New Mexico, Walker AFB; Wyoming,F. E. Warren AFB; Arizona, Davis Monthan AFB; California, Beale AFB.

1966 April 18 — The Air Force begins a cursory investigation into the Portage County police chase case. Initially they telephone local news outlets, seeking information. However, local newspapers and radio have only vague outlines of the case. Air Force investigators also interviewed meteorologists and weather agency personnel, hoping to learn that a weather balloon was launched in the area during the UFO chase. They learn that there were no weather balloons launched that morning, and also that the wind had been so mild that the police would have had no difficulty catching up with any wind-borne object. Quintanilla calls Spaur to ask him about “this mirage you saw.” Spaur insists he has seen a clearly defined metallic object maneuvering at very low altitudes. When
Quintanilla asks if they watched the object for more than a few minutes, Spaur asserts that he and Neff chased it for over half an hour, and that Huston saw the object for much of that period, and that Panzanella too had seen it. Quintanilla then, as Spaur said, “kind of lost interest.”

1966 April 18 — An egg-shaped object, 80 feet in diameter and 15 feet high, is observed from a distance of 80 feet by a 42-year-old witness driving a car near Battle Creek, Michigan. The object supports a cockpit with windows and three rows of lights, emits red flames, and makes the same noise as a heavy truck on wet pavement. The object follows the car for some time.

1984 April 18 — 9:30 p.m. A married couple is driving on a road near RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, UK, when they come upon a huge rectangular object straddling the road ahead. It has at least 60 lights arrayed in rows on its frame. Red and green lights are at its edges, but the majority are white. The object remains absolutely still and silent about 100 feet in the air. They are anxious to get home, so they do not see the object leave.

1995 April 18 — 9:00 p.m. A woman in Prospect, Chebucto Peninsula, Nova Scotia, sees a large, brilliant, white light hovering in the sky to the northwest. She can see its reflection on the surface of the still water. She calls her husband, who gets binoculars and determines there are two lights side by side. After several minutes or so, his mother on the floor above says she can see the light too. As soon as they switch the deck lights off for a better view, the two lights start moving directly toward their house, and he watches it slowly fly about 100 feet above the house. It seems to be a rectangular object about 200 feet long by 100 feet wide. It disappears behind the tree line.

2013 April 18 — Members of the Brazilian Ufologists Commission meet with representatives of the Brazilian armed forces at the Ministry of Defense to discuss gaining access to military documents involving UFOs. Attendees determine that Navy, Army, and Air Force documents related to UFOs are to be made public, as established by the law on access to information. More than 10,000 pages of previously confidential documents are released to the public and are available at the National Archives in Brasilia and online. http://www.openminds.tv/ufo-researchers-meet-with-brazilian-ministry-of-defense-990/20445

1897 April 19 — 2:00 a.m. A man in El Paso, Texas, sees a cigar-shaped object with lighted portholes on each side. The object approaches from the east and passes overhead at 500 feet. Voices from the craft are heard. 

1897April 19 — 12:00 noon. George Dunlap, a man known to Davis H. Tucker, physician at the Harlem Prison Farm [now the Jester State Prison Farm] in Fort Bend County, Texas, is riding in the country near Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he sees an airship moving toward him about half a mile distant. It makes a loud whistling noise, scaring his horses and causing him to be thrown from the buggy. As the horses flee, the ship lands, a rope comes down, and two men rush over to apologize. They are the owner Mr. Wilson (formerly of Fort Worth, Texas) and his friend Scott Warren. The man is taken into the airship and introduced to two others, a Mr. Waters and a Hispanic man. Wilson tells him the airship is sustained by a gas, and that several of them have been built. 

1897 April 19 — 9:00 p.m. A bright light moves from the northwest over Cochransville [now a ghost town], Monroe County, Ohio, where it hovers for 20 minutes, flashing red, white, and green lights. Through binoculars a cone-shaped object with large fins on either side can be discerned. It is apparently 180 feet long. 

1897 April 19 — 10:30 p.m. Rancher Alexander Hamilton, his son Will, and his hired hand Gid Heslip are awakened by a noise in the cattle pen of their ranch at Yates Center, Kansas. They watch as a 300-foot-long, cigar-shaped airship with a carriage underneath descends to about 30 feet above the ground. Two men, a woman, and three children are heard talking in the carriage. They see a calf caught in a nearby fence with a cable knotted around its neck that connects to the airship above. They cut the cable and the airship floats away. A few weeks later, Hamilton admits he made the story up. http://www.spaceshipsofezekiel.com/html/misc-kansas-airship-cownapping.html 

1897 April 19 — After 11:00 p.m. John R. Ligon, an agent for a brewery in Houston, and his son Charley notice lights in a pasture a few hundred yards away near Beaumont, Texas. They walk over and discover four men moving around a large dark object, who ask for water. They accompany Ligon to his house, each bringing two baskets, which they fill and return. One of the men identifies himself as “Wilson” and says they are traveling in a flying machine that has been over the Gulf of Mexico and is now headed toward Iowa. Ligon says the airship is 130 feet long and 20 feet wide, propelled by four large wings and powered by electricity. Wilson gives Ligon a tour of the ship and says it is one of five built in a small Iowa town. Rabbi Aaron Levy of Beaumont also claims to have met aeronauts from a landed airship near the city around the same time. 

1949 April 19 — AFOSI at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, sends to USAF headquarters a list of all green fireball reports it has investigated (39 in all) from December 5 to April 12. The common characteristics of most of the incidents are: “a. Green color, sometimes described as greenish-white, bright green, yellow-green, or blue green. b. Horizontal path, sometimes with minor variations. c. Speed less than that of a meteor, but more than any known type of aircraft. d. No sound associated with observation. e. No persistent trail or dust cloud. f. Period of visibility from one to five seconds.” Clark III 541; https://www.project1947.com/gfb/sab11349.html

1953 April 19 — 1:00 p.m. Four US Army reconnaissance observers (including pilot Lt. Julius Morgan, Lt. James O. Rymus, and Lt. Jack E. Myers) in two aircraft see a white, rounded, delta-shaped object 5–7 feet in diameter flying at 60–80 mph with a “vibrating” motion over Communist territory in Korea. An official G-2 Intelligence Report says the object is in the Old Baldy (Hill 266) and Pork Chop Hill areas. Radar supposedly tracks them also moving faster than sound (>767 mph).

1957 April 19 — 11:52 a.m. Two metallic discs are seen entering the Pacific Ocean about 300 miles southeast of Tokyo by Japanese fisherman aboard the Kitsukawa Maru. A violent turbulence disturbs the ocean after they submerge. The objects are 30 feet long and wingless.

1961 April 19 — 7:40 p.m. Commanding Officer C. J. Peterson of the minesweeper HMS Maxton sees a swiftly moving object as the ship is 33 miles off San Vito Lo Capo, Sicily, Italy. It is green and leaves an orange trail as it moves higher and disappears to the northwest. The ship’s crew sees a similar object on April 20 at 4:50 a.m. when it is 25 miles south of Capo Carbonara, Sardinia, Italy.

1977 April 19 — Santiago Laco Ozano, 32, is milking cows in Rocha, Uruguay, when he hears a strange noise as the area around him is illuminated. Looking up, he sees a small object giving off a powerful beam of light. He faints, and on recovering about 5 minutes later, notices his hair is slightly burned. He is admitted to a nearby hospital, whose personnel verify the singeing and that his scalp has no lesions. (IUR 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1978): 2)

1977 April 19 — Early morning. Rose Granville, proprietor of the Haven Fort Hotel in Little Haven, Pembroke, Wales, is disturbed by a strange humming noise. She looks out a window and sees an oval-shaped object “like the moon falling down” land behind her home. Two tall humanoids appear in front of the UFO, which is about the size of a minibus. They have blank faces and pointed heads and are wearing white outfits like boiler suits. They appear to “take measurements or gather things” and climb a grassy bank in a field. When she returns to the window after calling other family members, the object and the figures have vanished.

1991 April 19 — Afternoon. Two militiamen on patrol in Almaty, Kazakhstan, notice a flare at the top of Kok Tobe Mountain. They watch flames go up and down and then see an array of red light beams. They drive to within 650 feet of a hovering UFO. At that point, a few rays sweep across the car and it stops dead. The object then dims its lights and disappears. The men return to the police station but cannot recall how they did so.

1897 April 20 — Henry Heintz of Elkton, South Dakota, patents an airship consisting of a cigar-shaped balloon and a structure for passengers beneath it. At some point he allegedly brings his invention out for a test flight in front of the Elkton blacksmith shop. The airship rises 8 feet into the air before plopping to the ground. (https://patents.google.com/patent/US580941A/ 

1897 April 20 — 10:00 p.m. Sheriff Henry W. Baylor of Uvalde, Texas, sees a bright light and hears strange voices behind his house. He finds a landed airship and its crew of three men, one of whom is named “Wilson” (from Goshen, New York), who inquires after an acquaintance, C. C. Akers of Eagle Pass, Texas. After procuring water from a hydrant in Baylor’s yard, the men board the airship, which speeds away northward toward San Angelo. County Clerk Henry J. Bowles sees the airship as it passes over Getty Street in Uvalde. Akers tells a reporter in Galveston that he knew a New Yorker named Wilson when he lived in Fort Worth in 1876–1877. Baylor’s seemingly compelling testimony disintegrates after he confesses in late May to making the whole story up, possibly in collusion with Akers.

1907 April 20–26 — The Nashville (Tenn.) American prints some tall tales about encounters with occupants of a balloon who land briefly in various places (usually near a spring) around central Tennessee. The witnesses include a farmer named W. A. Smith, Walter Stephenson, Herman Schubert, Asa Hickerson, and A. Mollycoddle. The aeronauts are dressed strangely, play music, and speak a foreign language.

1952 April 20 — 9:15 p.m. Naval aviation student Edmund Kogut and his wife Shirley are at a drive-in movie theater in Flint, Michigan, when they see several groups of UFOs fly over. There are 2–9 objects in a group and about 20 groups, all flying in a straight line except for some changes in direction accomplished unlike any known aircraft. They are shaped like conventional aircraft but have an odd reddish glow surrounding them.

1959 April 20 — Ufologist Morris K. Jessup commits suicide in a Dade County park, Florida, from carbon monoxide poisoning. Some theorists connect his involvement with the Allende letters and the Philadelphia experiment to his death, but friends say Jessup has been discussing suicide with them for several months.

1964 April 20 — Early morning, During Operation Deep Freeze VII, six members of a US Coast Guard aircraft sight a V-formation of 9 glowing-white objects speeding at an estimated 35,000 feet altitude. They are flying a in a C-130 turbo-prop transport from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, with supplies. The right-side observer first sees the objects approaching at about 460 mph from above and to their right side. When they come abreast of the airplane, they slow to its speed. After a short time, they fly above the airplane and take up position above and to its left side. The pilot attempts to radio the ground but the radio is dead, and their radar also stops working. When the pilot tries to switch to auxiliary power, it too is not functioning. At one point the airplane’s engines stop (the oil begins to congeal in the cold air). Instead of losing altitude, it maintains “a steady altitude and course.” The airplane allegedly continues flying in complete silence, then it enters a “strange haze” (like a white-out) with the air filled with static electricity. There is electrical arcing from one observer’s body to metal inside the fuselage. The haze vanishes after about 20 minutes. The power suddenly returns, and the crew can restart the engines in sequence. The airplane has covered a distance of 305 miles during the 45–50 minutes at indicated airspeed of 184–218 knots.

1969 April 20 — 7:30 p.m. A woman out walking at Harwood Island, New South Wales, sees and hears a large patch of 2-year-old cane rustling and waving on a still night. A powerful beam of light switches on across the top of the cane path, and it slowly turns in a half circle before going out and being replaced by a “low beam” and “cabin lights.” A UFO is above the cane and she feels a powerful force lifting her up and pulling her toward the object when the “high beam” is on. The helmet-shaped object is 20–28 feet long and 22 feet wide. At its closest the UFO is 40–50 feet away. It disappears suddenly.

1980 April 20 — 5:30 a.m. Richard A. Jokinen, an electrical engineer, is driving north on I-280 in San Mateo, California, on a fishing trip with his 18-year-old son. They see five bright, apparently metallic, Saturn-shaped objects flying very fast in formation at low altitude. The objects are traveling about 500 feet above the Crystal Springs Reservoir and are visible against trees of the coastal mountains west of the reservoir. The sighting lasts about 5 seconds, during which the objects cross 120° of viewing angle. 

1980 April 20 — 9:00 p.m. A group of nine family members are on their front lawn in Hyderabad, India, and see a bell-shaped cloud forming at about 2,000–3,000 feet altitude. It remains stationary and they look away, but soon they see three smaller bell-shaped clouds forming evenly spaced below the first and forming an equilateral triangle. The smaller clouds then merge with the larger one and form an orange ball bright enough to throw a shadow on the roof near them. It shoots off at great speed toward the airport, then disappears after breaking into four smaller orange balls of light. The duration of the sighting is 15 minutes.

1997 April 20 — 1:40 p.m. A woman is sitting on a park bench along the St. Clair River in Sarnia, Ontario. A grayish-white object suddenly appears in front of her, suspended vertically, with the bottom party positioned 25° above the horizon. The object has tubelike shape, rounded at both ends. She then notices a white spherical object that seems to have been ejected from the first. It travels a short distance north to Lake Huron and vanishes. The original object then disappears after another few seconds.

1897 April 21 — 8:00 p.m. A man is riding his horse between Lancaster and Baltimore, Ohio, when something scares his horse. He sees an object with two brilliant white lights on either end landing in a nearby field. He tethers his horse and approaches the object, which seems as large as a house. Inside he can see two men conversing, so he walks up to ask them questions. One of the aeronauts seems to be Japanese and the other speaks English with a British accent. The craft is called the Aeribarque, and they are on a test flight. The aeronaut says that they often land in remote areas and come to nearby towns for supplies or mechanical parts, posing either as tourists or “harmless cranks trying to invent perpetual motion.” After giving the witness a demonstration of the electrical lighting system, they take off into the sky. 

1897 April 21 — 11:00 p.m. Confectioner John S. Scheer, Frank King, and Frank Mulick of Erie, Pennsylvania, watch a cigar-shaped, winged object moving north at a relatively high rate of speed. It has a large propeller on its tail end, but it flies silently and disappears over Lake Erie.

1952 April 21 — The Canadian Defence Research Board establishes a UFO study group that meets for the first time today. Project Second Storey, formed by Omond M. Solandt, DRB chairman, meets at least five times. It is chaired by astrophysicist Peter M. Millman and includes Wilbert B. Smith and representatives from Naval Intelligence, Military Operations and Planning, and the Defence Research Board. At its April 24 meeting, it decides to liase with the US government on UFO matters. http://luforu.org/ottawa-ontario-canada-north-america/

1976 April 21 — Night. RCMP Constable Bill Toffan sees an apparent vehicle with its lights flashing ahead of him as he is driving on Canada Highway 16 about 60 miles east of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. As he draws next to it, he sees it is actually in the air. Suddenly there is a blinding flash and he nearly loses control of his car. After a brief report appears in the press, the RCMP orders Toffan not to discuss the incident.

1991 April 21 — 8:00 p.m. Captain Achille Zaghetti and his copilot are flying a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 Alitalia airliner with 57 passengers. They are over the English Channel just off the coast of Romney, Kent, and preparing to land at Heathrow Airport, London, when they see a round object or missile, about 10 feet long, approaching from their left. It is less than 100 feet away. The control tower confirms a radar target, which is now behind them. The British Army denies firing any missiles. The British Civil Aviation Authority concludes that “extensive enquiries have failed to provide any indication of what the sighting may have been.” Nick Redfern notes that the description of the UFO is consistent with a pilotless drone of the type used for defense practice.

1996 April 21 —Around 9:00 p.m. Terezinha Gallo Clepf is celebrating her 67th birthday at the restaurant at the Parque Zoobotânico Mun. Dr. Mário Frota in Varginha, Brazil, when she steps onto a porch to smoke a cigarette. She looks to her left and sees a strange creature with bright red eyes and a yellow helmet on its head. It is behind a fence that circles the porch. They stare at each other. Clepf goes back into the restaurant but soon comes back out and the creature is still there. She gets her husband to take her home

1897 April 22 — 10:10 p.m. A ball of fire is seen moving slowly and horizontally from southwest to northeast over Kokomo, Indiana. Some people can distinguish the faint outlines of a cigar-shaped object and wings. The light is white with a reddish tint and no more than 300 feet in altitude. The witnesses include Harry M. Grimes, William E. Sollenberger, and banking executive Frank McCarty. 

1897 April 22 — 11:00 p.m. John M. Barclay wakes up when he hears a whirring noise that causes his dogs to bark wildly outside his home near Rockland, Texas. He goes outside and sees an oblong airship with wings and brilliant lights. When he first sees it, the object is hovering 150 feet above the ground. It circles a few times then lands in a nearby pasture. Barclay goes down to investigate with his Winchester rifle, but the lights go out as he gets closer. Some 90 feet away from the airship he is stopped by a man who asks him to put his rifle down. He identifies himself as “Smith” and gives Barclay $10 to purchase lubricating oil, two chisels, and bluestone. When Barclay returns with the materials, the aeronaut will only say he is from “anywhere,” adding that “we will be in Greece tomorrow.” 

1897 April 22 — 12:00 midnight. Frank Nichols, a farmer living 2 miles east of Josserand, Texas, is awakened by a whirring noise. Outside, he sees a huge airship in his cornfield. Before he can get close, two men with buckets ask him if they can draw water from his well. Nichols consents and in return they give him a tour of the vessel, whose motive power is “highly condensed electricity.” One aeronaut tells him that five airships have been built in an Iowa town.

1949 April 22 — 9:05 a.m. A round, flat, thin, metallic disc is seen traveling west to east, dropping slowly, over Cliff, New Mexico.

1964 April 22 — 9:00 p.m. Marie Morrow, Ruth Ovelette, and Morrow’s son are driving west about 10–15 miles east of Lordsburg, New Mexico, when a brilliantly luminous object sweeps about 10 feet above their car from behind, illuminating the interior and emitting a whirring, whining sound. The UFO then rises but maintains its course along the highway before veering toward the north and vanishes. http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/APRO%20Bulletin/1964%20%20complete%206%20issues/AFU_19640500_APRO_Bulletin_May.pdf

1966 April 22 — Quintanilla announces in a press release that the Portage County UFO is an Echo satellite, with later observations (in Pennsylvania) of Venus. Quintanilla calls Spaur’s superior, Portage County Sheriff Ross Dustman, to give him this explanation, and Dustman laughs out loud.

1966 April 22 — Lt. Col. Robert R. Hippler of the USAF Directorate of Science and Technology is tasked with recruiting a university for the UFO project suggested by the O’Brien committee in February. He assembles a panel of experts that suggests he bring in H. Guyford Stever, head of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Stever queries MIT, Harvard, California, Northwestern, and North Carolina, but all refuse to deal with UFOs.

1966 April 22 — 9:00–9:45 p.m. Witnesses in Beverly, Massachusetts, including two police officers, see a platter-shaped object the size of a large automobile with 3 red-green-white lights hover silently over Beverly High School then depart to the southwest. At one point, witnesses see the object only 20–30 feet above the head of another witness.

1967 April 22 — At the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., James E. McDonald says of Donald Menzel, “when he comes to analyzing UFO reports, he seems to calmly cast aside well-known scientific principles almost with abandon, in an all-out effort to be sure that no UFO report survives his attack.” He also says, “I have learned from a number of unquotable sources that the Air Force has long wished to get rid of the burden of the troublesome UFO problem and has twice tried to ‘peddle’ it to NASA—without success.”

1984 April 22 — 10:10 p.m. A woman and her mother are watching TV at a trailer park in Saltfleet, Lincolnshire, UK, when they see a dome-shaped object with circle of white lights, a small group of red lights above, and a brilliant white light on top. It is hovering nearby and about 500 feet in the air. More lights turn on and the object begins to revolve. As its speed increases, the colours blend into one another. The object moves away to the south, but over the next hour it circles the trailer park in wide loops that take it several miles out to sea before returning over their heads. It switches a searchlight beam off and on. The woman’s two dogs are looking fearfully at the UFO. At one point the object drops to 100 feet and hovers in absolute silence above the witnesses. The searchlight comes from two headlight beams projecting forward. The UFO has a “smoky glass” dome on top. Dogs are howling for miles around. The object switches off all but four of its lights and climbs vertically before heading out to sea to circle for a few more minutes.

1986 April 22 — After 10:00 p.m. Medical technicians taking an injured man in an ambulance to Debrecen, Hungary, see a huge, luminous, orange sphere flying silently above the right side of the road at Hajdudorog and moving along with them. It is about 325 feet away from them, floating at 100–130 feet. The sphere is surrounded by a ring, and flames appear on its surface from time to time. Two flames blaze on opposite sides, while another moves to and fro along its middle. The sighting lasts for 15 minutes for a distance of nearly 12 miles. When the ambulance reaches Hajdúböszörmény, the object speeds up, stops above a forest, and slowly descends while radiating a bright light that illuminates the trees. It goes out shortly afterward. On the return from Debrecen, the huge sphere returns over Józsa, this time with 6–7 flames instead of 3. It speeds over the village and “waits” on the other side for the ambulance, following it again to the north. The perplexed technicians decide to stop the ambulance. The UFO slows down, but does not stop, moving over a power line and illuminating the cables below. The ambulance recommences its journey, with the object following for another 10 minutes. A short time later, covering the same route, the technicians notice that the forest where the sphere landed is on fire. They find the grass all wet, with 5-foot flames (natural gas?) emanating from the ground. 

April 22 — 11:00 p.m. Two people are driving on the Via Flaminia near Pesaro, Italy, when their car engine stops. After hearing a strange sound, they see 3 discs 65 feet in diameter with domes and tripods standing on the left of the road. They have white and blue lights. After hovering for 20 seconds, the discs emit a strong whistle, accelerate, and disappear.

1990 April 22 — Before 12:00 midnight. Two workers in a factory courtyard in Basècles, Belgium, watch two enormous spotlights illuminate the area. A huge trapezoid-shaped “platform” moves slowly and silently above a smokestack, at one point covering the entire courtyard, 330 by 200 feet. They observe six lights on the object, which is grayish. Structures on the bottom of the platform look like “an aircraft carrier turned upside down.”

1998 April 22 — 9:20 p.m. A former Canadian F-104 pilot watches a UFO embedded in a cloud of green light fly toward the south over their car as he is driving near Whistler, British Columbia. It is visible only a few seconds. Other witnesses further south see the UFO stop over Puget Sound for 5–10 seconds, jump instantly to another location, and hover again before speeding away to the south. 

1998 April 22 — 9:23 p.m. Civilian Larry Swanson sees a disc-shaped UFO fly silently north to south at about 300–400 feet altitude over the center of Naval Submarine Base Bangor [now Naval Base Kitsap] on the Kitsap Peninsula, Washington. At one point, the disc tilts slightly, allowing Swanson to view its underside, which is glowing white except for a central circular area about 30 feet in diameter. It slowly glides out of sight.

1897 April 23 — Evening. As some residents of Merkel, Texas, are leaving a church service, they notice a heavy, anchor-shaped object being dragged by a large rope that is attached to an airship in the sky not far above them. After 10 minutes, a small figure dressed in a blue sailor suit starts climbing down the rope. But when he sees people watching him, he cuts the rope and returns to the airship, which moves away to the northeast. The anchor goes on exhibit at a local blacksmith shop.

1897 April 23 — Night. Henry A. Hooks and A. W. Hodges of Kountze, Texas, allegedly meet two aeronauts named Wilson and Jackson when their airship suffers a gas leak and lands.

1948 April 23 — A preliminary 25-page report, written by Project Sign’s Col. Howard McCoy and Lt. Col. James C. Beam, summarizes UFO reports received through February 1, with attached memos and documents. It is addressed to Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg and Director of Intelligence Charles P. Cabell. The Rhodes photos and 99 other cases are listed. A comment by chemist Irving Langmuir is appended, noting his doubts about the reality of flying discs.

1951 April 23 — Col. Harold E. Watson writes a memo to the USAF Director of Intelligence, explaining his view that “little if any results” have been obtained from Project Grudge other than the objects are not from a foreign power. But since there is still some doubt, all reports should be forwarded to AMC in Dayton.

1952 April 23 — 9:30 a.m. R. C. Munroe, engineering standards section head for Raytheon Manufacturing Company, notices an object near an AT-6 Texan trainer aircraft above Lexington, Massachusetts. He estimates its altitude at 40,000 feet. It decelerates abruptly and goes into a flat turn. “It is inconceivable to me that any human being could have withstood the deceleration or acceleration displayed by this aircraft.”

1976 April 23 — 2:40 a.m. A 1st Lt. is on communications duty aboard a US Navy destroyer in the Atlantic southwest of Bermuda. The lookout calls his attention to a green light dead ahead through light fog three miles away at 10° above the horizon. Radar reports no target and the sonar room hears no engines. The crew watches the green light dip to 30–40 feet above the surface and approach the ship. The lieutenant orders a course change to starboard, and the green light becomes much larger, making a comparable turn to port in order to pace the ship. The ship and the object both make subsequent turns, with the light now only 50-60 feet away. Suddenly a large blip appears on the radar scope. The destroyer returns to its original heading and the light stations itself on the port beam. When the captain comes on deck, the light circles the ship twice. Then once again off to port, it becomes a brighter green, tilts at an angle, and submerges. The next day the captain tells the crew not to discuss the incident. (http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/APRO%20Bulletin/APRO%20Bulletin%20-%201978%2005%2000%20-%20Vol%2026%20No%2011.pdf

1982 April 23 — 5:15 a.m. Officials at the Head Office of Meteorology in Ankara, Turkey, observe two UFOs that are manoeuvring over the city for an hour. They are elliptical and disappear in the direction of the Eskisehir Highway around 6:15 a.m.

2007 April 23 — Afternoon. The passengers of Flight A-Line 544 depart Southampton, England, in a BN2a Mk3 Trislander aircraft at about 2:00 p.m. in fine weather with good visibility for miles around, though a haze layer is present at 2,000 feet, and a continuous cloud layer at 10,000 feet. They rise to an altitude of 4,000 feet and are cruising on autopilot about 10 miles south of the Isle of Wight. Capt. Ray Bowyer notices, exactly in the direction of Guernsey (southwest and 12 o’clock ahead) what appears to be a brilliant yellow lamp or light. He thinks that it might be an airplane or reflections from the ground, as Guernsey is immediately behind it. The reflection of the sun off a greenhouse is a possibility but the UFO persists for a couple of minutes. It is brilliant yellow, with a dark grey band enveloping it one third from the right, like a band around a cigar. Bowyer makes contact with Jersey ATC to check on traffic heading his way. Paul Kelly at Jersey ATC cannot see any traffic in that position, but he picks up a faint primary return radar signal. A passenger behind the captain confirms what Bowyer is seeing and points out a second UFO immediately behind the first: Bowyer estimates both lights to be “up to possibly a mile across.” Radar traces also seem to register the presence of two objects, which Bowyer believes to be correlated with the position and time of the sighting. A study by David Clarke, however, cannot establish a definite link, as the radar reflections of cargo or passenger ferries may have affected at least some of the readings. Bowyer disagrees with Clarke’s team on the supposed link between the radar traces and ferries and proposes that two solid airborne UFOs are working in unison that day. Captain Patterson, the second pilot witness, posits some type of “atmospheric phenomenon” as an explanation. (ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Alderney_UFO_sighting ; Kean 73–81; UFOFiles2, pp. 166–168; https://rr0.org/time/2/0/0/8/02/ChannelIslands/index.html ; http://www.martinshough.com/aerialphenomena/Report%20on%20Channel%20Islands%20UAPs%2023.04.07.pdf

2014 April 23 — 10:51 p.m. Another F/A-18F Super Hornet from Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11, the “Red Rippers”) has an encounter with multiple “unidentified aerial devices” while flying out of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach and operating in the W-72 warning area. The crew initially detects two UADs on radar, one at 12,000 feet and another at 15,000 feet, both apparently stationary or near-stationary. They then confirm both of these objects using the jet’s Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) system. While investigating the first pair of UADs, another two appeared to pass through the ATFLIR field of vision at high speed. The two moving objects do not appear on the aircraft’s radar.

1874 April 24 — 3:30 p.m. Chemist and astronomer Vojtěch Šafařík of Prague [now in the Czech Republic] sees “an object of so peculiar a character that I do not know what to make of it.” It is a dazzling white object slowly crossing the moon. He first sees it in front of the moon, then watches it against the “deep blue sky like Sirius or Vega in daylight.”

1897 April 24 — An airship in need of repairs lands near Stringers Ridge on the other side of the river from Chattanooga, Tennessee. An unnamed journalist talks to one of the aeronauts, who identifies himself as Prof. Charles Davidson of Sacramento, California, the inventor of the airship, which can travel as fast as 93 mph.

1897 April 24 — 11:00 p.m. Howard Warn is outside his home in Toledo, Ohio, when he notices bright, multicolored lights moving rapidly toward the southwest. The lights are attached to a cigar-shaped object at an altitude of 500 feet. He calls his father, Milo S. Warn, and they watch the lights until the object disappears into heavy clouds to the southwest.

1949 April 24 — 10:30 a.m. General Mills meteorologist Charles B. Moore and four Navy Skyhook balloon launch crewmen (Navy Chief Fire Controlman William Akers, Davidson, Fitzsimmons, Moorman) see a white, round object, shadowed yellowish on one side, cross the sky from the south to the east, three miles north of Arrey, New Mexico. Joseph Gordon Vaeth is present as the Navy representative in charge of ground handling. Moore tracks it for 60 seconds on a theodolite. The distance is unknown, but assuming the object is 57 miles away, it would have a velocity of 18,000 mph, a width of 40 feet, and a length of 100 feet; but this is speculative.

1950 April 24 — Enrique Hausemann Muller takes a film of a bright, circular UFO with rays of flame spinning off its edge in a pinwheel fashion in the Balearic Islands, Spain. Probable hoax. http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1950-Apr-July.pdf

April 24 — 10:00 p.m. Bruno Facchini steps outside his house on the outskirts of Abbiate Guazzone, Varese, Italy, and notices something flashing near a power line. He goes to investigate and encounters a landed disc with an open door and steps leading down. Three or four men in diving suits and helmets are inside. One seems to be welding a pipe. Facchini speaks to them, but they respond with growling sounds. One points a small “camera” at him that emits a beam that knocks him over. Facchini lies still while the repairs are completed, and the UFO takes off. http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/ufologia/FSR%201974%20V%2020%20N%206.pdf http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/Italy/Notiziario%20UFO%20(CUN)/Notiziario%20UFO%20-%201971%2001-02%20No%2037.pdf , pp. 19–22; http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/Italy/Notiziario%20UFO%20(CUN)/Notiziario%20UFO%20-%201985%2003-1986%2001%20-%20Vol%2020-21%20No%20104.pdf

1962 April 24 — 7:45 p.m. Alice W. Gasslein and her mother are driving near their home in Springfield, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, when they see a large domed object emitting flashes of green light moving over the roofs of nearby homes. A rotating band around the main body consists of a series of square windows from which come shafts of bright white light. They drive back home to alert her husband, Joseph A. Gasslein, an aviation worker. By that time, the UFO is about a half-mile distant, giving off colored lights. Around 8:10 p.m., the object returns flying toward the Gassleins’ home (south of Walsh Park) only 20 feet above ground level and passes over their backyard before making a sharp left turn and moving away to the east. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1962-Jan-Jun.pdf

1964 April 24 — 10:00 a.m. Dairy farmer Gary Wilcox of Newark Valley, New York, is driving a tractor on his property when he sees a shiny object on the inside edge of a nearby patch of woods. He gets off the tractor and approaches the object, which is egg-shaped, 20 feet long, 16 feet wide, and four feet high. It is hovering two feet above the ground and making a sound like a car idling. He touches it and feels a hard metal. Two figures suddenly appear from under the object. They are 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide, dressed in seamless silvery garments. Each carries a tray filled with alfalfa, roots, soil, leaves, and brush. Wilcox hears a voice say, “Do not be alarmed. We have talked to people before.” They ask him what he is doing, and Wilcox says he is spreading manure. One humanoid asks if he can have some and converses some more about space exploration. They claim they are from Mars. After a while, the UFO takes off in a horizontal direction. Wilcox notices some small depressions where the figures were standing, as well as a thin, red, jellylike substance.

1964 April 24 — Around 5:50 p.m. Socorro (N.Mex.) police officer Lonnie Zamora, while chasing a speeder, hears a continuous roaring sound and sees a brilliant blue “cone of flame” in the sky to the south-southwest. The bottom of the flame is out of sight behind a hill. Thinking there has been an explosion, he tries to pursue it, turning off to the right on a rough gravel road, but loses sight of it while trying to get the car up a steep hill. By the time he reaches the top, the sound stops and the flame is no longer visible. He then notices a metallic object in a ravine about 450 feet away. At first, he thinks it is an overturned car, but then he sees “two figures in what resembled white coveralls, pretty close to the object on the northwest side, as if inspecting it.” One seems to turn in a startled way as if he hears Zamora’s car approaching. The figures are small, and the object is oval-shaped and positioned so its long axis is horizontal. Zamora loses sight of object as he drives through a dip in the road. He radios headquarters that he is investigating a possible car accident. He stops a second time and gets out, hearing 2–3 loud thumping noises like a door shutting hard. He walks three steps to the front of the car to possibly 50 feet away from the object when he hears a very load roar increasing in volume and sees a smokeless blue-orange flame coming from beneath. He notes a red insignia or lettering on the side of the object. Zamora thinks it is going to explode and runs away, putting the car between him and the object and dropping to the ground. He feels some slight heat from the flame. The roaring noise stops, and Zamora looks up to see the UFO flying away to the southwest at a level height, just clearing an 8-foot dynamite shack. He runs back to the patrol car and radios headquarters, just as the object climbs slowly and goes past Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon Mountain (about 6 miles away). The entire incident takes place in less than 2 minutes. Police Sgt. M. S. Chavez arrives, and they find burning brush (including a badly damaged creosote bush) where the UFO has been, as well as four asymmetrically placed, trapezoidal imprints 12–16 inches long, 6–8 inches wide, and 4–6 inches deep. An FBI agent, D. Arthur Byrnes Jr., who has heard about it on the police radio, speaks with Zamora in the evening. He notifies army intelligence at White Sands Missile Range, who sends Capt. Richard T. Holder. Military police arrive and collect samples, working by flashlight. The next morning, Holder gets a call from a colonel at the war room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking for a report. T/Sgt. David Moody from ATIC and Maj. William Conner from Kirtland AFB check the area for radioactivity on April 26. Hynek arrives on April 28 and interviews Zamora and Chavez. Richard H. Hall and Ray Stanford arrive for NICAP and obtain some metal traces on a rock in the landing area; they take the sample to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where metallurgist Henry E. Frankel agrees to analyze the material. His tentative analysis suggests a zinc-iron alloy, perhaps from a zinc pail. In 1966, Blue Book chief Maj. Hector Quintanilla writes in a classified article in Studies in Intelligence that “This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of a thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.” Some investigators think the case might involve a test of a Lunar Surveyor module from White Sands. http://www.nicap.org/640424socorro_dir.htm ; http://www.nmsr.org/socorro.htm ; http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/APRO%20Bulletin/1964%20-%20complete%206%20issues/AFU_19640500_APRO_Bulletin_May.pdf ; http://socorro-history.org/HISTORY/PH_History/200808_socorro_ufo.pdf ; http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/11/socorro-ufo-landing-analysis.html ; http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-socorro-symbol-resolved.html ; http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/11/no-socorro-solution-by-chief-of-project.html ; http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/11/zamora-vs-people.html ; 1947/1987, pp. 62–66; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Zamora_incident ; https://alienexpanse.com/index.php?threads/ray-stanford-and-his-nasa-goddard-ufo-metal-cover-up-claim-1964.3284

1965 April 24 — 5:30 p.m. Ernest Arthur Bryant is walking toward Scoriton Down near Scoriton (or Scorriton), Devon, UK, when he sees a saucer-like object approach him. It stops nearby and a door opens. Three beings appear and beckon to him. He approaches the saucer. Two of the three beings appear to be nonhuman, but the third seems to be a youth in his teens. The youth speaks with an accent that Bryant thinks might be Russian and calls himself Yamski. He says that he is from Venus, and then remarks that he wished “Des” was there, as he would understand what is happening. At the close of their conversation, he says that in a month he will return and bring proof of “Mantell.” Ufologists who eventually hear the story immediately associate Yamski with George Adamski, the controversial contactee who died on April 23. Adamski was of Polish background and had a noticeable accent. If this were Adamski, he has lost any signs of aging. Adamski’s friend Desmond Leslie was a coauthor of his first book. Captain Thomas F. Mantell, piloting an F-51, had been killed in 1948 when he began chasing what he thought was a UFO. According to Bryant, the saucer returns June 7 and leaves some items, including several pieces of metal, allegedly from an F-51. He reports the story to the British UFO Research Association, which launches an investigation. The various items Bryant turns over to the two investigators (a turbine fitting, metal parts, a broken bulb and fitting, a phial containing silver sand, and a piece of paper on which the words “Adelphos Adelpho” are written) prove to be mundane and irrelevant to the F-51, according to aeronautical engineer Leonard G. Cramp. In spite of problems with the story, one of the investigators, Eileen Buckle, rushes into print with a book, The Scoriton Mystery. Shortly afterward, Bryant unexpectedly takes ill and dies from a brain tumor on June 24, 1967. The other investigator, Norman Oliver, visits his widow. She says that she is familiar with the story in the book, as her husband had presented it to her first as the script for a science fiction novel. It is only after the investigation is well along that she realizes her husband was trying to sell the story as a real event. She indicates that the supposed items related to Mantell were purchased at a naval surplus store. Alice Wells, head of the Adamski Foundation, dismisses the Scoriton story from the beginning, as does Desmond Leslie. Between their rejection and Oliver’s uncovering of the hoax, few remain to support Bryant except Buckle. https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/ce3/1965-24-04-uk-scoriton.htm

1989 April 24 — 10:55 p.m. An object described as three times the size of an aircraft hovers above Cherepovets, Vologda Oblast, Russia, at a height of 1,000 feet.

2014 April 24 — 12:47 p.m. Two more F/A-18Fs make radar contact with another UAD in the W-72 warning area while conducting Basic Fighter Manoeuvering out of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. Both aircraft are able to maintain a radar track with the object, which is stationary or near-stationary at 11,000 feet. The aircraft are also able to lock onto the object with CATM-9Xs, a captive-carry training version of the AIM-9X Sidewinder missile. However, in this instance, neither one makes visual contact.

1897 April 25 — Night. William F. Whittier, editor of the Sunbury (Ohio) News-Item, sets up his camera in the printing office to take lightning photographs. He manages to take a photo of a nearby lightning strike and develops it the following morning. The negative shows not only the lightning but the outline of what seems to be an airship. Whittier makes many copies of the photo and sells them to Sunbury residents.

1945 April 25 — 9:45 a.m. Acting Squadron Leader Kit Francis Williams of the RAF 617 Bomber Squadron is flying a Lancaster with 25 other aircraft to bomb Hitler’s headquarters at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Just after a turn near Kaiserslautern, Germany, at 16,500 feet, Williams witnesses an object like a large woolly blanket that takes up his entire windshield. He thinks it could be as much as 4–5 miles wide. It moves vertically and is gone in an instant. Suddenly his aircraft loses its electrical power and loses one of its bombs. He and his bomber and engineer get severe headaches. They return to base in England after regaining power. https://www.theufochronicles.com/2016/11/ufo-incident-april-25-1945-bomber-pilot.html

1949 April 25 — Lt. Col. Doyle Rees wires AFOSI headquarters to ask if he can send two of his men to AMC to find out if Project Grudge plans to do anything about the green fireballs. Before Rees has a response, Joseph Kaplan arrives in Albuquerque, having been directed there by AF Intelligence Director Maj. Gen. Charles Cabell and Scientific Advisory Board Chairman Theodore Von Kármán, who wants Kaplan to set up a field investigation. They emphasize that Grudge is not to be informed. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1949-Jan-Jun-SN.pdf

1952 April 25 — 11:00 a.m. A biochemist and a bacteriologist are driving to their office in San Jose, California, when they see a metallic-looking disc rotating around a vertical axis and wobbling. It is moving slowly over the office and is about 4–5 feet in diameter. It flies in a slow arc. Then they see a black object hovering at a high altitude under an overcast. This one is about 100 feet in diameter. Two identical objects come into view out of the clouds. The three objects “jittered about like boats in a stream.” Then the small disc stops spinning, hovers, then shoots upwards, followed by one of the black objects. The remaining two objects linger another minute or so, then take off separately. The episode lasts 15 minutes. The biochemist calls Moffett Field in Santa Clara County, but hangs up before reporting the sighting, which they describe as a “most disturbing experience.” The object “utilized some propulsion method not in the physics books.” http://www.nicap.org/520425sanjose_dir.htm

1952 April 25 — Battelle releases its first status report on Project Stork, noting that it has selected a panel of consultants, initiated a news clipping service, and devised a coding scheme for UFO reports. https://www.cufon.org/cufon/stork1-7.htm

1958 April 25 — The officer for UFO investigation in Denmark, Lt. Col. Hans-Christian Petersen, tells the magazine B-T that multiple-witness sightings are commonplace and that the current Danish wave is comparable to that of the US 1952 wave. “Nothing is gained by rejecting all the accounts as fantasy,” he tells reporters. Petersen has founded the Skandinavisk UFO Information group in December with five other Danish military jet pilots. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1958-Mar-Apr.pdf 

1961 April 25 — US Air Force Guidance Collection Letter No.4, originally classified Confidential, describes and provides guidance for Project Moon Dust reporting. Several items of interest appear in the document: classification level of Moon Dust Alerts and reports, focus of Moon Dust on “foreign earth satellite vehicles,” and destination agencies for Moon Dust reports among them. Project Moon Dust is a covert project to exploit the discovery of Soviet hardware when it temporarily lands in American hands. (http://www.nicap.org/af_doc/MoonDustICGL4.pdf

1964 April 25 — Morning. J. D. Hatch is driving on US Hwy 70 between Mescalero and Tularosa, New Mexico, when a bright oval object descends and seemingly lands on the other side of Round Mountain east of Tularosa.

1964 April 25 — Evening. Two motorists driving on US Hwy 84 between Abiquiu and Espanola, New Mexico, see a strange object that is definitely not an airplane fly straight toward their car before shooting away. All they can see is a blue-flamed exhaust.

1977 April 25 — 3:45 a.m. Eight soldiers camped on a military patrol 3 miles from Putre, Arica y Parinacota, Chile, suddenly see two bright violet lights nearby. The soldiers’ dog and horses remain still while the lights hover nearby. The leader of the group, Corporal Armando Valdés Garrido, orders the other soldiers to put out their campfire. The two large lights are about a half-mile away and hovering close to the ground. Valdés approaches the lights, ordering them to identify themselves. At this point a bright light envelops Valdés and he apparently vanishes in a mist in plain view of the others. The soldiers frantically begin searching for him but are unable to find him. At around 4:15 a.m., Valdés suddenly reappears. He has a strange look on his face and he gives out a sinister laugh, asking several times where his mother is. Then he says, again in a very sinister sounding voice, “You will never know who we are and where we come from.” The others notice that he appears to have a week’s growth of beard, whereas he had been clean-shaven just an hour ago, and his digital watch indicates the impossible date of April 30. He is almost in hysterics and one of the soldiers has to slap him, at which point Valdés faints. One of the other soldiers, Raúl Salinas, who has been standing a few feet in back of the others, notices a strange humanoid creature behind some nearby rocks. He describes it as half animal and half human; no facial features are visible, but it seems to be wearing a helmet and is carrying a red light. Salinas is stunned to see the creature appear at several places simultaneously. He thinks that there might be several humanoids. He does not mention this to the others at the time, since they are already scared, but the others do not see the humanoid or humanoids. When Valdés wakes up he cannot remember where he has been. In 2013, Valdés, now an evangelical pastor, admits that no one on the patrol saw aliens—only that they saw something that frightened them. He claims he only left the group to go urinate. Many ufologists now feel that the Chilean government encouraged the abduction scenario to mask the presence of troops and horses in northern Chile in the event of a war with Argentina or a regional conflict. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_Cabo_Vald%C3%A9s ; http://www.ufoevidence.org/Cases/CaseSubarticle.asp?ID=823

1984 April 25 — 6:00 p.m. A woman is in her garden at Blairgowrie, Scotland, working on a tapestry when her dog leaps up and runs indoors. A ball of light appears in the air and seems to enter her body. She is blinded for a few seconds but feels calm. A white cloud rises from her head and hovers above some bushes. It blinks twice and climbs into the sky toward a large silvery object shaped like a house key. The cloud moves along the length of the key, flashing and lighting up bits in turn. She calls her son, who arrives just as the UFO sways from side to side and vanishes in a sudden pink flash.

1984 April 25 — 9:55 p.m. Three witnesses driving on American Canyon Road south of Napa, California, see a huge triangular object the size of a football field hovering 100 feet above the road. They drive beneath it, and after 5 minutes the object moves out of sight. https://vdocuments.mx/mufon-ufo-journal-1984-5-6-mayjune.html

2013 April 25 — 9:20 p.m. An unknown object flying at a low altitude passes directly above the Rafael Hernández Airport runway in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, causing the delayed departure of a commercial aircraft. No transponder signal or other communication from the object alerts the airport tower, creating a dangerous situation with departures and arrivals. The pilots of an airborne US Customs and Border Protection De Havilland Canada Dash 8 turboprop aircraft see a pinkish or reddish light over the ocean in their vicinity, so they film the object on infrared thermal video. The object is 3–5 feet in length and its speed varies from 40 to 120 mph. The 3-minute footage shows the flight of an object that crosses into northwestern Puerto Rico from the Atlantic Ocean, traverses the space over the airport twice, then returns to the Atlantic where it apparently submerges. Its speed through the water reaches a high of 95 mph. Chemist Robert Powell and five other members of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies later obtain the video and subject it to a thorough analysis. Their conclusion in 2018 is that the video is the “best documentation of an unknown aerial and submerged nautical object exhibiting advanced technology” that the authors have seen. http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/299316_9a12b53f67554a008c32d48eff9be5cd.pdf

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.”

1759 April 27 — 4:00 p.m. Following a clap of thunder, a flat, pale object is seen “dancing” in the sky over Longdon, Somerset, UK. It is joined by three similar objects, all of which move from west to east for 30 seconds and disappear in a cloud.

1948 April 27–28 — Physicist Joseph Kaplan, a member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, visits the Kirtland AFB Office of Special Investigations, AEC’s Sandia Base, and Los Alamos, under orders from Theodore Von Kármán, chairman of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, to review UFO reports and investigations from the area. Kaplan and Lincoln LaPaz meet with security personnel at Los Alamos. Kaplan reports that “these occurrences relate to the National Defense of the United States” and should be investigated scientifically.”

1949 April 27 — Rees, Kaplan, and LaPaz brief Armed Forces Special Weapons Project personnel at Sandia Base. LaPaz outlines plans for a network of visual, photographic, spectrographic, and radar observations covering Los Alamos, Sandia, and White Sands. Scientist William D. Crozier of the New Mexico School of Mines offers to handle air sampling. Rees urges that the Killeen Base in Texas be included. Kaplan, who says the project is “of extreme importance” because “these occurrences relate to the National Defense of the United States,” recommends LaPaz to handle the project. http://www.nicap.org/nmexico/lightphen3.htm ; http://www.nicap.org/docs/490512_AFOSI_Rees_%20memo_o%20Kaplan_visit.pdf ; https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1949-Jan-Jun-SN.pdf 

1949 April 27 — USAF Directorate of Intelligence briefs the USAF Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations on UFOs. “Investigations continue in an effort to find definite explanations for the many unidentified aerial objects which have been reported during the past two years.” http://www.nicap.org/docs/project1947.com_fig_airbrf.pdf 

1949 April 27 — USAF Director of Intelligence Charles Cabell sends a report on “Unidentified Aerial Objects: The Problem” to the Joint Intelligence Committee. It summarizes the history of Project Sign up to its redesignation as Grudge and adds an appendix on “Unidentified Aerial Objects: Fact and Discussion,” which is basically a short version of the sanitized February 11 Sign report, with some green fireball information added. It recommends sending reports of unidentified “light phenomena” to the scientific community and reports of “atomic powered craft of unusual design” to the AEC. It concludes that “There are numerous reports from reliable and competent observers for which a conclusive explanation has not been made” and that some “involve configurations and described performance which might conceivably represent an advanced aerodynamical development. A few unexplained incidents surpass these limits of credulity. It is unlikely that a foreign power would expose a superior aerial weapon by a prolonged ineffectual penetration of the United States.” This essentially resurrects the ETH as a possibility, without clearly stating it. http://www.nicap.org/dean/JIC_report/project1947.com_fig_jic.pdf ; http://www.cufos.org/pdfs/IUR_article1.pdf 

1949 April 27 — A 22-page memorandum for the press (629-49) on “Project Saucer” is released by the Pentagon Office of Public Information, scheduled deliberately to coincide with part one of Shalett’s article in the Saturday Evening Post. The writer is unknown, but it is more pro-ETH than the current Project Grudge mentality, listing several solid and dramatic cases. It concludes: “The ‘saucers’ are not a joke. Neither are they a cause for alarm to the population.” The discrepancy between Shalett’s mostly dismissive tone and the positivity of the Project Saucer statement causes Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe to wonder if there is a major disagreement about UFOs within the Air Force. http://www.nicap.org/docs/SaucerRptApr1949.pdf 

1949 April 27 — 9:20 p.m. Two Army patrolmen southeast of Killeen Base, Texas, see a blinking violet light no more than 1.5 inches in diameter and only 10–12 feet from them, 6–7 feet above the ground. During the 60-second observation, the light passes through the branches of a tree. At 9:25 p.m., 2 miles away, four Army soldiers see a 4-inch light with a 2–4-inch metallic cone attached to the back. It silently approaches them in a level flight at 60–70 mph. It disappears to the southwest at a distance of 150 feet. At about 9:37 p.m., a 2-inch-wide white light appears 100 feet away to the northwest, flying in a zig-zag fashion in a level path 6 feet above the ground. It vanishes abruptly. A third light shows up at 9:39 p.m. in the west-southwest. http://www.nicap.org/490427camphood_dir.htm

1950 April 27 — While preparing for an MX-776A Shrike air-to-ground missile test at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Charles Riggs, a member of the Project Twinkle cinetheodolite camera crew supplied by Land-Air Inc., sees, tracks, and manages to film four high-flying objects streaking across the sky. Another station also tracks the objects. The photos show only a smudgy dark object, but the triangulation results in a calculation by mathematician Wilbur L. Mitchell and Capt. Perry Bryant of the objects’ size as 30 feet in diameter and 150,000 feet in altitude. http://www.nicap.org/500427whitesands_dir.htm ; https://sohp.us/Sign-Historical-Group-Workshop-Proceedings.pdf 

1950April 27 — 8:25 p.m. TWA Flight 117 pilot Capt. Robert Adickes and Flight Officer Robert F. Manning are flying near Goshen, Indiana, when they see a bright-red disc-shaped UFO behind their DC-3. It overtakes the plane in about 2 minutes. Stewardess Gloria Henshaw and 11 passengers (including Boeing engineers C. H. Jenkins and Dean C. Bourland and executives E. J. Fitzgerald and S. N. Miller) also see the object. It veers off at 400 mph, drops down to 1,500 feet, and disappears. http://www.nicap.org/500427goshen_dir.htm

1967 April 27 — 9:00 p.m. Clifton N. Crowder, manager of the Mobil Chemical Company warehouse in South Hill, Virginia, leaves the warehouse and starts home. About 50–75 yards down a narrow asphalt highway his headlights fall on an object 400 feet away on the road ahead. It is pewter-colored, shaped like a storage tank, about 12 feet in diameter, and 15–16 feet high. It is standing on legs about 3–3.5 feet long. He switches to his bright lights and the object belches a white burst of flame from the bottom and ascends rapidly. Meanwhile, the road is on fire. After it dies out, Crowder drives to South Hill and contacts police. They return and find a kidney-shaped black spot on the road, about 3 feet wide at the widest point. Two spike holes about 6 inches apart are also found, as well as four marks where the landing gear were, about 11–12 feet apart.

1968 April 27 — The May 14 issue of Look magazine contains John Fuller’s article on the Low memo and the near-mutiny at the Colorado project, “Flying Saucer Fiasco.” http://www.nicap.org/fiasco.htm

1986 April 27 — J. Allen Hynek dies in Scottsdale, Arizona, from a malignant brain tumor.2014 April 27 — The crew of a F/A-18F from Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11), flying out of NAS Ocean in Virginia Beach and operating in the W-72 warning area, encounters an unknown aerial device. This report is the most spartan in its details of the three, but describes a “near mid-air collision with balloon-like object.”

2020 April 27 — The Pentagon officially releases the three videos showing UFOs that were previously released between December 2017 and March 2018 by the private company To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/pentagon-ufo-videos/index.html

1897 April 28 — 8:00 p.m. Hiram C. LaGrone hears a disturbance among his horses on his ranch at Deadwood, Texas. Stepping outside, he sees a brilliant, multicolored light approaching from the southwest. It slows, hovers, then lands in a field. LaGrone walks up and discovers five men, two of whom take rubber bags and procure water from his well. The other three tell him that this is one of five airships touring the country (and the same one that landed in Beaumont on April 19).

1949 April 28 — Some printed copies of Air Intelligence Report 100-203-79, “Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the United States,” bear this date, although it was originally released December 10, 1948. http://www.project1947.com/fig/1948air.htm

1949 April 28 — Kaplan, LaPaz, Rees, and Neef meet with security officers at Los Alamos National Laboratory to discuss green fireball observations at that facility. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1949-Jan-Jun-SN.pdf 

1949 April 28 — 5:45 p.m. Howard Hann [Hamm?], a Mr. Hubert [Huber?], and Tex Keahey see a very large, bright, sausage-shaped object travel from northeast to southwest over the rim of the Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona, over a period of 12 minutes. The object is shiny metallic and reflects the sun, apparently revolving as it moves like the “slow roll of an airplane.” There is no noise, nor is there exhaust or a vapor trail. There are no wings or engines or “protuberances of any sort.” It appears to be traveling at 300–600 mph. http://www.nicap.org/490428tucson_dir.htm

1949 April 28 — 8:30 p.m. Several security patrols at Killeen Base, Texas, report nine separate sightings of lights southeast of the base. Most change color from white to red to green. On one occasion, four lights appear together; on another, 8–10 show up in each other’s company. No debris or evidence of flares are found.

1956 April 28 — At the third Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention, contactee Dick Miller plays tape recordings allegedly made by Mon-Ka, a Martian, in which he asks Los Angeles radio stations to shut down for two minutes at 10:30 p.m. on November 7, 1956, so that Mon-Ka can speak from his spacecraft. As a publicity gimmick, two radio stations (KATY [now KYNS] of San Luis Obispo and KBIA of Los Angeles) go off the air at that time, and KTTV in Los Angeles sends up an airplane to watch for the approaching spacecraft. Nothing happens.

1964 April 28 — Early evening. A round, whitish object hovers then darts away over Anthony, New Mexico. State policeman Raúl Arteche sees it moving west over the Port of Entry near El Paso, Texas. He says it looks like the object Lonnie Zamora saw.

1964 April 28 — Early morning. Don Adams is driving in Edgewood, New Mexico, when his car stalls. He sees a glowing, greenish object 100 feet overhead and fires six rounds.1967 April 28 — Condon recommends J. Allen Hynek and Richard H. Hall to Encyclopedia Britannica as excellent persons to write UFO entries.

1967 April 28 — 11:30 a.m. Brian F. Jenkins and seven other coast guards at Brixham, Devon, UK, watch a huge, cone-shaped object through 25x binoculars mounted on a tripod. The object is hovering at 15,000 feet and seems to be revolving. Jenkins says the cone is pointing down, and the object seems made of glass or highly polished metal: “Near the bottom there was a triangular-shaped opening or door with a white rim on the top that reflected a lot of sunlight. The bottom was crinkled, very white, and seemed to consist of strips of metal hanging down.” It drifts to the northwest, rising to 22,000 feet and 8 miles away. At 12:40 p.m., a jet aircraft approaches it, flies above it, passes it, turns, and approaches it from below before it disappears from sight. Possible balloon.

1949 April 29 — The April 30 issue of the Saturday Evening Post with part one of Sidney Shalett’s “What You Can Believe about Flying Saucers” hits the newsstands. The USAF Public Relations Office has cooperated fully with Shalett, who sets out a fairly even-handed introduction to the phenomenon. http://www.nicap.org/articles/ShalettsArticle1.pdf 

1952 April 29 — Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter issues Air Force Letter 200-5, which directs intelligence officers at every base to report UFOs immediately to ATIC and all major USAF commands. It enables Project Blue Book staff to communicate directly with any Air Force base without going through the normal chain of command, and provides for wire transmission of reports to ATIC, followed with details via air mail. AFL 200-5 is modified by AFR 200-2 in 1953. http://www.noufors.com/Documents/AFL_200-5.pdf ; Ruppelt 132–133; http://www.nicap.org/afl2005.htm

1952 April 29 — An Air Force memorandum written to justify a trip by Lt. Col. E. Sterling and Stefan Possony to Europe mentions that their work for USAF Intelligence’s “Special Study Group” is to evaluate Soviet advanced aerial delivery systems, as well as to shed “some much needed light” on the “vexing ‘flying saucer’ problem.” It adds that the “Air Force cannot assume that flying saucers are of non-terrestrial origin, and hence, they could be Soviet.” 

1954  April 29 — 10:11 p.m. An unidentified illuminated object is seen above the Second Army Radio Station, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, by the supervisor radio operator and two coworkers, Cpl Flath and Pfc. Hough. Described as round, the color of the sun, and 3–4 times the size of a star, the UFO appears in the southwest, blinking on and off. As it reaches the station, it stops blinking and disappears by going straight up. The sighting lasts 7 minutes. https://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1954-Jan-May.pdf

1977 April 29 — 11:45 p.m. A woman and her daughter are driving north of Oxford, Ohio, when a white light begins pacing their car on the left about 180 feet away. They speed up and pass it after 3 minutes. The mother only sees a light, but the daughter perceives a “saucer with a vertical cone.”

1978 April 29 — Night. Ten persons call the Aurora, Illinois, police department to report a UFO. One couple believes they have had a close encounter with the object, which they describe as a domed disc the size of a football field. The police alert the Center for UFO Studies and Allan Hendry interviews some of the witnesses. He learns that some connect TV interference and power failures with the UFO’s appearance. An 11-year-old boy is so frightened that he hides behind the back seat of the family car. However, Hendry identifies the source of the sighting as an advertising plane owned and operated by a Chicago firm.

2013 April 29–May 3 — Stephen Bassett’s Paradigm Research Group holds a Citizens Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Forty UFO researchers, along with political and military representatives (Robert Salas, Paul Hellyer, Nick Pope), testify to six former members of the US Congress: Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Merrill Cook, Lynn Woolsey, Darlene Hooley, Roscoe Bartlett, and Mike Gravel. The witnesses speak for 30 hours over five days. The panel reaches the conclusion that the the US government and other governments need to share what is known about UFO sightings and the United Nations should take the subject of UFOs seriously. http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_9830.shtml

1949 April 30 — Hynek turns in his astronomical analysis of Sign’s 237 cases. His contract with Sign is over.

1952 April 30 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #6. https://www.slideshare.net/alexpituba/projects-grudge-and-bluebook-reports-1-12-nicap

1960 April 30 — George Adamski appears on Long John Nebel’s late-night TV show on WOR. https://www.the-adamski-case.nl/his-life/final-years/ ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jclUlNXAhA

1962 April 30 — Just before 10:00 a.m. During a free-flight test (Flight 52) of the X-15 to a height of 246,700 feet (46.7 miles) by NASA pilot Joseph A. Walker from Edwards AFB, California, to Ely, Nevada, the instruments photograph 5–6 cylindrical objects. No visual confirmation. On May 11, at NASA’s Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space in Seattle, Walker mentions the objects photographed (and perhaps shows the slides; it is not mentioned in the proceedings). NICAP is unable to obtain the photos. NASA claims the objects are ice flaking off the aircraft (“fireflies”). They are described by a NASA spokesman as “barbell shaped, bright-orange in color, and passing in groups up to six behind the X-15.” Opinion ranges from “definitely something up there,” to “film spots,” to “sun rays on the lens.” http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2014/01/fireflies.html Jacobsen implies it was the A-12 test the same day.

1963 April 30 — Adamski arrives in Copenhagen for another scheduled lecture tour of Europe at the invitation of Hans C. Petersen, He attends the Skandinavisk UFO Information Congress in Frederica, Denmark. (https://www.the-adamski-case.nl/his-life/final-years/)

1964 April 30 — A B-57 pilot at Holloman AFB, Alamogordo, New Mexico, radios to the control tower that he is watching an egg-shaped, white UFO with markings that match the Socorro object. He continues to watch it as it lands at the base. Coral and Jim Lorenzen insist they heard the story from a reliable source. In addition, a ham radio operator claims to have heard the exchange between the pilot and control tower. Holloman AFB denies the incident occurred. Shortly afterward, an airman walks into a clothing store in Alamogordo and spins an incredible story of a UFO parked in a hangar under heavy guard at Holloman. A couple days later, he returns to the store and denies everything. http://www.nicap.org/reports/640515whitesands_report2.htm1976

April 30–May 1 — The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal is launched at a specially convened conference of the American Humanist Association. Paul Kurtz, James Randi, Martin Gardner, and Ray Hyman take seats on the executive board. The committee will be funded with donations and sales of their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Skeptical_Inquiry 

1976 April 30–May 2 — The Center for UFO Studies holds its first conference on UFO research at the Lincolnwood (Ill.) Hyatt House. The proceedings are published later in the year, featuring papers on sighting waves, exosociology, and humanoid reports. Presenters include Ted Bloecher, Ann Druffel, Loren Gross, Richard H. Hall, David M. Jacobs, James McCampbell, David Saunders, Leo Sprinkle, David Webb, and Ray Stanford.