Top 10 UFO Incidents So Crazy The Government ACTUALLY Responded

In 2023, this footage from the previous year was released to the public by none other than NASA. In it, you can clearly see an object, described by officials as a “metallic orb” flying through the air during a reconnaissance mission somewhere in the Middle East. The footage was captured by an MQ-9 Reaper drone and was subsequently investigated by the Pentagon, which has been unable to explain what it might be. It’s not the only time an object like this has been seen, either; others have been spotted, which has led some to speculate that it might be some kind of top-secret human craft – though we’re still none the wiser as to how it might work.

In 2018, two completely separate commercial pilots said they saw a UFO in the skies over Arizona while flying. A pilot for Learjet was so alarmed by what he saw that he contacted air traffic control in nearby New Mexico, though nothing had been spotted on radar. And then, after being warned to keep an eye out, an American Airlines pilot also saw an object, which he described as passing over the airplane “at least two to three thousand feet” above him. Authorities quickly got involved and released a statement that it was almost certainly a weather balloon, but that explanation hasn’t washed with the pilots, who say it was something else entirely.

Back in 1951, when the UFO craze was only just beginning to take hold in modern America, there was a widely publicized sighting down in Texas. Dozens of strange lights were seen flying overhead, which experienced scientists decided couldn’t have been a meteor shower. The event was widely reported on and eventually investigated by Project Blue Book, the USAF’s top secret programme to research UFO sightings. There was an extensive investigation that deduced the lights were simply large birds flying under Lubbock’s streetlamps, but many remain unconvinced to this day – perhaps because the investigation refused to explain what its source for their theory really said.

More Arizona, an extremely well known and well documented UFO encounter happened there in 1997. A series of bright lights were seen across Arizona and even Nevada flying in formation. There was an additional triangular object that was reported on as well, though the lights and the object could have been one and the same. But what were these anomalous UFOs? Well, the US military was blamed in this case, with the USAF coming out to explain that it was a test flight and training exercise, and even explaining that the pilots had supposedly been dropping flares. The Governor of Arizona even got involved, though he didn’t take the idea that aliens could be behind the incident seriously.

Navy jet pilots captured this footage of what’s been described as a “tic-tac” UFO back in 2004, but the footage wasn’t released until 2020, sixteen years later. It was spotted by numerous pilots and given that nickname because it really did look like a Tic Tac, but it flew erratically and extremely quickly through the air. The footage is striking, to say the least, though some officials thought that it wasn’t being taken seriously enough. One pilot said that the UFOs could be a foreign incursion, made more worrying by them showing up in restricted airspaces. The Pentagon has started to take more of an interest in UFOs, perhaps due to these sightings.

Back in 1969, eight years before he would become the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter spotted a UFO in Georgia. He didn’t have much of a political career at this point, and claimed that he and various witnesses saw a “bright white object” in the sky that then changed color and rapidly changed directions – all hallmarks of UFO sightings. A few years later and Carter was Governor of Georgia, at which point he made a statement to investigators. Carter even promised to disclose America’s knowledge of UFOs if elected president in the 70s – and though he was elected, he went back on this particular pledge.

Canada’s most famous UFO incident, also in 1969 a man named Stefan Michalak had a strange encounter at Falcon Lake in Manitoba. He saw multiple UFOs in the sky and then one opened a door, and he said he heard American voices from within. Eventually he was struck by a heat ray, and when he later turned up at hospital, his strange injuries were documented in great detail. Interestingly, Machalak never blamed extra-terrestrials, instead believing he’d encountered a top-secret American aircraft and that it had somehow given him radiation sickness with the heat ray. Regardless, the sighting was extensively investigated by both the Royal Canadian Air Force and the USAF.

From Canada to the UK, the Rendlesham Forest Incident is often dubbed “Britain’s Roswell”. In 1980, USAF personnel stationed abroad at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk saw the lights of an unidentified object land in the nearby forest. They went to investigate and found what could be described as an alien spacecraft, though it later disappeared and left mysterious burn marks behind. Because the witnesses were experienced airmen, the incident was taken very seriously, and it was even reported to the UK’s Ministry of Defence and investigated by the police – though not in as much detail as anyone would have liked.

In 1952, there was an unprecedented wave of UFO sightings in Washington D.C., centered around Washington National Airport. Multiple objects appeared on radar and overhead, spotted not just by civilians but by many pilots and highly trained officials who would be able to identify aircraft in the sky. Some thought the strange lights were meteors and a media frenzy began. The situation was so serious, with others believing it was a Soviet plot to create mass hysteria in America, that President Truman himself ordered it investigated. The Air Force and the CIA got involved, and to this day the event hasn’t been fully explained.

Yes, though it’s been thoroughly debunked in recent years, the government was still deeply involved with Roswell from start to finish. Initially written off as a simple weather balloon crash when it happened in ’47, Roswell eventually took on a life of its own in ufology circles because of how quickly the authorities swept in to cover it all up. We now know that the reason it was covered up is because the balloon was part of a classified mission to try and detect Soviet nuclear bomb tests, and the US didn’t want this getting out at the time because the Cold War was just beginning. But Roswell remains the most famous close encounter in history, nonetheless.