Top 20 UFOs Caught on Camera

Set against the backdrop of Tientsin, Hopeh Province, China, this photo can be traced back to at least 1942, although some argue that it was actually snapped in 1911. Either way, Japanese student Masujiro Kiru stumbled upon it in his father’s photo album during World War II. The photo was reportedly taken by an American serviceman with several onlookers gazing up at the flying saucer-like object above. Of course, many have argued that it was a bird, a streetlight, or even a hat. We guess you could say that it’s all up in the air.

In late November 1989, Belgium started receiving numerous reports of a UFO. Various people described the UFO as a giant triangle with a flat surface and lights below, and the reports kept coming well into early 1990, reaching a crescendo in late March of that year. When a UFO was picked up on radar one night, two Air Force pilots investigated, coming up empty handed. While they didn’t see anything, 143 other individuals supposedly did. For over twenty years, ufological group SOBEPS claimed the photo was authentic; but the photographer eventually revealed that it was a hoax. Writer Marc Hallet attributed the Belgian UFO Wave to the media and SOBEPS spreading misinformation, causing a mass delusion.

In August 2014, social media was bombarded with photos of a UFO hovering over Houston, Texas. Taken from different spots around the area, the UFO seemingly consisted of several lights forming a ring. At the center, you can make out a single orb, as if the other circular lights are revolving around it. The UFO almost shares a resemblance to Saturn, although some experts have theorized that there’s nothing otherworldly about it. Fletcher Gray of the Mutual UFO Network deduced that it likely stemmed from nearby highway lights. It’s also worth noting that Houston endured a thunder and lightning storm that night, which may have contributed. Still, how fitting would it be if alien life visited Space City?

In 2007, a Turkish night guard named Yalcin Yalman, working in Istanbul’s holiday village, noticed strange activity in the sky and started filming. He kept his eyes on the skies throughout the next few years, recording a treasure trove of UFO footage. The UFO that repeatedly pops up in these videos certainly looks like a spacecraft, even calling to mind the ones from “War of the Worlds”. Upon further inspection, some claim that you can spot two alien heads peeping out of what appears to be a window or a door. Our eyes may be deceiving us, but ufologist Nick Pope described Yalman’s findings as “a turning point for Turkish UFO studies,” adding, “The authorities can no longer turn a blind eye to this phenomenon.”

Ever since the Roswell UFO incident in 1947, New Mexico has been a hot spot for alleged alien activity. Almost ten years after the historic sighting, New Mexico local Ella Louise Fortune had another close encounter of sorts. Cruising down Highway 54 on October 16, 1957, the nurse took a photo of a bright white flying disk. The UFO reportedly hovered around the Holloman Air Development Center for fifteen minutes. That said, the fact this occurred near an Air Force base might provide a logical explanation. Even after the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization studied the imagery, though, nobody could come up with a conclusive answer.

In August 1951, three Texas Technological College professors noticed somewhere between 20 and 30 lights shimmering in the sky. Five days later, Texas Tech freshman Carl Hart, Jr. gazed out his bedroom window to find a cluster of lights forming a V shape. Hart managed to take five photos of the lights, getting them published in various newspapers and Life magazine. This caught the attention of the Air Force, which launched an investigation. At first, they believed the Lubbock Lights were really plovers! The Air Force eventually announced that it wasn’t a bird or a spaceship, but an “easily explainable natural phenomenon” … without unveiling what the phenomenon actually was. Well, that’s not suspicious at all...

As if being the site of infamous witch trials wasn’t bad enough, Salem was also invaded by aliens at one point! Okay, maybe we’re exaggerating just a tad, but this was definitely a weird occurrence. On August 3, 1952, a U.S. coast guard looked outside a lab to find four large, vibrant lights up above. The 21-year-old guard snapped a photo through a window, and people have been making calculated guesses as to the exact nature of these objects ever since. Flying saucers? A witch’s spell? Lamplights? In any case, Salem just got even eerier.

In 2016, a video surfaced on YouTube from NASA’s live feed of the International Space Station, seemingly showing an object making atmospheric entry. The feed was then suspiciously cut off, although NASA claims that this was due to technical difficulties and the object was likely debris or lights from Earth. However, a subsequent video from the same feed showed what appeared to be a similar object departing Earth, followed by a bright, golden beam of light. This wouldn’t be the last time that conspiracy theorists gravitated towards the ISS. In 2020, the feed captured another object moving over Earth. It was later reported that this was a retired communications component being jettisoned, although we’re definitely keeping a close watch on the ISS.

Launched on September 12, 1991, the STS-48 mission’s goal was to deploy satellites from the Space Shuttle Discovery. In UFO circles, though, the mission is best-remembered for footage captured on September 15. While not easy to make out, the video shows objects zooming by and bright lights flashing in Earth’s orbit. According to NASA, these were ice particles responding to the engine jets. Astronomer Phil Plait has backed up these claims, but we gotta admit, the believer in us likes to wonder. It’s not the only Space Shuttle mission to have caught UFOlogists' eyes. In 1996, footage from STS-75 seemed to show objects buzzing around the broken tether of a drifting satellite. Debris . . . or curious visitors?

It’s only fitting that the Kaikoura lights surfaced the year after “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” hit theaters. New Zealand’s Kaikoura mountain ranges caught the media’s attention on December 21, 1978, when a cargo plane crew observed house-sized lights flashing around the aircraft for several minutes. Air traffic control specialists from Wellington tracked the lights, which an Australian television crew then recorded in color. The TV crew came along for the cargo plane’s next flight from Wellington back to Christchurch. Shortly after takeoff, the crew captured footage of a giant, illuminated orb. New Zealand’s Ministry of Defence has provided several possible explanations, including lights from boats, cars, or Venus; but alternative explanations abound.

The Black Knight satellite remains one of the most famous conspiracy theories in UFO circles. It’s said that this mysterious satellite has been orbiting Earth for 13,000 years. In 1954, UFO investigator Donald Keyhoe claimed that the Air Force had discovered two artificial satellites - despite the fact that such technology didn’t exist at the time. It’d be another three years until we launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Regardless, various newspapers like the St. Louis Post Dispatch and San Francisco Examiner picked up the story. The Black Knight regained interest in 1998, when NASA released this photo from the STS-88 mission. While most would agree that it was space debris, others aren’t letting go of their Black Knight theory.

The Phoenix Lights have inspired a documentary and multiple horror movies, but nobody can say for sure what happened on March 13, 1997. This incident can be broken into two phases. First, a v-shape formation was seen flying over Phoenix, although little footage exists of this event and the footage we have is low quality. There’s more documentation of the second event, which saw five circular lights floating in the night sky. Even with numerous photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts, though, a giant question mark continues to hover over Phoenix. While the U.S. Air Force chalked the lights up to military flares, many have argued against these claims and even Arizona governor Fife Symington described what he saw as “otherworldly.”

A little speck can certainly stir up a lot of speculation. In 2017, the Chilean government agency tasked with examining UFO sightings released footage of a flying object that defied explanation. The footage, which had been classified for almost three years, was taken by the Chilean Navy from a helicopter during the day. The pilot failed to make contact with the object, which moved like another helicopter. Even more curious, the object didn’t pop up on air traffic control radar. Most mysterious of all, the UFO released an unknown substance, and vanished into the sky. Experts were stumped, with the agency’s director saying: “We do not know what it was, but we do not know what it was not”. Well, that’s . . . reassuring.

This incident took place in February 1942, three months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Receiving word of another possible attack, air raid sirens went off around Los Angeles County and the area endured a blackout. Throughout the night, 1,400 shells were fired into the air. Five people died as a result and property damage was significant. Although it reportedly turned out to be a false alarm, the L.A. Times published a photo of the air raid with searchlights directed at what looked like a spaceship. While the photo was touched up, this didn’t stop ufologists from holding it up as evidence. The theory inspired the 2011 film “Battle: Los Angeles”.

On March 5, 2004, the Mexican Air Force recorded footage of eleven UFOs at 11,500 feet above southern Campeche state. Surrounding a military jet, these lights were detected during a routine search for drug-traffickers. Jets pursued the UFOs, but eventually gave up and the objects disappeared. While some believe this was the work of flares, explanations also range from ball lightning to a meteorite deteriorating in Earth’s atmosphere. Whatever these objects were, infrared equipment operator Lt. Mario Adrian Vazquez is convinced that they were “completely real.” Pilot Maj. Magdaleno Castanon went so far as suggesting that the UFOs knew they were being pursued.

Even by UFO standards, this one is perplexing. It all started in April 2013 at the Rafael Hernández Airport, located in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. A video was taken of an unknown object swiftly flying over land and then seeming to submerge underwater. After doing so multiple times, the object appears to split in two. Supposedly, the US Department of Homeland Security tried to keep this under wraps, but the video was eventually leaked by an anonymous whistleblower. A group known as the Scientific Coalition for Ufology was responsible for posting the footage online. According to the SCU website, it “exhibits characteristics that cannot be explained by any known aircraft or natural phenomenon.”

In 1950, Evelyn Trent noticed an ominous object levitating around her family’s farm in McMinnville, Oregon. She alerted her husband Paul, who took a couple of photographs before the UFO departed west. In another account they gave, Evelyn and Paul both saw the UFO at the same time in their backyard. Either way, the farming couples’ pictures eventually made their way into Life magazine and other publications, igniting one of the most heated debates in UFO history. Physicist Bruce Maccabee believes that the UFO in the photos was “real” and “physical.” Non-believers like Philip J. Klass and Robert Sheaffer, meanwhile, say the photos were faked. The Condon Committee’s investigation fell somewhere in between. Whatever you think, few UFO sightings have inspired this much analysis.

Our top three UFO sightings are actually part of a package, although each has a distinctive signature. Filmed by the US Navy, and published online in the late 2010s, they were declassified and officially released by the Pentagon in 2020. Released under the filename “Go Fast”, this video was taken over the East Coast in January 2015 by an F/A-18F Super Hornet during the USS Theodore Roosevelt UFO incidents. The footage was captured using Raytheon’s Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared pod, or ATFLIR. Just as entertaining as the footage itself is the fighter pilots’ comments. While the audio is somewhat hard to understand, you can certainly grasp the astonishment they experienced while watching the object.

Also released by the Pentagon, “FLIR1” was filmed on November 14, 2004, around the San Diego coastline. Like “Go Fast,” this video was also taken aboard a Super Hornet using ATFLIR. The footage was captured during the USS Nimitz UFO incident, in which the Navy had a radar-visual encounter. The video centers on a dark, round object that suddenly moves slightly to the left. After lingering a little while longer, the object quickly darts even further until it’s completely out of sight. Commander David Fravor can’t tell you exactly what the object was, but he recalls that it “accelerated like nothing [he’d] ever seen.”

Rounding out this trio of UFO videos is “Gimbal,” which the Navy captured the same year as “Go Fast.” Often getting mixed up with the USS Nimitz UFO incident, this sighting actually took place aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt by the coast of Florida. Out of the three videos, the object in “Gimbal” arguably looks the most like a flying saucer. Before you jump to any conclusions, skeptical investigator Mick West has called all three of these sightings into question, believing the “Gimbal” object is just a plane. Honestly, the world may never know. If you think this is all of the UFO information that the government has been sitting on, former U.S. Senator Harry Reid claims that it “only scratches the surface.”