How Long Have UFOs Been on Earth? | Unveiled

How Long Have UFOs Been on Earth?

The last century has seen UFOs explode in popularity, from being a niche story only a few people could tell, to a universally understood phenomenon. But though the twentieth century is inextricably linked with flying saucers and alien abductions, sightings can actually be traced back much further. Even the Pentagon can’t explain away every UFO sighting on record.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: how long have UFOs been on Earth?

The modern UFO craze only really dates back to the 1940s. It was in the 40s that many landmark UFO incidents occurred, beginning with the prevalence of foo fighters in World War II and ending with the Roswell Incident. Foo fighters were spotted many times by airmen near the end of the war, with pilots seeing erratic orbs of light flying through the sky around them, performing maneuvers that should have been impossible. Though these men were under the immense stress of flying planes through warzones, foo fighters were seen so many times by so many people that they’re difficult to dismiss as some kind of psychological response. Many times since, pilots both military and commercial have reported seeing UFOs in the sky flying alongside them. In one incident in 1991, an Italian pilot believed a UFO could have actually collided with his plane, and this one was even seen on radar. Roswell, meanwhile, remains the most famous UFO incident in history.

However, the story doesn’t actually start in the 1940s at all. Some of the earliest reported sightings came from Romans over two thousand years ago. Roman authors wrote about sightings of “phantom ships”, mysterious lights, and even a silvery “flame-like body” shaped like a wine-jar that landed between two armies. One historian also described a silver rain that’s referred to nowadays as “angel hair”. These sightings could be explained as large meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, or in the case of angel hair, simple spider webs. But one historian claimed that a light not only descended down towards Earth, but flew away again too. This is obviously something a falling meteor wouldn’t be able to do.

Much further afield from the Roman Empire, you’ll find stories of ancient aliens supposedly visiting parts of Africa and South America. However, unlike the Roman sightings, these stories have been created in modern times by Westerners trying to explain away the engineering feats of indigenous cultures. Historians and archaeologists widely accept that even the most compelling evidence of UFOs in South America are nothing of the sort. The Quimbaya artifacts, for instance, are said by some to depict airplanes, but are really just stylized images of birds and insects. Ancient pyramid construction is a lot less mysterious than you may believe too, and other pieces of evidence, like the famous crystal skulls, have been debunked as hoaxes dating to the nineteenth century. When we talk about the history of UFOs, we’re looking at sightings that were accepted as strange, unexplained occurrences at the times they happened, instead of retroactively claiming other countries were host to alien visitations many years later.

Strangely though, after the Roman sightings, we don’t have any recorded UFO incidents for more than a thousand years, all the way up until the sixteenth century when they were again spotted across Europe. In 1561, residents of Nuremberg supposedly witnessed a great aerial battle. Five years later, spherical objects allegedly flew over Basel.

This time, we don’t have to wait over a millennium to read about another sighting. In 1639, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, recorded a landmark UFO sighting in his diary. Three Puritan men had reported seeing a bright light running back and forth between their boat and the village Charlestown. It’s an account that’s eerily similar to the later foo fighter reports, but with no frame of reference for planes or even hot air balloons.

Sightings haven’t only been in the western world, either. There were also early sightings in Korea and Japan. In 1803, a hollow “boat” washed ashore in Japan’s Hitachi province, with a young woman inside. She didn’t speak Japanese and held a box that she wouldn’t let anyone touch. Some drawings of the boat resemble a flying saucer.

Perhaps the first UFO scare, however, didn’t come until the 1890s. This was the time when airships were being constructed, soon to be readily available as commercial transportation before the creation of large airliners. Subsequently, in 1896, mass hysteria swept the United States, with people reporting “phantom airships” in the skies. Photo evidence of said airships has been debunked, but the idea still took hold and ran rampant throughout the US until the following year. Knowing what we know now about outer space, aliens wouldn’t be able to travel to Earth in a blimp, but the airship panic has never been conclusively explained.

That brings us back to the Second World War, when sightings went far beyond just foo fighters. One famous incident was the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles, in which US armed forces were so convinced that a surprise attack had been launched – potentially by Japan – that they started firing into the sky. However, no enemy planes ever materialized, and it’s not clear exactly what happened. This came a mere two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the official line is that nerves and stress caused the air force to overreact to a balloon. Five years later, the American West again became the site of an influential UFO sighting: the 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting over Mount Rainier in Washington. While flying alone through the Pacific Northwest, Arnold saw a formation of nine UFOs in the sky. He later described what he saw as a “saucer”, giving us the phrase “flying saucer”, which has become immortalized in pop culture as the definitive image of Unidentified Flying Objects.

The infamous Roswell UFO Incident occurred less than two weeks later. In the decades since, it’s become the quintessential UFO crash and cover-up story, as well as a hallmark of modern ufology. That’s despite the official explanation that the crashed object was a weather balloon from Project Mogul, designed to look for evidence of Soviet nuclear weapons tests.

What can’t be explained so easily is the 1952 Invasion of Washington D.C., another series of strange radar anomalies that convinced the US it was under attack. During the Invasion, many people reported seeing UFOs. They were even being detected over the White House and the Capitol on radar. The official line was that the sightings were due to stars, meteors, and a “temperature inversion”. The fervor around UFOs was so high in the late 40s and early 50s that it led to the creation of Project Blue Book, the most famous UFO investigation in history, carried out by the US Air Force for the better part of two decades.

But there may have been an even stranger extraterrestrial encounter in the US in 1952: the Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia. Though the Flatwoods Monster has often been explained away as a large owl, the famous sighting still involved a bright light in the sky, as well as the creature itself, which was said to cause nausea in those who encountered it. And this wouldn’t be the last time West Virginia found itself at the center of a potential alien invasion; the following decade, sightings of a mysterious creature now widely known as Mothman terrorized the town of Point Pleasant. These sightings culminated in the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967, for which the creature has been blamed. Mothman, though a living creature and not a spaceship, was a UFO in its own right.

We have one final part of the puzzle: the abduction narrative. Though UFOs have been reported in some form or another for centuries, alien abductions are a lot newer, and can more or less be traced to the famous abduction of Barney and Betty Hill in 1961. According to the Hills, a spacecraft descended on their vehicle as they drove through New Hampshire at night. After having vivid dreams, Betty came to believe they’d been brought on board the craft, where they met aliens. Both of the Hills underwent hypnosis, which led to more “memories”.

Fourteen years later, another abduction entered pop culture. In 1975, logger Travis Walton was supposedly picked up by a tractor beam in Arizona – although there’s evidence that the entire story was a hoax concocted for a cash reward. Walton also got a lucrative book deal and a movie adaptation from his tale.

Today, the landscape of UFO encounters is entirely different. Not only is everybody able to put their personal story online if they have one to share, but 80% of people worldwide have a smartphone. That means they’ve always got a camera to hand and it’s often a good one. Unfortunately, even with detailed, photographic evidence, most UFOs are still debunked, and very few pieces of evidence remain truly unexplained. There are of course a few exceptions - with debate continuing over the Pentagon UFO videos captured by United States Navy fighters and leaked in 2017.

We’ve been seeing strange lights in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, and in a lot of ways, are still no closer to understanding them. And that’s how long UFOs have been on Earth.