5 of the most mysterious UFO sightings ever reported

When we look up at the night sky, we can’t help but wonder what’s really out there. Most of the time, the answer is a plane or a satellite. But once in a while, people see something in the sky that doesn’t make any sense. Over the past few decades, UFO sightings across the U.S. and around the world have made headlines because no one was able to fully explain them, and in some cases, officials have even denied that they happened. So, here’s a look at some of the most mysterious UFO sightings on record.

This event happened on December 29, 1980, when three people driving through East Texas came across a massive diamond-shaped object above the treeline. Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and her young grandson Colby, spotted 23 military helicopters around it. A local police detective and his wife also reported seeing similar helicopters pass through the same stretch of sky that night.

Strangely enough, all three witnesses came down with vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, and painful blisters in the days that followed. Doctors later linked these symptoms to radiation exposure. The group sued the U.S. government for $20 million, arguing the object was part of a classified program. But the case was dismissed in 1986. Was this a government cover-up or a misunderstood aircraft? We still don’t know.

In 1980, security personnel stationed near England's Rendlesham Forest saw strange lights coming from the woods. At first, they thought a plane had gone down. Upon entering the forest to investigate, the initial patrol reported finding a glowing, metallic object moving through the forest and cutting between the trees. The next day, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt led a team back to the site, where they found small triangular marks pressed into the ground, branches snapped clean off nearby trees, and radiation readings ten times higher than normal.

In 2010, a retired Halt put it all down again, this time in a notarized affidavit, and accused both the American and British governments of covering the event up. Some still think it was a hoax. But others consider it one of the best-documented UFO encounters on record.

Between 1989 and 1990, thousands of people across Belgium reported seeing triangular-shaped objects moving slowly through the sky. Military officials even tracked the objects on radar. Then, on March 30, 1990, around 13,500 witnesses watched as two Belgian F-16 fighter jets were sent up to intercept the mysterious shapes. Over the course of an hour, the jets attempted nine radar locks. During one of them, the target reportedly dropped from 9,000 feet to 5,000 feet while accelerating from 150 mph to more than 1,100 mph in mere seconds. This speed was way beyond what aircraft of that time were capable of achieving.

Major General Wilfried de Brouwer, who oversaw the response, later wrote, "The Belgian UFO wave was exceptional, and the Air Force could not identify the nature, origin, and intentions of the reported phenomena." To this day, no one has been able to clearly explain what was detected during those years.

A Japanese cargo aircraft was crossing the sky over eastern Alaska on November 17, 1986. During the journey, the crew noticed two unidentified objects trailing the plane. When these objects peeled away, a much larger, disc-shaped craft appeared and started following the cargo aircraft. In the words of Captain Kenju Terauchi, who was commanding the flight, it was ‘twice the size of an aircraft carrier,’ a vessel he later referred to as the ‘mothership.’ Noticing this, Captain Terauchi altered course several times, but the object matched every maneuver.

All the data gathered was later brought before officials at the FBI and the CIA, who later denied the meeting ever took place. John Callahan, a former FAA executive, told the National Press Club in 2007, “At the end [of the meeting], one of the three people from the CIA said, ‘This event never happened; we were never here; we’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.’” He asked the CIA, “What do you think it was?” The reply came, “A UFO, and now they have over 30 minutes of radar to go over.”

Just after 8:15 p.m. on March 13, 1997, a massive V-shaped object featuring five glowing spheres was spotted in the sky over Phoenix. Witnesses across Arizona noticed the same slow-moving formation that evening. Roughly two hours later, the Air Force released a series of slow-falling flares during a training exercise, and news cameras that caught the flares on film led many to assume the two events were connected. Some observers suspected the flares were released deliberately.

Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington III, who witnessed the object himself, later pushed back firmly on the flare explanation, saying, "I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation." The Phoenix Lights are considered one of the most unexplained UFO events in U.S. history.