First Modern UFO Reports
From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)
Before "flying saucers" and "UFO"s were coined as a term, there were a number of reports of strange, unidentified aerial phenomena from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. These include:
- On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that John Martin, a local farmer, the previous day had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed," and also used the word "saucer" in describing it. [1] This would be the first known use of the word "saucer" to describe an unidentified flying object.
- On November 17, 1882, astronomer E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory described in the Observatory Reports "a strange celestial visitor" that was "disc-shaped," "torpedo-shaped," or "spindle-shaped." It was said to be very different in characteristics from a meteor fireball. Years later, Maunder wrote it looked exactly like the new Zeppelin dirigibles. The strange object was also seen by several other European astronomers. [2]
- In the late nineteenth century, sightings of large airships, often using searchlights, were sometimes conflated with extraterrestrial visitors. One of the most famous early reports was an 1897 crash of an airship of unknown origin in Aurora, Texas. Local news reported the recovery of the body of a "Martian pilot" in the crash.
- On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the U.S.S. Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and "soared" above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after 2 to 3 minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns. [3] [4]
- The so-called Fátima incident or "The Miracle of the Sun," witnessed by tens of thousands in Fátima, Portugal on October 13, 1917, is believed by some researchers to actually be a UFO event.
- Between 1932 and 1937, there were hundreds of reports of large "ghost planes" over the Scandinavian nations, often reported using powerful searchlights and accompanied by multi-colored lights at much higher altitudes.
- In both the European and Japanese aerial theatres during World War II, "Foo-fighters" (balls of light and other shapes that followed aircraft) were reported by both Allied and Axis pilots.
- On February 25, 1942, an unidentified craft was detected over the California region. The craft stayed aloft despite taking at least 20 minutes worth of flak from ground batteries. The incident later became known as the Battle of Los Angeles, or the West coast air raid.
- In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as "Russian hail," and later as "ghost rockets," because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. This was subsequently shown not to be the case, and the phenomenon remains unexplained. Over 200 were tracked on radar and deemed to be "real physical objects" by the Swedish military. A significant fraction of the remainder were thought to be misperceptions of natural phenomena, such as meteors.
