UFO Timeline

This site declares that UFO's are "no contemporary phenomenon" and lists several incidents from the times of Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and Christopher Columbus.

Below is a more contemporary timeline starting in 1860 and coming up to present day.

July 13, 1860	A pale blue light engulfs the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Residents look up into the evening sky to see its source: a 200-foot-long something streaking along on a level course 100 feet above. Trailing behind it at 100-foot intervals cruised three "very red and glowing balls." A fourth abruptly joined the other three after shooting out from the rear of the main object, which was "giving off sparkles after the manner of a rocket." The lead object turned toward the southeast, passed over the Delaware River, and then headed straight east until lost from view. The incident -- reported in the Wilmington Tribune, July 30, 1860 -- lasted one minute.
Throughout the 1850’s and 1860’s	Settlers in Nebraska repeatedly view “elongated mechanical structures” in the sky that resembled “luminous serpents.” A Nebraska folk ballad reported one such sighting: ‘Twas on a dark night in '66/ When we was layin' steel/ We seen a flyin' engine/ Without no wing or wheel/ It came a-roarin' in the sky/ With lights along the side/ And scales like a serpent's hide. A virtually identical sighting was reported in a Chilean newspaper in April 1868. "On its body, elongated like a serpent," a witness declared, "we could only see brilliant scales, which clashed together with a metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in flight."
April 16, 1897	April 16, 1897: A “cigar-shaped object” crashes into a windmill in Aurora, TX (located just outside of Fort Worth). Some report an alien survivor was found after the crash, while other townsfolk claim to have found the alien’s body and given it a Christian burial.
February 25, 1942	Battle of Los Angeles incident. One or more objects appear above the West Coast. One of them hovers above L.A. for 30 minutes while anti-aircraft batteries are continuously firing on it. The object does not seem to be affected by it and moves on.
Summer 1946	Extremely fast red, green, white, blue, and yellow balls of light with fiery tails appear over the skies of Europe. According to Time Magazine a Swiss Army plane collided with one of the objects, killing all 3 occupants. Other witnesses on the water or in the air claimed to have had near misses with some of these things. The press, clueless as usual, speculated that these "ghost rockets" might have been launched from the Russian controlled Peenemunde, the former great German missile base. At the end of the summer, the reports came from Denmark, Norway, Spain, Greece, French Morocco, Portugal, and Turkey. Then the phenomenon left.
June 24, 1947	The first widely reported flying saucer sighting in the U.S., which marks the beginning of a large UFO wave. The wave peaks in the first 2 weeks of July.
July 7, 1947	The Roswell incident. After having reviewed debris from the crash site, a local air base sends out a report that it has retrieved a flying saucer. When word reaches the generals in Washington the story rapidly changes to a weather balloon. Haven't seen any mainstream reports about the retrieval of bodies.
July 26, 1947	The National Security Act creates the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the first peace time civilian intelligence agency, the CIA. The Air Force, Navy, and Army, have been merged with the DOD and now fall under the leadership of the Secretary of Defense. The National Security State with all its compartmentalized secrets is born. There's been a lot of speculation in regards to the irony of the "birth of the CIA" (formerly, The Central Intelligence Group [CIG]) in September of 1947, coinciding with all the "flying saucer (UFO) activity" beginning (publicly speaking) in June of that year; starting with Kenneth Arnold's sighting near Mt Rainier, to the "crashed discs" in the area of Roswell, New Mexico. Some have claimed, that the sole purpose in creating the CIA was to investigate the "flying saucer”
Sep 24, 1947	The Majestic 12 is secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials that are responsible directly and only to the President of the United States. It was supposedly formed by a special, classified executive order of US President Harry S. Truman on September 24, 1947, upon the recommendation of Dr. Vannevar Bush and Secretary James Forrestal. The purpose of MJ 12 was to investigate UFO activity in the wake of the Roswell incident. http://www.cpsi-paranormal.org/MJ12.html
December 30, 1947	Project Sign is established after 3 months of planning. It is later followed up by Project Grudge and Blue Book.
January 1948	The "ghost rockets" are back and are first seen in countries like North Jutland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. The phenomenon spreads to all of Europe and even to South-America. This time many witnesses are reporting that the fireballs move slowly. In March 1948 the reports have died out again.
December 1948	The "Green Fireball" phenomenon appears in the United States, especially in the southwest, where all the top secret military research institutions are located. These balls are very large, pale green, noiseless, "meteors", which never seem to crash. In the latter part of 1949 the reports die out.
1950-1953	UFOs are spotted and sometimes tracked on radar in Korea.
June 1952	The National Security Agency is created in secret.
July 1952	The famous Washington sightings. During the latter part of July, UFOs are spotted and tracked on radar above Washington D.C. One picture captures them flying above the White House. The lights react intelligently to the scrambled jet fighters.
1954	The phenomenon of flying saucers and other UFOs has kept increasing since 1947. They are seen by many many pilots. Reports of them start to decrease, however, because the Air Force tends to ridicule and silence each civilian pilot that wants to speak out. In February 1954 Scripps Howard writes: "Commercial airline pilots report between five and 10 flying saucer sightings each night." In September a large noisy UFO is spotted above Rome, which is tracked on radar for 39 minutes. It stopped in mid-air for a few seconds after which it shot straight up and out of sight. Sightings were going on since 5 days at the time. 40 days later there's another sighting. It is also seen and reported by United States Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. In December, the New York Times reported: "President Eisenhower said today an Air Force official had assured him that flying saucers were not invading the earth from outer space." Guess there were a lot of sightings.
1953-1955	The UFO phenomenon kicks off in Europe, first starting in the west and then moving to the south and into the USSR. In 1955, the sightings in Europe drop off although they never disappear. In the U.S. sightings by all kinds of people, including civilian and military pilots, keep becoming more frequent. The Air Force cracks down on these reports, which results in less and less pilots reporting them.
December 1958	450 civilian pilots protest against the Air Force's policy of ridiculing pilots that report UFOs. Sightings were briefly on the rise again since the year before.
1960	National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is established.
1961	Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is established. Betty and Barney Hill claim they were abducted by a type of Grey alien. Many thousands of reports would follow within a decade.
1962	Air Force Major Robert White reports a small UFO about 40 feet away from his X-15 rocket plane's window. At the moment he is flying 59 miles above the surface of the earth.
1966	A lot of UFO activity, which included sightings in Michigan by about 150 people for several hours over a period of two nights. Twelve police officers were among the witnesses and a group of 87 coeds with their mentors had seen the round glowing object fly past their second story windows. They had been making notes for several hours and one of the things they noticed was that the object dimmed its light as soon as the police cars approached. The UFOs moved around in a swamp for most of the time, so the official explanation became "swamp gas".
1967	The first reports about cattle mutilations appear in the papers.
1969	Project Blue Book, the official UFO study of the Air Force, is finally wrapped up. As expected, it concludes that there's nothing to the UFO phenomenon. A former head of the project, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, completely disagrees with this conclusion. The same goes for J. Allen Hynek, the astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book.
1973-1975	The cattle mutilations are becoming a major issue to farmers in many U.S. states and by 1979 the phenomena has claimed the lives of over 10,000 head of cattle. Night-time helicopters are often reported in the vicinity of mutilated cattle. Helicopter pilots take alternative routes or are flying 500 feet higher in order to evade angry stockmen with big guns.
1975	In October and November a rash of helicopter-sounding, but unidentified UFOs visit nuclear missile sites in Montana, Michigan, and Maine. Sometimes tracked on radar (up to 40 minutes), but also seen by pilots and ground crews. The objects turn out to be too fast for a KC135 tanker plane (max speed is about 650 mph. Today's world record for the helicopter is 250 mph). On one occasion, when two F-106 jet fighters were scrambled the UFO temporarily disappeared. Another object that visited an AFB in Maine disappeared towards the Canadian border.
1976	UFO sighting over Tehran, Iran. The colored, fast-flashing object is tracked by Iranian ground radar, seen independently by the crew of a commercial airliner and pursued by an Iranian F4-Phantom. When it is preparing to launch an AIM9 missile at a small second UFO that came out of the larger object, the F4's electronic system goes dead, only to be reactivated again when it veers away. A report is compiled by American officials.
Early 1980's	Reports about giant underground bases where humans and aliens are working together start to appear. Questionable people like William Cooper and John Lear are some of the first individuals to research it. Even today very little is known about the subject, although there are many stories and rumors. The grey alien has become commonplace within the UFO community. The first black triangles are filmed. A few were already reported in the seventies.
1980	Mysterious crop circles were noticed in a field in southern England in 1980. The local press printed stories and photographs of them, the beginning of what eventually became a worldwide sensation. Questions were asked in parliament, eyebrows were raised, shivers ran down spines. The area was a hotbed of supposed UFO activity anyway, as strange noises, weird lights moving at night and the odd behaviour of dogs was testified down the years
Dec 25, 1980	The beginning of the evening of December 25th 1980 was the start of UFO activity at Royal Air Force Bentwaters base, which was to last three nights with countless sightings by witnesses. The third night of the activity was to be the one most intriguing and still continually disscused today
1989-1990	The black triangle phenomenon appears over Belgium. The crafts were seen by about 10,000 witnesses, at least one high quality picture was taken of them, and the Belgian Air Force acknowledged the amazing maneuvers of one of the objects they were chasing (pulled 46G when it sped away).
Jul 11, 1991	Shorty after 1:00pm, on July 11, 1991, the prophecy seemingly began to unfold. Beneath the eclipse that the Maya had labeled 'The Sixth Sun', a silvery disc shaped object hovered silently above Mexico City. 17 people, unknown to each other, in different locations of Mexico City, videotaped the ufo. This sighting became the earliest most documented mass sightings in history.
March 13, 1997	Thousands report and film UFO activity over Phoenix, AZ. United States government denies. At the same time it is reported a spy satellite, MSTI-3, goes mysteriously dead and an A 10 fighter with USAF Captain Craig Buttons disappears over Arizona, then satellite mysteriously gets “turned back on.” The North American Air Command in Colorado goes on alert.
August 6, 1997	Mexico City: The most documented photographic event of UFO activity takes place, witnessed by millions. The Mexican government acknowledges the crafts are alien. Little if any of this is reported on sanitzed American televison and papers.
Since 1997	The black triangle phenomenon appears all over the U.S. in ever increasing frequency. In March 1997 there is the famous Phoenix Lights incident.
1999	With their Cometa Report France seems to push for more openness about the UFO topic.
2001	Steven Greer comes forward with many inside witnesses. His Disclosure Project is a milestone in the UFO research community. By this time, astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell have already expressed their support for disclosure of classified UFO information. Cooper claims he has seen a formation of flying saucers in the early 1950s and that his film crew filmed a landed UFO up close. Update: Greer is a very weird guy, and although the influence of his Disclosure Project shouldn't be marginalized, be careful when it comes to the information many of his witnesses have provided - at the very least it's a very mixed bag.
2004-2005	There are many UFO sightings in Iran, which has prompted them to start up their own investigation of UFOs, together with the Russians. As usual, most sightings occur near sensitive military sites en nuclear power plants. Mexico and Brazil seem to be pushing for more openness about the UFO topic.
2005	Many UFO files from Britain have become accessible to the public. It turns out that there have been many sightings over the last decade by both radar personnel and pilots. One UFO that showed up on radar appeared to be 10 miles long and 2 miles wide. A good number of in depth and unbiased mainstream articles about UFOs have also been published in Britain in the past decade.