Mankind has been witnessing flying craft above their heads for as long as they’ve cared to look up at night. Unidentified flying objects pre-date history. Of course, we only really talk about modern sightings because they’re so much better documented. So it stands to reason that the world’s most famous and notable UFO experiences have happened in the past few decades.

The phenomena of widespread spacecraft viewings - and serious discussions around extraterrestrials visiting Earth - kicked off in earnest in the mid-20th century. The catalyst, perhaps, being one incredibly famous UFO incident. Starting with that very event, let’s explore some of the most famous UFO sightings from across the world...

You hardly need us to tell you about The Roswell Incident, do you? It’s almost beyond famous. 

Midway through the summer of '47, Rancher William 'Mac' Brazel found debris scattered across one of his many pastures. There was metal, large pieces of plastic and odd scraps of paper strewn everywhere. Brazel reported what looked to be aerial wreckage to local authorities. Soon, soldiers from the nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base paid him a visit and helpfully cleaned up and took away every single scrap of the debris.

The incident was downplayed by the US Air Force (they later claimed it was merely a crashed weather balloon that accounted for the wreckage), but plenty of theories soon circulated about aliens being involved. In 1995, footage of an alien autopsy from the incident was released. It was later proven to be a hoax, but the man behind it claims it was mocked up as a reconstruction of an actual ET dissection carried out after the UFO crash.

On the night of September 19th 1976, several eyewitness reports of mysterious bright lights in the skies of Tehran were called into the Iranian authorities. The country’s air force sent up an F-4 fighter jet to investigate.

As the airplane neared its target and attempted to lock on the thing using radar, the pilot discovered that his instruments had begun to malfunction. He was forced to land the plane for safety reasons. 

Iran was so concerned about the incidence that they contacted the USA, knowing that they had experience in such incidents. They were, apparently, told a number of reasons why they need not worry. The lights were probably Jupiter and/or a meteor shower and the F-4s were known for instrument failure. Did Iran buy those excuses…? Who knows.

From the heat of the New Mexico desert to the night skies of the ancient Middle Eastern city of Tehran to… a pub in Bracknell.

The Running Horse is a Hungry Horse boozer in the Berkshire town of Bracknell. In 2013, a local driving instructor who’d popped in for a pint with his girlfriend saw multiple flying discs in the sky above the pub. They weren’t discarded burgers from unhappy patrons, though. These were unidentified flying - not frying - objects.

A former Ministry of Defence UFO expert Nick Pope (not to be confused with the Burnley and England goalkeeper of the same name) claims that the photograph that the eyewitness managed to take is 'one of the best' he's ever seen.

Pope investigated reports of UFO sightings in the nineties for the UK government and said this of the sighting: "The shape and colour seems to rule out things like aircraft lights or Chinese lanterns. It would be interesting to know if anyone else saw this, or if anything unusual was tracked on radar."

It was the second UFO sighting in Bracknell in 2013. Some six months previously there were reports of an orange, red and yellow object, which was described as 'streaking across the sky for all of three seconds.'

A star is capable of sustaining life on lots of planets. Our galaxy alone contains around 300 billion stars. And there are approximately 200 billion galaxies out there. We'd suggest you 'do the math(s)', but a sum like that might blow up your calculator. 

The simple answer is this - there must be alien life out there... and the chances are, they've dropped in to see us once or twice before.

Here’s some useful - if really quite spectacularly obvious - advice... If you want to watch birds, look out your window. Better yet, head to a nature reserve. If it’s trains you fancy spotting, well, head to your nearest train station. 

Okay, but what if you think gulls are dull and you say ‘no way’ to railways? If you’re more interested in, say, UFOs (and why wouldn’t you be?), you’re gonna need to know where to look...

For your viewing convenience, we’ve put together a list of the top four British cities you need to head to for catching sight of an unidentified flying object. And here they are:

In 2009, a special branch of the Royal Air Force tasked with monitoring and analysing UFO sightings was shut down by the UK military. A recent Freedom of Information Request from this year found that in the 50-odd years of existing, the department dealt with an average of 626 ‘credible UFO sightings’ each and every year. The highest number of which came from the English capital.

London is easily the most populous city in the UK, so it should come as no surprise that it’s seen the highest number of officially reported glimpses of UFOs. There were 56 places on the list, with The Big Smoke easily sitting top with an average 54 sightings looked into each year.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that was reported: 'An object with a white and alternating red lights at an angle. Came from South East London towards Canary Wharf. It stopped in mid-air and an alternating sequence of red lights flashed at 180 degrees. Lights switched side instantly.'

London has some impressive numbers historically. But for a city with a more recent history of hosting unidentified flying objects, you’re best off heading to Merseyside.

Residents of the suburbs of Knowsley and Prescot have reported seeing mysterious lights and what look like green flying saucers in the city for some four decades now. The first major ‘flap’ (a term for a concentrated wave of sightings) was reported back in the summer of 1967.

Since then, the whole city has reported hundreds of incidents involving enormous circular objects in the sky, often accompanied by unusual buzzing sounds. There have also been many, many reports of cigar-shaped objects in the night sky, as well as emerald green spheres that shoot off above people’s heads at terrific speed.

So for consistent local UFO sightings, the city of the liver bird is a lively option.

If you don’t fancy Liverpool, there’s only one other metropolitan area in Britain to head to for consistent viewings of the same unidentified craft… Dudley.

The birthplace of none other than Lenny Henry himself, Dudley has become something of a Mecca for UFO spotters in recent years. Ufologists make the pilgrimage in order to try and spot ‘The Dudley Dorito’, a craft said to look not unlike the triangular snack from which it gets its rather unique alliterative name. 

21 year-old Dudleyite Munesh Mistry describes his brush with the nacho-shaped object like this: 

'Me and my closest friend saw an amazing fast-moving and silent craft in the shape of a triangle made up of what appeared to be three lights fly across the sky at a mind boggling speed. At first it looked like three birds flying in unison, then when seeing the triangle shape, we both were amazed and immediately discarded that explanation.'

The Ministry of Defence have received hundreds of similar calls reporting sightings down the years, but have never released any firm explanation as to what might be behind the phenomenon. 

Okay, so Bury’s not technically a city, but we’re featuring it anyway (come to think of it, neither is Dudley). More of a market town than a city, this former mill town sits just a few miles northwest of Manchester, near Rochdale and Bolton. Yet while it may only have a population of some 80,000 or so people, there’s a bizarrely high amount of UFO activity there.

A triangular craft was spotted above the area of Radcliffe in mid-2020, with images going viral all across social media. Some locals who witnessed the craft will have remembered the spate of UFO sightings there between 1997 and 2000. 

‘Bright white lights’, ‘defined masses spouting fire’ and even batches of a dozen or more ‘saucer-like objects’ have been reported over the years. Add to that ‘fireballs’ and ‘oblong shapes zooming through the sky’ and it all adds up to Bury being something of a UFO hotspot.

Good luck on your UFO-spotting mission, eh?

He’s got slightly more pressing matters to attend to now, like organising removals men and contacting his utility providers about a change of address. But back in October of 2020, US President Donald Trump was happy to take some time out of his electioneering schedule to answer some questions from the media about UFOs.

He was asked why the US Department of Defense had recently set up a special task force to look at ‘unidentified alien phenomena’. He wasn’t backwards about coming forwards with his reply, either (which you can read below).

It got us to thinking, though… How had previous presidents felt about unidentified flying objects and the potential existence of alien life? Well, let’s have a quick look, shall we? 

When the world’s most famous UFO sighting, The Roswell Incident, occurred, Harry Truman was in The White House. The US Army took what happened in New Mexico seriously. Truman, however, did not. At least not publicly, anyway. 

When he was once asked if he’d seen any flying saucers, the President replied, 'Only in the newspapers.' He then made light of the phenomena, asking the reporter quizzing him, 'Did you ever hear of the moon hoax?'

A lot of American presidents have happily chatted about flying saucers, but few have had quite the up close and personal experience as the 49th Leader of the Free World. While serving as Georgia Governor back in 1969, the former peanut farmer witnessed a UFO one evening.

'There were about twenty of us standing outside of a little restaurant. A kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn't have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar-looking light. None of us could understand what it was.'

'All of a sudden, one of the men looked up and said, "Look, over in the west!" And there was a bright light in the sky. We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don't know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden it changed color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white. And we were trying to figure out what in the world it could be, and then it receded into the distance.'

The incident had a big effect on the man. He later said that he would never dismiss any UFO sighting claim out of hand again.

'One thing's for sure,' he said. 'I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.'

He didn’t, though. Obviously.

While President Carter was only too happy to discuss his close encounter, his successor was a little cagier. It’s widely believed that Ronald Reagan witnessed a UFO while flying in an aircraft piloted by one Bill Paynter in 1974.

In ‘UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities’, a book written by ex-Army Colonel John Alexander, the author shares Paynter’s story. In it, the men saw ‘big light flying a bit behind the plane,' which then accelerated to an extremely high speed and flew off.

No official report was ever filed, but Paynter claims the following: 'We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield and all of a sudden, to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens.'

Former Arkansas Governor and red-faced saxophonist Clinton was fairly open about his position on aliens when he was top dog.

'First I had people go look at the records on Area 51 to make sure there was no alien down there,' Clinton told Jimmy Kimmel back in 2014. 'People thought that because everyone who works there has to stop about an hour away and put on special clothing and then drive in and out, and that’s because a lot of our stealth technology is made there. We know that now, but there are no aliens there.'

He wouldn’t exactly have admitted it had the place had been crawling with extraterrestrials though, would he?

There’s no record of President Barack Obama caring too much about Ufology. In fact, everything he ever said on the record about alien life was pretty flippant. But those around him during his administration took it seriously enough.

Obama once said: 'People always ask me about Roswell and the aliens and UFOs, and it turns out the stuff going on that’s top secret isn’t nearly as exciting as you expect,' he once said during an interview. 'In this day and age, it’s not as top secret as you’d think.'

Hillary Clinton, however, was less dismissive. In 2016, her presidential campaign manager John Podesta and - weirdly - Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge - had a series of meetings where they planned to work together to ‘uncover important information pertaining to UFOs and the US government’. 

Here's what President Trump said when a journalist once asked him about the existence of aliens and UFOs: 'Well, I'm going to have to check on that. I mean, I've heard about that. So I'll check on that. I'll take a good, strong look at that,' he said. Things then took a slightly more aggressive tone when the POTUS followed up with this:

'I will tell you this, we now have created a military the likes of which we've never had before, in terms of equipment. The equipment that we have, the weapons that we have… I hope to god we never have to use them.'

Now is it just us or was that the American President kind of threatening to nuke little green men...? Given how the USA could start a war in an empty car park, we wouldn’t put it past them to kick off with the entirety of space.

As the title of this article suggests, we’re about to present to you what we believe are the very weirdest UFO conspiracy theories known to man. Now, to do this, we all have to agree that there’s a sliding scale of UFO conspiracy theory weirdness. And that means accepting that some UFO conspiracy theories will have to sit at the ‘least weirdest’ end of that scale. Which is really something, given that the whole area is very, very, weird in itself.

‘Weird’ doesn’t necessarily mean impossible, though. Lots of utterly bizarre-sounding things happen all the time. Caterpillars turn into butterflies. The fella from the US Apprentice just spent four years in The White House. Is it really so incredible that extraterrestrials may have visited us…? 

The notion of UFOs being alien craft might be credible, but these ideas here? Well, they stretch credulity to near breaking point. See what you make of them: 

For a seemingly pragmatic - albeit ludicrously murderous - dictator, Adolf Hitler was strangely drawn to the occult and the paranormal. In fact, the entire Nazi Party was somewhat fascinated by the esoteric (it turns out that The Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t total fiction). One pervading conspiracy theory claims that there was a secret branch within the Nazis dedicated to creating flying saucers.

While it may seem like a fairly straightforward mission to create a new aerial weapon ship, plenty of folk believe there to be extraterrestrial trifling involved. The 1960 book ‘Le Matin des Magiciens’ (‘The Morning of the Magicians’), by writers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, suggests that Nazi Germany developed a fleet of spacecraft (with extraterrestrial intel) in order to fly into space and meet with an alien race with which it had been communicating.

After the war, the scientists working on the project - apparently - disappeared to Antarctica to continue their research. And then strolled into Hollow Earth to meet the aliens who, it turned out, were actually living inside the Earth the whole time.

Hey, it could have happened.

On February the 1st 1959, nine experienced Russian hikers died in mysterious circumstances while trekking in the Ural mountains. No formal account for their deaths has been given by Russian authorities, although causes of death have been offered up (hypothermia and ‘physical trauma’). In time, ‘The Dyatlov Pass Incident’ has become the most talked-about and speculated upon of all conspiracy theories in the country.

Lots of explanations have been offered down the years, including: extreme katabatic winds, avalanche, animal attacks, infrasound-induced panic, even some sort of nefarious military involvement has been suggested. The theory we're most interested in, however, is the one that suggests that the hikers were attacked from the sky with some sort of superweapon. By aliens.

The part of the northern Urals where the group died is known as something of a UFO hotspot. In fact, the trekkers themselves had actually reported sightings while out on their expedition.

“It’s not a coincidence that UFOs were reported by these hikers in the Ural mountains,” ufologist Philip Imbrogno, once told Ancient Aliens. “I believe that many UFO sightings come in here from a parallel reality and they come from portals. This area may be a hot portal.”

“The orbs themselves could have been a life form, the orbs themselves could have been extraterrestrial probes,” Bill Birnes, another ufologist, has suggested. “It could have been inadvertent. The orbs, in probing the area where the humans were, created collateral damage. Maybe they didn’t mean to harm human beings, maybe it wasn’t an attack as much as the power of the orbs, the energy, was so intense the humans were prematurely aged, irradiated, and suffered all kinds of lethal biological symptoms.”

No, not the electric car guy. That’s Elon Musk. Nikola Tesla was a Serbian scientist, inventor and engineer credited with tons of important discoveries and innovations, not least of which sees him as almost the de facto inventor of modern electricity. 

Anyway, famed man of science Nikola Tesla spoke to aliens. Or at least claimed to have, anyway. Back in 1899, he was working on a wireless power project in Colorado and, well, we’ll let the man himself take the rest of the story up:

"I have a deep conviction that highly intelligent beings exist on Mars," Tesla told a journo from The Albany Telegram some two and a half decades later. "While experimenting I obtained extraordinary evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extraordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1-2-3-4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal."

Tesla never showed anyone his ‘extraordinary evidence’, however.

In recent years, a new hypothesis has surfaced concerning Tesla’s close encounter. According to the theory, Tesla was actually contacted by an alien artifact that’s been flying about the Earth’s orbit for some 13,000 year old. Something known in ufology circles as ‘The Black Knight Satellite’.

According to the idea, the Black Knight sits in space monitoring us and decided to have a chat with Nikola one day. Presumably because he’s so smart. Or the ETs running it were just bored. Who knows?

Where do you stand on those seemingly outlandish theories? Daft or possible...?