Whether you’ve seen an unidentified flying object or not is usually directly linked to how many planes you’re able to recognise (and also if you’re liable to forget to put your contact lenses in). 

Most folk will live out their entire lives never once gazing upon any inexplicable aerial phenomena. It’s a sad fact of life that the closest many of us will get to a flying saucer will probably come shortly after criticising our other half’s tea-making skills.

Just because UFO sightings are rare, however, that doesn’t mean they don’t go on. In fact, hundreds of incidents are reported to the UK government every year. Many, no doubt, turn out to nothing more than £12.99 RyanAir flights to Fuerteventura. But occasionally there’s something to the reports...

Here are some of the most interesting and maybe even convincing UFO sightings from modern British history:

So called for its shape, not its taste, the ‘Dudley Dorito’ is a triangular craft that’s had multiple sightings reported across the Midlands in the past decade. 

Teacher Darren Edwards is one of many people to have spotted the Dorito in the skies above Shropshire. 'It was moving towards me and made no sound,' he claims. 'I quickly checked on Google, it didn’t match any military aircraft or UAV drones. It was so slow it almost hung in the sky. It also seemed to change its shape slightly as it turned.'

Its unusual form has led some ufologists to suggest that rather than be extraterrestrial in origin, the Dorito could be some form of military hardware being tested out by UK or US air forces. They’re basically saying, ‘aliens - it’s nacho craft.’

The Ministry of Defence have since given their explanation for why several residents of the Welsh village of Llandrillo simultaneously heard a loud noise in the sky and saw a bright light that many considered to be from some form of aircraft. The MoD, rather unsurprisingly, does not claim it to be caused by tourist aliens keen to enjoy the views of the picturesque Berwyn mountain range.

The official explanation for what was rather teasingly referred to as ‘The Roswelsh Incident’ by some tabloid wags was written off as natural phenomena. The odd thing, though? The noise was, apparently, due to a 3.5 magnitude earthquake and the light was due to meteoric activity. At exactly the same time. What are the chances, eh?!

Kim Wilde may have sung about the Kids in America, but in June 2009 - the day after Michael Jackson died - the former pop star was far more interested in the UFOs in Hertfordshire.

'I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud,' she’s said in an interview since. 'Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon. I said to my husband and my friend, 'that's really odd,' so we walked down the grass and looked to see if there was any source.'

'All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11.00 to 1.00. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes. Whenever it moved, something shifted in the air - but it was silent. Absolutely silent.'

Pretty wild(e).

Robert 'Bob' Taylor said that in late 1979 he saw 'a flying dome made out of a dark metallic material with a rough texture like sandpaper' - approximately 6 metres in diameter - hovering above the forest floor in a clearing in Dechmont Woods, Livingston. Taylor also claims that smaller spheres 'similar to sea mines' then seized him and took him abroad the larger object before he passed out.

Ufologist and writer Malcolm Robinson says it could be ‘one of the few genuine cases of an actual UFO encounter.'

Various sceptics say Robert's supposed memories could, in fact, be hallucinations brought about by temporal lobe epilepsy caused by Taylor's previous meningitis or a stroke.

Nobody knows for sure.

Keep watching the skies! When you’re not watching Blaze, that is.

The grainy images of two men in hazmat suits examining the lifeless, pot bellied body of a large-headed extra terrestrial are famous. Or, at least, infamous. Synonymous with an apparent UFO crash landing, the 17 minute ‘alien autopsy’ footage turned out - unfortunately - to be a hoax. 

Yet while the video that excited so many when it surfaced back in 1995 proved to be fake, the incident the clip claimed to come from is very real indeed. What exactly happened in ‘The Roswell UFO Incident’, however, remains to be known. At least to us normal folk, anyway.

What might’ve happened in the small New Mexico city of Roswell back in July 1947…? 

Let’s look at some of the theories, shall we?

We’ll begin with the main theory that’s pervaded the incident for decades - that an alien spacecraft crash-landed in the New Mexico desert. 

It didn’t take long for the stories of a downed flying disc to start circulating when unusual debris was found on a ranch some 30 miles north of Roswell in early July 1947. By July 8th, local newspaper the Roswell Daily Record led with the headline, ‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region’.

As the years passed, the story was built upon by locals, ufologists and conspiracy theorists. The ‘discovery’ of the since-debunked 1995 autopsy filmed really brought the story to the world’s attention.

Yet while the post-mortem may not have been legitimate, there’s no evidence to say the crash wasn’t that of an alien spacecraft. Of course, there’s no evidence that it was, either.

Post-war America had a fascination with the Nazis. Understandably, given Adolf Hitler had recently very nearly taken over the world. But whereas Europe, having faced the evils of the Third Reich first hand, was quick to dismantle Nazism and consign it to history, the USA was focused on pilfering its biggest talents and most useful technology.

While Operation Paperclip secretly shipped Nazi scientists and doctors across the Pacific to do their bidding for a new employer, other secret operations connected to the work of Nazi Germany quietly went about their business. 

Basically, what we’re saying here is this: NAZI UFOs.

Yup, that’s right, some people have claimed that the object that crashed in the New Mexico desert was part of a project to test Nazi flying machine tech. It was, apparently, a craft called ‘The Bell’, a machine which was propelled with electric particles. 

According to this theory, the technology was unstable and simply dropped out of the sky during a test flight. The project was then scrapped.

Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s classic conspiracy book The Roswell Incident was first published back in 1980. In it, a new theory is put up for examination.

Berlitz and Moore suggest that it was, in fact, a spaceship which crashed on the ranch. But that it wasn't ‘driver’ error or shot down, the accident was caused simply by a strike of lightning. 

Why were the aliens there? Well, according to the authors, they were looming in the skies keeping their oversized eyes on US nuclear weapons activity. Something they were concerned about. For some reason.

73 years of whispers, theories and tales of alien spacecraft and autopsied ETs have led to the incident being firmly mired in paranormal lore. So perhaps, rather ironically, the most controversial explanation as to what happened back in July of ‘47 is the US government’s ‘official’ version of events.

For years, the official story was this: it was a weather balloon that crashed. This rather simplistic explanation kept most Americans happy for a few decades until alternative ideas surfaced. 

Eventually, the American Air Force expanded on their story and admitted a little more. The balloon was, they revealed in two reports in the late 1990s, a nuclear test surveillance balloon used in something called Project Mogul, a top secret and covert operation to detect sound waves coming from Soviet Russsian atomic bomb tests.

It’s doubtful we’ll ever really know the full story. The truth is out there. It’s just that none of us will ever find out what it is...

Anyone with the taste and common decency to be familiar with the (excellent) Blaze TV series Ancient Aliens will no doubt know all about the theory that extraterrestrials built The Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt.

Whether there’s any truth to the hypothesis remains a topic of some consternation and controversy. Many scholars, academics and regular Joes will scoff at the notion. After all, it is a fairly wacky suggestion. Little green men assembling enormous triangular structures in the deserts of planets light-years from their own… It’s not the obvious answer.

But there are plenty of folk out there (scientists, researchers and - as we’ll discover - even science-y billionaires) who are convinced that aliens were behind the Great Pyramids of Giza.

As for us? Well, we can’t be sure either way. Ancient Aliens can be pretty persuasive, though. Did aliens build the Pyramids of Egypt? Here are some reasons why they just might have:

There is one principal argument that proponents of the theory that alien life constructed the giant pharaoh tombs refer to. They say that it just wouldn’t have been possible for humans to build them back then. The Pyramids are over 4,500 years old. Back then engineering was relatively basic and the task of assembling such huge polyhedrons was extraordinary.

Take The Great Pyramid, for example. The largest of Giza’s three structures and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. At nearly 500 feet tall, the thing is 756 feet long on each side and made up of more than 2.3 million stones. Each stone weighs nearly 3 tons each. That's a total mass of well over 6.5 MILLION TONS.

Even using the kind of construction equipment and technology available nowadays, that is a hugely intimidating project for anyone to undertake. Given the comparatively rudimentary tools and building knowhow available back in 2,560 BC, the job looks all but impossible to conceive for humans. Especially for unskilled slaves, no matter how many of them were forced into labour.

The Great Pyramids’ location is not insignificant. They weren’t just randomly plonked in the sands of Egypt. Not only do the three buildings align almost perfectly with the stars in Orion’s belt, they also have quite telling coordinates.

The exact geographic coordinates for The Great Pyramid itself are 29.9792458°N. The speed of light is - rather remarkably - exactly 299,792,458 metres per second. Ancient alien researchers point to this as proof to their claims. Precision, when it comes to measuring the speed of light, was only honed by man in the 1950’s, so the Ancient Egyptians couldn’t have known about it. 

The speed of light is central to the theory of time travel. The theory goes that aliens from the future travelled back in time and built the pyramids at 29.9792458°N on purpose. As something of a clue, perhaps.

On the 31st July 2020, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted: 'Aliens built the pyramids obv'. His confident statement received well over half a million likes on the social media networking site. 

He followed up with another tweet, correctly saying that 'The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure made by humans for 3800 years. Three thousand, eight hundred years.'

The South Africa-born tech billionaire is known for his controversial views, but the man’s no slouch when it comes to pulling off big projects and even dealing in outer space. So while his comments might not convince many, they do provide extra firewood for the already fiercely burning debate.

So, did aliens build the pyramids? Well, that was never really a question we were going to be able to definitively answer here. Opinions are split and we may never know the real answer. Likely they weren’t, but maybe - just maybe - they were…

Ancient Aliens might not be able to give you the full answers either, but they don’t half half offer up some interesting ideas on it all.

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...?