8 of History’s Most Famous UFO Sightings

With the raid of Area 51 coming up (or maybe it’s already happened (depending on when this gets published)), it’s just the perfect time to write about UFO sightings. Now, I’m a firm believer that there are aliens out there. It would be very self-centered to think that in an infinite universe (with an infinite amount of galaxies and star systems), we’re the only life to have ever evolved. That being said, I’m not entirely sure that alien species have ever actually been to Earth.

But, here are 8 of history’s most famous (or infamous) UFO sightings!

Kenneth Arnold

The first UFO sighting we’re going to talk about occurred in 1947. In fact, a lot of the fascination with aliens and UFOs that we have today can be traced back to this first “encounter”.

While flying his small airplane near Washington’s Mount Rainier, pilot Arnold Kenneth saw something unusual in the sky. According to him, he saw nine big, blue glowing objects that were flying in a V formation. According to him they were flying at nearly 1,700 miles per hour (how he calculated that number without any special tools is beyond me).

Like any pilot, he assumed that these were just military planes, but this was far too fast for any human-made airplane.

His report made the national news, and soon after thousands of other people began claiming that they also saw alien aircrafts and, in some cases, actual aliens. This is a trend we’ve been seeing a lot ever since — whenever a UFO sighting makes the news, many people begin reporting to have seen UFO’s themselves.

Roswell

Another UFO sighting that took place in 1947! Coincidence? I don’t think so!

Unlike the story of Kenneth Arnold, the rancher William Brazel didn’t actually see any flying saucers in the sky. No, what happened to him was much more mysterious and unusual. When he was walking across some of his New Mexico pastures, he found metallic rods, metal and plastic scraps, and unusual “papery” chunks. Soon after he reported the wreckage that occurred in one of his fields, the Roswell Army Air Force arrived and retrieved all the materials.

Ever since then, conspiracy theorists have been sure that there was a real UFO crash, and that alien bodies were collected from those fields, dissected, and studied.

But, those are nothing but conjectures (according to the US government). The fact that there was a crash is true. That can’t be denied. However, what crashed wasn’t a UFO, but a military-grade air balloon that was created as part of a military project called Project Mogul.

Whether that’s true or there was an actual UFO crash in Roswell, the field has become a tourist attraction, and there’s even a spaceship-shaped McDonald’s there!

Lubbock Lights

A few years after Roswell, in August of 1951, three Texas Tech professors saw a semicircle of flying lights above them. As with Kenneth Arnold’s story — these lights were flying incredibly fast. They reported what they saw to the news, and over the next few days dozens of other people claimed to have seen these lights fly across the sky too. One Texas Tech student, a freshman named Carl Hart Jr. even took photos of the event. These got published in the newspaper.

The prevailing assumption as to the origins of these lights is that they were birds that were reflecting the luminescence from the street lamps. However, all the people who were there claimed that the flying objects were way too fast to be birds. They’re sure that what they saw was a UFO (or several).