More than 100 people sighted a UFO in western England in 1993

It is a little past one in the morning on March 31, 1993, when the telephones at the British Ministry of Defence begin ringing without pause. Within a few hours, more than a hundred witnesses across the west of England — including numerous police officers and military personnel on active duty — report seeing luminous craft moving through the night sky at astonishing speed. The affair, which would go down in the annals as the "Cosford Incident," would become one of the most thoroughly documented UFO files ever handled by the British authorities.

It was Nick Pope, then head of the "UFO desk" (the so-called Sec(AS)2a) at the Ministry of Defence, who inherited the investigation. By his own account,"the phones were ringing off the hook"when he arrived at his desk on the morning of the 31st, the previous night's reports already piled up before him.

Over the Somerset hills, "like two Concordes joined together"

The first notable testimony comes from the Quantock Hills in Somerset, where a police officer accompanying a group of scouts describes a triangular craft gliding across the sky at tremendous speed. His description, since become well known, likened the shape to two supersonic Concorde airliners flying side by side, as though welded together. Further reports soon poured in from Cornwall, Devon, and the West Midlands, sketching out a wave of sightings that appeared to sweep across the whole of south-west England within a matter of hours.

RAF Cosford: two white lights "at great velocity"

It was above RAF Cosford, in Shropshire, however, that the sighting occurred which would lend its name to the entire affair. An RAF Police patrol reported seeing two creamy-white lights, accompanied by a faint reddish glow at the rear, pass overhead at an estimated altitude of roughly 1,000 feet. The official police report, classified "Police In Confidence," stressed the object's extreme speed and its complete silence — two characteristics that, in the witnesses' view, ruled out any known conventional aircraft.

RAF Shawbury: a beam of light that "seemed to be looking for something"

A little over an hour later, it was the turn of the neighbouring base at RAF Shawbury to become the scene of an even more dramatic observation. The duty meteorological officer, whom Nick Pope has never publicly named out of respect for his anonymity, described an object roughly the size of a C-130 transport aircraft or a Boeing 747, moving slowly — at no more than 30 to 40 miles per hour — towards the base's perimeter. The craft then projected a laser-like beam of light that swept back and forth across the ground, as though it "were looking for something." A deep, continuous humming sound could be heard, felt almost as much as it was audible. Then, abruptly, the light switched off and the object shot away at breathtaking speed, leaving the witness — a man well accustomed to observing military aircraft — thoroughly unsettled.

Radar stays silent, the Ministry of Defence takes note

Troublingly, neither RAF Shawbury nor RAF Cosford managed to pick up any trace of the object on radar at the time of the sightings. In his official report to his superiors, Nick Pope went so far as to write that an unidentified object of unknown origin appeared to have been operating within the UK Air Defence Region without being detected, which, in his own words, seemed to be of considerable defence significance warranting further investigation. The Ministry even went so far as to formally ask the United States military whether the craft observed belonged to their own forces — an unusual step, revealing just how seriously the affair was treated behind closed doors.

The space-debris theory: an explanation that divides opinion

Not every explanation, however, points toward the extraordinary. On the evening of March 30, 1993, the Commonwealth of Independent States — successor to the USSR — had launched a radio satellite into orbit aboard a rocket whose booster stage later broke apart on re-entering the atmosphere. Computer-simulated trajectories for the falling debris coincide, according to some researchers, with several reports of "bright lights" that same night. Jenny Randles, a prominent figure within the British UFO Research Association, went further still, suggesting that the Shawbury meteorological officer's account might be explained not by an extraordinary craft but by the passage of a police helicopter — a possibility the witness himself would later come to consider more seriously.

A file that, thirty years on, refuses to close

Despite these more prosaic leads, the Cosford Incident continues to divide researchers and skeptics alike. Nick Pope himself has maintained, for decades, that no explanation fully accounts for all of the testimonies gathered that night — particularly the beam of light and the humming sound described at Shawbury. His critics, meanwhile, point to inconsistencies in the timeline he has presented over the years, notably the gap of more than an hour separating the Cosford and Shawbury sightings, difficult to reconcile with the notion of a single craft travelling between the two bases. The British Ministry of Defence has since released the full case files relating to that night of March 30–31, 1993, departing from its long-standing position that UFOs held "no defence significance."

"It seems that an unidentified object of unknown origin was operating in the UK Air Defence Region without being detected on radar; this would appear to be of considerable defence significance, and I recommend that we investigate further."
— Nick Pope's report to the Ministry of Defence, April 1993

Excerpt from the RAF Cosford police report

"The patrol observed two creamy-white lights, accompanied by a faint red glow at the rear, crossing the base's airspace at great velocity, at an estimated altitude of approximately 1,000 feet. No engine noise was heard. Further inquiries with other military bases, civil airports, and local police forces revealed a number of consistent civilian sightings reported in the same area during the same period."
— RAF Police report, classified Police In Confidence, March 1993

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In the early 1980s, a huge UFO appeared in the Hudson Valley

Between 1982 and 1986, several thousand residents of Westchester County, New York, reported the recurring appearance of a massive, silent craft — shaped like a V or a boomerang — gliding at low altitude above the Taconic Parkway. Neither the investigators of the time nor the authorities ever fully explained the phenomenon.

A New Year's Eve Like No Other

According to the archives compiled by the earliest investigators, it began on the night of December 31, 1982, just minutes before midnight. A retired police officer, sitting in his backyard in the town of Kent, spotted a cluster of red, green, and white lights to the south. He first assumed it was a plane in distress. But the object passed over his house at an estimated height of about 150 meters, moving far too slowly and too quietly for a conventional aircraft — accompanied only by a low, distant humming sound. As he watched, he made out a dark, triangular fuselage connecting the lights, arranged in a V formation.

That lone account went largely unnoticed for months. It would take until the following winter for the case to take on an entirely different scale.

The Night of March 24, 1983: Yorktown's Switchboard Overwhelmed

A week after sheriff's deputy Dennis Sant spotted a dark, metallic object near Brewster that he would describe as "a city of lights," reports began pouring in once again. On March 24, 1983, a former police officer once more saw the V-shaped formation, this time accompanied by a more pronounced hum. That same night, IBM computer engineer Ed Burns was driving along the Taconic Parkway near Millwood when his car radio began crackling with static; he pulled onto the shoulder, joining dozens of other motorists, to watch what he would later describe as a massive, perfectly silent "triangular ship."

In Yorktown, calls flooded in so heavily that the local police switchboard nearly buckled under the load, to the point that officials feared they would be unable to handle genuine emergencies. Two officers present at the scene at the same time gave contradictory descriptions: one described a single mass carrying several lights, the other described a tight formation of small planes — a discrepancy that would fuel debate over the object's true nature for years to come.

A Scientific Investigation Takes Shape

On March 26, 1983, the Westchester-Rockland Daily Item ran a now-famous front-page story under the plain headline: "Hundreds Claim to Have Seen UFO." The article caught the attention of a group of independent researchers connected to J. Allen Hynek, a former scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force on Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, and founder of the Center for UFO Studies. Alongside the astronomer, teacher and investigator Philip J. Imbrogno took charge of the fieldwork.

The team set up a dedicated hotline and logged more than three hundred calls in a single evening, on the night of March 24 alone. One witness, later quoted in their book, summed up the general impression in a line that would become well known among researchers working the case: if there were such a thing as a flying city, that was exactly what the object looked like that night. The findings of this investigation were eventually published by Hynek, Imbrogno, and journalist Bob Pratt in Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings, which remains the definitive documentary account of the case.

One Object, or Dozens of Prankster Pilots?

Given the sheer scale of the reports, the most commonly offered explanation was a hoax: a group of amateur pilots flying tight formations of ultralight aircraft, running flashing lights, to simulate a single craft. The theory found grim partial support on Halloween night 1984, when a small plane landed at Stormville Airport — one of the object's recurring flight paths — and its pilot was detained by a state trooper who suspected him of staging the sightings. The man denied any involvement and was never charged, but the report the officer wrote that night would become, in the eyes of skeptics, the key piece of evidence for the mundane explanation.

Imbrogno himself, however, rejected that single explanation for every sighting. He pointed out that the object had been seen well before these nighttime formation flights began, and that witnesses who observed multiple separate appearances reported clear differences between them — some matching the description of a single, rigid craft, others, later on, matching a swarm of small aircraft. Air traffic controller Anthony Capaldi, who himself observed the object over Stormville in the summer of 1983, further noted that aircraft flying in such a tight formation would necessarily have produced audible engine noise — yet nearly all witnesses insisted instead on the craft's near-total silence, broken at most by a faint hum.

The Flyover of the Indian Point Nuclear Site

The episode that gave the case its most unsettling turn came on June 14 and July 24, 1984, when several witnesses — including security guards at the Indian Point nuclear power plant on the eastern bank of the Hudson — reported a large, structured object moving slowly or hovering in the immediate vicinity of the reactors. One guard on duty estimated the craft at roughly 100 feet long, flying at under 900 feet, and compared it to several helicopters flying in extremely tight formation. For those inclined toward the extraordinary explanation, the object's proximity to such a sensitive facility as a nuclear plant made the prankster-pilot theory considerably less convincing; few ultralight enthusiasts, it was argued, would risk flying so close to a restricted installation.

A Phenomenon That Spread Far Beyond Westchester

According to estimates from the Hynek-Imbrogno team, the object — or objects — were seen by more than five thousand witnesses between 1982 and 1986, across an area extending well beyond Westchester County alone: reports also came from Putnam and Dutchess Counties, and as far as neighboring Connecticut, including New Haven and Brookfield. The reports point to a preferred flight path along the corridor formed by the Taconic Parkway, a marked tendency to hover over bodies of water, and exclusively nighttime appearances — no credible daytime sighting was ever recorded.

The case saw a major resurgence of media attention in 1992, when the American television program Unsolved Mysteries devoted a segment to it. The show managed to gather a group of pilots willing to claim responsibility for the formation flights — but they balked at publicly recreating the V-shaped maneuver they claimed to have flown, citing the FAA regulations such a demonstration would have violated. To this day, the case remains officially unsolved.

Timeline

December 31, 1982 — First recorded sighting, in Kent, New York.
March 17, 1983 — Sighting by sheriff's deputy Dennis Sant near Brewster; traffic halted on Interstate 84.
March 24, 1983 — Major wave of sightings; Yorktown's police switchboard overwhelmed; more than three hundred calls received by the investigation hotline in a single night.
March 26, 1983 — Publication of the Westchester-Rockland Daily Item story; Hynek and Imbrogno's investigation begins.
Summer 1983 — Sighting by air traffic controller Anthony Capaldi over Stormville.
June 14 and July 24, 1984 — Reported flyovers near the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
October 31, 1984 — A pilot is detained at Stormville Airport.
1992 — Unsolved Mysteries airs its segment on the case.

Archival Document — Witness Testimony Collected by Investigators

"If there is such a thing as a flying city, this was a flying city. There was no engine noise at all, just that low, almost continuous humming sound. The lights were arranged in a clear V shape, and the whole thing moved with a slowness that made no sense for an aircraft of that apparent size."

— Testimony quoted in Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings (Hynek, Imbrogno & Pratt), regarding the events of March 24, 1983.

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In 1883, an astronomer observed hundreds of UFOs near the Sun

In August 1883, Mexican astronomer José Bonilla photographed an armada of unidentified objects filing across the solar disk. Ridiculed by Paris, ignored for a century, he would finally be vindicated by modern science — which revealed that the Earth may have narrowly escaped total annihilation that very day.

An ordinary morning at the desert observatory

On August 12, 1883, José Árbol y Bonilla, director of the Astronomical Observatory of the State of Zacatecas, was preparing his instrument for a session of solar sunspot observations. Nothing foretold the extraordinary. The sky was clear over the high plateaus of Zacatecas, at an altitude of 2,400 metres, and the morning light was sharp. The observatory itself was a young institution: inaugurated on December 6, 1882 — barely nine months earlier — it was the first major Mexican observatory founded outside the capital. Bonilla was its founding director, a man of scientific rigour who had trained in celestial photography during a stay at the Paris Observatory.

Then the objects appeared.

Dark, hazy, silhouetted against the white disk of the sun, they crossed the field of the telescope in successive groups. Bonilla observed them, counted them, sketched them, noted the precise time of their entry into and exit from the solar background. Some passed alone; others came in clusters of fifteen to twenty at a time. Their speed was variable — a fraction of a second to a full second to traverse the disk — their shapes, elongated and blurred, resisted all classification. The astronomer made a decision: he would photograph them.

Using the wet collodion plate process — the cutting-edge photographic technique of the era, which he had mastered in Paris — Bonilla exposed his plates at one hundredth of a second, keeping pace with the relentless appearance of the bodies. This work extended over two days: on August 12 he counted 283 distinct objects; on August 13, 164 more followed. In total, 447 entities crossed the sun over less than three and a half days of observation. Not a single other observatory in the world — neither Mexico City, nor Puebla, nor any European post — reported anything comparable.

Bonilla's silence, Paris's condescension

Bonilla's conduct in the aftermath of the observation is itself worthy of note. The astronomer did not yield to the temptation of sensationalism. He scrupulously recorded what he had seen, filed his plates, copied out his notes — and said nothing. He proposed no explanatory hypothesis. He invoked neither meteors, nor atmospheric phenomena, nor any pre-established category that might have allowed him to neatly close this inconvenient dossier.

It was not until two and a half years after the events that Bonilla resolved to submit his report to Camille Flammarion, founder and editor of the journalL'Astronomie, published in Paris since 1882. Flammarion was at the time one of the most influential figures in European scientific popularisation — author ofAstronomie populaire, published in 1880, founder in 1887 of the Société astronomique de France, an unclassifiable personality hovering between rationalism and mysticism. It was he who received the document from Zacatecas.

Paris's response was published on January 1, 1886, in the first issue ofL'Astronomiefor the new year. It was withering. The editorial staff proposed that the objects photographed by Bonilla were, in all likelihood, migratory birds flying at high altitude, or insects resting on the objective lens of the telescope. The argument was clever in its way: if the bodies had been a few centimetres from the lens — rather than out in space — their presence would have been detectable only at Zacatecas, which would account for the absence of any simultaneous observation elsewhere. Bonilla rejected this interpretation. But he did not press the matter. He had no counter-hypothesis to offer, and the Parisian journal had moved on.

For one hundred and twenty-eight years, the Zacatecas observation remained what astronomers call acuriosity without explanation— a documented fact, orphaned of meaning.

Vindication from UNAM: a cometary close pass

In 2011, three astronomers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México reopened the case. Héctor Javier Durand Manterola, of the Geophysical Institute, María de la Paz Ramos Lara, and Guadalupe Cordero published on arXiv, the open preprint platform, a paper entitled:Interpretation of the observations made in 1883 in Zacatecas (Mexico): A fragmented Comet that nearly hits the Earth.

Their method was geometrical. By exploiting a simple fact — the objects had been observed only at Zacatecas, and not from Mexico City or Puebla, both situated a few hundred kilometres away — the researchers calculated the maximum distance at which the bodies could have been located and still remained invisible from those two other points. The result was vertiginous. The objects Bonilla photographed were not in the upper atmosphere. Nor were they halfway to the Sun. They were skimming the surface of the Earth.

According to the calculations of Durand Manterola and his colleagues, the fragments passed at a distance of between 538 and 8,062 kilometres from the Earth's surface. To appreciate this proximity: the International Space Station orbits at approximately 400 kilometres altitude. These objects grazed the Earth in the most literal sense of the term — within the low orbital belt, at an altitude humanity itself would not reach for another seventy-eight years.

The estimated dimensions of the fragments are equally unsettling: between 46 and 795 metres in width, between 68 and 1,022 metres in length. The individual mass of the bodies would have ranged from several hundred million to several trillion kilograms. The total mass of the parent object — before fragmentation — would have been comparable to that of Halley's Comet, perhaps several times greater.

The Shoemaker-Levy analogy and the comet that did not strike

The most illuminating scientific precedent is that of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Discovered in March 1993 by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy at the Palomar Observatory, it had already been captured by Jupiter and had fragmented during a passage too close to the gas giant in July 1992. In July 1994, its twenty-odd debris fragments struck Jupiter in succession, leaving scars in its atmosphere the size of the Earth, visible through amateur telescopes worldwide. The energy released was estimated at several million megatons of TNT.

What the UNAM astronomers suggest is that on August 12, 1883, a comet comparable in scale to Shoemaker-Levy — perhaps more massive — grazed the Earth without a single human being, save for José Bonilla, bearing witness. Had the trajectory differed by a few thousand kilometres, had even one fragment struck the atmosphere rather than grazing it, the impacts could have triggered planetary tsunamis, dust clouds blotting out the sun for years, a mass extinction event. The industrial civilisation of the era — at the very dawn of the Belle Époque, a decade before the Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa — might have been annihilated without ever understanding what struck it.

In his original notes, as reproduced inL'Astronomieof 1886, Bonilla himself described the behaviour of the bodies with a precision that strikes with retrospective force:"Their time intervals were variable, a body passing through would not take more than one third, half a second, or at most one second to cross the disc, and a minute or two passed before others appeared — some passed as 15 or 20 at once, so that it was difficult to count them. I drew the trajectory of many of these bodies on the solar disc, marking their 'entrances' and 'exits' on the paper."

The photographs: the first images of a UFO?

Bonilla's photographic plates, preserved in the archives of the Zacatecas Observatory, occupy a singular place in the history of astronomical imagery. They constitute one of the very first photographs of unidentified flying objects ever made. This fact, long seized upon by the ufological literature of the latter half of the twentieth century — Jimmy Guieu, Frank Edwards, and Henry Durrant each referenced them in works of widely varying interpretive licence — acquires an entirely different significance in the light of the 2011 research: the photographed objects were real, solid, of colossal dimensions, and situated at near-orbital range from the Earth.

Popular ufology embroidered these images with enthusiasm: extraterrestrial vessels, secret military formations, unknown airships. All such interpretations founder on a single observation: in 1883, no earthly power possessed a fleet of 447 aerial craft capable of orbiting at less than 8,000 kilometres altitude. The truth, as reconstructed by the Mexican astronomers of the twenty-first century, is more dizzying still: these were cometary debris in a grazing transit, a string of celestial boulders of which the smallest exceeded the height of a multi-storey building, and the largest rivalled the largest asteroids of the main belt.

Bonilla, a man of measure before the unnameable

Perhaps the most arresting aspect of this affair remains the intellectual posture of Bonilla himself. Trained in Paris in the tradition of observational rigour, director of a peripheral observatory in a nation still seeking international scientific recognition, this man confronted the inexplicable and chose the only truly scientific attitude: to record without concluding. He did not seek to impose an explanation. He did not inflate his figures. He noted 283 objects on the first day, 164 on the second, described their trajectories, photographed their blurred silhouettes, and submitted his report without embellishment.

The international community treated him with condescension. Paris found birds where Bonilla had seen solid bodies crossing space at prodigious speeds. History proved Paris wrong.

In 2011, a century and a quarter after the events, Mexican astronomers — working in the same country, in the same national tradition that had formed Bonilla — reread his notes, reworked his geometry, and established that on that August morning in 1883, on the high plateaus of Zacatecas, the Earth had narrowly escaped an extinction-level catastrophe without ever knowing it. The solitary observer who had watched the Sun that day and faithfully recorded what he saw was the only human being on Earth to have been, in utter unknowing, witness to one of the greatest close calls in the history of our planet.

---

Archival Document — Extract from José Bonilla's report, published inL'Astronomie, January 1, 1886

"On August 12, 1883, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, I observed a great number of dark, opaque bodies crossing the solar disk in various directions. Their intervals were irregular, the duration of their transit varying between one third and one full second. Some moved in isolation; others appeared in groups of fifteen to twenty units, making their enumeration difficult. I traced on paper the trajectories of several of them, noting their points of entry and exit on the disk. Their nature remains, to my mind, unexplained."

— José Árbol y Bonilla, Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico

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Egypt – A papyrus recounts the appearance of a UFO in ancient times

A thirty-five-century-old Egyptian papyrus records what may be the earliest written account of unidentified objects ever set down in writing. But did this crucial — and untraceable — document ever truly exist?

Year 22 of the Reign: A Morning Like No Other

In the twenty-second year of the reign of Thutmose III, during the third month of winter, at the sixth hour of the day — roughly noon by the solar reckoning of ancient Egypt — the scribes of the "House of Life" noticed something unusual in the sky. What they saw brought them to their knees. They prostrated themselves, then ran to warn the Pharaoh.

The House of Life — thePer Ankh— was no mere scriptorium. It was the highest intellectual institution in Egypt, a place where astronomers, physicians, and theologians worked side by side under the protection of Thoth, god of knowledge. By the standards of their time, the men who witnessed this phenomenon were the most qualified observers imaginable.

Here is the translation of the text as established by Prince Boris de Rachewiltz in the 1950s:

"In the year 22, in the third month of winter, at the sixth hour of the day, the scribes of the House of Life perceived a circle of fire coming from the sky. It had no head; from its mouth came a foul breath. Its body was one rod long and one rod wide. It had no voice. The hearts of the scribes were troubled and they threw themselves upon their bellies. They went to report it to Pharaoh. His Majesty ordered that the scrolls kept in the House of Life be consulted."

Several days later, according to the same text, the phenomena multiplied until they outshone the sun itself and filled "the four corners of the sky." The Pharaoh's army watched them in formation. Fish and birds fell from the sky. The Pharaoh ordered incense to be burned, commanded that the event be recorded for all eternity in the Annals of the House of Life, and declared the day worthy of remembrance.

Thutmose III, the Napoleon of the Pharaohs

To grasp the weight of this testimony, one must understand its context. Thutmose III — also spelled Tuthmosis or Thothmes — is regarded by Egyptologists as one of the greatest rulers ancient Egypt ever produced. His official reign stretches from approximately 1479 to 1425 BCE, though he first served as co-regent under his stepmother Hatshepsut for nearly twenty-two years.

Nicknamed the "Napoleon of Ancient Egypt," he led seventeen major military campaigns, pushing the empire of the Nile north to the Euphrates and south to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile. His victory at the Battle of Megiddo in 1457 BCE — whose account was engraved on the walls of the temple of Karnak by his personal secretary Tjaneni — remains one of the earliest documented battles in human history.

It was a man accustomed to military marvels, to grandeur and the close observation of the world, who found himself facing the blazing sky of that mysterious winter. That this pharaoh, who had erected stelae from the Euphrates to Sudan, judged this aerial phenomenon remarkable enough to immortalise it in his official annals speaks volumes about what his scribes reported.

Alberto Tulli and the Cairo Bazaar

The papyrus would never have entered modern consciousness without an incident that took place in 1933 in a Cairo bazaar. Alberto Tulli, then director of the Egyptian section of the Vatican Museums, was browsing among antique dealers when he reportedly came across a papyrus fragment bearing, he believed, a passage from the Annals of Thutmose III. The asking price exceeded his means. He therefore had the text copied by hand, replacing the original hieratic script with hieroglyphics — a procedure then common in scholarly circles.

Tulli returned to Rome with his transcription. The original papyrus remained in Cairo in the hands of a dealer known as "Tano" — most likely Phokion J. Tanos, a well-regarded Cairo antiquarian. What became of the original document thereafter is unknown.

Upon Alberto Tulli's death, his papers were bequeathed to his brother, a priest at the Lateran Palace. When that brother died in turn, his possessions were dispersed among various heirs. The papyrus transcription vanished in the process.

Prince de Rachewiltz Steps onto the Stage

The affair resurfaced in 1953. Prince Boris de Rachewiltz — an Italo-Russian scholar, self-taught Egyptologist, and, by marriage, son-in-law of the poet Ezra Pound — claimed to have found the famous transcription among the late Tulli's papers. He published a translation inDoubt, the journal of the Fortean Society, and declared that the text formed an integral part of the Annals of Thutmose III.

Rachewiltz noted that the retranscription from hieratic into hieroglyphics had been carried out not by Tulli himself, but by Dr. Étienne Drioton, a celebrated Egyptologist and then director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Drioton's name lent the enterprise considerable scholarly credibility.

A second, independent translation was produced by American anthropologist R. Cedric Leonard, who described "burning disks" where Rachewiltz had written "circles of fire" — a minor divergence reflecting less a contradiction than the inherent complexity of hieroglyphic language, whose signs may carry several interpretations depending on ritual or astronomical context.

A Chain of Doubts

The story of the Tulli Papyrus is also the story of a chain of intermediaries that no one can verify today. In 1968, investigator Samuel Rosenberg, tasked with writing a section of the Condon Report on UFOs, cabled the Vatican seeking clarification. The reply from Gianfranco Nolli, then inspector of the Vatican Museums' Egyptian section, was terse:"Papyrus Tulli not property of Vatican Museum. Now it is dispersed and no more traceable."

Worse still, Rachewiltz later admitted that he had never held the papyrus in his hands, acknowledging that his translation was based on notes taken by Tulli during a brief consultation of the document at "Tano's" home in Cairo in 1934. What existed, then, was not a papyrus — not even a complete copy — but a translation of a transcription of notes from a viewing of an original document now lost. Ufologists Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, in their landmark reference workWonders in the Sky(2010), described the affair plainly as a hoax.

Rosenberg went further, suggesting that the text might be a disguised borrowing from the Book of Ezekiel — the "wheels of fire" of that prophetic vision bearing a troubling resemblance to the Tulli Papyrus's "circles of fire." Other researchers, less categorical, advanced natural explanations: a grazing comet, a bolide meteor, a St. Elmo's fire-type electrical phenomenon amplified by the atmosphere of the Nile Delta.

What the Text Says — and Does Not Say

Setting aside the authenticity debate, the text itself rewards careful reading. Several details stand out for the analyst. First, the absence of a head: in hieroglyphics, describing an object without a head means it has no visible leading part — a formulation that sits awkwardly with a comet or meteor, both of which present an identifiable trajectory. Second, the foul odour: this unexpected sensory detail appears nowhere in the standard astronomical descriptions left by Egyptian sky-watchers, who concerned themselves with shapes, colours, and movements — never smells. Third, the duration: the phenomenon lasted several days, ruling out most instantaneous meteoritic events.

The unit of measure — one "rod" — equalled approximately 52 centimetres by the Egyptian standard of the era, suggesting an object of relatively modest apparent size, perhaps observed at low altitude from the ground. Several researchers have noted that describing an object as having "no voice" reflects genuine surprise: the scribes expected a sound, and heard none.

A Ghost in the History of Ufology

Whatever the truth of its origins, the Tulli Papyrus has taken on a life of its own in the mythology of the unexplained. It is cited in dozens of works devoted to historical UFO sightings, often presented as the centrepiece of an ancient extraterrestrial contact file. Zecharia Sitchin, author of the controversialEarth Chroniclesseries, even claimed — without ever producing evidence — that Thutmose III had been taken aboard one of these celestial craft.

Yet the document illuminates a broader truth: since antiquity, human beings have looked up at the sky with wonder edged with dread, and even the most learned scribes have sometimes been unable to name what they saw. Whether in Nuremberg in 1561, New Zealand in 1909, or the skies over Boston in 1639, the heavens have always kept their secrets — and they keep them well.

The Tulli Papyrus, authentic or not, embodies a fundamental truth: humanity has been searching for answers up above far longer than it is ready to admit.

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Archival Document: Translation of the Tulli Papyrus

Translation by Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, published in Doubt, No. 41, 1953

"In the year 22, in the third month of winter, at the sixth hour of the day, the scribes of the House of Life perceived a circle of fire coming from the sky. It had no head; from its mouth came a foul breath. Its body was one rod long and one rod wide. It had no voice. The hearts of the scribes were troubled and they threw themselves upon their bellies. They went to report it to Pharaoh. His Majesty ordered that the scrolls kept in the House of Life be consulted. After some days had passed, these things became more numerous in the sky. Their splendour exceeded that of the sun and extended to the four corners of the sky. The army of Pharaoh watched with him in their midst. It was after the evening meal. Then these circles of fire ascended higher in the sky and moved toward the south. Fish and birds rained down from the sky. A marvel never witnessed since the founding of their land [...] And Pharaoh caused incense to be burned to make peace with the Earth [...] and what had happened was ordered to be written in the Annals of the House of Life so that it be remembered for all time."

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Psychic Predicts Alien Invasion During Scotland-Brazil Match

The friendly match between Scotland and Brazil, scheduled for tonight in Miami, is drawing media attention that goes far beyond the purely sporting context. While the fixture offers an interesting clash on the pitch, it has found itself at the center of a wave of bizarre speculation on social media, blending UFO theories with viral belief trends.

A Viral Rumor with Millions of Followers

The origin of this buzz comes from Vó Bahiana, an influential figure in the Brazilian digital landscape. Followed by a community of 23 million people on Instagram, the psychic published a series of statements claiming to have had a premonition of a major incident during the match.

"I dreamed that aliens invaded a football pitch and that players were taken away by the first ship that arrived."

According to her predictions, the match will be brutally interrupted by a large-scale extraterrestrial manifestation. The post describes a crisis scenario involving panic in the stadium stands and the appearance of spacecraft flying over the pitch.

Football Stars Targeted by the "Prediction"

Beyond the spectacular nature of these claims, the psychic explicitly named high-profile figures from the Brazilian national team.

• An Abduction Scenario: The claims evoke the disappearance of spectators as well as the abduction of several professional players.

• The Mentioned Players: Star forwards Neymar and Vinícius Jr. were explicitly cited as the primary targets of this alleged intergalactic event.

While these claims clearly stem from digital folklore or a calculated audience strategy, they illustrate how quickly alternative theories can capture the public's attention ahead of major sporting events. Observers will ultimately focus on the very real security and logistical challenges of this fixture in Miami, far removed from science fiction theories.

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In 1639, a UFO was observed over Boston, Massachusetts

On March 1, 1639, three men drift on a river near Boston, facing a light that changes shape, darts like an arrow, then vanishes — leaving them inexplicably carried back a mile upstream, against the tide, with no memory of having rowed.

Boston, Massachusetts — Nearly four centuries before the acronyms UAP and UFO entered everyday speech, a text of thoroughly Puritan sobriety already recorded an encounter that posterity would, not without irony, come to regard as the first reported unidentified flying object on North American soil. The author was neither a drunken sailor nor a sensation-seeking pamphleteer: it was John Winthrop himself, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founder of Boston, and author of the celebrated "city upon a hill" sermon. His journal, a cornerstone of American colonial historiography, devotes an entry to an episode that stands in sharp contrast to his usual notations on harvests, conflicts with Algonquian tribes, or the theological disputes then roiling the young colony.

An ordinary night on the Muddy River

The affair begins modestly. James Everell, described by Winthrop as "a sober, discreet man," boards a lighter — a flat-bottomed barge used for transporting goods — with two companions, to make their way down the Muddy River, a tributary of the Charles River that in 1639 wound through the marshes of what is now Back Bay, before that neighborhood was filled in during the nineteenth century. The area, today absorbed into the urban fabric of Boston and Brookline near present-day Fenway Park, was at the time little more than a stretch of mudflats and brackish water bordered by pastures where livestock grazed during the summer months.

It is in this setting that, according to the account Winthrop recorded, an unusually intense light appeared.

The governor's account

The journal entry, dated March 1, 1639, deserves to be examined in full, so sharply does its precision contrast with Winthrop's usually terse style. When the light stood still, it flamed up and measured, by the witnesses' estimate, about three yards square — roughly nine feet, or just under three meters. When it moved, it contracted and took on the shape of a swine, racing then with the speed of an arrow toward Charlestown on the opposite bank, repeating this pattern for two to three hours.

But it is the rest of the account that has, more than anything else, fed the legend. The three men, who had drifted nearly a mile downstream on the current while watching the phenomenon, found that once the light vanished, their boat had been carried back to its starting point — against the tide — with none of them recalling having rowed. Winthrop adds, finally, that "divers other credible persons" reportedly saw the same light afterward, in the same place.

A man whose word carried weight

The identity of the principal witness is no small detail in a Puritan society where the credibility of any account rested entirely on the reputation of the person reporting it. Winthrop takes care to note that Everell enjoyed "good reputation, activity and estate" in Boston — a way, in the language of the time, of certifying that he was neither a drunkard nor a teller of tall tales. For a governor concerned with the moral order of his colony, recording such an episode without disputing it amounted to lending it considerable credit.

Nick Pope, a former investigator for the British Ministry of Defence on unidentified aerial phenomena, has recently pointed out that the rigor of the testimony fits a pattern observed in many contemporary reports: the most frequently cited witnesses today — pilots, police officers, military personnel, radar operators — are likewise chosen for their presumed seriousness and sobriety.

The will-o'-the-wisp hypothesis, and its limits

The explanation most commonly advanced by later commentators points to ignis fatuus, the "will-o'-the-wisp" phenomenon resulting from the spontaneous combustion of gases released by decomposing organic matter in marshy ground — and the Muddy River, whose very name evokes mud, offered fertile terrain for such an effect. James Savage, who republished Winthrop's journal in 1825, already advanced this explanation in a footnote, suggesting that the prevailing fear and the imagination of the age, quick to see the hand of the devil in any unexplained event, had likely amplified what was at bottom a natural occurrence.

The hypothesis, however, runs into several details of the account. A will-o'-the-wisp is a phenomenon that rises from the ground and generally stays close to the marsh surface; it does not cross, in a matter of seconds, the more than two-mile distance separating the Muddy River from Charlestown, nor does it dart "as swift as an arrow" across the night sky. The meteor hypothesis, for its part, runs up against the duration of the observation — two to three hours — far longer than the few seconds a fireball remains visible. As for the aurora borealis, its presence at Boston's latitude remains possible but rare, and explains neither the erratic movement nor the shape attributed to the light.

The detail of the swine, or the memory of daily life

There remains the more troubling question of the animal shape described by the witnesses. Some researchers see in it a purely psychological clue: the Muddy River and its surroundings then served as summer pasture for swine destined for slaughter, the hamlet itself later taking the name Brookline. It is not implausible that the three men, having encountered or heard pigs earlier that day, unconsciously projected this familiar image onto a luminous mass of indefinite shape — a hypothesis that takes nothing away from the sincerity of the testimony, but that raises questions about how the human mind shapes the inexplicable out of the familiar.

A colony under theological strain

The episode occurs in a context worth bearing in mind for anyone seeking to understand the colony's state of mind in 1639. Only months earlier, in 1638, Winthrop had presided over the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, the central figure of the Antinomian Controversy that had deeply divided the Puritan community over questions of divine grace and religious authority. In a society that had just lived through this major theological crisis, and that interpreted the slightest natural event as a possible sign of divine will — or of diabolical interference — the appearance of an elusive light above the water could only fuel the widest range of speculation.

Winthrop himself offers no interpretation of the episode in his journal, unlike other entries where he does not hesitate to invoke the workings of "the evil one." This interpretive silence, from a man otherwise quick to comment on signs of Providence, has often been noted by researchers who have studied the text.

"When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton, and so up and down about two or three hours."

— John Winthrop, personal journal, March 1, 1639

Archival document

Excerpt from John Winthrop's journal, "The History of New England from 1630 to 1649," entry of March 1, 1639:

"In this year one James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others, saw a great light in the night at Muddy River. When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Divers other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place."

A precedent that did not stand alone

Winthrop's journal does not end there. Five years later, on January 18, 1644, the governor recorded a further troubling episode: three men returning to Boston by boat reportedly saw two lights rise from the water near the town's north point, take on a human form, approach the town, then disappear near the south point. A week later, another account describes a mysterious voice rising from the harbor waters, which Winthrop linked to a ship explosion and to the memory of a missing sailor suspected during his lifetime of practicing necromancy. These repeated occurrences, all recorded by the same careful hand, suggest that the 1639 episode was no isolated anecdote in the governor's mind, but part of a series of observations he considered serious enough to archive.

The memory of the place, today

The episode has not faded into obscurity. In 2019, artists Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier installed an artwork titled "Winthrop's UFO" along the Muddy River, in the landscaped park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in Brookline — a luminous structure evoking the swine-like silhouette described nearly four centuries earlier. The site, today wedged between sports infrastructure and the landscaped grounds of the Emerald Necklace, thus preserves a tangible trace of a mystery born in the darkness of the colonial marshes.

What remains of the mystery

Nearly four centuries after the fact, the Muddy River episode remains in that gray zone where the historian runs up against the limits of the discipline. The source text suffers from no ambiguity of transmission: it comes from a firsthand document, written by one of the most influential and best-documented figures of colonial America, and corroborated, by his own account, by several independent witnesses. None of the natural explanations advanced — will-o'-the-wisp, meteor, aurora borealis — accounts for every element reported: the duration of the sighting, the erratic trajectory, and above all that lost hour the three men could never explain. What remains, as is so often the case with these old archives, is the impossibility of choosing between a misperception, a tale amplified through repeated retellings, and the slender but never quite dismissible possibility that something genuinely unexplained occurred that night above the marshes of Boston.

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A flying saucer motionless in the sky over West Richland, Washington

On May 31, a witness observed a disk-shaped craft above the hills overlooking Vantage Highway, just a few miles from the Hanford nuclear site. The object, whose lower half reflected sunlight "like a mirror," vanished within seconds — a pattern echoed by dozens of other accounts recorded along this corridor over the past eight decades.

It was 10:04 a.m. on Sunday, May 31, 2026, when a driver traveling along Vantage Highway, north of West Richland, Washington, looked up toward the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain. According to the report he filed that same evening with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), headquartered nearby outside Spokane, he spotted a shape he initially compared to a blimp hanging motionless in the air.

"It was a disk, the upper half a dark color, the lower half a blinding chrome, with the sun reflecting off it," he wrote in his statement. He placed the object roughly four to five miles away, to the southeast, at an elevation angle of about 45 degrees. It showed no movement whatsoever. "It was stationary, huge. I saw it for three to six seconds. Then it disappeared instantly, like a cloak had been thrown over it."

The witness, alone in his vehicle at the time, stressed the intensity of the metallic glare: "I can't express enough how much the bottom half of the craft shined." No trajectory, no acceleration, no sound is mentioned in the report. Rather than fleeing, the object seems to have simply switched off — a pattern ufologists sometimes call "instantaneous occultation," documented in several hundred cases worldwide without any optical or atmospheric explanation reaching consensus.

Hanford, the most fertile ground in the country for unidentified craft

Taken alone, this single account could be dismissed as an optical illusion or the glint of a conventional aircraft. But its location places it squarely within a landscape steeped in history. West Richland borders the Hanford Site, the former plutonium production complex built in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, which supplied the fissile material for the first atomic test at Trinity and for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Researchers who study the Hanford file trace the earliest sightings back to the very period of the site's construction. By late 1942, the location had been chosen to host the world's first plutonium production facility, with no prior interactions with unidentified craft recorded anywhere in Washington State. But within months of the completion of the first production unit, "B Reactor," in September 1944, unexplained radar "blips" began appearing over the installation.

Correspondence later retrieved by researchers at the Project 1947 archive documents the account of Commander R. W. Hendershot, tasked with investigating these unidentified radar returns detected in late 1944 and early 1945. The matter grew serious enough that local military command became formally involved. Colonel Franklin Matthias, the officer in charge of the Hanford Engineer Works during the war and the man responsible for the press briefing held after the bombing of Hiroshima, later confirmed that radar had been installed "when we saw, or thought we saw, unidentified aircraft operating." He noted that an arrangement had been struck between Hanford and the Navy under which fighter pilots from the 9th Service Command would defend the site against aircraft of any kind.

Those pilots were called into action on several more unsettling occasions in January 1945, when unidentified objects were reported on at least three separate instances over Hanford's plutonium production plant. One of the fighter pilots involved, Clarence R. Clem, described them as "bright, reddish-orange fireballs… with no form, no substance."

A corridor that has never stopped drawing eyes skyward

Far from fading after the war, the phenomenon persisted across the following decades. One account gathered more recently recalls a night in the summer of 1965 when an entire family reportedly watched roughly a hundred glowing, capsule-shaped objects scattered across several hundred acres of Hanford's shrub-steppe land, remaining lit for hours without any change in intensity — a scene the witness still counts among the most vivid memories of his childhood.

According to Dan Nims, a Walla Walla-based representative of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), sightings at Hanford actually predate the famous 1947 wave, going back to 1944 and 1945, when the site, in the midst of wartime, was an extremely sensitive and closely guarded area. More recently, a worker at the nuclear reservation driving north across the site at night was startled by a vertical, cigar-shaped object outfitted with lights, hovering more than 500 feet in the air. "As I was looking at it, it disappeared," he reported to MUFON, before the same object reappeared, this time "much closer and directly on top of me," measuring an estimated 100 to 300 feet in length.

Nims, who spends part of his time collecting such accounts on MUFON's behalf, points to a hypothesis frequently debated in ufological circles: nuclear installations — whether power plants, nuclear-equipped naval vessels, or weapons sites like Hanford — appear to draw a disproportionate number of sightings. Some researchers argue that the trigger may have been the detonation of the first atomic weapons themselves, marking, in the eyes of hypothetical observers, a major technological leap for the human species.

The area encompassing Hanford and Benton and Franklin counties remains, according to figures cited by both MUFON and NUFORC, one of the hottest spots in Washington State for sightings, with the two organizations together logging between ten and twelve thousand reports nationwide every year.

West Richland, already no stranger to the phenomenon

The May 31 sighting is not the first to come specifically out of West Richland. One witness previously reported, from Keene Road facing Rattlesnake Mountain, a metallic flash observed in broad daylight, with no visible object and no clouds in the sky aside from the glare itself — a flash that repeated four times before fading away in the direction of Hanford, in a description strikingly similar to the one gathered this spring.

"It was stationary, huge. I saw it for three to six seconds. Then it disappeared instantly, like a cloak had been thrown over it."

— Excerpt from NUFORC report no. 198204, filed May 31, 2026

The shadow of Maury Island and the birth of the modern era

It is hard to discuss the skies over Washington State without circling back to the founding event of modern ufology. The dawn of the modern UFO age is generally traced to 1947, when Bill Bequette, then a young reporter at the East Oregonian in Pendleton, wrote a short story about the extraordinary sighting reported by pilot Kenneth Arnold. Arnold was flying between Chehalis and Yakima when he spotted a string of nine objects speeding in formation past Mount Rainier, at a speed he estimated at roughly 1,200 miles per hour.

Just days after that now-legendary sighting came the so-called Maury Island incident in Puget Sound, where a harbor patrolman reported seeing six circular, doughnut-shaped objects. Some theorists have tried to link the episode, without credible evidence, to radioactive waste from Hanford — a claim historians of the case now consider unsupported by any documentation, since Hanford's waste has always been kept under strict containment on-site.

What to make of this latest report

Taken on its own, the May 31 account amounts to a brief sighting, uncorroborated by other witnesses and unsupported by radar or photographic evidence. Still, the profile described — a motionless, reflective disk followed by an instantaneous disappearance with no transition — remains consistent with a significant number of earlier reports gathered from this specific stretch of American territory, which has drawn disproportionate attention from witnesses and researchers alike for more than eight decades.

One question remains that even partially declassified military archives have never settled: why does this stretch of arid land along the Columbia River — birthplace of America's plutonium program — continue, generation after generation, to draw these silent apparitions?

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• nuforc.org

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