1942: Battle of Los Angeles
A large number of unexplained lights in the sky are spotted over Los Angeles, resulting in five civilian deaths from panic. The 37th Coast Artillery Brigade fires 1400 rounds over the course of 90 minutes into the sky over Los Angeles. The Army later attributes the lights to reflections from a lost weather balloon.
1947: Maury Island Incident
Three fishermen report seeing unusual aircraft hovering over Puget Sound, Washington they can't identify, one of which ejects a slag-like debris that lands on - and kills - their dog. They report some pieces of debris also landed on a nearby beach. Police recover several fragments and contact the Fourth Air Force which sends a B-25 from California with a crew to take possession of the debris. The B-25 crashes deep in the forest en route back to California, killing all aboard. The FBI investigates the matter and says the purported siting was a hoax concocted by the fishermen. One of the fishermen later claims he was contacted by men dressed all in black and driving a black car who asked him not to talk about his experiences.
1947: Roswell Incident
The Roswell Army Air Base public information office issues a press release stating they've captured a "flying disc" that had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field, at the time the only location of nuclear weapons in the world. The following day, Lt. Col. Jesse Marcel holds a press conference saying they were mistaken and it was actually just a weather balloon. Thirty years later, after he retired, Marcel retracts his statement, saying he had been ordered by the base commander to claim it was a weather balloon but he actually believes the debris was extraterrestrial.
1968: Wright Patterson rumors
In a 1988 statement, Senator Barry Goldwater says that, in the 1960s, he asked SAC commander Gen. Curtis LeMay if the rumors of recovered ET bodies from the Roswell crash are true, if they were being held in a morgue at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and if so if he could visit the morgue. He claims LeMay said “Not only can’t you get into it, but don’t you ever fucking mention it to me again.”
1960s-1980s: ICBM Stalking
In 2010, Robert Hastings, a former USAF missileman, claims that once, while he was stationed at a Minuteman Missile Silo in the 1980s, several unusual aircraft appeared and hovered near it coinciding with a power outage at the silo. He says a security team arrived and opened fire at the aircraft which withdrew. He provides an affidavit from Larry Manross, the retired missile launch commander at Minot AFB, who substantiates the claim. Robert Salas, another former missileman, says he experienced a similar occurrence in 1967 at an ICBM field outside Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.
1980s
Paul Bennewitz, an electrical engineer and Coast Guard veteran, runs a business selling specialized sensors to Sandia National Laboratory. He becomes convinced he has seen UFOs near Kirtland Air Force Base from his home near the base and begins talking about it. In the 2000s, Richard Doty - a retired U.S. Air Force OSI special agent who had been posted to KAFB at the time - says that OSI believed Bennewitz had witnessed tests of a classified and experimental system. To keep it covered up, they contacted Bennewitz and helped him believe he was seeing UFOs controlled by ETs by feeding him false documents. Doty's claims are later reinforced with declassified FOIA documents. Bennewitz, being fed with increasingly crazy claims by the Air Force, becomes obsessed with the idea of an imminent alien invasion, has a mental breakdown, and is sent to a mental institution. The government later settles with the family out of court.
Doty subsequently claims that, while Bennewitz never saw a UFO, he (Doty) had received a 45-minute briefing that claimed the USG actually did recover alien technology at Roswell and that, on one occasion in the 1990s, he had been tasked with contacting a rancher in New Mexico dying of cancer who claimed to have come into possession of a piece of alien technology that had been given to him as a "gift." He retrieved this item and was ordered to surrender it to civilians who weren't known to him but were dressed all in black and drove a black car.
1984: MJ-12
Documents are released purportedly originated from the U.S. Government that assert the existence of a body called the Majestic 12. The Majestic 12 was a self-perpetuating group of 12 senior military officers, scientists, and bureaucrats who controlled all known information relating to a series of visitations that have been occurring of a non-human intelligence, and was originally created by Harry Truman but stopped reporting to presidents after Dwight Eisenhower, thereafter operating independently and outside government control. The original Majestic 12 included former physicist Donald Howard Menzel, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Admiral Sidney Souers, CIA director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, National Security Advisor Gordon Gray, and others. The FBI investigates the documents and declares them to be a hoax.
2004: Tic Tac UFOs
Four U.S. Navy pilots encounter unusual, "Tic Tac shaped" aircraft operating off the West Coast. They claim they exhibit flight characteristics that defy known aircraft capabilities, including making right-angle turns at the speed of sound.
