Timeline of Ufology

This is a timeline of key events in the reported, sometimes ostensible study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), nowadays also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). Note that ufology is not an established academic subject. The timeline primarily includes inquiries into the subject from governmental commissions, public institutions, private sectors, and their establishments. It also includes the publication of major books and reports of alleged evidence or their dismissal.

20th century

• 1919 - American writer Charles Fort published The Book of the Damned.
• 1950 - American aviator Donald Keyhoe published the book The Flying Saucers Are Real, one of the first reputable books on ufology.
• 1950 - The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence organized the Flying Saucer Working Party, an investigative committee for UFOs. They released a report in the following year which attributed UFO sightings to misidentifications, hoaxes or delusions.
• 1952 - The United States Air Force started Project Blue Book, which was headquartered at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
• 1953 - The Robertson Panel, headed by American mathematician and physicist Howard P. Robertson, was formed to investigate the wave of UFO sightings reported to the Project Blue Book in 1952.
• 1956 - The US-based civilian research group, National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, was founded by Thomas Townsend Brown.
• 1958 - Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung published his book Ein Moderner Mythus: Von Dingen, die am Himmel gesehen worden (A Modern Myth: Of Things Seen in the Sky), providing an initial account of the psychological implications of UFO experience. It was translated into English in 1959 with the title Flying Saucers.
• 1960 - Jacques Vallee published the book Challenge to science: the UFO enigma, where he discussed the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFOs.
• 1960 - USAF Captain Edward J. Ruppelt published The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, where he used the term UFO.
• 1962 - The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence started the UFO desk, a telephone hotline for collecting UFO sighting reports.
• 1966 - Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek testified at the congressional hearing of the US House Armed Services Committee that there is no evidence of extraterrestrial visitors.
• 1967 - The Falcon Lake Incident occurred, followed by investigations from various Canadian and US governmental agencies.
• 1967 - The Italian National UFO Center (Italian: Centro Ufologico Nazionale) was founded.
• 1969 - The Condon Committee released the report titled Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects.
• 1969 - The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) was established by Allen R. Utke, Walter H. Andrus Jr., John F. Schuessler, and others. The first MUFON annual conference was held in Peoria, Illinois in the following year.
• 1972 - J. Allen Hynek published his book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry, where he described the three types of close encounters between humans and UFOs.
• 1972 - The German society for UFO research, GEP (German: Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des UFO-Phänomens), was founded in Lüdenscheid by Hans-Werner Peiniger and Gerald Mosbleck.
• 1973 - Carl Sagan and Thornton Page edited and published the book UFO's—A Scientific Debate, a collection of exchanges and articles derived from the namesake symposium organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969.
• 1973 - The Center for UFO Studies was founded by J. Allen Hynek. It started publishing the Journal of UFO Studies since 1979.
• 1974 - The US-based National UFO Reporting Center was established in Davenport, Washington by Robert Gribble.

Timetable of instrumented field UFO research

• 1975 - Jacques Vallee published his book The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influences on the Human Race, which popularized the concept of invisible college in ufology.
• 1977 - J. Allen Hynek published The Hynek UFO Report.
• 1977 - The French Space Agency formed the research unit GEPAN, later renamed to GEIPAN (French: Groupe d'Études et d'Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés) for the investigation of the UFO phenomena. The first director of the unit was Claude Poher.
• 1978 - Italy experienced a wave of UFO sightings that were reported in news outlets. The Italian Air Force was orderd by the prime minister Giulio Andreotti to start documenting UFO cases.
• 1979 - American astronomer Allan Hendry published The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating and Reporting UFO Sightings, which was hailed by the Skeptical Inquirer as "one of the most significant and useful books on the subject ever published."
• 1986 - Wendelle C. Stevens and August Roberts published two volumes of UFO Photographs Around the World with photos from Lt. Colonel Stevens' UFO archive.
• 1989 - Ufology Research, based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, started publishing the annual Canadian UFO Survey.
• 1992 - A conference on alien abduction organized by psychiatrist John E. Mack and physicist David E. Pritchard was held at MIT. The proceedings and interviews with attendees were later published.
• 1993 - Psychologist Nicholas Spanos and coworkers showed that study subjects with self-claimed alien encounter experiences have no tendency toward abnormality. Most of the intense UFO experiences of subjects happened during sleep and some of them are linked to sleep paralysis.
• 1994 - Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack published his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, where he argued that alien abduction is a genuine experience (rather than sleep paralysis).
• 1999 - The France-based organization COMETA released the COMETA report, titled Les OVNI et la Défense: à quoi doit-on se préparer? (UFOs and Defense: What Should We Prepare For?).

2000s

• 2002 April - David Clarke and Andy Roberts published their book Out of the Shadows: UFOs, the Establishment and Official Cover-Up, where they claimed that the belief in UFOs is a form of mass hysteria.
• 2004 May - A former head of GEIPAN Jean-Jacques Velasco and journalist Nicolas Montigiani published their book Ovnis: L'Evidence (UFOs: The Evidence).
• 2005 October - Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy published the book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, where she presented evidence that people with self-claimed alien abduction experiences are more prone to influence by suggestion.
• 2007 March - The French agency GEIPAN published its UFO database online.
• 2007 - The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was established by the United States Department of Defense. The information was only made public in 2017.
• 2008 January - Robert L. Hastings published the first edition of his work UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, a comprehensive record of UFO activities near nuclear facilities. However, his reports and accounts have been met with skepticism from Benjamin Radford.
• 2008 May - UK National Archives started releasing past files on UFO investigations.
• 2008 - The French National Aeronautical and Astronautical Association (French: Association Aéronautique et Astronautique de France, 3AF) established a commission SIGMA (French: Somme des compétences en matière du paramètre extérieur) to study unidentified aerial phenomena. The second phase of the commission was SIGMA2 established in 2013.
• 2009 December - The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence closed its UFO desk.

2010s

• 2014 July - The first CAIPAN (Collecte et l’Analyse des Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés, or Collection and Analysis of Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) international conference organized by the French Space Agency and GEIPAN took place in Paris.
• 2015 January - John Greenewald Jr. released over 130,000 pages of declassified United States Air Force documents relating to UFOs.
• 2015 October - The UFODATA project was announced. It was conceived by CUFOS director Mark Rodeghier and its board members also included Alexander Wendt, Philippe Ailleris, and Christopher Mellon.
• 2017 October - To the Stars Academy was founded by Jim Semivan, Harold E. Puthoff, and Tom DeLonge.
• 2017 December - The New York Times published an article written by Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper in the front page of to expose the Pentagon's alleged Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Another article of similar content by Bryan Bender appeared around the same time on Politico. Prominent scientists including astronomers Seth Shostak at SETI and Sara Seager at MIT cast doubt on the sensibility and outcome of the program.
• 2019 May - Luis Elizondo, the alleged former head of AATIP, introduced the five observables of UFOs (or UAPs) in an interview. Elizondo went on to repeat them in further interviews with other media platforms such as The Washington Post and HowStuffWorks in the years that follow. In the meantime, Elizondo's background and his role in AATIP has been questioned.

2020 - 2025

• 2020 - Enigma Labs was founded by Alex Smith to collect UFO data.
• 2020 July - Documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act showed records of unidentified drone swarms over Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in the country, in September 2019.
• 2020 August - The United States Department of Defense announced the establishment of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The move also called for the use of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena instead of UFOs.
• 2021 May - The International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research (ICER) was launched.
• 2021 June - The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force released the report titled Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
• 2021 July - The Galileo Project was announced in a press conference and astrophysicist Avi Loeb became its director.
• 2022 March - The Canadian government released 500 pages of UFO sightings report for the past 20 years.
• 2022 May - United States House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation held the first public hearing on UFOs in 50 years. Scott Bray and Ronald Moultrie testified in the hearing.
• 2022 June - NASA announced the formation of an independent UAP study team.
• 2022 July - The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established within the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense. Sean M. Kirkpatrick was named its first director.
• 2022 September - The Canadian Office of the Chief Science Advisor launched the Sky Canada Project.
• 2022 December - The United States Department of Defense suggested to change the name of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena to account for unidentified submerged objects and trans-medium objects.
• 2023 April - The Scientific Coalition For UAP Studies released its first report, UAP Pattern Recognition Study 1945-1975 US Military Atomic Warfare Complex.
• 2023 June - American whistleblower and former NGA intelligence officer David Grusch was interviewed by Ross Coulthart on NewsNation, where he claimed the existence of decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program organized by the U.S. federal government.
• 2023 July - A congressional hearing on UAP was organized where David Fravor, Ryan Graves, and David Grusch testified their claims.
• 2023 July - RAND Corporation published a report from analysis of past self-reported UAP sightings, which showed that the sightings more likely occurred in rural areas and within 30 kms of military operation areas.
• 2023 August - The Sol Foundation was established in California. It held its inaugural symposium in November, 2023.
• 2023 September - The NASA UAP Independent Study Team released a report and found no evidence of aliens behind UAPs.
• 2023 December - The nonprofit organization UAPx released its first results on its expedition in 2021.
• 2024 February - Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies from the Society for UAP Studies published its first issue.
• 2024 March - AARO released the Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, stating that no verifiable evidence that UAP sightings represented extraterrestrial activities.
• 2024 March - The first UAP conference was held at the European Parliament.
• 2024 June - A parliamentary group was established in Japan for UAP investigations with Yasukazu Hamada as its head.
• 2024 October - US National Archives released the records of UFO investigations in the period of 1948 to 1968.
• 2024 November - Subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a hearing under the title Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth. The experts who testified include Timothy Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo, Michael Shellenberger, and Mike Gold. A week later, the AARO director Jon T. Kosloski testified in the US senate on the progress over the past year.

See also

• Investigation of UFO reports by the United States government
• List of investigations of UFOs by governments
• UFO conspiracy theories
• Perspectives on the abduction phenomenon

Further reading

General information

• "UAP knowledge Library". Enigma Labs.
• Hynek, J. Allen (1966-10-21). "UFO's Merit Scientific Study". Science. 154 (3747): 329. doi:10.1126/science.154.3747.329. ISSN 0036-8075.
• Kirkpatrick, Sean (2024-03-06). "We Need to Investigate UFOs—But Without the Distraction of Conspiracy Theories". Scientific American.

UFO/UAP history

• Boardman, Adam Allsuch (2020-10-06). An Illustrated History of UFOs. National Geographic Books. ISBN 978-1-910620-69-4.
• Eghigian, Greg (2024). After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-086987-8.

UFO/UAP databases

• Public institutions: US National UFO Center (NUFORC), US National Archives, AARO, UK National Archives, GEIPAN
• Private sector: CUFOS, Enigma Labs, SkyWatch, UFODATA

UFO/UAP astronomy

• Lembeck, Michael F.; Heimerdinger, Dan; Graves, Ryan; Snow, Marty; Reali, Peter (2023-06-12). Detection, Characterization, and Evaluation of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. doi:10.2514/6.2023-4322. ISBN 978-1-62410-704-7.
• Villarroel, Beatriz; Krisciunas, Kevin (2024-10-17), A Civilian Astronomer's Guide to UAP Research, arXiv:2411.02401

UFO/UAP encounters

• Appelle, Stuart; Lynn, Steven Jay; Newman, Leonard; Malaktaris, Anne (2014), Cardeña, Etzel; Lynn, Steven Jay; Krippner, Stanley (eds.), "Alien abduction experiences.", Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (2nd ed.)., Washington: American Psychological Association, pp. 213–240, doi:10.1037/14258-008, ISBN 978-1-4338-1529-4, retrieved 2024-11-16
• Pasulka, D. W. (2023-11-07). Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. St. Martin's Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-250-87957-8.