25 case files, newest first.
At 3:56 a.m. on June 2, 2016, a fireball lit up the Southwest, and sonic booms were heard across the Phoenix area. More than 400 people reported it. It wasn't a launch or a re-entry. Radar tracked falling stones, and fifteen meteorites were recovered. They were named Dishchii'bikoh.
Six days after Kelso, 23 children at an Invercargill school said they had seen the airship in broad daylight. The local paper printed two of their drawings. The Press Association's verdict went around the country: the drawings were “not a bit alike” and the children's testimony “need not be taken very seriously.”
At 7:21 p.m. on October 7, 2018, people across metro Phoenix photographed a strange glowing streak in the western sky. It was a Falcon 9 launched from Vandenberg in California, lit by a sun that had set over Arizona more than an hour earlier, and its first stage flew back to land at the base for the first time.
At dusk on December 22, 2017, a glowing, branching cloud crossed the Southern California sky and stopped traffic on the freeways. The Los Angeles Fire Department had to explain it: a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg. AP reported it was seen as far away as Phoenix.
In the last hours of 1978 a TV crew on a cargo flight filmed bright lights off New Zealand's Kaikōura coast, and air-traffic radar logged returns. A government cable from January 1979, now at Archives New Zealand, shows scientists debunking one film, stuck on the other, and guessing at Jupiter or Venus.
At noon on 23 July 1909 schoolchildren in Kelso, West Otago, watched a boat-shaped “airship” circle over their school. A reporter got six drawings that he called “dumbfounding to all sceptics.” Within three weeks the scare had spread nationwide, and the papers were finding fire balloons, a lantern and a confessed hoax.
On the evening of November 17, 1896, a bright light drifted southwest over Sacramento, and by the next day the city was full of people who said they'd heard voices, singing and orders shouted from it. The San Francisco Call ran it across its front page. This is where America's great airship wave starts.
On the Tuesday before Christmas 2015, a bright, slow, fragmenting light crossed the evening sky from California to Arizona. It wasn't a meteor. It was the spent third stage of the Soyuz rocket that had launched a cargo ship to the space station the day before.
Just after 7 p.m. on September 28, 2025, a long, glowing streak drifted across Arizona from Flagstaff to Tucson, and some people asked if it was a comet. It was a Falcon 9 that had launched from Vandenberg a few minutes earlier, lit by a sun that had already set.
A Cody, Wyoming resident says the white lights he watched rise over Cedar Mountain all last winter came back in late September 2026. Every account traces to one local news report. Open, and most likely prosaic, until someone lines up flight tracks and sky charts.
A dark sphere over a Los Angeles freeway went viral as an evening traffic-report mystery. The footage is actually from FOX 11’s own chopper stream at twilight on September 15, 2026 — still unidentified, most likely mundane.
AARO’s public case-resolution report on Eglin states equipment/operability findings that conflict with “secret video” folklore — two paperwork lanes, one nickname.
Public FOIA packages show Air Force/AARO acknowledging Eglin-related records while citing exemptions to withhold — acknowledgment ≠ release.
CENTCOM forwards a 16-second phone recording of an AC-130J IR display; DVIDS flags the secondary-capture fidelity limit.
CENTCOM 2023 IR (~51s): contrast enters frame, sensor pans to track; official description declines judgment.
The Mariana Montana film travels with Utah footage inside the 1953 Navy analysis (D098) — better photogrammetry ≠ final taxonomy.
Air Force Fact Sheet via NARA: 12,618 sightings (1947–1969); 701 remain Unidentified; project ended 17 Dec 1969.
archives.gov offers catalog bulk downloads for UAP-related series — researcher on-ramp without conspiracy framing.
A declassified Naval Photographic Interpretation Center progress report charts the 1952 Utah and 1950 Montana movies without settling a modern ET claim.
war.gov/UFO hosts rolling unresolved UAP records under PURSUE with explicit “unable to make a definitive determination” framing.
A New Mexico ranch recovery, a hurried press note, and a retraction that never quite settled the file.
A ~1m46s INDOPACOM IR track zooms into an elongated line of contrast patches that fade with distance — still not an ID.
Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse’s 16mm Kodachrome reappears as a DoD digitization — old primary media as new access.
INDOPACOM forwards ~57 seconds of 2023 IR showing a tracked contrast patch and focus box — informational only, unresolved.
A one-minute infrared clip from a 2025 Middle East platform enters the Pentagon’s sixth UAP release — unresolved, agile, no ET conclusion.
