• DOCUMENTED The base rate for "solved" is very high. The US Air Force's Project Blue Book (March 1952 – 17 December 1969) collected 12,618 reports and left 701 as "unidentified" — roughly 5.5%. The remaining ~94% were attributed to aircraft, astronomical objects, balloons, weather phenomena, hoaxes and other conventional causes.
• DISPUTED But the debunking was sloppy too. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek — Blue Book's own astronomical consultant, who later became a proponent of scientific UFO study — called the project's statistical practice "nothing less than a travesty," charging that "possible" identifications were routinely promoted to "probable" and then to settled fact with little investigation. Both things can be true: most reports have mundane causes and the official numbers were massaged.
• UNSUPPORTED "701 unexplained cases" is not evidence of anything in particular. An unexplained case is a case with insufficient data. That is a statement about the record, not about what was in the sky.

← swipe table →

Project Blue Book final statistics, US Air Force, 1969 (records at NARA RG 341). Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (the "Condon Report"), University of Colorado / USAF, 1968.

• TESTIMONY Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan presented two three-fingered bodies to a public hearing of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies on 12 September 2023, returning with further material in November 2023. He stated under oath at that hearing that the specimens were not part of terrestrial evolution. The fact of the sworn statement is documented; the claim itself is not.
• RESOLVED Peru's Public Ministry examined seized specimens and reported them constructed. Forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada of Peru's Instituto de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses reported at a press conference on 12 January 2024 that the bodies were assemblages of human and animal bone bound with modern synthetic adhesive — "dolls," in his phrasing — not the remains of any single organism. An earlier Peruvian prosecutor's assessment described specimens "recently manufactured" and coated with a paper-and-glue mixture to simulate skin.
• DOCUMENTED UNAM did not endorse the conclusion. Maussan cited radiocarbon work associated with Mexico's Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; UNAM publicly denied endorsing his interpretation and said his conclusions did not follow from the work performed.
• DOCUMENTED Peru's Ministry of Culture objected on heritage grounds, treating the material as looted pre-Columbian human remains — which is the ordinary, and grim, explanation for where ancient bone in southern Peru comes from.

The key logical trap: the radiocarbon dates were probably real. Dating a bone tells you when the animal died. It tells you nothing about who glued it to a different animal, or when.

← swipe table →

Ministerio Público del Perú / Instituto de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses, press conference of forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada, Lima, 12 January 2024; peer-reviewed write-up: "Anatomía de un fraude: el caso de las presuntas momias alienígenas humanoides tridáctilas de Nazca, Perú," Arqueológicas. Mexican Chamber of Deputies public hearing, 12 September 2023 (proceedings on the Cámara de Diputados record); second public hearing, November 2023. Statements by Peru's Ministerio de Cultura and by UNAM, 2023–2024.

• DOCUMENTED Broadcast by Fox on 28 August 1995 as Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, hosted by Jonathan Frakes, and rebroadcast to larger audiences; also aired in the UK on Channel 4. It was released by British music producer Ray Santilli, who said it showed a 1947 Roswell autopsy.
• DOCUMENTED Santilli and producer Gary Shoefield admitted the footage was manufactured in April 2006. Sculptor John Humphreys built the bodies over roughly three weeks from plaster casts, filled with butcher-shop material — sheep brains, chicken entrails, knuckle joints and raspberry jam. Humphreys also appears in the film as one of the masked examiners.
• UNSUPPORTED Santilli's residual claim. He maintains the film is a "restoration" or "reconstruction" of genuine 1947 footage he saw, which had degraded, and has said a small number of authentic frames were incorporated. No such original footage, and no independently verifiable frame from it, has ever been produced.
• DOCUMENTED Note the stake on both sides of the confession. The 2006 admission landed alongside the release of Alien Autopsy, a comedy film about the making of the hoax, in which Santilli and Shoefield were commercially involved. A confession timed to a film launch is still a confession — but the timing is part of the record.

Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, Fox Network, 28 August 1995. Santilli/Shoefield admissions, April 2006, made in UK press interviews and around the release of Alien Autopsy (Warner Bros., 2006) — see "How an Alien Autopsy Hoax Captured the World's Imagination for a Decade," Time, 24 June 2016.

• DOCUMENTED The "Be Witness" event, Auditorio Nacional, Mexico City, 5 May 2015. Two Kodachrome slides said to show a small body recovered at Roswell were unveiled to a paying audience and paid livestream, promoted by Jaime Maussan with Roswell researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt; the slides were held by videographer Adam Dew.
• RESOLVED The body is a mummified human child. An informal group of researchers (the "Roswell Slides Research Group," including Curt Collins, Tim Printy and others) applied deblurring software to the museum placard visible in the slide. The recovered text identifies the specimen as the mummified body of a roughly two-year-old boy, displayed as a museum loan with descriptions of the burial shirt and blankets — an ordinary Native American mummy exhibit, photographed in a display case. Wikipedia's own summary of the episode records the corpse as "later identified as a human child."
• DOCUMENTED The promoters had access to the placard the whole time. The slides had circulated privately for years and were shown at a paid event before the placard was read. The resolution required no laboratory, no access to the physical object, and no government cooperation — only image processing on a detail already in the frame.
• DISPUTED The precise museum provenance. The identification of the specific institution and exhibit rests on the reconstructed placard text and matching to known displays rather than on physical examination of the body itself. The "not an alien" conclusion is not in serious dispute; the exact catalogue history is less firmly nailed down than the deblurring result.

"Be Witness" event, Auditorio Nacional, Mexico City, 5 May 2015. Placard deblurring published by the Roswell Slides Research Group, May 2015. Note: we were able to verify the event, promoters and the human-child identification against reference sources; the verbatim placard transcription is reproduced from the research group's own publication and should be read as their reading of the image.

• RESOLVED Billy Meier (Switzerland, 1975– ). Meier claims ongoing contact with beings he calls the Plejaren and has produced photographs, films and metal samples. In 1997 his ex-wife stated the craft in his photographs were models built from household items including trash-can lids and carpet tacks. Photographs presented as portraits of extraterrestrial women "Asket" and "Nera" were matched to Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund, performers with The Golddiggers on The Dean Martin Show. Author Gary Kinder recorded Meier admitting to using models, after his wife produced photographs of incomplete models Meier believed he had burned.
• DOCUMENTED Meier's stake. The claims underpin FIGU, the organisation he founded, and the Semjase Silver Star Center, sustained by publications, memberships and visitors.
• RESOLVED Gulf Breeze, Florida (Ed Walters, 11 November 1987 – 1 May 1988). Walters produced 32 photographs and video of a lit, ribbed craft. On 10 June 1990 a nine-inch model — four plastic foam plates and drafting paper, with punched-out windows — was found in the attic of Walters' former house. Robert Nathan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory assessed many of the images as double exposures. In February 1993 family friend Tommy Smith stated he had watched Walters fake the photographs.
• DOCUMENTED Walters' stake, and the institutional failure around it. Walters received a reported $200,000 book advance and a $450,000 offer for miniseries rights. MUFON's then-director Walter Andrus had called it "the best case we've ever had" in June 1988; after the model surfaced, investigators who concluded it was a hoax reported being driven out of the organisation. The lesson is about the reviewers, not just the hoaxer.

Kal K. Korff, Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story (Prometheus, 1995) — reviewed in "Fakeships of the Pleiades," Skeptical Inquirer, 1996; Gary Kinder, Light Years (1987). Gulf Breeze: model discovery reported 10 June 1990; Robert Nathan (JPL) image analysis; Tommy Smith statement, February 1993 — narrative and MUFON aftermath in Robert Sheaffer, "War of the Words: The True but Strange Story of the Gulf Breeze UFO," Skeptical Inquirer, Sept/Oct 2007.

• DOCUMENTED How they arrived. In December 1984 Los Angeles television producer Jaime Shandera received an unmarked package containing undeveloped 35mm film, postmarked New Mexico. Developed, it yielded a purported Truman–Forrestal memo dated 24 September 1947 and an "Eisenhower Briefing Document" dated 18 November 1952, describing a secret committee of twelve overseeing recovered craft.
• DOCUMENTED The FBI investigated and rejected them. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations referred the material to the FBI's Dallas office on 15 September 1988. The Bureau concluded the documents were "completely bogus" and closed the matter on 30 November 1988. The case file is public in the FBI's electronic reading room ("Majestic 12"), and includes the pages annotated to that effect — the origin of the widely circulated image of a UFO document stamped BOGUS.
• DOCUMENTED The forensic objections are specific. Skeptic Philip J. Klass documented that Truman's signature appears to be a pasted photocopy, reproducing incidental scratch marks from a known document; that the unusual date format matched the personal correspondence of ufologist William Moore, who was involved in promoting the papers; and that Robert Cutler was out of the country on the date of the "Cutler–Twining memo" attributed to him.
• DISPUTED Some proponents still defend a subset. A minority of researchers argue individual documents in the sprawling MJ-12 corpus may be genuine or genuinely derived. No MJ-12 document has ever been authenticated by NARA or any issuing agency, and the National Archives has stated it holds no record of such a committee in the relevant record groups.
• DOCUMENTED Klass had a stake too. He was a paid aviation journalist and a founding figure in CSICOP with a long-running public identity as the movement's chief debunker, and he pursued proponents aggressively, including through wager offers and correspondence campaigns. His MJ-12 findings held up; his adversarial posture is still part of the picture.

FBI file "Majestic 12," FBI Records: The Vault — AFOSI referral 15 September 1988, case closed 30 November 1988. Philip J. Klass, analyses published in Skeptical Inquirer and The Klass Files, 1987–1990 — see "New Evidence of MJ-12 Hoax," Skeptical Inquirer 14(2), Winter 1990.

Almost every argument about this case is people talking past each other, because there were two separate events hours apart and they are not equally resolved.

• RESOLVED The ~10:00 pm lights over Phoenix were flares. The US Air Force attributed them to slow-falling, long-burning LUU-2B/B illumination flares released by a flight of four A-10 aircraft of the Maryland Air National Guard during a training drop over the Barry M. Goldwater Range in western Pima County. The apparent "hovering" is a known artifact: rising heat from the burning flare inflates the parachute canopy, slowing descent. This is the footage most people have actually seen.
• DISPUTED The earlier ~8:00–8:45 pm formation is less settled. A V- or triangle-arranged set of lights was reported moving southeast across Nevada and Arizona. Tucson astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha, with skeptic Robert Sheaffer, traced it to a formation of five A-10s flying at high altitude under Operation Snowbird, noting that military aircraft in formation need not display the blinking anti-collision lights civil aircraft use. Witnesses insist they saw a single solid object occluding stars. The aircraft explanation is plausible and specific but rests on reconstruction rather than a released flight log tying that formation to those minutes.
• TESTIMONY Governor Fife Symington. Symington publicly mocked the case at a 1997 press conference by producing an aide in an alien costume; a decade later he stated that he had personally seen the object and considered it not man-made. Both the mockery and the reversal are documented; his account of what he saw remains testimony, and by the time of the reversal he was an active media commentator on the subject.

← swipe table →

US Air Force statement on the Barry M. Goldwater Range flare drop, 1997. James McGaha and Robert Sheaffer, published analyses in Skeptical Inquirer — "Alien Lights? At Phoenix, Stephenville, and Elsewhere: A Postmortem" (McGaha and Nickell, March/April 2015) and "The 'Phoenix Lights' Become an 'Incident'" (Sheaffer, July/Aug 2016). Symington press conference, 19 June 1997; Symington statements from 2007 onward.

These are not exotic. They account for the overwhelming majority of sightings, and each has a recognisable signature.

← swipe table →

• DISPUTED O'Hare International, 7 November 2006. Around 4:15 pm, roughly a dozen United Airlines employees at Gate C-17 — pilots, mechanics, ramp staff and supervisors — reported a silent grey disc above the terminal. The FAA declined to investigate, characterising it as a weather phenomenon, and the object was not on radar. Astronomer Mark Hammergren proposed a hole-punch cloud, consistent with conditions that day. Skeptics also note the witness statements disagree on shape, altitude, motion, duration and even how many objects were present. Against that: hole-punch clouds do not usually get described as a metallic disc by aviation professionals, and the explanation was never formally tested. No photograph has ever been produced, despite early claims.

O'Hare: Jon Hilkevitch, "In the sky! A bird? A plane? A … UFO?", Chicago Tribune, 1 January 2007; FAA response to media inquiries and released ATC audio, 2006–2007; Mark Hammergren (Adler Planetarium) commentary. Starlink orbital totals as of June 2026.

• DOCUMENTED The footage is real and its provenance is unusually good. A US Department of Homeland Security / Customs and Border Protection aircraft recorded thermal-infrared video of a small object near Rafael Hernández Airport, Aguadilla, on the evening of 25 April 2013.
• TESTIMONY The anomalous reading. The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), a volunteer research organisation, published an analysis concluding the object travelled at high speed, transited the sea surface and appeared to separate into two. SCU's authors are named and their methodology is public; the group exists to argue this class of case, which is a stake worth naming.
• DISPUTED The lantern explanation. Analyst Mick West argues the object is one or two wind-borne sky lanterns, that the apparent extreme velocity is a parallax artifact of the camera aircraft's own motion combined with an incorrect distance assumption, and that the "splitting" is simply two lanterns drifting apart. SCU researchers dispute this on wind-direction and speed grounds. Neither side has produced a decisive datum; this is a real disagreement between people who have both done work, not a case where one side is obviously bluffing.
• UNSUPPORTED "It went underwater." The transmedium claim rests on interpreting an infrared blob's apparent position against a coastline in a low-resolution thermal image at unknown range. That is exactly the measurement least reliable in this medium.

SCU, "2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico UAP" report (Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies), with SCU's own summary and rebuttal page. Mick West, analyses published at Metabunk, 2018 onward. We were unable to retrieve either primary document directly at time of writing; the positions are summarised from the public record and should be checked against the originals.

• TESTIMONY What Arnold actually reported. On 24 June 1947, flying near Mount Rainier, Washington, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine bright objects in formation, estimating 1,200–1,700 mph. He described their movement: they flew erratically, he said, "like a saucer if you skip it across the water," and weaved "like the tail of a Chinese kite."
• DOCUMENTED "Flying saucer" describes the motion, not the shape. Arnold was interviewed by Bill Bequette of the East Oregonian on 25 June. Bequette's early stories did not use the phrase; Herbert Strentz's 1970 study of press coverage concluded it came from an editor or headline writer, with the Chicago Sun among the first to run it, around 26 June. Arnold complained afterwards that he had been misrendered — the objects he drew were not discs.
• DOCUMENTED The consequences are measurable. Once the phrase was in print, the reported shape of UFOs shifted decisively toward discs. The culture supplied the shape; the witness had not.
• DISPUTED What Arnold saw. Proposed explanations include mirage effects from snow-capped peaks (Steuart Campbell), a flight of jet aircraft, meteors, lenticular clouds, and — the one that draws the most ridicule but is not obviously worse than the others — American white pelicans, which soar in undulating lines and flash white. Donald Menzel variously proposed water droplets on the aircraft window or atmospheric optics. None has been established; Arnold's speed estimate depends entirely on his distance estimate, which he could not have known.

Kenneth Arnold statement to Army Air Forces, July 1947 (Project Blue Book case file "Mt. Rainer, Washington, June 1947," NARA RG 341); East Oregonian, 25–26 June 1947; Herbert Strentz, doctoral study of UFO press coverage, Northwestern University, 1970.

• RESOLVED The 11 July 1991 total solar eclipse "UFO." Numerous camcorder operators across Mexico recorded a steady bright object near the eclipsed sun, and the clips were promoted heavily on Mexican television. The object's position corresponds to Venus, which was above the sun and became visible during totality — an identification anyone can check independently by running planetarium software for that date, time and latitude. That reproducibility is what makes this one solid rather than merely asserted.
• UNSUPPORTED The August 1997 Mexico City "disc over the skyline" video. Widely circulated and promoted as authentic, the clip shows a metallic disc gliding past high-rise buildings. No camera-original tape, no identifiable videographer with a verifiable account, and no corroborating witness has ever been produced — in a metropolitan area of some twenty million people, in daylight. Analysts have pointed to compositing artifacts and skyline inconsistencies. We could not locate a published, peer-reviewed forensic analysis, so the honest status is: the claim of authenticity has never been substantiated, not that a formal debunk exists.
• RESOLVED The "Metepec creature." A small body promoted in Mexico as a captured alien turned out to be a skinned monkey.
• DOCUMENTED The common thread. Jaime Maussan promoted the eclipse footage, the Metepec creature, the 2015 Roswell slides and the Nazca bodies. He has also promoted a purported COVID-19 treatment ("Hydrotene") rejected by the scientific community. A track record is not proof that any given new claim is false — but it is legitimate prior information, and readers are entitled to it.

Venus identification for the 11 July 1991 eclipse is verifiable from any ephemeris or planetarium application. Metepec and Hydrotene per published biographical coverage of Jaime Maussan. Note: the 1997 Mexico City video's status is reported here as unsubstantiated rather than formally debunked, because we could not verify a definitive published analysis.

This is not an insult to witnesses. Honest, sober, well-trained observers — including pilots — get aerial estimates badly wrong, for structural reasons.

• DOCUMENTED Angular size does not give you size or distance. A witness measures only the angle an object subtends. Size, range and speed are then inferred from an assumed distance. Get the distance wrong by 10× and the size and speed are wrong by 10×. In an empty sky there are no reference objects to anchor the assumption, which is why "it was the size of a football field" and "it was moving at 3,000 mph" are almost never independent measurements — they are the same guess, restated.
• DOCUMENTED Pareidolia is a fast, automatic perceptual process, not gullibility. Magnetoencephalography work by Hadjikhani and colleagues (2009) found that objects merely perceived as faces evoke activation of the fusiform face area at around 165 ms — early enough to be perception rather than after-the-fact reasoning. The brain imposes structure on noise before you get a vote.
• DOCUMENTED The autokinetic effect. A stationary point of light in an otherwise dark field appears to drift and dart. Muzafer Sherif used the effect in his classic 1935 conformity experiments precisely because the apparent motion is entirely internal — and because witnesses converge on each other's estimates when they discuss it. That second finding matters for multi-witness cases: group discussion increases agreement without increasing accuracy.
• DOCUMENTED Expectation shapes the report. The reported shape of UFOs shifted toward discs after the press coined "flying saucer" in 1947, toward black triangles in the late 1980s and 1990s, and toward silent, slow-moving lights in the drone-report era. The stimuli in the sky did not change that fast; the available descriptive vocabulary did.
• DOCUMENTED Instruments have their own illusions. Infrared and targeting cameras produce apparent rotation from gimbal movement, apparent shape from aperture geometry, and apparent velocity from parallax against a distant background. A sensor record is better evidence than a memory — but it is not self-interpreting.

N. Hadjikhani et al., "Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects," Neuroreport 20(4), 2009. Muzafer Sherif, The Psychology of Social Norms, 1936 (autokinetic experiments, "A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception," Archives of Psychology 27(187), 1935). Condon Report chapters on perceptual and photographic evidence, 1968.

• Project BLUE BOOK — Unidentified Flying Objects US National Archives · holdings page with the 12,618/701 figures
• Sanitized Version of Project Blue Book Case Files on Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects NARA Catalog, RG 341, 1947–1969 · the case files themselves
• Blue Book case file: "Mt. Rainer, Washington, June 1947" NARA Catalog, RG 341 · the Kenneth Arnold sighting file
• Records Related to UFOs and UAPs at the National Archives NARA research hub · finding aids across record groups
• Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (the "Condon Report") Univ. of Colorado / USAF, 1968 · complete searchable text
• Comprehensive Catalog of Project Blue Book Unknowns NICAP · case-by-case listing of the unidentifieds
• Especialistas del Ministerio Público confirmaron que momias incautadas… no son reales Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, Jan 2024 · official forensic finding
• Anatomía de un fraude: el caso de las presuntas momias alienígenas humanoides tridáctilas de Nazca, Perú Arqueológicas (Ministerio de Cultura del Perú) · peer-reviewed analysis
• Primera audiencia pública sobre Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos No Identificados Cámara de Diputados, Sept 2023 · official record of the hearing
• Segunda Audiencia Pública Sobre Fenómenos Anómalos No Identificados Cámara de Diputados, Nov 2023 · the return visit, official record
• FBI file: Majestic 12 FBI Records: The Vault · the "completely bogus" case file
• Philip J. Klass, "New Evidence of MJ-12 Hoax" Skeptical Inquirer 14(2), Winter 1990 · Truman signature forensics
• "Roswell Slides" BUSTED! — "MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY" Robert Sheaffer, 8 May 2015 · the deblurred placard text
• How an Alien Autopsy Hoax Captured the World's Imagination for a Decade Time, 24 June 2016 · Santilli, Shoefield and the 2006 confession
• "Fakeships of the Pleiades" Skeptical Inquirer, 1996 · review of Korff on Billy Meier
• Robert Sheaffer, "War of the Words: The True but Strange Story of the Gulf Breeze UFO" Skeptical Inquirer, Sept/Oct 2007 · Walters, the model, MUFON
• James McGaha and Joe Nickell, "Alien Lights? At Phoenix, Stephenville, and Elsewhere: A Postmortem" Skeptical Inquirer, Mar/Apr 2015 · the two Phoenix events
• Robert Sheaffer, "The 'Phoenix Lights' Become an 'Incident'" Skeptical Inquirer, July/Aug 2016 · flare drop and A-10 formation
• Jon Hilkevitch, "In the sky! A bird? A plane? A … UFO?" Chicago Tribune, 1 Jan 2007 · the story that broke O'Hare
• 2006 O'Hare International Airport UFO Sighting — FOIA case file The Black Vault · released FAA records and ATC audio
• 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: The detailed analysis… Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies · the full SCU report
• SCU: 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP Incident — a detailed analysis explorescu.org · SCU's own rebuttal to the lantern case
• Aguadilla Infrared Footage of 'UFOs' — Probably Hot Air Wedding Lanterns Metabunk (Mick West) · the lantern and parallax argument
• Hadjikhani et al., "Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects" Neuroreport 20(4), 2009 · MEG evidence for fast pareidolia (free full text)
• Muzafer Sherif, "A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception" Archives of Psychology 27(187), 1935 · the autokinetic experiments
• Starlink Statistics Jonathan McDowell, Jonathan's Space Report · running satellite totals
• Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, Fox Network, 28 August 1995 no stable public URL found
• Kal K. Korff, Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story (Prometheus, 1995) no stable public URL found
• Gary Kinder, Light Years (1987) no stable public URL found
• Robert Nathan (JPL), image analysis of the Gulf Breeze photographs no stable public URL found
• Tommy Smith statement on the Gulf Breeze photographs, February 1993 no stable public URL found
• UNAM statement disclaiming Maussan's interpretation of its analyses, 2023 no stable public URL found
• US Air Force statement on the Barry M. Goldwater Range flare drop, 1997 no stable public URL found
• Governor Fife Symington press conference, 19 June 1997, and statements from 2007 onward no stable public URL found
• Herbert Strentz, A Survey of Press Coverage of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1947–1966 (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1970) no stable public URL found
• East Oregonian, 25–26 June 1947 (Bill Bequette's Arnold stories) no stable public URL found
• The August 1997 Mexico City "disc over the skyline" video and analyses of it no stable public URL found
• The "Metepec creature" and the "Hydrotene" episode no stable public URL found

Links verified August 2026. Unlinked items in this section are ones for which no stable public URL could be confirmed.

Images are public domain or freely licensed; each carries its credit and licence, and links to its source record. Served from this site rather than hotlinked.