Something Seen

Hundreds of witnesses reported lights over Phoenix, Arizona, on the night of March 13, 1997. Skeptics trace them to Air National Guard training flights.

On a still June night a yellow substance fell by the bucketful onto a ship in Pictou Harbour, Nova Scotia. Tests reported in the American Journal of Science suggested to one Mr. Blake that it might be insect eggs.

On 16 July 1952 two Coast Guard men at Salem reported bright lights outside a window, and one photographed them. Investigators later blamed reflections.

On 8 January 2008, dozens of Stephenville, Texas, residents reported bright lights overhead after dark. The Air Force later said F-16s had been flying in the area.

A photograph of a long-necked head above Loch Ness appeared in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934. In 1994 Christian Spurling said it showed a toy submarine topped with a serpent head.

A huge explosion over Siberia on 30 June 1908 that Evenki reindeer herders and a Russian villager saw and heard. NASA calls it an asteroid impact; the idea of a crashed alien ship gained ground after a 1946 science fiction story.

Students at two Westall schools in Clayton South, Melbourne, said that on April 6, 1966, a metallic object hovered over them and dropped behind trees. In 2013 the local council approved a flying-saucer playground near the spot.

On the night of 22 December 1909, thousands of people in Worcester, Massachusetts, reported seeing an airship. The sightings followed inventor Wallace Tillinghast's claim to have built a fast aeroplane.

For more than an hour in June 1801, a mirage of a city nobody could name hung over Youghal, County Cork. Mirages of walled towns had been seen there in 1796 and 1797.

A former policeman from New York City, living in Kent, said that just before midnight on 31 December 1982 a huge V-shaped craft passed low over his house.

The luz mala, or evil light, is a bright ball of light reported floating just above the ground in rural Argentina and Uruguay. Country people have long taken it for a soul in torment.

A long, spindle-shaped body sat on the face of the sun and crept slowly across it, staying in view until it reached the edge on 7 September.

The yeti is a figure of Himalayan legend. Evidence offered for it includes footprints photographed during a 1951 Everest attempt and scalps held by a monastery and a village; a 2017 DNA study and a 2019 account of the 1951 print both point to bears.

An ape-like creature that people report seeing in the Australian bush. The name is one of several for a being with roots in Aboriginal oral history.

The last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, died at Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo on 7 September 1936. People have reported sightings ever since, none of them confirmed.

In October 1873 a boy named Tom Piccott hacked at the tentacles of a giant squid off Portugal Cove, Newfoundland. Sources disagree on the day.

The tsuchinoko is a short, thick snake with a big head reported from across Japan. Towns and villages have offered rewards for one caught alive, and the largest, 200 million yen, went unclaimed.