Nearly a century of wondering: How U.S. UFO claims evolved in reality and fiction

The U.S. story of UFOs—moving between government reviews, military reports, and popular entertainment—has stretched across decades and repeatedly resurfaced in the national conversation. An AP timeline of the “American UFO saga” traces how reports began to circulate widely after World War II, how official investigations unfolded through the Cold War, and how later shifts in terminology and disclosure brought renewed attention.

The arc starts with a widely reported sighting in 1947. On June 24, Kenneth A. Arnold, a private pilot, reported seeing nine objects flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state, and the report set off a wave of other sightings. In early July, another widely discussed incident followed when a ranch foreman checking sheep in New Mexico found strange debris near Roswell; authorities initially said it was from a “flying disc” but later said the material was from a weather balloon.

Within a year, the investigation framework moved from public reports to an organized government response. In 1948, the U.S. Air Force began Project Sign, and the effort was later renamed Project Blue Book in 1953. AP’s timeline says more than 12,600 reported sightings were investigated between 1948 and 1969.

As official inquiries continued, UFO stories also gained traction in Hollywood. AP’s timeline points to 1950’s spy film “The Flying Saucer” as an early example of how popular entertainment began incorporating the theme of unidentified flying objects. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the UFO narrative also merged with other public touchpoints—such as radar and pilot accounts of unexplained objects above Washington, D.C., and the start in 1955 of Air Force construction for what would become the Area 51 site northwest of Las Vegas.

In parallel, television and cinema helped lock UFO imagery into mainstream culture. AP’s timeline notes that “Star Trek” premiered in 1966, and that Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” arrived in 1977, followed by “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” in 1982. Later, the film “Independence Day,” released in 1996, further cemented the genre’s “alien invasion” framing in the U.S. entertainment landscape.

By the late 1960s, official posture also shifted. On Dec. 17, 1969, the U.S. Air Force said it found no evidence of any UFO that was extraterrestrial in nature or that threatened national security, and it terminated Project Blue Book. Still, the theme did not disappear; AP’s timeline describes later episodes that kept fueling interest, including 1977’s Spielberg release and subsequent reports from U.S. and allied locations.

The narrative also returns to military documentation and modernized review structures. AP’s timeline says that in 1980, U.S. Air Force personnel stationed in Great Britain reported seeing strange lights above Rendlesham Forest in December, and it describes later UFO-report developments including the 2015 “Gofast” and “Gimbal” video references. It then moves into the 2019-era acknowledgment that the Navy described three clips of declassified military footage as unidentified aerial phenomena, rather than confirmed extraterrestrial encounters.

In 2020 and 2021, the U.S. government’s approach further evolved into what AP describes as organized review efforts. The Pentagon announced a UAP Task Force in 2020, and a government report in 2021 said investigators reviewed 144 sightings of aircraft or other devices traveling at mysterious speeds or trajectories but did not find extraterrestrial links, highlighting a need for better data collection.

In recent years, the UFO discussion has also been shaped by testimony and competing claims about what the government does or does not know. AP’s timeline says former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified in July 2023 that the U.S. was concealing a longstanding program to retrieve and reverse-engineer unidentified flying objects, and it notes that the Pentagon denied it was concealing such a program. The timeline then points to an updated official conclusion in 2024: a Defense Department study by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office that, AP says, found no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence.

The developments in 2026, as reflected in AP’s timeline, show the topic continuing to generate policy interest and public debate. AP says former President Barack Obama, answering a question about whether “aliens” are real on a podcast, later posted that “the odds are good there’s life out there,” but that the chances of visitation were low and that he saw no evidence during his presidency of extraterrestrials making contact with the U.S. AP also says President Donald Trump announced he was directing the Pentagon and other agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs, and it notes that U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna requested in a letter that the government release about four dozen videos related to UAP sightings to an oversight committee task force, citing risks to military security and readiness.