8 Bizarre Mass UFO Sightings That Still Baffle Experts

Regardless of how you feel about the potential for alien life somewhere out there in the universe, UFO sightings are often difficult to substantiate with real evidence. They tend to be fleeting and isolated incidents that can’t be corroborated by third parties. That’s not the case for the sightings below, which were witnessed by multiple people and frequently documented in local newspapers. 

1. The Phoenix Lights
2. The Ariel School Incident
3. The Voronezh UFO Incident
4. The Michigan “Swamp Gas” UFOs
5. The Fiorentina Stadium UFO Sighting
6. The Westall UFO Incident
7. The Stephensville UFO Sightings
8. The Berkshire UFO Sightings

The Phoenix Lights

On the evening of March 13, 1997, people throughout Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada witnessed something that would come to be one of the most famous UFO incidents of all time. Around 8 p.m., reports began trickling in of an enormous V-shape in the sky. Made up of seven glowing orbs, this shape was gliding in a north-south direction so slowly that it was difficult to tell if it was moving at all. Then, it disappeared. Half an hour later, there was another strange sight in the sky—this time, a single line of orbs hovering in place and then also vanishing.

One 1997 poll found that up to 10 percent of Arizonans claimed to have witnessed the lights—ranging from police officers, families, air-traffic controllers, and even the governor of Arizona himself (though he didn’t admit this until several years after the incident). Actor Kurt Russell was flying a personal aircraft into Phoenix with his stepson at the time, and he was allegedly one of the first pilots to report the lights.

Unlike most other UFO sightings, the Phoenix Lights have an official explanation—the first set of orbs was a formation of planes, and the second a set of flares dropped during a training program—but almost 30 years later, some still don’t buy it. 

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The Ariel School Incident

Outside the small town of Ruwa, Zimbabwe, a group of around 60 children made international news when they claimed to see a UFO and its passengers during a brief recess from class. Adults were in a faculty meeting when students of the Ariel School reportedly saw a silvery disc flying over a field near their playground on September 16, 1994.

According to interviews with the children conducted by both a UFO expert and a Harvard professor, the kids watched the disc land and saw aliens emerge from it. The creatures were waxy-skinned and child-sized, with bulbous eyes but otherwise small features. They wore shiny black suits and had long, dark hair, and communicated telepathically to the students, warning them: “Pollution mustn’t be.” Others in Zimbabwe and the neighboring countries of South Africa and Zambia also reported seeing bizarre streaking objects in the sky in the days preceding and following the Ariel School incident.

Some have called this a case of mass hysteria rather than a genuine UFO sighting, saying the group interview tactics employed by investigators on the scene allowed students to feed off one another and align their versions of events. Despite longtime scrutiny, however, many of the students have stuck to their stories even well into adulthood.

The Voronezh UFO Incident

Three hundred miles southeast of Moscow in Voronezh, Russia, a trip to the local park turned into something beyond explanation for several dozen people. On September 27, 1989, some children and their parents witnessed a glowing disc-shaped craft hover and then land in a small park outside the city. The craft opened and several beings disembarked—they were over 9 feet tall, had green skin and three eyes, wore shiny metallic suits, and were escorted by some kind of robot. They seemed to survey the area, and some reports allege that the aliens shot one of the children with a beam, causing him to temporarily disappear.

Soviet media covered the ensuing investigation extensively, revealing that the spaceship had allegedly left a mark on the ground where it had landed along with trace amounts of radiation in the area. Some of the child witnesses drew what they had seen, and many believers point to similarities across these images as proof that the sighting was genuine. 

The Michigan “Swamp Gas” UFOs

Ann Arbor, Michigan, experienced a series of mass UFO sightings in March of 1966 that still have people talking to this day. Starting at around 4 a.m. on March 14, multiple UFOs were reported to police from all over town. Soon enough, it was confirmed that two other police departments along with the nearby Selfridge Air National Guard Base had also received reports. Even across the border in Ohio, people had seen the same thing: several “disc-shaped” objects with red and green lights, swinging back and forth in the sky for around two hours before vanishing. The reports were so numerous that the Civil Defense as well as the U.S. Air Force immediately began investigating. 

Three days later, more strange objects were spotted in the air by a police sergeant, and three days after that came another mass sighting that is perhaps the most infamous of the series. On that day, March 20, a farmer and his adult son saw a strange light flying towards their farm. As it got closer, the farmer noticed it was oval-shaped with a “waffled” pattern on the exterior, and then it lowered into the woods a distance away.

The farmer and his son located the landing site and saw what they later described as a car-sized ship with a cone-shaped top, outfitted with lights bright enough to light up the whole forest. The two men reported that the ship began disappearing and reappearing around the woods, almost glitching in and out of existence, before it took off into the sky at incredible speed. The following night, a similar craft was reported at a nearby college. Cops, staff, students, and the director of civil defense all watched the ship hover and lower over the college for hours before it vanished, marking the end of the series of bizarre sightings over the area. 

Officials ultimately blamed “swamp gas” in the area for what had been seen—an explanation that was so widely derided even at the time that it’s now become synonymous with UFOs and government skepticism. In conversation with the Ann Arbor News 30 years after the string of sightings, former Washtenaw sheriff Douglas Harvey recalled a conversation he had with the Civil Defense-appointed astronomer tasked with investigating the reports at the time, J. Allen Hyneck.

“Dr. Hynek in the car said, ‘There is something. We just can’t put our finger on it. We've been investigating this for quite a while.’ ” Back at Sheriff Harvey’s office, he says, Hynek received a phone call that lasted for quite some time. “He came out and I said, ‘Well, Dr. Hynek. What do you think?’ He said, ‘It’s swamp gas.’ He tells me one minute he has no idea what it is. And then he makes one phone call to Washington and comes out and gives a statement that it’s swamp gas. Very strange.” The swamp gas story, according to some, also doesn’t explain the presence of high levels of radiation and boron at both of the latter two sighting locations, making this an intriguing case for UFOlogists even now.

The Fiorentina Stadium UFO Sighting

On October 27, 1954, 10,000 fans were watching a football match in Fiorentina’s Stadio Artemio Franchi outside Florence, Italy, site of the World Cup 20 years prior, when they saw something inexplicable. It was just after half-time during a game between the stadium’s home Fiorentina club and their local rival, the Pistoiese club, when suddenly players stopped playing and started pointing to the sky.

For 15 minutes, players and patrons alike watched as an unidentified aircraft hovered above the stadium, moving slowly. Some say it was egg-like, while others describe it as more cigar-shaped or even as multiple objects rather than just one. As the object passed overhead, a silvery substance rained down from the sky—sticky, similar to cotton wool or cobwebs, and extremely delicate. It quickly coated the stadium along with residential houses nearby, but disintegrated nearly immediately. Samples taken of the substance came back from the lab as containing boron, silicon, calcium, and magnesium. 

Some have hypothesized that the sighting and raining substance could be misidentified spider silk from migrating spiders. While October is within the migrating range of Northern Hemisphere spiders, many refute this explanation, pointing out that spider silk is made of proteins that would have been identifiable via lab work and doesn’t contain the elements found in the substance. Many of the players in the match insist to this day that they saw something extraterrestrial. 

The Westall UFO Incident

Yet another school witnessed an unidentified object in the sky all the way back in 1966 in what has been nicknamed “Australia’s Roswell.” Around 11 a.m., just after recess was called, many saw a metallic flying disc in the sky over Westall High School, just southwest of Melbourne. The saucer-like object was larger than a car; it flew across the sky and then descended towards a wooded area known locally as The Grange, briefly landed, then darted back into the sky and away at impossible speeds. The object was reportedly so clear that nearly all witnesses described the same features, and many immediately refuted the notion that it could be a misidentified weather balloon. The sighting was so shocking and bizarre, in fact, that one young girl supposedly fainted from fear.

As soon as the craft was gone, some of the students ran to the landing site and were amazed to find an oval burn mark in the grass. Some say that the students were interviewed by the men in black at the scene, while others say they saw military personnel in the area soon after the sighting.

In total, over 200 students, faculty, and residents witnessed the event. There’s significant belief in some kind of government cover-up at play, with one retired schoolteacher who witnessed the UFO claiming he was visited by officers of the Australian Air Force who threatened his job if he spoke out about what he had seen. Surviving student witnesses still gather each year at the crash site, frustrated that the Australian government has yet to recognize the sighting or offer an official explanation of what happened on that day over 50 years ago. 

The Stephensville UFO Sightings

In January of 2008, residents of Stephenville, Texas, reported seeing a large, triangular object lined with bright lights flying low in the sky. According to witnesses, it was silent, moved quickly, and vanished without a trace. Several of those who caught a glimpse say they also witnessed two military F-16 jets chase the object in hot pursuit. Once the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) caught wind of the sighting and began to investigate, reports began flooding in by the dozens across town. 

The investigation turned to the local Naval Air Station, which adamantly refuted any involvement from any of its planes—but then flipped weeks later, claiming it had been performing routine training exercises in the area at the time of the sightings. Additional investigation into radar data corroborates the townspeople’s experiences, and may also cast doubt onto the official explanation; radar detected not only two F-16s in the area and headed in the direction as was claimed, but also a third object in the air ahead of them lacking a transponder (something all military craft are outfitted with). The case remains mysterious.

The Berkshire UFO Sightings

On Labor Day of 1969, an entire Massachusetts county had a run-in with some kind of unknown craft, and some even claim to have been abducted. From Sheffield, to Great Barrington, to Stockbridge, many residents began noticing lights in the sky around 8 p.m. that night—bright, colorful orbs that performed in ways known aircraft didn’t.

Accounts vary: Jane Green reportedly saw a large, bright object in the sky hovering over her car, while 9-year-old Thomas Reed claims to have been abducted that night. According to Reed, his family car was bathed in a bright light one moment and a mile away from their original location the next, with no recollection of most of the previous hour. (Reed claims he could remember some of the ship’s futuristic interior, though.) The family sat through multiple interviews and even polygraphs, but their stories stayed consistent and no apparent deception was observed. 

One radio station got calls all evening of people reporting their various sightings. With anywhere from 40 to 250 eyewitnesses total, all across various locations, many find it difficult to easily write off the Berkshire UFO sightings as some kind of mass hysteria or hallucination, and many witnesses maintain their belief that something otherworldly visited them that night.