According to SportsLogos.net, though there have been countless UFO-related incidents through the years, only one besides Roswell has changed the name and mascot of a minor-league baseball team. It also has the not-inconsequential honor of being regarded as the first filmed evidence of UFOs.

Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (also known as the Condon Report) described how, on August 15 (or August 5 — records differ), 1950, Nick Mariana, the general manager of Great Falls, Montana, baseball team the Electrics, and his 19-year-old unnamed secretary witnessed two bright objects moving slowly through the sky. He later described them in the Blue Book report as “like two new dimes in the sky.” Mariana had a film camera in his car, and he maintained that he recorded around 30 seconds of footage of the spinning objects.

Mariana thought that they took off at around 400 mph. When the Air Force looked at the footage, they knocked this down to 200 mph. Once the Air Force returned the film, 30 frames that best showed the objects had been removed, and they explained the film as the “reflections of two F-94 jet fighters that were in the area.” Edward J. Ruppelt, then-head of Project Blue Book, disagreed, also discounting birds, balloons, and meteors.

No matter, the Great Falls Electrics became the Voyagers, and they adopted a baseball-loving alien as their mascot.

The BBC reported that on October 27, 1954, in Tuscany, 10,000 fans in the Stadio Artemi Franchi for a soccer match went silent. Then they began to scream. The players on the pitch suddenly stopped playing to stare. Ardico Magnini, one of the players, recalled, “It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly … also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.” 

According to These Football Times, the object remained for 15 minutes and dropped “silver flakes of a stringy-type substance.” This substance — an established UFO phenomenon called “angel hair” — was analyzed by the Institute of Chemical Analysis before it disintegrated. A spectrographic analysis showed that it contained boron, silicon, calcium, and magnesium, but that did little to explain what it was.

The skeptical explanation is that these thousands of people misidentified meteors. The threads? Only spiderwebs, though spiders do not employ boron or silicon when spinning. According to Football Italiana, when this was theory was ridiculed, CICAP, a skeptical organization, stated that the air force had been performing exercises that day and dropping a radar countermeasure called chaff, which also doesn’t satisfy the descriptions of the thousands who witnessed the object.

New York Magazine interviewed Chad Underwood, a U.S. Navy pilot who, on November 10, 2004, filmed the now-famous “Tic Tac” UFO with the infrared camera on his F/A-18 Super Hornet.

The Tic Tac was one of a group of slow-moving objects seen ten miles off San Clemente Island. At 28,000 feet, they were too high and fast to be birds and too slow to be an aircraft. Then they “exhibited ballistic-missile characteristics” in plummeting from 60,000 feet to 50 feet above the Pacific Ocean without creating a single sonic boom. Underwood’s footage shows the 40-foot-long, white object hovering between 15,000 and 24,000 feet without detectable propulsion, even when it sharply banks left. When he screened it for other pilots later, there weren’t many skeptics, but they were keen to want to fly it themselves.

Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who was piloting another fighter when the sighting occurred, told Global News, “I felt the vulnerability of not having anything to defend ourselves. And then I felt confused when it disappeared.”

The Pentagon never debriefed those on the USS Nimitz because there was nothing to debrief. It wasn’t a top-secret project. Spokesman Joseph Gradisher told NBC News, “The three videos show incursions into our military training ranges by unidentified aerial phenomena.”

NPR reported that on January 8, 2008, residents of Stephenville, Texas, including a police officer and a pilot, saw a UFO as “bigger than a Wal-Mart.” It hovered for about five minutes before zipping into the sky. Pilot Steve Allen (who described its size in Walmarts) said it sped away at 3,000 mph, followed by fighter jets. To Popular Mechanics, he said, “The jets looked like they were chasing the lights, and the lights seemed to be toying with them.”

James Huse, a former Air Force navigation specialist, witnessed the objects and said its lights were “the reddest things I’d ever seen in the sky.” Angelina Joiner, a reporter, called Major Karl Lewis of the 301st Fighter Wing, who denied that they had anything flying that night. Personnel from other bases said the same. Twelve days later, the military did a 180, putting out a press release reading in part, “Ten F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron were performing training operations from 6 to 8 pm on January 8.” Lewis explained that there had been an “internal communications problem” that prevented the military from admitting this any sooner. When further pressed to release details of what the planes were doing, he said, “we fly like we fight.”

The world’s militaries must get more careful about these training maneuvers.

KFVS 12 reported that, in 1941, Pastor William G. Huffman of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was called by the sheriff to help the victims of a plane crash. There was a serious crash when he arrived, but it was far from an airplane. His granddaughter Charlotte Mann said in 2021, “There was a round silver disc that was broken open, and there were metallic shards in the field that had set fire to the field,” along with “three creatures.” By the time Huffman arrived, two had already died. The pastor did not feel comfortable administering last rites.

Cape Girardeau UFO researcher Michael Huntington said that the Army Air Corps arrived, took all the evidence they could, including photographs of men holding the alien bodies, and swore everyone to secrecy, a command Huffman obeyed until he was on his deathbed, according to KFVS 12. When KFVS12 contacted the FBI, they received the reply, “We were unable to identify records responsive to your request.”

Mann doesn’t take this as evidence that this story might lack substance but that it had been officially squelched. She, after all, told people as early as the 1970s that she had seen the pictures of the aliens.

Thomas Mantell, a 25-year-old Kentucky Air National Guard pilot with more than 2,000 hours in the air, has the dubious distinction of being the first person killed by a UFO on January 7, 1948, according to We Are the Mighty.

Colonel Guy Hix, the base commander, described the object as “about one fourth the size of the full moon” and said it hovered, still, for over an hour. Another observer stated that it came near the ground before climbing quickly back to 10,000 feet, and it flew at more than 500 mph. Mantell and two others chased the UFO. His wingmen gave up at 22,500 feet, but, over the objections of the other pilots, Mantell kept climbing in pursuit. Once he passed 25,000 feet, he blacked out, and the plane spiraled.

The Voice Before the Void states that historian David M. Jacobs marked this as the turning point: “[T]he fact that a person had died in an encounter with an alleged flying saucer dramatically increased public concern about the phenomenon.”

Theories were that it was a Soviet missile or that an alien craft had shot Mantell down when he got too close. People variously claimed that his body was bullet-riddled or missing and that what was left of his plane was radioactive. Project Sign at first suggested that he pursued Venus and then said that Mantell had died chasing an object that would have been unknown to him: a Skyhook balloon, then top-secret.