About these stories

20 UFO Sightings and What Really Happened is a set of true stories in six short chapters, told the way you would watch stories on your phone. It starts with the night Los Angeles fired more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells at an empty sky, the pilot whose sighting near Mount Rainier gave us the flying saucer, and the Roswell press release that was withdrawn within a day. It follows radar ghosts over Washington, the 12,618 reports in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, close encounters in New Hampshire, Melbourne, Nova Scotia, Suffolk and Zimbabwe, a radio signal nicknamed Little Green Men, the Wow! signal, two famous hoaxes, the Phoenix Lights and the Navy’s Tic Tac. For each one you see what witnesses reported and what investigators found, and where no agreed answer exists, the stories say so.

How it works

Each chapter is its own page. Tap the right side of the screen for the next slide and the left side to go back, hold to pause, and use the button at the end of a chapter, a sideways swipe or the circles on the cover to move between chapters. Some slides ask you something: guess what the Air Force blamed, decide whether a famous photo is real or rigged, scratch a classified file, open a note pinned to a chart, find the light on a forest horizon or drag between what people saw and what it was. A round takes about seven minutes.

Where the AI comes in

Three parts are written live by AI and labelled as AI: the short read of your answers, the Sky Desk’s replies and the what-if scene. The AI is given the checked facts and told not to invent facts, quotes, dates or numbers. It can still make mistakes; if it is busy or offline, a hand-written text appears instead and says so.

What is checked

Every story was checked on 16 October 2026 against Wikipedia pages we opened: Battle of Los Angeles, Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting, Roswell incident, 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident, Project Blue Book, Barney and Betty Hill incident, Westall UFO, Shag Harbour UFO incident, Rendlesham Forest incident, Ariel School UFO incident, PSR B1919+21, Wow! signal, Belgian UFO wave, Alien autopsy, Alien Autopsy (1995 film), Phoenix Lights, USS Nimitz UFO incident, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. What witnesses said they saw is told as their account, not as fact. Where a popular version of a story was not supported by those pages, we left it out. The pictures are open-licence photos and scans from Wikimedia Commons, credited on each slide and below, the US Navy’s public infrared clip, which loads only when you press play, and our own drawings; no film stills or official art are used, and no real person is drawn.

Nothing you answer is stored: closing the tab clears it. Spotted a mistake? Use the Contact page.