Strange-Shaped UFOs Spotted Around the World | The Proof Is Out There | History

It's November 11th, 1973, in the rural village of Pentaya, Sweden. Fourteen-year-old O.K. Lijon is roaming the countryside with his niece's Instamatic camera when he sees a group of strange objects in the sky, and he's able to capture one of them on film. In a series of images, O.K. captures a small black speck moving slowly across the sky. He's described it as a loaf of bread, but with more pronounced edges. It had a dark spot on top and continued to turn and become flatter. The rest of the body, he says, had a steel gray color and, seemingly, a slight yellow glow underneath it. And all of a sudden, a triangular object ejects from the loaf UFO. As O.K. would later illustrate, the triangular craft flies much faster, in an arched motion underneath the loaf and in the opposite direction. O.K. claims it was a silver-white color and seemed like it was glowing. Author and historian Amy Title says O.K.'s incident wasn't as isolated as it may seem. This sighting ties in with a large number of triangular-shaped UFO sightings in Sweden in the early 1970s. In the summer of 1970, triangular phenomena were seen and photographed over Jumpland. A triangular object was also seen and followed by a Lansen aircraft in June of 1971. But out of all of these, O.K.'s sighting in particular drew special attention from Sweden's burgeoning UFO community. O.K.'s case was thoroughly investigated by Gothenburg's Information Center for Unidentified Flying Objects. Their member magazine was known for its meticulous investigation of aerial phenomena. The investigation revealed that the negatives hadn't been tampered with, the images were authentic, and the UFO was a genuine mystery. In the 50 years since, ufologists have spent decades trying to figure out what O.K. saw. Because the sighting was in such a remote location, it's very possible that what O.K. saw was actually a secret military aircraft being tested. Other militaries have also tested their aircraft in the same region above the Norwegian Sea. It's possible that what this is is actually a Russian aircraft. O.K. is 14 years old when this happened, so it's also possible that O.K. didn't understand what he saw. Or it's possible O.K. saw something more mysterious and we don't know what it is. What is so compelling about these blurry photos that we're still talking about them 50 years later? Let's look at the loaf of bread photos first. Each one is a bit different. The lighting is different. The coloring is different. You'd expect to see some of that in a moving object. And then there's the triangle image here. Much harder edges. More aerodynamic. Almost more menacing. Let's see how our experts take on this 50-year mystery. First, we asked Rich Hoffman of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies if O.K. could have stumbled upon a remote test by a secret military aircraft. He's uncertain if we're looking at a human aircraft at all. You can't really make out any kind of propulsion. No engines, nothing that's keeping it up in the air. It's the lack of clarity on the actual photos that makes it very hard for us to determine anything about it. One thing that could add clarity to the grainy photos is this collection of sketches from the witness himself. Summitt pointed out that the triangular silhouette and the triangle craft he drew both resembled the Saab 37 Beacon jet, a Swedish combat aircraft developed in the 1960s. And that could have explained this triangular-shaped object if they were flying around in that area that was very much a double-delta-winged aircraft, very much like this. But that wouldn't explain the object's ability to morph into different shapes as shown by both O.K.'s drawings and photos. Could we be looking at a speck of dust inside the camera? Well, those would create the same shape of artifact on each photo and in these images, the object is clearly changing shape. So maybe the speck was something like a gnat that was so close to the camera that it appeared out of focus. But our photo expert, Andrew McCarthy, doesn't think so. O.K. was using an Instamatic, which was a very popular point-and-shoot film camera at the time. This point-and-shoot camera had a very small aperture lens. It was designed to be able to shoot at infinity easily without requiring any kind of manual focus. If this object was more out of focus, it would be more transparent and have less contrast. So since this is as dark and as defined as it is, we know that any blur that we're seeing from this object is most likely caused by motion blur. So what could we possibly be seeing? While I don't think these photos are a hoax, there is no plausible explanation for them. We have no explanation for why this loaf-shaped UFO just hovered for a few minutes and why this triangular-shaped UFO was ejected from it. There's just not enough information in this story to make a conclusion. This photo is a true UFO. Our verdict? We're calling this a genuine UFO. The journalist who documented O.K.'s sighting concluded there was no reason to doubt his information. He left it to his readers to decide. And we leave it to you. It's July 2019, about 100 miles off the California coast. U.S. warships are engaged in military exercises. And according to the ship's logs, they're also being harassed by, quote, unmanned aerial vehicles of unknown origin. Reporters uncover the story in April of 2021. And things get really wild when filmmaker Jeremy Corbell releases this. Night vision footage recorded on a destroyer, the USS Russell, picks up a trio of objects that seem to fly overhead. The largest one is blinking. Whoever shot this video thinks the objects are important enough to leak the footage to the public. Let's slow it down and zoom in. Because there's something else worth pointing out here. The objects are triangle or pyramid-shaped, and that's significant. Starting in the mid-1970s, we began seeing a rise of sightings concerning UFOs that appeared to be triangular in shape. This was pushed a lot more forward into the late 80s, early 90s. There have been a string of triangle UFO sightings, including one over Belgium in 1990, and a famous incident in the skies over Phoenix, Arizona, on March 13, 1997. One thing that's different about the USS Russell triangles, they were filmed during military maneuvers, which always attract a lot of unwanted attention. It's very possible that the Chinese would be using drones to surveil American naval ships in the Pacific Ocean. It's very much part of their intelligence mandate. The fact that the Navy did confirm that this video was used in their intelligence reports is compelling. However, we need to be very clear, we don't know if this is a foreign power, we don't know, as some people have speculated, if they're otherworldly. Unlike other famous Navy videos, this footage was not shot on a military-grade camera, which would provide crucial metadata. But our experts think there's enough here for a thorough analysis anyway. Let's see what they come up with. Tim McMillan has reported extensively on unexplained naval encounters with devices of unknown origin. He's doubtful this could be a secret triangle-shaped American military craft. I think that people are probably very familiar with the B-2 stealth bomber or the retired F-117 stealth plane, but they're actually delta wing. They are not perfectly triangular like what we're seeing here. It's not an aerodynamic shape, and there isn't any perfectly triangular aircraft that we're aware of anywhere in the world. It's definitely not one of our stealth fighters. Mick West wonders if they might be natural objects. So what I did was I took the video, I overlaid it on a star map here. So we have Jupiter down here and the other stars down here. They're all lined up, took the video. And then I moved the video, and one little star appears over here. It matches up quite nicely. And if we keep going, the video ends up right here, and there's two stars in that exact spot. West thinks stars might explain two of the three objects, but what about the third, and why is it pyramid-shaped? Mark D'Antonio looks for clues in the camera work. In the video, you see this flagpole-type thing sticking up. Well, that's in focus, but everything past it is not. West wonders if what's happening is a phenomenon known as bokeh. When the camera is out of focus, light from a distant object will hit the camera sensor in the shape of the aperture. It's filmed by somebody holding up their phone camera to a night-vision monocular. This is a night-vision monocular, and this is actually one that has a triangular aperture. Then you would get these triangular shapes. An out-of-focus camera with a triangle-shaped iris, that could explain how this image was made, but importantly, it still doesn't explain what it was filming. For D'Antonio, the flashing light stands out. 7, 8, I'm counting the blinks, 9. And they were flashing at one flash per second. Now, that's 60 flashes per minute. 60 flashes per minute is the stroke frequency that you can see on aircraft. Yes, the Green Pyramid is flashing at the FAA's required frequency, and the odds of an alien spacecraft coincidentally flashing at the exact same rate seem pretty low. So, our verdict on this video. Two of the objects are almost definitely out-of-focus stars, and the third is most likely a commercial plane. It's a video that got a lot of attention this year, but in this case, it's no UFO. We call them as we see them. November 2020 on the coast of Cornwall in southwest England. A live webcam viewer is recording a gorgeous sunset, but the footage captures something more than a postcard-worthy seascape. A glowing orb races onto screen, hovers, then rockets straight up and out of frame. Watch again. Rapid deceleration and then vertical flight. It appears to rocket almost 3,000 feet straight up in less than a second. That indicates some sort of space-time distortion. Anthropologist Michael Masters has a theory about who might be in such a craft. It's important to consider our own evolution and our technological and biological evolution in the sense that maybe they're us. Maybe they're coming from the future to examine their own hominin evolutionary past. Masters believes that if future humans can manipulate time to travel into the past, they might also be able to build spacecraft capable of these remarkable maneuvers. This would also make sense in the context of what we see in this video. As this craft flies in at tremendous speed and stops instantaneously and then accelerates at tremendous speed. G-force is a measure of acceleration with 1G, the force Earth exerts on us. And at first glance, it looks like G-force generated by this object's acceleration would be off the charts. I've never seen any device that can stop on a dime and take off at maximum velocity. So I would suspect that if this is for real, it's either an experimental craft by the military or, let's face it, possibly an extraterrestrial civilization. The forces suggested by this video pose a technical problem for the time travel theory. Today's astronauts endure about 3Gs on liftoff. At around 6Gs, the average person can black out. Past 100Gs, the forces can shatter bones and squash our organs. So if this is a craft transporting humans from the future, how would they survive? Is another explanation more plausible? Let's turn the video over to our experts. Forensic video analyst Michael Primo checks to make sure this video isn't a fake. I don't detect any evidence to support that this has been fabricated or that this object has been inserted into the video recording. I've examined dozens of UFOs and UAPs over the years and I have seen some objects that travel at a high rate of speed. This is exhibiting similar characteristics. So the video is legit and the object's rapid movement is consistent with other UFO sightings, but that doesn't rule out every existing human technology. A leading theory would be a drone. But Tim McMillan says a secret military drone wouldn't be out in public. And regulations for commercial drones make that explanation unlikely. First of all, for commercial drones, they're capped off at 300 feet for regulation purposes. So it's hard to get an accurate gauge on altitude and everything, but we can see it move through the cloud cover out of frame. So it definitely appears to be exceeding that 300-foot maximum that you would expect with a commercial drone. This one's unique. I don't know that I have a very good explanation for it, frankly. Astronomer and video effects designer Mark D'Antonio wonders if the object might be something else entirely, a reflection. If this is a webcam, are we seeing this through a window? Does that mean there is something being put on the window like a laser pointer that is moving across the window causing this to look this way? But look at the rest of the frame. There are no other reflections suggesting there's a glass window between the camera and the image it's recording. I can't tell from this, so I can't come to any reasonable conclusions. This one seems to have stumped just about everyone. So that leaves Master's time travel theory. What does D'Antonio make of it? We've already figured out that we might be able to go faster than the speed of light by using a warpage of space-time. And NASA's got a funded lab looking at this because they think it's a possibility down the line. And recent research indicates that a wormhole, another warpage in space-time, could be used to travel through time. You know, sometimes science fiction does become science fact, and it's a possibility. So, our verdict? Well, it's not a hoax, and it's not a plane or a drone, and it's not a laser pointer. Until we can identify it conclusively, we'll consider this a genuine UFO. But look, we really want to get to the bottom of this. If you have any more information about this clip, please reach out and let us know. It's November, 2014, and a Chilean Navy helicopter is on routine patrol near the capital, Santiago. The crew is testing out a forward-looking infrared or FLIR camera. Something catches the technician's eye, and when he points his camera, this is what he captures. Two large overlapping orbs. Check it out. They're moving in unison. Maybe they're even connected. So, we see here, this is done in infrared. Everything that's white is cooler, and everything that is in black is much warmer or hotter, giving off a lot of heat. Based on the thermal camera's readout, the object is hotter than everything else in the frame, and the Navy crew says the object's speed matches their own 130 knots. Then look. The objects seem to release a plume of some sort. Not once, but twice. For forensic investigator Chase Klotzke, the plumes are an intriguing sight. I've just never seen anything like this before, and the plume, like, what is that? It's so unusual. Is it gas? Is it vapor? One thing Klotzke is certain about, the video is not a hoax. This case is absolutely the real deal. Chile actually openly investigates their UFOs, so when the Chilean government comes out and says this is something that has the characteristics of a UAP, we take it to the bank. The Chilean government studied this video for two years before releasing it to the public, and this UAP, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, didn't just look strange. We have reports from the Chilean Navy that this aircraft did not appear on its radar system. We also have a report that they did try to communicate with this aircraft, but it never responded back, which is a bit of a mystery. The Chilean camera could switch between optical and infrared settings. For an unexplained reason, the plume that shows up as hot in the infrared doesn't appear at all in the optical viewer. To cut through all of these mysteries, we turn the footage over to our experts. Tim McMillan considers whether it might have been a hostile craft trying to sneak into Chilean airspace. Obviously the drone theory is one that everyone has to examine. This was filmed in 2014. Drone technologies were not nearly as advanced as they are today, and they weren't as frequent, even with the militaries of the world. And so there's not really any shape that would be consistent with what you would expect to see from a drone. Balloons are also mistaken for UFOs quite often, so astronomer and video effects designer Mark D'Antonio looks at that possibility. Certainly balloons do go that high, and certainly balloons do travel slowly, but they generally don't show hot spots like this. I do not believe this is a balloon. The key could be those strange plumes. D'Antonio thinks the object is moving through pockets of moist air. I have watched contrails start and stop and make dashes in the sky. I think this is a contrail from a commercial jet. Two hot spots, two trails. Others think the plumes could be a plane dumping fuel, but wouldn't the two-year investigation have tracked that plane down? And the object appears to be headed toward Santiago, a city of over four million people. Aircraft, when they're in trouble, will tend to go out to the ocean to be able to dump their fuel, and they do that in non-populated areas, and if you look at the settings on the WESCAM camera, it was looking at an object that was fairly straight ahead, which means that the object was equivalent to its altitude, which puts it at a relatively low, Airplanes only form contrails of ice above 30,000 feet. Hoffman sees why the Chilean authorities still view this video as unexplained. The Chilean video has an object that has all the appearances of being something that we would think of as being an aircraft, but we just don't know for sure. There are still no clear explanations for why radar failed to detect this object, or why the plume doesn't show up in the optical viewer, but it's worth pointing out that the U.S. Navy only started seeing UAPs like the famous Tic Tac when it installed its Aegis radar systems, which the Chileans didn't have. So, no one can identify what the Chilean Navy caught on video, so we're going to call this a real UFO. November 2021. A passenger on a train speeding through the Italian countryside notices something strange outside his window and starts recording. Three orange lights in a triangular formation floating in the air above the horizon. Let's zoom in. The lights not only appear to be orbs, but they're also glowing. The video is uploaded to social media and quickly becomes a sensation. A lot of the comments on the video obviously linked this light pattern to the typical triangular UFO, making claims that this was some sort of alien spacecraft. Journalist M.J. Benaia says that kind of reaction shouldn't be surprising. Italy has a fairly rich UFO history. In the early 1950s, an entire soccer game was actually stopped in the city of Florence when a crowd of 10,000 people in the stadium looked up and saw a handful of strange oval-shaped UFOs fly over them. Even before then, a UFO crash in 1933 allegedly became the catalyst for a secret program led by one of Italy's most notorious figures. Some people believe that Mussolini, the famed Italian dictator, had a secret UFO hunting program. The idea was that in 1933, a UFO crashed in Italy, and Mussolini allegedly hired famed radio pioneer Guillermo Marconi to figure out what this technology was and whether it could be weaponized. The Italian Center for UFO Studies documented almost 10,000 cases over a 50-year period, and we've reported on some of them, including this anomalous event we investigated last year. Could this triangle be something related? We asked for our experts' opinion. We begin with forensic video analyst Michael Primo. Our first question, has the footage been manipulated in any way? The lights appear to be real, at least to my naked eye, when analyzing it frame by frame. What the encoder is saying using macro block analysis is that this information in this green color is different than this information in this green color. So it's a possibility that some use of CGI was added to this recording based on the macro block analysis, but no definitive conclusions can be drawn at this time. Acknowledging that red flag, we take the video to astronomer and video effects designer Mark D'Antonio to see if this could be a plane. I don't think that this one here is an aircraft, because an airplane light of this brightness would be the landing lights, and airplanes generally have two landing lights, if not just one in some cases, not three. Now, you could say, well, is this a stack of aircraft, one farther from the other, making a logical triangle from this perspective? But these lights look all the same brightness, and if you stack up planes like that, the furthest plane away is going to be more, several miles behind the first plane in the lines will look a little bit dimmer and smaller than the one in the front. D'Antonio rules out any commercial or military aircraft, but he does believe there is a clue to the mystery in the video. If you also look carefully when this train is moving, it passes a sign along the way. The sign is being held up by two legs, and this object passes in front of one of those legs. The lights don't disappear when the train passes the sign outside. D'Antonio thinks it's because this mysterious object isn't actually in front of a photographer. I think that this is a light fixture reflected in the window from one of the adjacent train seats. But when we ask science writer Mick West to study the video, he disagrees. I don't think this is a reflection. For one thing, it's the only lights being reflected that you can see. If it was a train with lots of people, you would expect to see more. And when the person filming it is moving the camera, you see these bits of dirt on the window move around. But when they're moving around, there's no movement at all with this object, which means that it's not a reflection. By zooming in, Mick sees the lights are not staying in one place. I took the video and I tried stabilizing the lights on the screen so they all stay in exactly the same position. And you can see that it's not like a single solid object. They seem to be moving somewhat independently. Another thing that you notice is that the distance between the lights and the tree line gradually decreases. So we have orange objects that appear to be slowly drifting down. Wes believes there's an orange light that fits the bill, military flares. They're attached to little parachutes, so they just basically sink down fairly slowly and they burn for about a minute or two and then they'll usually drop. Our verdict? This is a toss-up. We can't explain why the lights don't pass behind the sign, but we can't call it a reflection either. We can't even say for sure it's real. The military flare theory feels right, but our experts aren't unanimous. Until we know more, we have to say this remains unidentified.