Thomas ‘Eddie’ Bullard received a PhD in folklore from Indiana University and has written on UFO abductions, pre-1947 aerial phenomena and the relationship between UFOs and folklore.

To name some cases that seem worthy to me – the strange, well-supported, tried-and-tested survivors – I will add a few that I have studied at some length:

1) The Father Gill case from 1959, when he and several dozen New Guinean parishioners waved to entities aboard a hovering craft and the entities waved back. Here is a case with many corroborating witnesses. Gill has stuck by his story over the years without embellishment and has left none of the many investigators in doubt of his sincerity. An effort to dismiss the sight as a combination of Venus and near-sightedness failed because he recognised Venus and wore his glasses during the sighting. Another effort to explain the UFO as a lighted boat viewed in conjunction with a looming illusion falters on the location of the object over land.

2) Barney and Betty Hill, 1961. The famous abduction may always remain a lightning-rod for criticism, but this case also deserves attention as one of the best CE-IIIs on record. Two witnesses reported conscious recall of extended pursuit by a UFO that grew larger and more detailed, finally hovering close by to appear as a large, extended object. Barney got out of the car and examined the object with binoculars, saw entities in the interior and fled in panic. Attempts to explain the object as Jupiter and its closer incarnation as a passing airplane have to strain and dismiss inconvenient evidence. I have seen the route and encounter sites and see no way to square the conventional explanations with the distinctly unconventional witness descriptions.

3) Exeter, New Hampshire, 1965. Young Norman Muscarello’s encounter with a pattern of six red lights flashing in sequence as he walked past a farm late at night frightened him enough to convince the police to take a look. Muscarello and an officer returned to the scene and did not have to wait long before the object returned, bright enough to cast its red glow all across the countryside. A second officer arrived in time to see the object passing into the distance. Disturbed livestock calmed down only when the object departed. Any military manœuvres had ended hours before this sighting began and one of the police officers had worked in night-time refuelling of aircraft while in the Air Force, so he was familiar enough with such operations to know that this object was not such a case. The proposal that a hoaxer with flashing lights strung along a kite string was responsible may account for the swaying motion of the lights, but the night was almost windless and the UFO covered too much ground for any but a superhuman kite flier.

4) The January, 2000, southern Illinois police chase case. Some time before dawn, a witness in Highland saw a group of lights and contacted the local police department. The dispatcher contacted an officer in the town of Lebanon, where the lights were headed, and the officer saw what he described as a triangular dark object with lights at each corner and extended illumination across the back. This object appeared in succession to officers in Shiloh and Millstadt, in one instance making a peculiar turn. One officer took a photo with a Polaroid, and while the cold morning interfered with the performance of the camera, he obtained the image of an object with multiple lights. This series of sightings lasted about half an hour. Venus was a brilliant morning star at the time – always cause for suspicion – but did not rise until just after the first sighting. Moreover, the object passed across the sky and photographed as an extended object, not a single bright light. The Air Force denied that any military aircraft was in the vicinity of a nearby airbase, leaving only a very unusual aircraft or a genuine UFO as the answer.

5) Robozero Marvel. Though Fortean Times called for cases from 1947–2007, I would like to mention the Robozero Marvel of 1663, a report from Russia published in the St Petersburg Archaeographic Society Archives for 1842. The report actually exists and went on record long before ideas of UFOs could influence the account. A cleric writing to his superiors of his investigation of the incident, which they had heard second-hand, spoke to eyewitnesses and learned that people gathered in church heard a rumbling noise at midmorning and went outside to see what was the matter. In the clear and sunny sky, a glowing red spherical object with blue smoke emerging from its sides and rays of light extending from the front crossed over the lake and disappeared. Less than an hour later, the people came out of church again to see the same or a similar object going in another direction. About noon, the object returned a third time, this time to hover over the lake for 45 minutes. The diameter of the sphere was enormous, equivalent to the height of a 15-storey building; the light rays illuminated the lake all the way to the bottom; and men in a boat could not approach near the object because the heat was so strong. The fish in the lake fled toward the shore and the red light from the object covered parts of the lake with a rusty colour. Despite the inconvenience of historic distance, this account is credible reporting for any age. The details are plentiful and striking. The description is like nothing of the standard marvels and prodigies of the era, and even allowing for exaggeration, the object was still huge and impressive. Attempts to account for it as a big meteor or ball lightning definitely do not fit. Here is evidence that something strange happened long before any earthly aircraft existed.