Newspaper Clippings
Before the internet, before social media, before cable news, unidentified objects in the sky made the newspaper. Local reporters wrote up what witnesses told them. Editors chose the headlines. Wire services carried the strangest stories across borders. What survives in these pages is the raw public record: how the press covered a phenomenon it could not explain.
This collection draws from two primary sources. The first is Australia's Trove digital archive, operated by the National Library of Australia, which has digitised nearly two centuries of Australian newspaper coverage. The second is the UFO Newsclipping Service, compiled by Lucius Farish from 1969 to 2011, which tracked press reports from newspapers in more than 30 countries.
Browse by Region
Australia
Nearly two centuries of Australian press coverage, from colonial-era "remarkable meteors" to Cold War flying saucer scares. Digitised from the National Library of Australia's Trove archive.
United States
The largest single collection: four decades of American press coverage compiled by the UFO Newsclipping Service, from small-town Arkansas gazettes to the New York Times wire.
United Kingdom & Ireland
British and Irish press coverage from the Rendlesham Forest era through the 1990s wave, drawn from Fleet Street broadsheets and regional papers alike.
Latin America
Press coverage from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. Latin America saw some of the most dramatic UFO waves of the 1970s and 1980s, and its press covered them with less institutional scepticism than their English-language counterparts.
Europe
Continental European press coverage spanning Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Belgium, and Ireland. Includes reporting on the Belgian triangle wave and Scandinavian ghost rocket sightings.
Rest of World
Press reports from Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, China, South Africa, India, Israel, and Malaysia. Evidence that the phenomenon is genuinely global, not confined to Western media markets.
About the Sources
Trove Digital Archive
The National Library of Australia's Trove project has digitised millions of pages from Australian newspapers dating back to the early nineteenth century. The NHI Archive has systematically searched this collection for UFO-related coverage, identifying 2,580 clippings across 203 individual newspapers. The earliest dates to 1839; the most recent to 2015.
These are mainstream press reports: news articles, wire service stories, letters to the editor, and editorial commentary. They show how Australian journalists covered aerial phenomena across nearly two centuries, from colonial-era sky mysteries through the flying saucer era to modern UAP reporting.
UFO Newsclipping Service
Lucius Farish ran the UFO Newsclipping Service from Plumerville, Arkansas from 1969 until his death in 2012. Each month he compiled photocopied newspaper clippings about UFO sightings from publications across the English-speaking world and beyond. The archive holds 425 issues containing 5,700 sighting reports from more than 30 countries.
Where the Trove collection is deep (one country, two centuries), the NCS collection is wide (dozens of countries, four decades). Together they form the most comprehensive record of global UFO press coverage held in any single archive.