The 10 Weirdest Objects People Mistook for UFOs

The 10 Weirdest Objects People Mistook for UFOs — here is a clear breakdown of what happened and why it matters right now.

The details below put the news in context: the key points first, the background after.

In May 2026, the US government’s decision to begin to release and declassify the official reports of UFO activity—known as the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting system for UAP Encounters, or “PURSUE”—threw the subject of potential alien activity back into the international headlines.

The release of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster Disclosure Day just a few weeks later, meanwhile, continued to shine a spotlight on this bizarre subject. Perhaps it is for good reason then that data now show a staggering one in ten Americans believe they have seen a UFO.

That being said, not all UFO sightings turn out to be truly unexplained phenomena. In fact, throughout history there have been numerous reports of supposed alien spacecraft sightings that have turned out to most likely be quite mundane and utterly explainable objects and phenomena upon closer inspection—including the ten things on this list.

At around 5 o’clock in the morning on April 17, 1966, police officers in Portage County, Ohio, reportedly pursued a bright, low-lying object in the sky for over eight miles. They drove so far that they crossed the border into Pennsylvania. Though the case still raises questions, it was ultimately suggested that they may have been attempting to catch up with the planet Venus.

Lenticular clouds are bizarre, rounded, lens-shaped clouds that often form individually in the sky when moist air becomes trapped over areas of high ground. The clouds’ extraordinary appearance, and their tendency to form individually, has sparked a number of UFO panics over the years—including a recent occasion when a massive cloud, bathed in the red light of a sunset, formed over the town of Bursa in northern Turkey in 2023.

In March 2025, stargazers in the United Kingdom began reporting an extraordinary spiral-shaped object in the night sky, centered around a single glowing speck of light. Far from being some manner of extraterrestrial spacecraft, however, the spiral was caused by an entirely Earth-based object—namely, the frozen exhaust plume of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

In 2011, a man in England called emergency services to report an “enormous light” that was “blazing” and “hovering” in the sky above his house. Having reported the sighting, he rang back a few moments later to explain that he had, in fact, been looking at the Moon.

Curiously, this particular UFO sighting wasn’t in the sky, but rather at the bottom of the ocean. The so-called “Baltic Sea anomaly” is a bizarre near-circular object discovered on the seabed of Europe’s Baltic Sea by a team of Swedish Ocean X treasure hunters in 2011.

Using on-board sonar, the team scanned the floor of part of the Gulf of Bothnia, the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland, and discovered what appeared to be a crashed flying saucer. Later investigations, however, found that the object was made of various types of rock, and was probably nothing more than a partially exposed glacial deposit.

In one of the most talked-about incidents of a potential alien abduction in recent history, a Scottish forestry worker named Robert Taylor claimed to have seen a large “dome-shaped” object in a clearing in Dechmont Woods, near Livingston, West Lothian, on November 9, 1979.

Two smaller round objects then rolled toward him, Taylor claimed, before he felt that he was grabbed by his legs and blacked out, waking 20 minutes later with torn clothes and in a disheveled state.

After walking home, Taylor reported the incident to the police; it remains the only supposed alien encounter ever to have been subject to a criminal investigation in the United Kingdom.

Although it has never been explained precisely what Taylor saw or experienced that day, one theory suggests that he may have suffered some manner of epileptic seizure—perhaps sparked by a bout of meningitis he had suffered some years earlier—which caused him to hallucinate before losing consciousness.

In 2020, a flurry of reports and social media posts claimed that a slow-moving, cigar-shaped UFO had been sighted in the skies above New Jersey. It turned out to be a Goodyear blimp flying over a Giants game at the MetLife Stadium.

In 2011, Colorado-based Fox affiliate KDVR reported “a mile-high mystery in the skies over Denver,” and told of a series of supposed sightings of bizarre objects that appeared above the city in the early afternoon. The sightings were later explained as nothing more than insects flying close to the camera.

During a meteor shower in the night sky in Brisbane, Australia, in 2006, a number of local stargazers reported a bizarre, round, green object that appeared to roll down through the sky from the mountains behind the city.

While some locals claimed the lights were caused by a UFO, perhaps a more likely explanation is that they were caused by so-called “ball” lightning—a rare and not fully understood atmospheric phenomenon in which charged particles in the atmosphere produce a flash of colored light without seeming to ever strike the ground.

It’s not just naïve people on the ground who make mistakes, though. In 2015, British astronaut Tim Peake was on a six-month trip aboard the International Space Station when he saw four strange lights outside the window, which appeared to be “moving in formation.”

What appeared at first glance to be the distant lights of alien spacecraft, however, turned out to be droplets of urine leaking out of a Russian spacecraft and freezing into yellowish crystals.