Dozens of newly declassified UFO records were released by the Pentagon on Friday, including a shocking map revealing where hundreds of UFOs were seen flying near major cities throughout the US.
Acting like a roadmap for extraterrestrial encounters, the US military created the top-secret document in 1948, marking off where pilots, scientists, police officers and ordinary civilians saw strange objects in the sky during World War II.
Between 1947 and 1948, the joint study by the Air Force and the Office of Naval Intelligence found that Americans had seen an entire fleet of UFOs, including ‘disks,’ ‘cigar-shaped’ craft, ‘balls of fire’ and ‘cones of fire.’
In total, 210 sightings were reported to the military, with the largest number of encounters coming near Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Louisville in the east, and Los Angeles, Portland and Boise in the west.
Flying saucers were the most commonly reported UFO, with ‘cones of fire’ being regularly seen in Ohio and Kentucky.
Meanwhile, cigar-shaped UFOs were reported throughout the country, with some witnesses even seeing them clearly enough to sketch what had just passed overhead.
‘There were no wings or fins,’ one pilot wrote on a drawing they made after seeing a cigar-like rocket that was approximately 100 feet in length and flying past them over the US.
Although the military could not confirm that these were real alien spacecraft, they deemed the reports added to the map credible enough to investigate and feared the UFOs may have been technology recovered by the Soviet Union during the war.
The US Air Force and Navy created a top-secret map showing over 200 UFO contacts between 1947 and 1948
Witnesses revealed detailed drawings of the craft they saw, including cigar-shaped rockets flying over the US
Many of these sightings came before UFO hysteria would grip the nation after the alleged events in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947.
These include two trained US Weather Bureau observers spotting a metallic disk three times while tracking weather balloons in Richmond, Virginia in April 1947.
‘The disk appeared metallic, shaped something like an ellipse with a flat bottom and a round top,’ the report revealed.
In May 1947, Byron Savage, a field engineer in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma reported seeing another flying disk roughly 10,000 to 12,000 feet overhead, moving north at high speed with no trail from an engine – similar to many modern-day UFO sightings.
One month later, on June 28, 1947, a US Air Force pilot flying at 10,000 feet saw five or six white circular objects in close formation traveling at about 285 mph near Lake Mead in Nevada.
Just days later, military officials would officially report that a flying disc had crashed and been recovered on a ranch near Roswell – only to retract the claim the very next day and say it was just a weather balloon.
These incidents would continue throughout 1947 and 1948, with civilian pilots, military airmen and law enforcement officials all saying they spotted groups of flying saucers and other strangely shaped objects flying around 10,000 feet over the US.
‘If it is firmly indicated that there is no domestic explanation, the objects are a threat and warrant more active efforts of identification and interception,’ the military concluded in their report.
Images taken in the late 1940s revealed strange craft spotted throughout the US, which were declassified on July 10, 2026
A top-secret military map shows the location of UFO sightings over the US, with larges clusters over the East and West Coasts
Military officials concluded that the number of reports, the similarity in the descriptions of these UFOs and the quality of many witnesses coming forward made it unlikely that all of these sightings were hoaxes or publicity stunts.
The Air Force and Navy grouped these UFOs into three distinct categories: disk-shaped, cigar- or pencil-shaped, and balls of fire.
Even after 80 years, witnesses who claim to see UFOs often mention these same shapes, while adding other shapes such as triangles and rectangles to the list as well.
The military believed these sightings followed a clear geographic pattern, with the heaviest clusters coming along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and additional concentrations in Ohio and Kentucky.
Multiple sightings of UFOs in the 1940s reported seeing large formations of flying saucers flying roughly 10,000 feet over the US (Stock Image)
Military officials believed one possible explanation was that these were ‘flying wing’ aircraft being tested by a foreign power
With no way of telling where these craft came from, intelligence officials settled on two possibilities: the first being that the UFOs were some type of US-made balloons, test rockets or experimental aircraft – especially ‘flying wing’ designs.
The other possibility that the military feared was that the UFOs were foreign-made technology, likely using experimental German technology from World War II that had fallen into Soviet hands.
If the objects were foreign aircraft, the military believed these sightings over US soil were being carried out to destroy US confidence in the newly created atomic bomb, being the ‘most advanced and decisive weapon in warfare.’
Moreover, intelligence officials feared these UFOs were doing reconnaissance of the US, testing American air defenses and familiarizing themselves with the routes to major cities.
