Feature

Six spheres, one flock of maybes

Start with the form, because the form is the funniest part.

On the night of July 29, 2025, a U.S. Air Force crew over the Middle East filed a mission report about an unidentified anomalous phenomenon. In the report’s own capitals: “6X SMALL SPHERICAL OBJECTS GROUPED TOGETHER.” They “seemed to be agile, frequently changing direction.” Response to the aircraft: none. Physical state: “Solid.” Estimated speed: 480 mph. Estimated altitude: 22,000 feet. The Department of War released the report and a minute of infrared video on September 18 as DOW-UAP-D108 and DOW-UAP-PR135, and the case is still listed as unresolved.

Then the paper arrived. On Tuesday, October 6, six researchers posted a preprint to arXiv titled “Six objects reported at 480 mph in a declassified military infrared video show brightness flicker at bird wingbeat rates.” The title gives away the ending, but the cast list is the fun part. Three of the authors, Richard Cloete, Omer Eldadi and Avi Loeb, give their address as the Galileo Project, Harvard University, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge. The lead author is Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space in Seattle, joined by Ravi Kopparapu of NASA Goddard. And sitting in the byline next to Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer best known for wondering out loud whether ’Oumuamua was built by someone, is Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. A Loeb–Shermer byline is like finding Mulder and Scully on the same expense report.

Here’s what they did. You can’t measure how far away the objects were, because the range data is redacted. But you can measure how their brightness changes from one frame to the next, and that doesn’t depend on distance. So the team tracked all six dots through five seconds of video. Every one of them brightens and dims steadily, 7.1 to 7.9 times per second, each at its own rhythm and out of step with the others. That rules out the video itself as the cause, since a compression artifact would hit all six at once. Then they ran the same test on infrared footage from the Galileo Project’s own sky cameras near Las Vegas, the ones built to catch something strange, and found what those cameras catch most evenings: flying animals pulsing at 3.4 to 10 beats per second. In other words, wings.

What about 480 mph? Parallax, they argue. With no range, a targeting system pins a dot to the spot where the line of sight hits the ground. A nearly stationary flock sitting at 60 to 80 percent of the aircraft’s height would project a ground speed of about 480 mph as the plane flew toward it. A burned-in compass on the screen shows the sensor turning only 2.7 degrees while it followed the group, so the aircraft was flying almost straight at the objects.

There are side quests. The team thinks a small island in the first ten seconds looks like Qaruh Island off Kuwait, where thousands of terns nest from May to July. They say so carefully: “possible but unconfirmed.” From the squadron, the 20.6-hour sortie and the 120-knot cruise, they infer the aircraft was probably an MQ-9 Reaper. And they point out that the report actually reads “48OMPH” with a letter O, and that 48 mph would be a perfectly respectable speed for a bird.

The authors flag their own weak spot, which is the altitude. If the crew’s 22,000-foot estimate is anywhere near right, the birds would have to be unusually high flyers. The preprint is not peer-reviewed yet. It’s marked “submitted to Scientific Reports, comments welcome.” It’s a strong hypothesis, not a verdict, and the authors end by asking for the redacted altitude data that could prove them wrong.

Feature · From the Vault

South Ashburnham, January 25, 1967 (the kitchen, the grasshoppers, and the blue book)

South Ashburnham sits in the hills of north Worcester County, near the New Hampshire line. In the words of the man who later investigated it, rolling wooded hills there “have gradually surrendered to the Cape Cod houses, ranches, and mobile homes.” On a misty Wednesday night in January 1967, one of those houses held a very full family.

Betty Andreasson had seven children. Her husband, James, was in a Veterans Administration hospital near Boston after a car accident, so her parents, Waino and Eva Aho, had come to help. In the early evening the kids were fed, in pajamas, and watching Bozo the Clown. Three-year-old Cindy was curled up on her grandmother’s lap. Betty was finishing chores in the kitchen.

Then the lights flickered and went out. A pink glow came through the small kitchen window and turned reddish-orange, pulsing. Betty hustled the children into the living room. Her father went to the pantry window and looked out at the backyard. Years later he signed a statement in shaky handwriting, and Raymond Fowler printed it in his book:

“These creatures that I saw through the window of Betty’s house were just like Halloween freaks. I thought they had put on a funny kind of headdress imitating a moon man. It was funny the way they jumped one after the other—just like grasshoppers. When they saw me looking at them, they stopped … the one in front looked at me and I felt kind of queer. That’s all I knew.”

That’s the part the family remembered consciously. Everything else came out a decade later, and it got very strange.

In August 1975, Betty read a newspaper story saying Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the former Air Force consultant who had founded the Center for UFO Studies, wanted reports. She wrote to him: “I am so happy to read someone is finally studying UFOs. Now I can tell of my experience—an encounter in 1967 with UFO occupants.” The letter sat in a file for more than a year. In 1977 a team picked it up that included Raymond E. Fowler, a Massachusetts investigator. Fowler was an Air Force veteran whose report on the 1965 Exeter sightings had prompted John G. Fuller’s Incident at Exeter. The team brought in Dr. Harold J. Edelstein of the New England Institute of Hypnosis in Wakefield.

Under hypnosis, Betty and her eldest daughter, Becky, who had been eleven that night, described small beings who came through the closed kitchen door. Betty said their leader called himself Quazgaa. She described her family frozen in place, being taken aboard a craft that sat on the slope behind the house, an examination that included a long needle up her nose, and finally an enormous, burning bird that the investigators later matched to the legendary phoenix. She said she was given a small blue book that she couldn’t keep, and that the secrets locked in her mind “will be revealed when the time is right.” Then, she said, a voice told her: “Go, child, now, and rest.”

Fowler checked what could be checked, and this is what makes the case stand out. Hospital records placed James in the VA hospital from January 23 to March 17, 1967. The Ashburnham Municipal Light Company recorded a power failure in Betty’s neighborhood on January 25, 1967, traced to a defective primary loop cutoff that was replaced the next day, although the time of the outage wasn’t logged. Weather records showed the night was misty. The investigation ran twelve months, included stress-evaluation testing and character checks, and filled a 528-page confidential report. Fowler published it in 1979 as The Andreasson Affair, followed it with The Andreasson Affair, Phase Two, then The Watchers, and the story kept getting stranger with each book.

Feature · Deep Dive

Ruwa, Zimbabwe, September 16, 1994 (the playground, the eyes, and the Harvard man)

One of the most famous mass sightings in UFO history happened more than 7,500 miles from Massachusetts. One of its main characters had an office in Cambridge.

It was about 10:15 on a Friday morning, recess at Ariel School, a private primary school in Ruwa, roughly 20 kilometers outside Harare. The teachers were inside at a staff meeting. According to Cynthia Hind, the Zimbabwe-based UFO writer who got there first, 62 children said they saw silver balls in the sky that vanished in a flash and reappeared, three times. Then one came down, landing or hovering, over the scrubby, snake-friendly patch of trees and thorn bush beyond the playing field where the kids weren’t allowed to go. A small figure in a shiny black suit appeared on top of it. The children described a long, scrawny neck and “huge eyes like rugby balls.” The youngest ran, shouting for help. The only adult nearby was a mother running the tuck shop, and when the children came to get her, she wouldn’t leave the food and the cash box.

The headmaster, Colin Mackie, had never been involved with UFOs and told Hind he believed the children had seen what they said they saw. Hind came out on September 20 with a BBC crew and a young man carrying a homemade Geiger counter, a metal detector and a magnetometer. The instruments found nothing. Hind waded through the thorn bush herself and found no flattened ground. She did get drawings, about 30 to 40 of them, and one sentence from a little girl that could carry a feature on its own: “I swear by every hair on my head and the whole Bible that I am telling the truth.”

Then the Harvard man arrived. Dr. John E. Mack was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the founding chair of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital. In 1977 he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T. E. Lawrence. In 1994 he published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, built on interviews with people who came to his office. It became a bestseller and a scandal, and Harvard reviewed his methods before leaving him in his post. About two months after the sighting, Mack and researcher Dominique Callimanopulos spent two days at Ariel School and interviewed twelve children one at a time.

Callimanopulos wrote it up in 1995. A fourth-grader told them: “At first I thought it was a gardener. Then I realized it was an alien.” A ten-year-old named Isabelle said: “He was just staring. He was scary. We were trying not to look at him ’cause he was scary. My eyes and feelings went with him.” What came to her as she looked, she said, was: “We are doing harm to the Earth.”

That message is the heart of the legend, and it’s also where the skeptics push hardest. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid points out that two nights earlier, on September 14, a Soviet-built Zenit-2 rocket stage from the Cosmos 2290 launch broke up in a long, burning streak across southern Africa. Radio stations filled up with UFO calls, which is how the Ariel story reached Hind and the BBC in the first place. Dunning also notes that roughly 250 children were outside that morning and most of them reported seeing nothing, that Hind talked to children in small groups within earshot of each other, and that the environmental-warning theme doesn’t appear in her first write-up. It shows up in Mack’s interviews, which took place weeks later. Mack’s own published research with Callimanopulos appears in his 1999 book Passport to the Cosmos.

Mack died in a road accident in London on September 27, 2004. He was in Britain to speak at a conference on T. E. Lawrence, the subject that won him the Pulitzer. He was 74 and lived in Cambridge. The Ariel children are adults now, and the scrub past their playground is still one of the most argued-over patches of ground in ufology.

Feature · Cold War File

Loring AFB, Maine, October 1975 (the helicopter that belonged to no one)

In 1975, Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, way up in Aroostook County, was a Strategic Air Command base with B-52s and nuclear weapons. The weapons sat in earth-covered bunkers, guarded day and night by the 42nd Security Police Squadron. The Canadian border was only a few miles away.

The story of October 27, 1975, as Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood reconstructed it from base records in their 1984 book Clear Intent, starts with a guard on the perimeter at 7:45 PM. He sees a low aircraft with a red light and a white strobe coming in over the north edge of the base at about 300 feet. The control tower picks up a radar return 10 to 13 miles out. Radio calls on every frequency get no answer. The object circles and comes within 300 yards of the weapons area at about 150 feet. The base goes on alert. Requests for air support from Hancock Field in New York and North Bay, Ontario, are turned down. The Maine State Police can’t identify it, and after about forty minutes the target heads toward Grand Falls, New Brunswick, and drops off the scope.

The next part comes straight from Washington’s own paperwork. A National Military Command Center memorandum dated October 29, 1975, 0605 EST, signed by Brigadier General C. D. Roberts Jr. of the Marines, reads:

“At 290200 EST AFOC informed NMCC that an unidentified helicopter, possibly two, had been sighted flying low over Loring AFB Maine, in proximity to a weapons storage area.”

An Army National Guard helicopter went up to look and saw nothing. NORAD got Canadian permission to chase the intruder across the border if needed. A follow-up update says one helicopter “penetrated Loring AFB from Canadian territory with one helicopter landing briefly in proximity to a weapons storage area,” and that “sightings of the unidentified helicopter(s) were limited to security guards.” Later updates have it at 150 feet, within 300 to 500 meters of the weapons area, then directly over it. They describe ground rules drawn up for the Guard crew: track and identify, no arrests, civilian police aboard only to talk to the ground. The memo also logs “a similar incident” the night before. By October 30 the visitor hadn’t come back, and the Air Force was planning to bring in its own helicopter from Plattsburgh.

No one in the released record ever says who was flying. Loring itself closed on September 30, 1994.