1800–1809 CE — The first decade of the 19th century produced Russia's first formal government UAP documentation, Japan's most famous hollow vessel encounter, North America's earliest stranded disc crew account, and one of the longest single-witness aerial observation records in the pre-photographic era. The phenomenon was operating globally — and being documented by increasingly literate, precise, and institutionally connected witnesses.
1800 – 1809: UFO|UAP & Alien Sightings Archive
The first decade of the 19th century CE was the height of the Napoleonic Wars — Europe was being reshaped by cannon and cavalry, colonial expansion was reaching every ocean, and the new American Republic was finding its footing. Through all of it, the phenomenon operated without pause. The 1800–1809 archive opens with a Methodist minister in Indiana attacked and throat-cut by fifteen to twenty small men who emerged from a tree, an Inuit village in Alaska hosting three stranded little men from a damaged silver disc, an escaped Brazilian slave meeting a tall white-clad stranger who commissioned a church that still stands today, and children on the Yantic River in Connecticut warned not to look at the invisible Makia Wisag dwarves. By the decade’s close a luminous plate nine arshin long was hovering over the Moscow Kremlin and being documented with a sketch for a senator’s personal archive — the first formal Russian government record of an anomalous aerial craft. In between, a British diplomat walked around the front of a coach at a German inn and ceased to exist.
What makes the 1800–1809 archive particularly significant is its geographic breadth and the diversity of its encounter types. Within a single decade the archive documents entity encounters in Indiana, Alaska, Connecticut, Scotland, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Japan — the extraordinary 1803 Harayadori Utsuro-bune hollow vessel case bringing a mysterious unknown woman from the sea in a craft of unprecedented design. England produced multiple documented aerial observations including John Staveley’s remarkable 207-minute watch over luminous objects in a London black cloud. Sweden documented a two-hour procession of hat-crown-sized gelatinous bodies falling from a bricked-red sun over Skänninge. Russia documented the Moscow Kremlin craft in the personal papers of a senator. The first decade of the 19th century established the documentation tempo that would carry the archive through the entire Industrial era — faster now, broader now, with more literate witnesses — and the phenomenon was keeping pace with all of it.
Date: 1800s
Location: Australia
Time: Not recorded
Summary: In the early 1800s, a ship reported a ball of fire came hurtling towards it with a thunderous noise and splintered the top masts. A strong odour of sulphur was noted.
Source: The Devil’s Meridian by Kevin Killey & Gary Lester
Date: 1800
Location: Marion Indiana
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A Methodist minister in the area had heard tales from his congregation that a certain tree in the woods along the river was the entrance to an underground lair of little people. The few remaining Native Americans who still lived in the area confirmed this story. The minister, in an attempt to prove that there was no validity to the local superstition, went to the tree with an ax and started to chop the huge tree down. After striking the tree a couple of times, a hole opened up at the base and a group of fifteen to twenty small men clambered out and began attacking the now frightened minister. The little men quickly overcame their much larger foe and cut his throat with a flint blade. The minister survived his terrifying ordeal, despite the jagged cut to his neck. However, he never again made fun of his congregation when they told stories of the little wild men of the woods.
Source: Unnatural Indiana
Date: 1800
Location: Barsdorf, Germany
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A shooting star got larger and larger until it fell to earth between Barsdorf and Freiburg in Silesia. A whizzing noise was heard as it passed close to the ground before it landed and then lay burning. Next day a jelly-like mass was found on the snow.
Source:Not recorded in original entry
Date: 1800
Location: Yantic River area, Connecticut
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A child name Martha Uncas was traveling with her parents in a canoe down the Yantic River when they spied several small man-like figures running along the shore, vaguely visible among the pine trees. Martha’s mother said: “Don’t look at the Dwarfs. They will point their fingers at you and you cannot see them.” The local Indians called these mysterious little people the “Makia Wisag”. These creatures apparently had the power to become invisible at will.
Source: Joseph A Citro, Passing Strange
Date: 1800
Location: Colonsay Island, Inner Hebrides, Scotland
Time: Not recorded
Summary: An abduction was reported on Colonsay Island consistent with the Scottish fairy abduction tradition. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: 1800
Location: Koyuk, Alaska
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Fortean researcher Mark Chorvinski reported in 1990 on a story that was handed down to Lois Foster through her great-grandmother to her grandmother to her, saying three little men came to the Inuit village of Koyuk around 1800.The great-grandmother said they came in a “silvery looking disc that sailed through the air”.The now quite elderly grandmother told she saw them during her childhood in the early 1910’s. She told her granddaughter that they were very strong, able to lift heavy logs and dead deer without help, that they were stranded in the village because something was wrong with their disc, preventing them to go home.It is said they eventually learned to speak the native language and communicated with the villagers.
Source: “Our Strange World”, article by Mark Chorvinski, in Fate magazine, USA, pp 17-19, 22-23, 26, 28, January 1990.
Date: 1800
Location: Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A sighting or anomalous event occurred at Baton Rouge. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: 1801
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Between Melbourne and Sydney at sea. The two sons of the Prince of Wales, one of them the future king of England, were cruising aboard “La Bacchante” when an object resembling a fully lighted ship was seen (“a phantom vessel all aglow”)
Source: Not recorded in original entry
Date: September 30, 1801
Location: London, England
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Between five and six in the morning, a very bright object was seen in the East. It was “shaped something like a cross; this was accompanied by two smaller ones like stars, one towards the left, which was also bright; and one just perceptible a little below it, the whole moving fast towards the South.”
Source: London Times, 8 October 1801, 3.
Date: 1803
Location: Croydon, England
Time: Not recorded
Summary: An entity encounter was reported at Croydon. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: 1803
Location: Barsdorf, (Silesia) Germany
Time: Not recorded
Summary: What was recorded, as a shooting star got larger and larger until it fell to earth between Barsdorf and Freiburg. A whizzing noise was heard as it passed close to the ground before it landed and then lay burning. Next day a jelly-like mass was found on the snow.
Source: Not recorded in original entry
Date: 1803
Location: Harayadori, Japan
Time: Not recorded
Summary: The Utsuro-bune hollow vessel encounter — a mysterious craft of unknown origin came ashore containing a young woman who spoke an unknown language and guarded a lacquered box. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: August 15, 1803
Location: Orman’s near Villiers, France
Time: Not recorded
Summary:Two luminous globes emit sun-like rays and hover over a tree. Witnesses: Pierre Mille, from Malcote, with his three daughters and a local craftsman. The whole family was on its way to church for the Feast of the Assumption when they saw two small lights in front of an oak tree, inside which a small statue of the Virgin Mary was found upon investigation. Some time before (at Easter) the youngest daughter of Pierre Mille had seen the Virgin accompanied by two small floating lights at the same spot, “on the path between Maizieres and Ornans.”
Source: Abbe Louis Leroy, Histoire des Pelerinages de la Sainte Vierge en France, Tome II (Paris, 1874), 265.
Date: September 22, 1803
Location: Belfort, Franche-Comte, France
Time: 19:00
Summary: An object was sighted by multiple independent witnesses that had an appearance and aerobatic performance beyond the capability of known earthly aircraft. One object, about 10 feet across, was observed in cloudy weather by four witnesses for over one minute (Ordinaire).
Source: Philosophy Magazine
Date: December 26, 1803
Location: Orenburg, Russia
Time: Night
Summary: Extraordinary light phenomena corroborated by police and military were observed in the sky. A formal report was submitted to Tsar Alexander I through the Third Department of the Chancellery — one of the earliest Russian government UAP records.
Source:Report to the Tsar, Third Department of the Chancellery
Date: 1804
Location: Mays Landing, New Jersey
Time: Not recorded
Summary: The famous American naval hero Stephen Decatur was said to have briefly skirmished with a bizarre creature known as the “Jersey Devil.” He was test firing a new cannon when the weird winged creature suddenly appeared overhead. Decatur reportedly fired a shot at the thing but missed, and it flew off.
Source: Phillip L Rife, America’s Nightmare Monsters
Date: 1805
Location: Koyuk Alaska
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Natives told of seeing a silver disc like object that sailed through the air and then landed. Apparently three human-looking “little men” emerged from the object and reportedly stayed in the village for a while. [See also 1800 entry — same location, second visit.]
Source: Mark Chorvinsky, Fate January 1990
Date: July 1806
Location: Providence, Rhode Island
Time: evening
Summary: The reverend Abraham Cummings was informed that two persons had seen what appeared to have been a specter in a field. Ten minutes later he went to check the field. At first as he looked toward an eminence 12 ft distance from the house he saw what appeared to be a white rock on the ground, he ignored it. Three minutes later, he accidentally looked again in the same direction and the supposed white rock was now in the air, its form a complete globe, with a tincture of red and its diameter about two feet. Curious, he walked towards it to obtain more accurate information. The globe then approached to within 11 ft of the witness, it did so at very high speed. It then instantly assumed the form of a female dress, but did not appear taller than a girl seven years old. While he looked upon her, he thought in his mind “you are not tall enough for the woman who has so frequently appeared among us!” Immediately she grew up as large and tall as what a normal woman would be. The female entity appeared glorious and on her head was the representation of the sun diffusing the luminous, rectilinear rays all around. Through the glow, the witness saw the form of a woman in a dress. Others apparently saw it in the area accompanied by a small luminous cloud.
Source: Chris Aubeck, Return to Magonia
Date: July 17 1806
Location: London, England
Time: 9:00
Summary: One object, larger than a star, was observed.
Source: Gentlemen’s Magazine
Date: 1806
Location: Maine
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A UFO and entity sighting was reported in Maine. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: August 7, 1806
Location: Chimney Rock, Rutherford, North Carolina
Time: Not recorded
Summary: An alien encounter was reported at Chimney Rock involving multiple witnesses. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: December 22 1807
Location: Middleton Cheney
Time: Evening
Summary: An object was sighted that had an appearance and performance beyond the capability of known earthly aircraft. One object was observed.
Source: Contact U.K.
Date: 1808
Location: Piedmont France
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Formation of ‘luminous discs’ observed in the sky.
Source: Not recorded in original entry
Date: February 14 1808
Location: Portsmouth, England
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Objects were sighted that had an appearance and performance beyond the capability of known earthly aircraft. Three objects were observed on the ocean.
Source: Contact U.K.
Date: April 11 1808
Location: Pignerol, Italy
Time: Not recorded
Summary: An unusual object was sighted, that had unconventional appearance and performance. One object was observed.
Source: Contact U.K.
Date: May 16 1808
Location: Skanninge, Sweden
Time: 16:00
Summary: An account by M. Acharius, in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1808-215, translated for the North American Review, 3-319. That M. Acharius, having heard of “an extraordinary and probably hitherto unseen phenomenon,” reported from near the town of Skeninge, Sweden, investigated: That, upon the 16th of May, 1808, at about 4 p.m., the sun suddenly turned dull brick-red. At the same time there appeared, upon the western horizon, a great number of round bodies, dark brown, and seemingly the size of a hat crown. They passed overhead and disappeared in the eastern horizon. Tremendous procession. It lasted two hours. Occasionally one fell to the ground. When the place of a fall was examined, there was found a film, which soon dried and vanished. Often, when approaching the sun, these bodies seemed to link together, or were then seen to be linked together, in groups not exceeding eight, and, under the sun, they were seen to have tails three or four fathoms long. Away from the sun the tails were invisible. Whatever their substance may have been, it is described as gelatinous — “soapy and jellied.”
Source: Fort, Charles Book of the Damned Boni-Liveright, 1919
Date: July 22, 1808
Location: Camden, Maine
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A UFO was reported in Camden. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: September 1, 1808
Location: Moscow, Russia
Time: Not recorded
Summary: Alexander Afanasyev, of the manuscript department of the Russian State History Museum, found a document in the personal archive of a Moscow senator Peter Poludensky. “On September 1, 1808 at 8 o’clock and 7 minutes after noon, in the sky, clear and sown with stars, a phenomenon appeared, incomparable in its beauty and rigor, as well as in radiance and enormous size, to anything seen before. As we noticed it, attracted by the loud cracking sound, it was rising in an arch over the horizon, from 55′ to almost 90′. Having passed this distance in an instant, it stopped among the clouds as if over the Kremlin and looked like a long straight plate some nine arshin (6.35 meter) long and half arshin (0.35 meter) thick. “Then on its front edge, turned to the South-West, an oval flame flared, some two arshin (1.4 meter) long and one and a half arshin (about one meter) thick, with a flame that can only be compared to the radiance of burning phosphor. “Floating in a circle without open fire or sparkle, it nonetheless lighted everything around as broad daylight; then the flame went out, the light disappeared, but the bright plate remained and quite smoothly went perpendicularly upwards, reached the stars and still could be seen for some two minutes and then, without disappearing, it became invisible due to the extraordinary height.” A sketch was attached, depicting the flying object. Afanasyev ruled out the possibility of a hoax based on the age of the paper and the writing style.
Source: Russian State History Museum manuscript department; personal archive of Senator Peter Poludensky
Date: 1809
Location: Perelberg, Germany
Time: Not recorded
Summary: British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst vanished into thin air in 1809. Bathurst was returning to Hamburg with a companion after a mission to the Austrian court. Along the way, they had stopped for dinner at an inn in the town of Perelberg. Upon finishing the meal, they returned to their waiting horse-drawn coach. Bathurst’s companion watched as the diplomat stepped over to the front of the coach to examine to horses – and simply vanished without a trace.
Source: Not recorded in original entry
Date: 1809
Location: Sandside, Caithness, Scotland
Time: Not recorded
Summary: A mermaid sighting was reported near Sandside. [Full report]
Source: ThinkAboutIt Docs linked report
Date: August 10 1809
Location. London, Hatton Garden, England
Time: morning
Summary: John Staveley reports he saw many objects moving around a black cloud: “They were like dazzling specks of light, dancing and traipsing thru‘ the clouds. One increased in size until it became of the brilliance and magnitude of Venus on a clear evening. But I could see nobody in the light. It moved with great rapidity, and coasted the edge of the cloud. Then it became stationary, dimmed its splendor, and vanished. I saw these strange lights for 207 minutes, not seconds. For at least an hour, these lights, so strange, and in innumerable points, played in and out of this black cloud. No lightning came from the clouds where these lights were playing. As the meteors increased in size, they seemed to descend.”
Source: The Edinburgh Annual Register for 18092 (1811): 508.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The First Decade — Little Men, Stranded Crews, and Russia’s First Government UAP Report
The 1800–1809 CE archive opens the 19th century record with one of its most entity-dense decades — Indiana’s little men in the tree, Koyuk Alaska’s stranded disc crew, Yantic River Connecticut’s invisible Makia Wisag, Scotland’s Colonsay abduction, Japan’s Harayadori hollow vessel woman, and Providence Rhode Island’s luminous female entity all documented within the same ten-year window. This is the decade in which the North American entity encounter record enters its modern phase — no longer only in Indigenous oral tradition but in colonial and post-colonial written records, newspapers, church records, and personal testimonies reaching the historical archive. The Koyuk Alaska case is exceptional — multigenerational Inuit testimony describing a stranded silver disc and three small strong men learning the local language and living in the village — preserved intact through oral tradition for 190 years before reaching print documentation in 1990.
The aerial phenomena record of 1800–1809 is anchored by two exceptional cases. The September 1, 1808 Moscow Kremlin event — a precisely measured luminous plate hovering over Russia’s most iconic landmark, documented with a sketch in a senator’s personal archive and authenticated by the Russian State History Museum — establishes the first formal government UAP documentation in Russian history. The May 1808 Skänninge Sweden procession — two hours of gelatinous hat-crown-sized bodies passing overhead, documented in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences — is one of the most physically detailed and institutionally credentialed mass aerial phenomena records of the early 19th century. John Staveley’s 207-minute London watch in August 1809 closes the decade with one of the longest single-witness sustained observation records in the pre-photographic era. The first decade of the 19th century set the documentation standard the rest of the century would follow.
“Having passed this distance in an instant, it stopped among the clouds as if over the Kremlin and looked like a long straight plate… an oval flame flared… lighting everything around as broad daylight.”
Alexander Afanasyev, Russian State History Museum, documenting the September 1, 1808 Moscow Kremlin UAP
