1900 – 1909: UFO | UAP | ENTITY SIGHTINGS BY DATE

The first decade of the twentieth century opens this archive’s chronological record — a period beginning before powered flight existed anywhere on Earth and closing with the British phantom airship wave already underway. Across these ten years, the record moves from a sea serpent misfiled as a submerged craft, through a naval officer’s shadow-casting objects reported to the journal Nature, to a landed craft on a Welsh mountainside with physical trace evidence left behind. Some entries are strong. Some are thin. Several turned out to be something other than what they were first filed as — a sea serpent, a psychic’s claimed trip to Mars, a confirmed tabloid hoax — and this archive corrects those honestly rather than quietly, case by case, year by year.

Each year below has been individually audited against its cited sources, with fabricated entries removed, misdated cases corrected and relocated to their proper year, and duplicate or hoax material clearly labeled rather than silently repeated. Several of the decade’s strongest cases — the Fort Salisbury “sea serpent” of 1902, the Burlington, Vermont “torpedo” of 1907, the Caerphilly Mountain landing of 1909 — have their own dedicated full reports, linked from their respective year pages.

YEARS IN THIS DECADE

RESEARCHER’S NOTES

1900–1909 — A Decade of Corrections as Much as Cases

The decade’s flagship reclassification is Fort Salisbury (1902): filed for years as a “USO,” the ship’s own second officer titled his log entry “the passing of the Sea Serpent” — a documented cryptid encounter, not a UFO case, now corrected with a full dedicated report.
1907’s Burlington, Vermont case shows the same pattern in reverse: presented as permanently unexplained, its own cited sources actually contained a professional ball-lightning explanation from the U.S. Weather Bureau, confirmed independently again in 1985.
Cross-year contamination was a recurring find: cases misdated by a year or more (Tacoma, Washington filed under 1903 instead of 1908; Fatima’s opening apparition filed under 1913 instead of 1917) have been identified and moved to their correct years throughout this decade.
1909 stands out as the decade’s richest year — four overlapping waves (the Jersey Devil cluster, the British phantom airship wave, the New Zealand airship wave, and the December Christmas Wave) inside a single twelve-month span, anchored by the Caerphilly Mountain landing, this archive’s only pre-1910 case with documented physical trace evidence.