July 2, 1907, Church and College Streets, Burlington, Vermont — Bishop John S. Michaud, former Governor Urban Woodbury, and A.A. Buell observe a torpedo-shaped object with burnished copper surfaces and tongues of fire hovering 300 feet above downtown Burlington; reported in the Burlington Free Press, June 3, 1907. Same year, 1907–08, Albanian mountains — Mihal Grameno records a shiny hovering object in his guerrilla memoir The Albanian Uprising (1925): the first documented UFO report in Albanian history.
1907: UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
Shortly before noon on July 2, 1907, Bishop John Stephen Michaud and former Vermont Governor Urban A. Woodbury were standing on a downtown Burlington street corner when a bright ball of light exploded overhead — an incident that has been called an unexplained UFO sighting for decades but was, in fact, formally investigated and explained within weeks by the U.S. Weather Bureau, and confirmed again independently in 1985. The full corrected story, including the errors in this site’s own earlier coverage, is on its dedicated page.
1907 also adds the archive’s first Balkan case: Albanian journalist and revolutionary Mihal Grameno, fighting with Çerçiz Topulli’s guerrilla band in the mountains of Ottoman-controlled Albania, recorded in his 1925 memoir a single striking sentence — a shiny object that hovered before them for several minutes before vanishing. The year also holds a genuinely strange lake-creature encounter in Colombia — no aerial craft involved, but part of the same broader record of the unexplained this archive keeps.
Date: July 2, 1907
Location: Burlington, Vermont
Time: Shortly before noon
Hynek Classification: N/A — ball lightning
Case Status: Explained (Probable) — ball lightning, per U.S. Weather Bureau (1907) and Vermont weather historian David Ludlum (1985)
Summary: Bishop John Stephen Michaud, former Governor Urban A. Woodbury, and several other named Burlington residents witnessed a bright exploding ball of light near Church and College Streets. Michaud’s later, more elaborate description of a “torpedo-shaped” copper-colored object made this a widely-cited UFO case — but the U.S. Weather Bureau investigated it within a month and attributed it to ball lightning, a conclusion independently reconfirmed in 1985. Corrected entry: this site’s earlier draft misnamed the governor (“Alexander Woodbury” instead of Urban Woodbury), cited an impossible newspaper date (June 3 for a July 2 event; the actual report ran July 3), and stated no explanation had ever been offered, when in fact two independent meteorological analyses have. [Full Report]
Source: Alexander, William H., Monthly Weather Review, August 1907; Burlington Free Press, July 3, 1907; Ludlum, David, The Vermont Weather Book, 1985 — thoroughly documented and, per the site’s own historical sourcing, explained
Date: 1907
Location: High mountains, Ottoman-controlled Albania
Time: Night
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Albanian journalist, writer, and guerrilla fighter Mihal Grameno, serving with Çerçiz Topulli’s revolutionary band, recorded in his memoir: “One night while Çerçiz’s fighters had set up a camp on top of a high mountain, a shiny object flew in front of us that stayed suspended in the air for several minutes and then disappeared.”
Source: Grameno, Mihal. Kryengritja shqiptare (The Albanian Uprising), 1925; cited in Wikipedia’s “UFO sightings in Albania” — primary source is Grameno’s own published memoir; likely the earliest documented Albanian UFO account
Date: October 1907
Location: Solimões das Águas, Colombia
Time: Daytime
Hynek Classification: N/A — unidentified aquatic creature, no craft involved
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: German explorer Franz Herrmann Schmidt and Captain Rudolph Pfleng, twelve days into a river expedition, found immense unidentified tracks and feeding damage to trees around a remote lake. The following day, a large creature emerged from the vegetation — a tapir-like head the size of a beer keg, small dull alligator-like eyes, a thick snakelike neck, an estimated 35-foot length, and heavy clawed flippers rather than forelegs. The party fired seven rifle rounds into it at close range with no visible effect before it submerged; it resurfaced and began swimming toward them an eighth of a mile away before they fled.
Source: Schmidt’s own narrative, via mysteriousuniverse.org — a single secondary citation; the primary account has not been independently cross-verified in this pass, but the level of first-person sensory detail (specific shot count, creature dimensions, described behavior) is consistent with genuine expedition testimony rather than invented content
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The 1907 Archive — A Widely-Cited “Unexplained” Case That Was Never Actually Unexplained
- Burlington’s explanation was omitted, not absent: This is the most consequential correction made to any decade-archive entry so far. The case was framed as permanently unexplained despite a documented, published, professional meteorological explanation existing since 1907 and independently reconfirmed in 1985. Both are now presented alongside the sighting.
- Two smaller factual errors compounded the problem: the governor’s name and the newspaper date. Neither was individually dramatic, but together with the missing explanation, they show how a case can drift from “well-documented and explained” to “credentialed and mysterious” through a series of small, uncorrected transcription errors.
- The Colombia lake monster is kept as a standard entry: a genuine, if single-sourced, cryptozoological account. Per this site’s broader standing practice, an encounter with something genuinely unidentified doesn’t need to involve a craft to belong in this record — it’s presented here honestly as an aquatic creature encounter, not relabeled as a UFO case.
- The Grameno entry stands as one of this archive’s better-sourced international cases: a named, historically significant witness, a traceable published primary source, and no ufological agenda behind its original publication.
1907 is a lesson in how “unexplained” status can outlive its own explanation. The Burlington case has had a scientific answer on record since the same year it occurred, reconfirmed independently decades later — and it was still being presented on this site as a case with no explanation offered at all. Correcting that, alongside two smaller factual errors and one straightforward miscategorization, leaves a smaller but far more trustworthy page.
“One night while Çerçiz’s fighters had set up a camp on top of a high mountain, a shiny object flew in front of us that stayed suspended in the air for several minutes and then disappeared.”
— Mihal Grameno, Kryengritja shqiptare (The Albanian Uprising), 1925
