1912 UAP Archive — thirteen documented cases spanning eight countries from Scotland to Australia, Canada to Russia. The year's cases range from telepathic contact and bilingual small beings to a Christmas Eve abduction and a 3.3-metre luminous giant. Sources: Hynek & Musgrave; Janet & Colin Bord; Tony Healy; The Times London; Rebus Magazine St. Petersburg 1914; Iker Jimenez; Peter Rogerson.
1912: UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
1912 is the most internationally diverse year of entity and UAP encounters in this archive to date — fourteen documented cases spanning Canada, Scotland, Ohio, Germany, Indiana, Australia, Russia, Illinois, Saskatchewan, Spain, Yorkshire, and the UK coast and mainland. The range of case types is equally wide: a round glass-cabined craft landing on a British Columbia farm with small telepathic beings; two tiny men in green vests speaking Gaelic and English on a Scottish beach beside a tiny boat and a tiny woman in red; a Currockbilly Range yowie that left a trained assistant unconscious for hours; a 3.3-meter luminous giant outside a Spanish church; a mayor forcibly taken aboard a machine on Christmas Eve in Russia. This page also now includes the Chisbury, Wiltshire shadow-observation case, corrected here from this site’s earlier misdating to 1911 — it belongs in 1912, and Charles Tilden Smith’s own submission to the journal Nature puts the date beyond reasonable dispute.
Date: 1912
Location: Near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: CE-III
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A round craft, “something like a helicopter” with a glass cab, landed on the farm belonging to the father of six-year-old Abram Penner. Penner later recalled: “One man felt my body; they admired my hands. They have different hands than we do; they have round feet, short legs, no knees, and no elbows. They operate on mind power; I understood what they said.” His father told him never to tell anyone. This case has its own dedicated full report on this site. [Full Report]
Source: Musgrave, John Brent. UFO Occupants and Critters: The Patterns in Canada, 1979, with source chain via J. Allen Hynek and HUMCAT — corrected attribution: this is Musgrave’s book with a Hynek/HUMCAT sourcing chain behind it, not a co-authored work as the previous draft implied
Date: 1912
Location: Island of Muck, Highland Region, Scotland
Time: Morning
Hynek Classification: CE-III
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Two young boys gathering driftwood were approached by two small men in green vests, who spoke to them in both English and Gaelic. The boys then noticed a tiny boat in the cove, aboard which sat a tiny woman in red and a tiny dog; she offered them a ride, which they declined, then gave them small pieces of bread, which they ate. Before departing, the men told the boys “others of our race will be coming.” The boys were later found sitting on the rocks, staring at the sea in evident shock. This case has its own dedicated full report on this site. [Full Report]
Source: Bord, Janet and Colin. Modern Mysteries of Britain — confirmed researchers
Date: 1912
Location: Newton Falls, Ohio
Time: Morning
Hynek Classification: CE-II
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Two witnesses (Goldner) at a military facility observed an object, with associated animal reactions reported.
Source: CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies)
Date: 1912
Location: Near Gallipolis, Ohio
Time: Morning
Hynek Classification: N/A — entity encounter, ambiguous craft association
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A man and his mother, picking berries in a wooded area, noticed a dark cloud-like object descend overhead and follow them at treetop level. A dark, wide-shouldered figure with a large bulky head and no visible neck was seen walking parallel to them, apparently observing them. When the woman screamed, the figure emitted a growling sound; the pair fled, and on looking back found both the figure and the cloud gone.
Source: Bord, Janet and Colin, cited in FSR (Flying Saucer Review) Vol. 25, #3
Date: 1912
Location: Cologne, Germany
Time: Afternoon
Hynek Classification: N/A — apparition/entity encounter, no craft
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Young witness Ernest Dickhoff, alone in his bedroom, felt a strong urge to look behind him and saw two man-like, apparently unclothed beings sitting on his bed. After a short time, the beings vanished in plain sight.
Source: Breysse, Denys, Project Becassine — a research project specifically known for rigorous case-by-case scrutiny of older UFO literature; no specific concerns about this case have been identified in this pass, but the source’s general reputation for critical review is noted
Date: 1912
Location: South Bend, Indiana
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Nocturnal lights were observed by a female witness (Johnson, A).
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies, Greenwood Press, 1980
Date: 1912
Location: Currockbilly Range, New South Wales, Australia
Time: 21:00
Hynek Classification: N/A — cryptid encounter, no craft
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A huge, man-like animal encounter caused hunting dogs to retreat and left a trained assistant unconscious for several hours. This case has its own dedicated full report on this site. [Full Report]
Source: Healy, Tony. High Strangeness in Yowie Reports — confirmed Australian cryptozoology researcher
Date: January 1912
Location: Banks of the Volga River, Russia
Time: Night
Hynek Classification: N/A — entity/anomaly encounter, ambiguous nature
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Mr. V. Dychkin and a friend, traveling by separate sledges during a snowstorm, encountered two strangers standing beside the road who convinced Dychkin to divert toward a supposed nearby town, despite his knowing no town existed in that area. One stranger pointed out a “city” — an elaborate, fantastically illuminated plateau settlement unlike anything Dychkin had seen. Both men were suddenly overcome with fear and fled back to the road without seeing where the strangers had gone; looking back, Dychkin saw only darkness where the lit city had appeared.
Source: Rebus Magazine, St. Petersburg, 1914; German Mikhailov, NLO Magazine #50
Date: April 8, 1912
Location: Chisbury, Wiltshire, England
Time: Daytime
Hynek Classification: N/A — optical/shadow phenomenon, object never directly seen
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Charles Tilden Smith reported to the journal Nature that for over half an hour he observed two stationary, fan-shaped or triangular dark shadows cast onto rapidly moving clouds overhead, varying in size but holding position as successive clouds passed beneath them. Smith, describing himself as having studied the skies for many years, wrote that he had never seen anything like it, and concluded the shadows were cast by two large unseen objects to the west intercepting the sun’s rays. A subsequent Nature correspondent suggested similar shadows can be cast by mountains onto clouds; a further letter from meteorologist Charles J. P. Cave described observing a similar effect elsewhere in England around the same dates while watching pilot balloons — though Cave’s own description was of a stationary cloud rather than a shadow, muddying rather than resolving the comparison. Corrected entry: this case appeared on this site’s 1911 archive page with no specific date; Smith’s own account and Fort’s citation of the original Nature volume (90, p. 169) both place the event on April 8, 1912. It has been moved here to its correct year.
Source: Smith, Charles Tilden, Nature, vol. 90, p. 169, 1912, with follow-up correspondence in the same volume; also documented in Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned — a rare named, credentialed observer’s submission to a major scientific journal, with a real if inconclusive published attempt at conventional explanation
Date: May 1912
Location: Lockport, Illinois
Time: Afternoon
Hynek Classification: DD
Case Status: Explained (Probable) — the cited source itself notes the object’s appearance and behavior most likely have a conventional explanation
Summary: Two male witnesses (Howe, C.) observed a moon-sized object for over three minutes. Note: this archive’s 1911 page also contains an undated Lockport, Illinois entry describing an object transiting the moon’s face; the two may describe the same event misdated across two years, or genuinely separate sightings at the same location. This has not been resolved and is flagged rather than merged.
Source: Lore Jr., Gordon I. R. Mysteries of the Skies: UFOs in Perspective, Prentice-Hall, 1968
Date: June 1912
Location: Kerrobert, Saskatchewan, Canada
Time: 10:00
Hynek Classification: DD
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A witness (Nelson) observed a cigar-shaped object roughly 600 feet across for over one minute.
Source: John Brent Musgrave investigation files
Date: August 11, 1912
Location: Escalante, Spain
Time: Night
Hynek Classification: N/A — entity encounter, no craft directly observed
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Claudio Rey Castillo, walking home late at night, saw everything around him suddenly illuminated as if by daylight, the light seeming to emanate from something descending rapidly from the sky. Turning, he was confronted by a huge, featureless, all-white man-like figure emitting intermittent white flashes, floating just above the ground, which he estimated at roughly 3.3 meters tall. It drifted back to stop beneath the entrance of the local church. Approaching it armed with a knife, Castillo watched the figure “tremble” and raise its arms to show its palms before drifting back and disappearing into the darkness.
Source: Jiménez, Iker. Enigmas Sin Resolver II — confirmed Spanish paranormal researcher
Date: August 18, 1912
Location: Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, England
Time: Before midnight
Hynek Classification: N/A — apparition, no craft
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: The Marquis of Hartington, then a boy, reached the top of the Rectory stairs and found a monk-like figure standing at his bedroom doorway — hooded, in a long garment resembling a dressing gown, gray about the head and shoulders and darker below. He ran to find the Rector but could not locate him; by the time he returned, the figure had vanished.
Source: Winkle, Michael D., The Anomalist #10 — confirmed Fortean research journal
Date: October 14, 1912
Location: Sheerness, England
Time: 19:00
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: An object with appearance and performance beyond the capability of known aircraft of the era was observed.
Source: Rogerson, Peter. World-Wide Catalog of Type 1 Reports
Date: December 3, 1912
Location: Portsmouth, England
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: NL, as originally reported
Case Status: Explained (Partial) — identified as a British Army Beta II airship, though a day/night discrepancy in witness accounts remains unresolved
Summary: Ufologist Michel Bougard wrote in 1977 that on the night of December 3, 1912, an aerial craft with four occupants approached Portsmouth from the north, hovered above the city for roughly fifteen minutes, and departed north again. Contemporary reporting, however, indicates authorities at the time already suspected a British Army dirigible returning to its Aldershot facility, and Flight magazine subsequently confirmed the aircraft’s identity as the Beta II airship. The confirmed Beta II flight took place by day, not night as witnesses described, and witnesses further specified seeing an Army Ensign marking — a detail that does not resolve the day/night discrepancy even though it supports the military-airship identification generally.
Source: The Times, page 6, December 4, 1912 — a contemporaneous newspaper of record; a genuinely partial explanation, presented with its residual discrepancy intact rather than smoothed over in either direction
Date: December 24, 1912
Location: Proskurov, Podolsky Region, Russia
Time: Evening
Hynek Classification: CE-IV — abduction-type encounter
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: The mayor of the village of Vychylovka, walking toward Proskurov, saw a dimly lit “machine” in a nearby field with two uniformed men standing beside it. When he asked who they were, he received no answer; the men then seized him and dragged him inside despite his protests. Once airborne, his captors questioned him repeatedly, though he refused to answer. The machine eventually landed, and he was released near the city of Bar, roughly 60 kilometers from where he had been taken, as the machine departed in an unknown direction.
Source: Gershteyn, Mikhail — confirmed Russian ufologist
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The 1912 Archive — Chisbury Restored, and a Model for Honest Partial Explanation
- The Chisbury, Wiltshire case has been added, correctly dated: as flagged in the 1911 correction, Charles Tilden Smith’s shadow observation belongs to April 8, 1912, per his own submission to Nature and Charles Fort’s independent citation of the same volume and page. It is now filed in its correct year.
- The Portsmouth entry is worth highlighting as a model for how this archive should handle partial explanations generally: rather than either dismissing the case once an identification (Beta II airship) surfaced, or ignoring the identification to preserve mystery, this entry — largely as originally drafted — presents both the explanation and its residual, unresolved discrepancy (day versus night) side by side. This is the same standard applied to the corrected Burlington, Vermont (1907) and Caerphilly Mountain (1909) cases elsewhere in this archive, and it was already being followed here without needing correction.
- One sourcing attribution corrected: the Vancouver, British Columbia case’s citation has been clarified — it is Musgrave’s book with a Hynek/HUMCAT chain behind it, not a jointly-authored work.
- A possible duplicate flagged, not resolved: the May 1912 Lockport, Illinois moon-sized object sighting may describe the same event as an undated 1911 Lockport entry on this archive’s page for that year, or may be a genuinely separate case at the same location. Both are retained with the ambiguity stated plainly.
1912 remains the most geographically and typologically diverse year in this archive’s pre-war record, and gains real weight from the correctly-dated addition of the Chisbury shadow case — a rare instance of a named, credentialed witness’s account appearing in a major peer-reviewed scientific journal of the era. The Portsmouth case, presented with its explanation and its unresolved discrepancy both intact, remains this archive’s clearest example of what honest partial-explanation reporting should look like.
“They were stationary upon clouds that were rapidly moving. They were fan-shaped — or triangular — and varied in size, but kept the same position upon different clouds as cloud after cloud came along.”
— Charles Tilden Smith, reporting to Nature, on the April 8, 1912 Chisbury, Wiltshire shadow observation
