1915 anomalous events archive: Sulitjelma CE-III landing (Norway), Kihnu Island giant entity encounter (Estonia), the 5th Norfolk Regiment's disappearance at Suvla Bay (Gallipoli), Bergen UAP observation, and the Devonshire entity report. Sources: Braene 1992, Sider 2007, Hall 2000, Eberhart 1980.
1915: UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
1915 sits at a peculiar crossroads. Europe was consuming itself in industrialized warfare — the Western Front locked in trench deadlock, Gallipoli bleeding the British Empire, the Zeppelin newly weaponized against English cities. Into that backdrop came a second layer of strangeness: aircraft belonging to no known nation, humanoid figures matching no combatant, lights predating no known flight program. Most of what happened this year survives only fragmentarily, filtered through wartime censorship and sourced predominantly through later cataloguing work by researchers like George Eberhart, Richard Hall, and Jean Sider.
This year’s record spans six countries and reaches from the front lines at Gallipoli to the quiet rural corners of Scandinavia and the Baltic. The anchor case — the disappearance of the 5th Norfolk Regiment at Hill 60, Gallipoli — is presented here with its inflated troop count corrected and its evidentiary weakness stated plainly, as the live page had already begun doing. The Devonshire, England “green man” entry is retained but honestly framed: its source is Arthur Conan Doyle, a committed Spiritualist and promoter of the Cottingley Fairies hoax, not an independent investigator, which matters for how the account should be weighed.
Date: 1915
Location: Canada
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Contemporary newspapers billed this as the “Phantom Invasion of Canada” — mystery aircraft reportedly invaded the skies over the national capital.
Source: Not individually listed; the broader Canadian phantom airship wave of early 1915 is historically documented in contemporary press; this specific entry’s primary citation is still needed
Date: 1915
Location: Orleans, Michigan
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: CE-I
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: An unidentifiable object with appearance and performance beyond known aircraft capability was observed at close range.
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies, Greenwood Press, 1980
Date: 1915
Location: Puglia, Italy
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: N/A — entity encounter, no craft
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: An undocumented local report claims residents captured a “little green man.” No further detail survives.
Source: Stilo, Giuseppe — a real Italian UFO historian, but this specific claim is unverified and extremely thin
Date: 1915
Location: Devonshire, England
Time: Afternoon
Hynek Classification: N/A — folkloric entity report
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A woman walking through a field saw a tiny, green, man-shaped figure wearing a red cap emerge onto a leaf, rock back and forth for about a minute, then vanish.
Source: Doyle, Arthur Conan — Doyle was a committed Spiritualist and prominent champion of the Cottingley Fairies fraud; this account almost certainly comes from his broader fairy/elemental research rather than independent investigation, and is presented here as a folkloric entity report rather than a conventional close-encounter case
Date: 1915
Location: Jicotea, Las Villas, Cuba
Time: Late evening
Hynek Classification: N/A — anomalous entity, ambiguous nature
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Two men patrolling a sugarcane field on horseback found their horses suddenly refusing to move, panicked, near a small white sack-like “bundle” on the trail that both sensed was alive. As it approached the horses, one man fired a pistol at it several times; each shot seemed to make it larger. When it neared the size of a horse, both men fled on foot, abandoning their mounts. The horses were found unharmed the next day.
Source: Personal investigation (uncredited)
Date: 1915
Location: Celeste, Texas
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Nocturnal lights were observed by a female witness (Latham).
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies, Greenwood Press, 1980
Date: 1915
Location: Bergen, Norway
Time: 23:00
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A large, bright, brown-red object roughly twice the apparent size of the moon was seen to the north, hovering then descending, repeating this two to three times before speeding away rapidly to the west.
Source: Hall, Richard H. From Airships to Arnold: A Preliminary Catalogue of UFO Reports in the Early 20th Century (1900–1946), UFO Research Coalition, 2000
Date: 1915
Location: Virchow, Germany
Time: Around midnight
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Two witnesses observed an object from a moving car.
Source: UFO Nachrichten (Germany)
Date: January 1915
Location: England (East Anglia, Scotland, Yorkshire)
Time: Various
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Widespread phantom airship/Zeppelin sightings occurred across Britain during a documented, intelligence-tracked scare, with a particular concentration around January 23 in East Anglia. British military files (AIR 1/565/16/15/89) record these sightings, with press coverage independently tracked in the British Newspaper Archive.
Source: Airminded.org (Dr. Brett Holman), drawing on UK National Archives AIR 1/565/16/15/89, 2016 — a genuinely well-documented, archive-sourced case
Date: February 9, 1915
Location: Bigfork, Montana
Time: 05:00
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A large, dark airship-like object was seen at low altitude, departing rapidly to the southwest.
Source: Hatch, Larry
Date: February 14, 1915
Location: Brockwell, New York
Time: 21:00
Hynek Classification: NL
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: More than one witness observed three objects.
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies, Greenwood Press, 1980
Date: 1915
Location: La Porte, Texas
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: Unclassified — no case content available
Case Status: Insufficient Data — entry is an unresearched placeholder
Summary: This entry consists only of an attached photograph and no accompanying text; the live page listed both summary and source as unanswered placeholders (“?”). A search for the specific case behind this image did not turn up a match. Rather than invent a description to fill the gap, this entry is flagged as needing primary research before it can be published as a documented case. If the underlying photo or story can be located, this entry should be completed properly.
Source: Unknown — no citation was ever attached to this entry
Date: April 1915
Location: Cabeço, Portugal
Time: Afternoon
Hynek Classification: N/A — apparition, no craft
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Four young girls walking along a hillside saw a transparent, statue-like figure suspended in the air over nearby trees, resembling a person draped in a white sheet with sunlight visibly passing through it; no eyes or hands were discernible. This is now understood as the opening event of the pre-Fatima apparition sequence involving Lucia dos Santos and her two shepherd cousins, preceding the main October 1917 Fatima event by roughly two and a half years.
Source: De Vicente, Enrique, Año Cero — a Spanish paranormal research publication; the four-girls detail and this attribution are consistent with secondary Fatima research literature
Date: Summer 1915
Location: Sulitjelma, Norway
Time: Unknown
Hynek Classification: CE-III
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: A witness saw a dark, bell-shaped craft descend and land behind a nearby hill. Two short humanoids with long wavy dark hair, gray skin, and disproportionately large heads emerged and approached; one stopped and smiled at the witness. Both wore dark brown overalls. They returned behind the hill, and shortly after, the craft rose and disappeared. Full detail on this site’s dedicated report page. [Full Report]
Source: Braene, Ole Jonny. Pre-1947 UFO Type Incidents in Norway
Date: August 12, 1915
Location: Hill 60, Gallipoli, Turkey
Time: Afternoon
Hynek Classification: N/A — disappearance case, disputed
Case Status: Insufficient Data — widely treated as a probable legend by military historians; no physical evidence has ever been found
Summary: During heavy fighting at Suvla Bay, a peculiar cloud reportedly engulfed a British regiment, which was never seen again. The event was said to be witnessed by 22 men of the First Field Company, New Zealand Army Corps, and described in an affidavit. According to the popularized version, the 5th Norfolk Regiment — inflated in some retellings to 800 men — marched into a formation of lenticular clouds hovering over Hill 60 and vanished. Correction: the regiment’s actual strength was approximately 250 men and 16 officers under Colonel Horace Proctor-Beauchamp, not 800; this figure has been corrected here. The regiment was posted as missing and presumed captured; Turkish authorities denied any knowledge of it after the war, and no trace has ever been recovered. This case is widely flagged by military historians as possibly embellished or entirely apocryphal, with the “vanishing cloud” detail in particular considered dubious.
Source: Magonia #41; Spaceview 45; LDLN 82; UK military archives; Dardanelles Commission Final Report, 1917; Historic-UK.com research — a heavily mythologized case; the underlying regiment’s disappearance and loss is a documented historical fact, but the specific “vanishing cloud” narrative rests on much thinner and later evidentiary ground
Date: September 1915
Location: Kazan Region, Russia
Time: Evening
Hynek Classification: CE-III
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Local residents heard and saw an object resembling a dirigible or huge balloon, with a roaring motor and spotlights shining downward. Also reported was a cigar-shaped object with a fin hovering over a village, with six humanoid figures visible in a “boat”-like structure beneath its underside.
Source: Mantle, Phillip, and Paul Stonehill, as cited in Sider, Jean. Les “Extraterrestres” Avant les Soucoupes Volantes, JMG, p. 213, 2007
Date: October 1915
Location: Linakjüla, Kihnu Island, Estonia
Time: Evening (moonlit)
Hynek Classification: N/A — entity encounter, no craft
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Tiju Vezik of the Nada Estate, walking to send mail, encountered three large, male-appearing figures in dark clothing near a neighboring estate’s gate. They moved silently in a line, parallel to the road, passing near two apparently unaware women, occasionally pausing to lean briefly before continuing. Crossing a field roughly 100 meters away, they disappeared under pine trees — their heads brushing the lower branches, suggesting a height of roughly four meters. Vezik fled home, fearing their return.
Source: Linna, Yuri, and Mikhail Gershtein, as cited in Sider, Jean. Les “Extraterrestres” Avant les Soucoupes Volantes, JMG, pp. 213–214, 2007
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The 1915 Archive — A Blank Entry Flagged, and Two Already-Careful Corrections Preserved
- The La Porte, Texas entry was a genuine placeholder: a photograph with no attached case, summary, or source. Rather than invent content to complete it, it’s flagged here as needing primary research. Searching for the specific image did not turn up a match; if the underlying story can be located, this entry should be properly completed rather than left blank or guessed at.
- The Devonshire “green man” and Gallipoli “vanishing regiment” cases were already carefully audited before this pass: the live page had correctly identified Conan Doyle’s fairy-research context and corrected the Norfolk Regiment’s inflated troop count. Both corrections are preserved and reinforced here, an example of prior research holding up under a second look rather than needing to be redone.
- The Gallipoli case in particular deserves its “widely disputed” framing stated plainly: the regiment’s disappearance and loss is real, documented military history; the specific “marched into a cloud” narrative is a later embellishment that most military historians treat with real skepticism. Both the documented loss and the disputed embellishment are presented together here.
- The Cabeço, Portugal case is correctly identified as the true opening of the Fatima apparition sequence — unlike the 1913 archive’s misdated Fatima entries (later corrected to 1917), this entry’s 1915 date is accurate, since the broader sequence genuinely began two and a half years before the famous October 1917 event.
1915’s record holds up well precisely because much of the hardest work — flagging Doyle’s fairy-research bias, correcting Gallipoli’s inflated numbers, placing Cabeço correctly in the Fatima timeline — was already done before this pass began. What was missing was smaller: an honest flag on one truly blank entry, rather than either quietly dropping it or filling it with invented detail.
“Local people heard and saw an object similar to a dirigible, a huge balloon, with a motor roaring in the air and with spotlights shining down.”
— Phillip Mantle and Paul Stonehill, as cited in Jean Sider, Les “Extraterrestres” Avant les Soucoupes Volantes, JMG, 2007, on the September 1915 Kazan region, Russia sighting
