1918 anomalous events archive: Rich Field Waco Texas noiseless rose cigar sighting (early 1918, NICAP/Hall sourced), Fontainebleau Quebec CE-III green humanoid encounter (November 1918), and the 1918 Australia-New Zealand mystery aeroplane panic (hundreds of reports, government-investigated). Sources: Hall/NICAP 1964, individual report page, Brett Holman/Nigel Watson.
1918: UFO|UAP & Alien Sightings Archive
The year 1918 is one of the thinnest in the thinkaboutitdocs.com archive — not because anomalous events did not occur, but because the final year of the First World War produced some of the most severe wartime censorship and information suppression of the entire conflict, and what little remained entered the research literature through fragmentary channels. The Armistice of November 11 ended four years of industrialized slaughter across Europe; in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand were simultaneously gripped by a documented mass mystery aeroplane panic involving hundreds of reports from across both countries of unidentified aircraft operating at night, thought at the time to be German in origin, and investigated seriously by both governments. The Waco, Texas entry — a reddish cigar-shaped object 100 to 150 feet long, noiseless, with no motor or rigging, passing silently over soldiers leaving a military mess hall at 500 feet altitude — is the same Rich Field observation from the 1917 page footnoted as potentially occurring in 1918 instead; NICAP and Hall both catalogue it as early 1918, placing it in this year’s record. The era’s available visual technology — silver gelatin press photography and early wirephoto — was entirely occupied with the war’s end. Anomalous events passed through local newspapers, military intelligence logs, and personal testimony with no systematic effort to preserve them.
The anchor case for 1918 is the November encounter at Fontainebleau, Quebec — a CE-III entity report in which multiple short, two-foot-tall green humanoid figures were observed near a wooded area at the beginning of night. The figures wore what appeared to be uniforms or suits. The report is sourced through UFO research cataloguing rather than contemporary press, and it represents one of the earliest documented short-green-humanoid entity reports in the North American record — a morphological type that will recur across the following decades with striking consistency. Against this the page carries tagged references to cases from Big Rapids, Michigan; La Porte, Indiana; and Bolivia — entries whose content was present in the original archive but was not recovered during the site restoration. Those cases are flagged as missing and in need of re-sourcing. The 1918 record as it stands is a skeleton: two confirmed cases, one linked individual report, two blanks, and a set of tags pointing at content that needs to be rebuilt.
Date: Early 1918
Location: Near Waco, Texas
Time: Dusk
Summary: Reddish cigar-shaped object, with no motor or rigging, passed silently from SW to NE. Soldiers leaving mess hall saw cigar-shaped object 100-150 feet long, 500 feet altitude, go directly overhead. Reddish color, no motors, rigging, or windows. “weirdest feeling of our lives.”
Source: (NICAP UFO Evidence, 1964, Hall)
Date: November 1918
Location: Fontainebleau, Quebec, Canada
Time: Beginning of night
Summary: Multiple short, approximately 2-foot-tall green-colored humanoid figures observed near woods; wore what appeared to be fitted uniforms or suits; CE-III report
Source: Individual report page linked
Date: 1918
Location: Big Rapids, Michigan
Time:
Summary:
Source: Eberhart’s Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies
Date: 1918
Location: Australia/New Zealand Mystery Aeroplane Panic
Time: unknown
Summary: Hundreds of reports of unidentified aircraft across both countries from March 1918 onward, investigated seriously by both governments and attributed initially to German naval raiders. This is the largest documented anomalous aerial event of 1918 by witness count and institutional response
Source: Documented in academic literature (Brett Holman, “The Enemy at the Gates,” MHHV 2021; Nigel Watson, UFOs of the First World War, 2015)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Armistice Year — 1918 and the Thinning Record
**The Last Year of the War — Censorship, Chaos, and the Sparse Record**
The anomalous record for 1918 is among the thinnest of the entire 1910–1925 period, and the thinness is not random. The final year of the First World War combined the most intense period of wartime censorship in the participating nations’ histories with the catastrophic 1918 influenza pandemic — which killed more people globally than the war itself — and the psychological and institutional exhaustion of four years of industrial killing. In this context, unidentified aerial phenomena were categorically deprioritized: if something flew that you couldn’t identify, it was a German aircraft, a weather balloon, or a hallucination, and you reported it to military intelligence rather than a newspaper. What survived is fragmentary. The Waco, Texas mess hall observation — soldiers watching a noiseless reddish cigar at 500 feet with that specific phrase “weirdest feeling of our lives” — is the year’s most vivid U.S. entry and captures something the instrumental language of official reports never quite did: the phenomenological weight of a genuine anomalous encounter, the full-body strangeness of seeing something that should not be there.
The Fontainebleau, Quebec CE-III entity report is the year’s most analytically significant case. Two-foot-tall, green, uniformed humanoids observed near a tree line at nightfall in rural Quebec in November 1918 — the morphological archetype that will become one of the most consistent entity types in the North American record across the following six decades. That this type appears in 1918 in eastern Canada, two years after the Sulitjelma gray-skinned humanoids of 1915 and four years before any coherent cultural framework for such beings exists in North American popular culture, is not a trivial data point. The 1918 record’s thinness should not be read as anomalous silence. The Australia and New Zealand mystery aeroplane panic of March through mid-1918 — hundreds of reports, government investigations, defensive precautions taken by both nations — is a documented mass-witness anomalous aerial event that the archive page currently omits entirely. Adding it would give 1918 its appropriate weight: a year of institutional suppression and genuine phenomena occurring in parallel, on opposite sides of the planet, at the close of the most destructive conflict the world had yet known.
From the Waco, Texas entry (early 1918), sourced via NICAP, UFO Evidence, Hall, 1964:
“Weirdest feeling of our lives.”
Witness Edwin Bauhan, describing the reaction of multiple soldiers at Rich Field, Waco, Texas upon observing a noiseless reddish cigar-shaped object pass overhead at 500 feet altitude
Date: 1918
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