1940 – 1944: UFO | UAP | Entity Sightings by Date

These five years (1940-1944) cover the first half of World War II — the period in which the phenomenon moved from isolated pre-war reports into a systemic military pattern spanning every theatre of the conflict. It opens with Udo Wartena’s Montana disc encounter and the Tyneside coal-shovel incident in 1940, runs through the Cape Girardeau and Zelyenyi Island crash-retrieval claims and the Golden Gate naval hunt of 1941, the Battle of Los Angeles and the Guadalcanal fleet disc of 1942, the RAF Ludham and Exelgroud entity encounters of 1943, and closes in 1944 with the night over the Rhine Valley near Strasbourg that gave the Foo Fighter phenomenon its name. Across these five years the entity record and the military aerial record run in parallel, each year’s archive built from primary press accounts, squadron and naval documents, and named field researchers, with disputed and unverifiable claims flagged rather than smoothed over.

“The lights were about a foot in diameter. Lights disappeared when Travel 34 turned into them.”
USAAF 415th Night Fighter Squadron intelligence report — the phenomenon that defined the second half of World War II’s UFO record, five years running.