1956: June UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive

At about 7:10 p.m. on June 16, 1956, João de Freitas Guimarães was walking on the beach at São Sebastião on the coast of São Paulo state when a jet of water rose from the sea and a bulky craft emerged and headed for shore. It landed in front of him on a tripod with ball-shaped feet. Two tall, fair-skinned men in green coveralls stepped out and communicated with him by some means he could only describe as telepathy. They invited him aboard, where a third crewman sat at the controls. He spent what felt like an entire day aboard before being returned to the beach. Guimarães was a Santos attorney and professor at the Catholic Faculty of Law, and when he described what had happened on Rio de Janeiro television in August 1957 he became one of the most credentialed early CE-IV claimants in the Brazilian record. The Brazilian National Archive holds a file on the case.

June 1956 is also the month in which the longest-duration radar and visual observation of the year was filed. On June 29, a round, color-changing object at 59,000 feet was tracked over the Los Angeles–San Diego corridor by ground radar at Mount Laguna and observed visually from both ground level and the air, with F3D aircraft sent up to intercept. Two hours of continuous observation. The month also produced: a T-29 pilot trailing a white-green light over Mississippi, a Banning, California landing case with a close-range humanoid sighting, an entire summer’s worth of European CE-III encounters — from Jarvenpää, Finland to Harsby, Sweden to the forest of Haute-Marne — and a midnight encounter in a sunflower field in Entre Ríos, Argentina, where a farmhand tied his horse to a fence post and followed two men in blue coveralls into a nearly square dark craft.

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Forest of Marsois, Haute-Marne, France
Time: 7:00 a.m.
Summary: A woman gathering mushrooms along a broad path reached the vicinity of a local dolmen and saw two short, stocky figures coming toward her. Thinking they were children she walked to meet them, then stopped. They were adults. Their bodies were thick and squat with short thin legs; they wore tight white one-piece suits, black mittens, black half-boots, a broad belt and round black helmets with transparent visors. No facial features were visible through the visor. She asked who they were; they ignored her and walked off into the trees.
Source: Lionel Danizel, Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 27, No. 5

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Near Yellowstone (California)
Time: Early evening
Summary: A child in the back seat of the family car, driving on an isolated road near the national park, looked out the rear window and saw three silvery-orange metallic discs with glass domes descending quickly from behind the treetops. Inside each dome stood a human-like figure. One disc pulled away; the other two approached to within 30 feet of the car. The nearest tilted slightly, letting the boy see a pilot-like figure inside wearing dark goggles who waved slowly when the boy waved at him. When the boy shouted to his parents and turned back, the objects were gone.
Source: UFO Sightings in New Mexico and the World
Source Status: Single child witness; retrospective account from a general catalog. Note: “Yellowstone, California” is likely a geographic error in the original source — Yellowstone National Park is in Wyoming. The location may be near Yosemite or another California park.

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Viale, Entre Ríos, Argentina
Time: Evening
Summary: Several families retiring from work saw a silent luminous sphere flying parallel to the railroad tracks toward the station. Many witnesses gathered; the sphere appeared about 2 meters across, lit from within but not projecting light outward. A man-like figure was visible in profile, apparently seated at unseen controls and wearing a large round helmet. The sphere disappeared silently in the distance.
Source: Fabio Picasso, Argentina

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Kadzherom, Komi Republic, Russia
Time: Late evening
Summary: Twelve-year-old Vladimir Nikishin and a friend were walking along a railway when they had gone far from their village. On turning to go home, they saw a huge black humanoid at least 2.5 meters tall standing on the embankment, wearing something like a large cap or hood and holding a thick rod or staff. Both boys were unable to move or look away. The entity’s eyes emitted a burning red light. It began walking toward them, and they remained paralyzed. A locomotive approached and the entity uttered a muffled growl, said “I will be back to take you” in a loud, brutish voice, and then vanished. The boys ran home. Adults told them similar creatures had been seen in the area since the 1930s.
Source: Vladimir Nikishin, Taynaya Vlast (Secret Power) newspaper, Moscow, No. 15, 2002
Source Status: Single retrospective account published 46 years after the event; no corroboration. This is a humanoid/cryptid report with no associated craft.

Date: Summer 1956 (midnight)
Location: Ombues, near Viale, Entre Ríos, Argentina
Time: Midnight
Summary: An anonymous farmhand on horseback encountered two men in blue coveralls standing beside a nearly square dark craft in a sunflower field. He was invited aboard, flown to a larger illuminated mother ship, told his visitors came from a distant world short of food and warned of mass landings in five years. The craft’s apparent leader ordered his memory suppressed before he was returned to the same spot. An 11-meter ring of flattened plants was found in the field. [Full Report]
Source: Fabio Picasso, Argentina

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Time: 9:00 p.m.
Summary: During a storm, student Karl Ackermann took shelter in a wooded area and saw a large disc-shaped object pass over him and land in a nearby meadow. He heard a crashing approach and a gigantic figure appeared from behind a hill, wearing what looked like a diver’s mask and breathing heavily, and carrying a small box under its arm. It gestured for Ackermann to follow, then moved quickly up the hill. He followed and saw it standing next to a large shiny structure. He heard loud buzzing and felt extreme heat; then everything disappeared.
Source: Ulrich Magin

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Near Auxerre, France
Time: 11:00 p.m.
Summary: A motorcyclist on an isolated rural road felt a strange eerie sensation and saw the outline of a large dark object in a field. His headlights lit up a six-foot tall man in a tight gray-silver outfit standing only four feet away. The being looked at him silently for a moment. The motorcyclist accelerated, then stopped and looked back. The object was now brightly lit, oval-shaped, with numerous lighted portholes. Several human-like figures moved inside. The object hummed, changed colors, and shot away at tremendous speed.
Source: Robert D. Barry, Saga UFO Annual 1975

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Near High Bridge, New Jersey
Time: Night
Summary: The twelve-year-old son of contactee Howard Menger was dying of brain cancer and bedridden. Several persons reported seeing a pulsating bar of light hovering over the boy’s bed. That same night, four men wearing luminous uniforms were seen on a hilltop 300 feet away.
Source: Jerome Clark, Fate magazine, June 1991

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Between Wimereux and Boulogne, Pas-de-Calais, France
Time: Night
Summary: A traveler on a road spotted a shiny disc-shaped object on the ground with a figure about 1.5 meters tall standing beside it. The witness was afraid and did not approach, and left the area.
Source: LDLN (Lumières dans la Nuit); Denys Breysse, Project Becassine

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Jarvenpää, Finland
Time: Night
Summary: A fifteen-year-old girl asleep in the farmhouse woke to find two small humanoids with large eyes and gray suits in her room, apparently interested in the alarm clocks. She feigned sleep as they moved to the living room and tampered with a large wall clock. One went to the storehouse where her brother slept and carried an alarm clock out. Both humanoids then bounced one after the other toward a corner of the field where a craft with many lights and a cupola was waiting, and entered it. The object rose straight up. The next morning, all the clocks in the house showed different times, from midnight to 4:30 a.m. For years afterward, nothing would grow in the corner of the field where the craft had landed.
Source: Mervi Virtanen, Finland

Date: Summer 1956
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Time: Day
Summary: Unknown. 
Source: Unknown
Source Status: No case details available. 

Date: Summer 1956 [Full Report]
Location: Belleville, New Jersey
Time: About 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.
Summary: Two eight-year-old girls playing in a residential backyard saw the sky go dark. A massive silent dark gray triangular object with blinking lights at each corner and an indented underside hovered about 100 feet over them. The witness said she could have touched it from a ladder. Both girls ran; the object was gone before they reached the door. The mother called the police, who dismissed it as a government test aircraft. [Full Report]
Source: Email report to thinkaboutitdocs.com

Date: June 1, 1956
Location: Belton, Missouri
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Summary: The witness had gone outside to empty trash and saw a 6-foot-5-inch, well-proportioned bright blue glowing humanoid figure apparently looking at a neighbor’s porch light bulb. He heard a voice in his head saying to be calm and not to be afraid. His mother came out, distracting him briefly; when he turned back, the figure was gone.
Source: NUFORC
Source Status: Single-witness retrospective account from a general reporting database.

Date: June 2, 1956
Location: Newton, Mississippi
Time: 10:51 p.m.
Summary: A military pilot of a Convair T-29 saw a white-green light flying a parallel course about 5 to 7 miles away.
Source: Project 1947 (BBU)

Date: June 5, 1956
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio (camping in the woods)
Time: 9:30 a.m.
Summary: A young witness camping alone heard his radio go dead and noticed new batteries had drained. He looked up and saw an object descend to within 3 feet of the ground without a sound. A glass-like ramp extended to the ground. He covered his eyes in fear, heard movement, and waited 15 minutes before uncovering them. The object still sat there. He then felt something ice-cold touch the back of his neck and blacked out. He woke in the same position with the object gone, walked his bicycle home feeling dizzy, and discovered it was already Sunday afternoon — he had lost approximately 24 hours.
Source: UFOevidence.org
Source Status: Retrospective single-witness account from a secondary online compilation. The 24-hour time loss is extraordinary but unverifiable.

Date: June 6, 1956
Location: Near Banning, California
Time: 4:30 a.m. (some listings give 5:30 a.m.)
Summary: A witness saw a thin disc with a small dome, shimmering silver, hovering about 100 feet away at 100 feet height. The object crossed the road slowly, turned, and crossed the road again behind the car, then vanished suddenly. A gray being about the size of a nine-year-old child with broad shoulders and wearing a diver’s suit moved slowly near the craft, then disappeared in plain sight.
Source: Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia, case 383; BBU Files (BBU #4127)

Date: June 11, 1956
Location: Near Eagle Pass, Texas
Time: Afternoon
Summary: Dan Martin answered his back door to find a man and woman who addressed him by the name “Dap O’Day” and immediately grasped his elbows. He reported being levitated to the upper atmosphere, then drawn aboard a large vessel, shown historical information and told details about his past lives. The apparent leader told him they would return. Martin later described the encounter through Paris Flammonde.
Source: Paris Flammonde, The Age of Flying Saucers (1971)
Source Status: Dan Martin appears in multiple Flammonde accounts; the case is in the contactee tradition. The naming convention (“Dap O’Day”) and levitation detail are atypical of the era’s abduction reports and may be allegorical or fabricated.

Date: June 12, 1956
Location: Harsby, Östergötland, Sweden
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Summary: Mrs. Brita Räninger sat under an oak tree meditating when she heard a monotonous buzz and saw a flat disc with a cupola, blue-green in color, about 4.5 meters wide and 1.2 to 1.3 meters high, resting in a nearby glade. Two or three slim humanoids, about 150 cm tall, with long curly black hair and wearing shining green leather-like coveralls, moved swiftly around the object. One turned and stared at her; she felt hypnotized. She had the telepathic impression they had landed to repair the craft. After 10 to 12 minutes the beings entered; their faces were seen in the cupola smiling. The craft rose with a loud buzz, circled slowly and shot away. An acrid phosphorus smell was left behind. A friend later found a circular scorched ring in the glade.
Source: Sven Olof Svensson

Date: June 15, 1956
Location: Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba
Time: About 9:00 p.m.
Summary: Military personnel were watching an outdoor movie alongside the landing strip when the audience shouted to stop the film. An object with an equally spaced row of round white lights moved down the full length of the 10,000-foot runway, then quickly disappeared. The runway was inactive, with its lights off. The witnesses reported the incident to base authorities, who contacted Project Blue Book. Blue Book attributed it to a flight of seagulls reflecting in formation off the runway lights — but the runway lights were off.
Source: NUFORC (submitted 2004); Jan Aldrich, Project 1947 NavCat

Date: June 15, 1956
Location: Wheelus AFB, Tripoli, Libya
Time: 2:00 a.m. and on several subsequent nights
Summary: USAF members assigned to the 6930th at Wheelus AFB reported seeing lights crossing the sky from north to south on a straight course on multiple nights, sometimes four to ten in a single night. The lights were fast enough to rule out conventional explanations, and the base radar unit confirmed radar tracking when jets were scrambled in response. Witnesses noted that despite different origin points along the northern horizon, the lights vanished at roughly the same southern point over the Libyan desert.
Source: NUFORC (submitted 2000s)
Source Status: Retrospective personal account; the multiple witnesses and radar confirmation corroborate the lights, but no Blue Book file has been located for this specific series. The Wheelus area produced a confirmed Blue Book radar case in January and October 1956.

Date: June 16, 1956
Location: São Sebastião, São Paulo, Brazil
Time: About 7:10 to 7:15 p.m.
Summary: João de Freitas Guimarães, a Santos attorney and professor at the Catholic Faculty of Law, was walking on the beach at São Sebastião on legal business. A jet of water rose from the sea between Ilhabela and São Sebastião and a bulky craft emerged, heading for shore. It landed before him on a tripod fitted with ball-shaped feet. Two tall, fair-skinned, blond men in green coveralls emerged. Communication appeared to be telepathic. He was invited aboard, where a third crew member sat at the controls. He was taken to a large mother ship and spent what he described as a whole day and evening in space before being returned to the beach. Guimarães first described the encounter publicly on Rio de Janeiro’s Channel 13 television in August 1957. The craft has been described as roughly 60 feet across and 18 feet high in English-language sources. Cross-reference: this case was listed under January 1956 in some compilations and appears as a cross-reference on the January 1956 archive; the primary SBEDV investigation and the Brazilian National Archive both date it to June 16, 1956.
Source: SBEDV (Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos sobre Discos Voadores) bulletins; Brazilian National Archive (Arquivo Nacional), OVNI collection

Date: June 1956
Location: Feyzin, France
Time: 6:00 a.m.
Summary: Roland X was traveling on his moped when he noticed a shiny hat-shaped object on the side of the road, partly covered by vegetation. It had a darker main body surmounted by a cockpit section. Afraid to approach, he watched from a distance and saw a robust gray being with very wide shoulders, about the size of a nine-year-old child, in a diver’s suit, moving slowly. The being disappeared in plain sight. The craft then rose in a spiral and angled away at high speed in absolute silence. The witness had felt a kind of energy between himself and the object that paralyzed him and forced him to look away.
Source: Figuet; J.-L. Ruchon

Date: June 1956
Location: Near Gorman, California (mountain road)
Time: Night
Summary: Jan Whitley and Emily Cronin, with Cronin’s sleeping six-year-old son, pulled off a mountain road to rest. They both became paralyzed and heard a high-pitched whine; the car swayed. Under later hypnosis, Cronin recalled seeing a tall, thin-faced figure in black looking in the back window at the sleeping boy. Two other beings tried to call it away; one shook the car and continued watching. The beings said the encounter was a mistake. The women were eventually able to drive away but could never relocate the exact spot.
Source: Ann Druffel and Idabel Epperson

Date: June 1956
Location: Near New Hampshire, Ohio (farm road)
Time: 10:00 p.m.
Summary: Two women in a car on a farm road past a round barn saw a bright light approach from a wooded area and stop by the road. The light was attached to a large dark rectangular object that descended almost to the road across from them. One entire wall facing them lit up from inside with pale green light. Three humanoid entities were visible inside, one at a console operating controls and two standing behind him. They appeared shorter than normal humans with arms reaching below their knees and had dark hair on their exposed skin. All wore light-colored short-sleeved smocks. After a few minutes the object moved slowly away and disappeared.
Source: CUFOS Associate Newsletter, Vol. 13, No. 3

Date: June 27, 1956
Location: Trieste, Italy
Time: Unknown
Summary: A luminous object hovered and then sped away.
Source: The UFO Evidence (NICAP), Section XII

Date: June 29, 1956
Location: Los Angeles to San Diego corridor, California
Time: 5:10 p.m. (PST)
Summary: A round, sometimes irregularly shaped object, silver-white to rosy in color, was observed high in the sky to the east for approximately two hours. It was tracked simultaneously by ground visual, air visual, ground radar and air-intercept radar. The radar site at Mount Laguna (station P-76) detected it at 59,000 feet with no measurable speed. F3D aircraft were sent to intercept but could not reach it due to its extreme altitude.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index; BBU Files (BBU)

Date: June 30, 1956
Location: Fremont, California
Time: Unknown (evening, camping out)
Summary: Two nine-year-old boys camping in a backyard watched a star-like light move slowly across the sky, approach a bright star directly overhead, merge with it, and not come out the other side. No speed change, no sound. The witness said it was not like any satellite he knew of.
Source: UFOStalker database
Source Status: Retrospective childhood account from a general reporting database. The first satellite (Sputnik) was not launched until October 1957, making this a pre-satellite-era moving light. The observation of a light “merging and not coming out” is unusual.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Month of the Beach Landing: São Sebastião and a Continent of Entity Encounters

June 1956 is anchored by the São Sebastião, Brazil case. João de Freitas Guimarães, a credentialed attorney and law professor, reported that a craft emerged from the sea, landed on the beach, and he was taken aboard for what felt like an entire day. The Brazilian National Archive holds a file on it, and he described it publicly on Rio de Janeiro television in August 1957. The case has been misdated to January 1956 in some compilations; the primary SBEDV investigation and the Archive both give June 16. It is the strongest claimed CE-IV of 1956 in the Brazilian record.

The official radar record is dominated by the Los Angeles–San Diego two-hour observation on June 29. Simultaneous ground visual, air visual, ground radar and air-intercept radar placed a round object at 59,000 feet, beyond the reach of the F3Ds sent after it. The Newton, Mississippi T-29 case and the Guantanamo runway incident — where Blue Book’s seagull explanation required reflecting lights from a runway that was switched off — fill out the military record. Europe had a concentrated wave of entity accounts this month: two in France (Haute-Marne and Feyzin), two more near Auxerre and Boulogne, one in Sweden with a scorched physical trace, and one in Finland with stopped clocks and a landing circle. The Argentine summer brought an Ombues midnight encounter, a luminous sphere over Viale railroad and a Belleville, NJ triangle rounding out a month unusually rich in CE-III and CE-IV accounts.

“A jet of water rose from the sea — and then a craft emerged and came toward the shore.”

João de Freitas Guimarães, São Sebastião, Brazil, June 16, 1956, as reported in SBEDV bulletins