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 & Alien Sightings Archive
The year 1915 stands at a peculiar crossroads in the history of anomalous aerial phenomena. Europe was already consuming itself in industrialized warfare — the Western Front had bogged into its trench deadlock, Gallipoli was bleeding the British Empire dry, and the Zeppelin had made its debut as a weapon of strategic terror over English cities. Into this backdrop of technological shock and mass death came a second layer of strangeness: aircraft that did not belong to any known nation, humanoid figures that bore no resemblance to any combatant, and lights in the sky that predated no known flight program. The era’s dominant visual technology — the silver gelatin press photograph and the wirephoto — was barely capable of capturing what witnesses described. Most of 1915’s anomalous events went into military intelligence files, personal diaries, and local newspaper columns, not photographic archives. What survives is fragmentary, filtered through wartime censorship, and sourced predominantly through the post-war cataloguing work of researchers like George Eberhart, Richard Hall, and Jean Sider.
The 1915 page carries a case load that spans six countries and reaches into both the front lines of a world war and the quietest rural corners of Scandinavia and the Baltic. The anchor event — the disappearance of the 5th Norfolk Regiment at Gallipoli, observed by 22 New Zealand Army Corps engineers — is one of the most written-about military anomalies of the twentieth century and remains officially unresolved. Alongside it sit a close-encounter landing in Sulitjelma, Norway, with two gray-skinned humanoids; four-meter-tall silent entities in Estonia; a shape-shifting luminous bundle in Cuba that grew larger under gunfire; and a cascade of mystery aircraft sightings over England and Canada that military intelligence could not explain away with Zeppelin sightings alone. The year’s entity cases are disproportionately significant for the era: at least four distinct close-encounter events, two with craft, in a period when the UFO phenomenon was not yet a cultural framework.
Date: 1915
Location: Canada
Time: Unknown
Summary: It was billed in newspapers of the time as the Phantom Invasion of Canada. Mystery aircraft invaded the skies and capital of this nation.
Source: Unlisted | Source Status: UNVERIFIED — Canadian phantom airship wave is historically real and documented in contemporary press, but this entry has no source citation. Needs: Canadian newspaper archive citations (Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, January–February 1915). Plausible event; source field must be completed.
Date: 1915
Location: Orleans, Michigan
Time: Unknown
Summary: An object was sighted that had an appearance and performance beyond the capability of known earthly aircraft. An unidentifiable object was observed at close range
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies Greenwood Press, Westport, 1980 ISBN:0-313-21337-2 | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: 1915
Location: Puglia Italy
Time: Unknown
Summary: An undocumented report stating that several locals captured a “little green man.” No other information.
Source: Giuseppe Stilo | Source Status: UNVERIFIED
Date: 1915
Location: Devonshire England
Time: afternoon
Summary: A woman walking along a field one afternoon noticed some movement on a nearby brush. She expected a mouse to come out any minute, but suddenly a tiny green colored man-shaped figure wearing a red cap appeared. The tiny being remained visible for about a minute rocking back and forth on top of a leaf and then vanished.
Source: Arthur Conan Doyle | Source Status: PROBLEMATIC — Conan Doyle is the source, not a researcher. Doyle was a committed Spiritualist who championed the Cottingley Fairies fraud. This report almost certainly derives from his fairy/elemental research and should be classified as folkloric entity report, not CE-III.
Date: 1915
Location: Jicotea Las Villas Cuba
Time: late evening
Summary: Two men were patrolling the edge of a sugarcane field on horseback when suddenly as they neared a bend on the trail the horses stopped and would not move, snorting as if in a panic. The men then noticed what appeared to be a small white sack like “bundle” on the ground near the trail. Both men had the impression that whatever it was, it was a “living” thing. The bundle now began approaching the now terrified horses. One of the men that was armed with a pistol fired several shots at the thing. Both men were then astonished to see that the “bundle” seemed to become larger every time it was shot at. When it almost as large as the horse the men panicked and fled the area on foot leaving the horses behind. The next day both horse were found wandering the fields apparently unharmed.
Source: Personal Investigation
Date: 1915
Location: Celeste, Texas
Time: Unknown
Summary: Nocturnal lights were observed by a female witness (Latham).
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies Greenwood Press, Westport, 1980 ISBN:0-313-21337-2 | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: 1915
Location: Bergen, Norway
Time: 23:00
Summary: Large bright brown-red object 2x size of moon, seen in north, hovered then descended; repeated this 2-3 times, finally sped 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, Fairfax, 2000 ISBN:1-928957-01-3 | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: 1915
Location: Virchow, Germany
Time: Around midnight
Summary: An object was observed from a car. One object was observed by two witnesses.
Source: UFO Nachrichten (Germany)
Date: January 1915
Location: England (East Anglia, Scotland, Yorkshire)
Time: Various
Summary: Widespread phantom airship/Zeppelin sightings across Britain during a documented intelligence-tracked scare, January 1915. Military files (AIR 1/565/16/15/89) record sightings, particularly around January 23 in East Anglia. Press coverage tracked in British Newspaper Archive.
Source: Airminded.org (Dr. Brett Holman), drawing on UK National Archives AIR 1/565/16/15/89, 2016 | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: February 9 1915
Location: Bigfork, Montana
Time: 05:00
Summary: Large dark airship at low altitude. rapidly to the southwest
Source: Hatch, Larry
Date: February 14 1915
Location: Brockwell, New York
Time: 21:00
Summary: Three objects were observed by more than one witness.
Source: Eberhart, George M. A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies Greenwood Press, Westport, 1980 ISBN:0-313-21337-2 | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: 1915
Location: La-Porte-Texas
Time: Unknown
Summary: ?
Source: ?
Date: April 1915
Location: Cabeco, Portugal
Time: afternoon
Summary: Four young girls were walking along a hill when they saw suspended in the air, over some nearby trees, a figure resembling a statue made out of snow. The rays of the sun seemed to shine right through it given it a transparent appearance; it resembled a person wearing a white sheet; no eyes or hands could be seen.
Source: Enrique De Vicente, Año Cero | Source Status: Plausible — Año Cero is a Spanish paranormal research publication. This event is the first of the pre-Fatima sequence at Cabeco (Cabeço), Portugal — Lucia dos Santos and the two shepherd cousins. The “four girls” count and Enrique De Vicente attribution are consistent with secondary Fatima research literature. Note: this is now understood to be part of the Fatima apparition sequence (1915–1917), preceding the main October 1917 event.
Date: Summer 1915
Location: Sulitjelma Norway
Time: Unknown
Summary: The witness saw a dark bell shaped craft descend and land, apparently behind a nearby hill. Two short humanoids emerged from behind the hill and walked towards the witness, one stopped and smile and the witness. The humanoids had long wavy dark hair; gray skin and the heads were big in comparison to their body. Both wore dark brown overalls. The humanoids then walked behind the hill and shortly thereafter the bell-shaped craft rose and disappeared.
Source: Ole Jonny Braene, Pre-1947 UFO Type incidents in Norway | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: Aug. 12, 1915
Location: Gallipoli, Turkey – Hill 60
Time: Afternoon
Summary: During severe fighting in the Dardanelles a peculiar cloud engulfed a British regiment which was never seen again. This was observed by 22 men of the First Field Company, NZ Army Corps and stated in an affidavit During World War I, a regiment of the British Army, the 5th Norfolk, disappeared in an attempt to take Hill 60 at Suvla Bay near Gallipoli. In front of 22 witnesses, the regiment — over 800 men ( figure is inflated — regiment comprised approximately 250 men and 16 officers under Colonel Horace Proctor-Beauchamp.)— marched into a strange formation of lenticular clouds hovering over Hill 60 and was never seen again. Posted as missing, the regiment was thought to have been captured. After the war, Britain demanded the return of the regiment, but the Turks denied any knowledge of the regiment’s existence. No trace of the regiment has ever been found.“(Could be a Yarn No evidence)”
Source: Magonia #41, Spaceview 45; LDLN 82 | UK military archives; Dardanelles Commission Final Report, 1917; Historic-UK.com research | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: September 1915
Location: Kazan region, Russia
Time: Unknown
Summary: Authors and ufologists Phillip Mantle and Paul Stonehill reportedly told that in the Kazan region, Russia, in September 1915 in the evening, 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. Also reported were a cigar shaped object with a fin that hovered over a village and six humanoid shapes in a “boat” under the object’s “belly”.
Source: “Les ‘Extraterrestres’ Avant les Soucoupes Volantes”, book by Jean Sider, JMG publisher, France, page 213, 2007. | Source Status: VERIFIED
Date: October 1915
Location: Linakjula in Kihnu Island, Estonia
Time: Unknown
Summary: Yuri Linna, of Estonia, and Russian ufologist Mikhail Gershtein, apparently reported that in Linakjula in Kihnu Island, Estonia, in October 1915 in the evening lit only by the moon, Tiju Vezik of the Nada Estate went to the post office to send mail. As she approached the opening of the gate surrounded by weeds of Koidu Estate to go on the road, she suddenly noticed three strange entities near some houses. They are described as apparently male, of colossal size, and wearing dark clothing. They moved in a line like soldiers without noise, quickly and parallel to the road, near two women who seemed unconscious of their presence. They used to stop and lean briefly, then continue their strange procession. They crossed a field which was about 100 meters away and disappeared under the pine trees. Amazed, Tiju Vezik noted that their head had touched the lower branches of the pine trees, which gave them a height of about 4 meters. Fearing the entities may come back, she went back home.
Source: “Les ‘Extraterrestres’ Avant les Soucoupes Volantes”, book by Jean Sider, JMG publisher, France, pp 213-214, 2007. | Source Status: VERIFIED
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Wartime Anomaly Layer — 1915 and the Dual Record
The year 1915 produced one of the most contextually complex anomalous records in the pre-modern era. The dominant geopolitical backdrop — the first year of full-scale industrial warfare in Europe — created a dual-track reporting environment. On one track, every unidentified aircraft was a potential enemy weapon, and governments had strong incentives to suppress, misclassify, or simply ignore anomalous aerial reports that did not fit known German or Austro-Hungarian technology. On the other track, precisely because military intelligence was actively cataloguing aerial observations, a larger-than-usual paper trail was created for phenomena that in peacetime would have gone unrecorded. The result is a year where the anomalous record is both richer and more contaminated than neighboring years — richer because military witnesses were trained observers filing formal reports, contaminated because wartime hysteria and censorship distort both what was reported and what was retained.
What survives from 1915 is disproportionately significant. The Gallipoli/Norfolk case, whatever its true explanation, produced multiple independent witness accounts, a formal Dardanelles Commission report that notes an anomalous light-refracting mist, and a 50-year persistence in military memory that forced it back into the public record in 1965. The Sulitjelma, Norway landing event — a child’s encounter with gray-skinned, large-headed humanoids exiting a bell-shaped craft — is one of the earliest European CE-III cases with a named, identified witness. The Kazan, Russia and Kihnu Island, Estonia reports add a northeastern European dimension to the year’s entity encounters that is rarely acknowledged in English-language research. The Cabeco, Portugal apparition — four young girls witnessing a luminous transparent figure above the trees — is now understood as the opening event of the 1915–1917 Fatima sequence, the most heavily-witnessed sustained anomalous contact event of the twentieth century. Taken together, the 1915 record is not a random scatter of sightings. It is a geographically distributed, multi-type anomalous event cluster compressed into a single calendar year of maximum geopolitical turbulence.
From the Kazan, Russia entry (September 1915), sourced via Jean Sider, Les ‘Extraterrestres’ Avant les Soucoupes Volantes, JMG, 2007:
“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.“
Philip Mantle and Paul Stonehill, as cited in Jean Sider, 2007
