1955: March UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive

March 1955 delivered three of the archive’s more remarkable entity encounters: a lone Ohio driver’s 4 AM roadside confrontation with three short, sparking gray beings that would later be tangled up with the Loveland Frogmen legend, a Pakistani air force man’s afternoon spent among thousands of kneeling onlookers beneath a malfunctioning riveted disc over Karachi, and a Japanese-islands Beechcraft crew whose instruments failed as a hat-shaped object paced their plane through an evasive dive. A New Territories village panic over a shaggy “beast,” carried into the record only through a self-acknowledged hoaxer’s fanzine, sits alongside them as a cautionary case in sourcing rather than a UFO report at all.

Date: February/March 1955
Location: Connecticut (exact location not given)
Time: Late night
Summary: This entry is the same case as the February/March 1955 Connecticut childhood-memory entry documented in full on the 1955: February archive page, where it is dated ambiguously across both months on the original record. See that page for the complete account.
Source: UFOs in the Gulf Breeze-Pensacola Area: Contact Since 1955

Date: March 1955
Location: Branch Hill, Ohio
Time: 4:00 AM
Summary: Robert Hunicutt was driving home at 3:30 AM when his headlights illuminated three short figures standing beside the road. The one closest to him held something like a rod or chain above his head, with sparks passing along it; as Hunicutt got out of the car, the figure bent down and seemed to tie something around his ankles. The beings were about 3.5 ft tall and gray, with very wide, lipless mouths and corrugations rather than hair on their heads; their chests were lopsided, with a prominent bulge on the right side, and they appeared to wear garments only below the waist. Hunicutt watched them from 20 ft for 4 or 5 minutes before driving away to wake the local police chief, noting a strong odor “like fresh cut alfalfa, with a trace of almonds.” [Full Report]
Source: Stringfield; Flying Saucers May 1961; Sanderson 147; Magonia 361

Date: March 1955
Location: Near La Roca, Spain
Time: Unknown
Summary: Architect Pedro Corella was driving when his car stalled. While checking the engine, he saw a “gyroscope-shaped” object in a field about 750 ft away, with two short humanoid beings visible on top of it. Moments later it rose and disappeared at a 45-degree angle. A farmer reportedly saw it at closer range, and physical traces were found at the site.
Source: Antonio Ribera

Date: March 1955
Location: France (exact location not given)
Time: Evening
Summary: A painter working outdoors reported a circular silvery machine, 8-10 m in diameter and topped by a dome, descending vertically into a nearby clearing about 50 meters away. A door opened and a person in a gray-brown suit and helmet descended — the witness realized it was a striking, fair-haired woman. She arranged 10 pairs of small stones on the ground and gestured between them, the witness, and points on the horizon, which he understood to mean she had contacted 10 other people. She indicated she would return in three days; on a later visit she gave him a small metallic cylinder that reportedly transformed into an opalescent substance. A further visit with an investigator left the witness ill, and he was later reportedly harassed by unidentified men and disappeared. This account’s source, Jimmy Guieu, was primarily a French science-fiction novelist whose own recurring fiction theme was a beautiful otherworldly woman — flagged here as a significant credibility caveat, in the same pattern as other contactee-adjacent sources in this archive.
Source: Jimmy Guieu, Blackout of the Flying Saucers

Date: March 1955 (no specific day given)
Location: A village near Hong Kong, New Territories
Time: Evening / night
Summary: Residents of a New Territories village barred their doors as police searched for a shaggy, gray-haired “beast” said to stand over 6 ft tall. Gardener Law Chiu said he grappled with it near a family temple before it fell on him and loped off on all fours; a second witness later reported it galloping past her garden, leaving large triangular footprints unlike a man’s or an ape’s. This is a cryptid/wild-animal panic report with no associated craft, carried into UFO literature only through the fanzine of a self-acknowledged hoaxer; the four-legged gait and triangular tracks point strongly to a wild boar. No Hynek classification applies. [Full Report]
Source: Gray Barker, Saucerian Review, 1956

Date: March 2, 1955 (BBU)
Location: Huntley, Illinois
Time: 5:00 PM
Summary: A car was followed for 10 minutes by three elongated “balloons,” each showing eight red lights and about 7 meters long.
Source: Magonia 362

Date: March 5, 1955
Location: Mountain View, Missouri
Time: Unknown
Summary: Contactee Buck Nelson reported the “spacemen” visiting his house; they arrived naked but, after shaking hands, put on purplish-blue overalls with low necks and short sleeves. The spacemen called on Nelson again briefly at night on March 22 and told him they had tried to approach earlier but had been “worried by a jet.”
Source: FSR Vol. 1 #2

Date: March 9, 1955
Location: Paris, Illinois
Time: Afternoon
Summary: Eugene Metcalfe reported watching a jet fighter cross the sky when a gigantic object “shaped like a call bell” descended over it, swallowing the jet “as easy as a hawk would a chicken” and departing upward with its prey. A fighter and pilot were reported missing in the region the same day. This account’s sole source is John Keel’s Our Haunted Planet, a folklore compilation; no independent record of a missing aircraft has been located, and the story is treated here as likely apocryphal rather than a documented case.
Source: John A. Keel, Our Haunted Planet

Date: March 16 [or 17], 1955 (BBU)
Location: 35 miles N of Salton Sea [or Ripley], California
Time: 9:24 AM
Summary: A USAF SAC pilot flying a B-47 saw a silver, circular object on a steady southward course, fading into the distance.
Source: Project 1947

Date: March 20, 1955
Location: Karachi, Pakistan
Time: Afternoon
Summary: Several witnesses aboard a British aircraft approaching Karachi spotted an orangey-bronze sphere hovering over the area; among them was British air force man John Parker. After landing, the men encountered the same or similar object — now disc-shaped — hovering low over the city, where thousands of onlookers had gathered, many kneeling and looking skyward. Parker and others approached to within about 60 yards, describing a riveted, bronze-colored craft at least 150 ft across with catwalks, ladders, portholes and rotors, periodically emitting whooshing sounds, sparks, and oily-smelling smoke while swinging left and right as if experiencing mechanical trouble. The sole source is a 1999 magazine article, 44 years after the claimed event, and no contemporaneous 1955 press coverage has been located. [Full Report]
Source: Graham W. Birdsall, UFO Magazine, May/June 1999

Date: March 20, 1955 (BBU)
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Time: 4:13 PM
Summary: Two U.S. military pilots flying separate aircraft tracked an unidentified target by airborne radar, which was also picked up by ground radar. The 5th Air Force reported an actual yellow alert as a result of the radar sighting.
Source: Project 1947

Date: March 24, 1955 (BBU)
Location: Ryukyu Islands, southern Japan
Time: 2:30 [or 2:13] PM
Summary: A Beechcraft flight instructor and student pilot saw a hat-shaped object with 3 windows on its top section, changing color from white to orange, fly under and around their plane. Their instruments failed and the engine sputtered; the pilot dove to evade the object, but it kept pace. Two jets were scrambled from Kadena Air Force Base. [Full Report]
Source: NARCAP; Project 1947

Date: March 29, 1955 (BBU)
Location: Sonoma & Soledad, California
Time: 7:35/7:38 PM (PST)
Summary: Ground Observer Corps observers McGrath and Brown saw a round, silvery-white object with red and green flashing lights rise vertically at a 45-degree angle. The 666th AC&W Squadron reported a slow-moving radar blip in the area at 8:15 PM, though only for a few sweeps. Two F-51 aircraft searched the area thoroughly but found nothing.
Source: Dan Wilson

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Three Continents, Three Entity Encounters, and a Hoaxer’s Cryptid Tale

March 1955’s three genuine standalones — Branch Hill, Ohio; Karachi, Pakistan; and the Ryukyu Islands — span the full range of the month’s strangeness: a solitary driver’s close-range confrontation with sparking, gray-skinned entities; a mass public sighting witnessed by thousands alongside a named military observer; and a radar-and-instrument-failure jet intercept. The already-existing Hong Kong “beast” entry, by contrast, illustrates the opposite lesson — a vivid story that dissolves on inspection into a probable wild-boar panic filtered through a hoaxer’s fanzine, and it is flagged accordingly rather than treated as a UFO case at all.

Elsewhere the month holds a Spanish architect’s roadside disc, a French painter’s contactee narrative sourced to a science-fiction novelist, and Buck Nelson’s continuing Venus correspondence — the ordinary texture of the era’s reporting, preserved without embellishment.