1910 – 1919: UFO | UAP | ENTITY SIGHTINGS BY DATE

The second decade of this archive opens with a mayor, a vicar, and a policeman watching a cigar-shaped object over a New Zealand city, and closes with a landed craft in an Iowa creek bed leaving physical ground marks behind. Between those two points sits the First World War, and this decade’s record moves through it in step — a Royal Flying Corps pilot’s sighting recognized by Guinness World Records as the first documented UFO encounter by a military pilot, the Fátima “Miracle of the Sun” witnessed by tens of thousands, and a wartime censorship blackout thin enough to leave 1918 as one of the sparsest years in this archive’s entire pre-1947 record.

As with the decade before it, every year here has been individually audited against its cited sources. Duplicated cases (a hoax told three times in 1914, a Fatima apparition misdated across three separate years) have been consolidated and corrected. Cases that turned out not to belong to their listed year — Tacoma, Washington; the Donghoi, Vietnam sighting; the British phantom airship description — have been traced to their correct years and relocated. Several of the decade’s strongest cases have their own dedicated full reports, including the Fátima Miracle of the Sun, the Caerphilly Mountain landing, the Webster City, Iowa encounter, and the January 1909 Jersey Devil cluster.

YEARS IN THIS DECADE

RESEARCHER’S NOTES

1910–1919 — The War Decade, and What Survived It

1917’s Fátima Miracle of the Sun is this archive’s most heavily documented pre-1947 event by any measure: a crowd of 30,000 to 70,000 witnesses, contemporary secular press coverage, and a full corrected record after three years of misdating (1913, 1915, 1916) were traced and fixed.
Wartime censorship left a real mark on the record, not just a research gap: 1918 in particular is one of the thinnest years in this archive’s full pre-1947 span, a fact this site states plainly rather than papering over with invented content.
1914’s Georgian Bay case is a cautionary example in its own right: a confirmed hoax, already identified as such in this site’s own sourcing, had been duplicated across three separate entries — with the hoax flag surviving on only one of them. Consolidating exposed how easily a debunked case can circulate as live material through simple repetition.
Physical trace evidence remains rare but real across this decade: Caerphilly Mountain (1909, carrying into this decade’s opening frame) and Webster City, Iowa (1919) bookend the decade as this archive’s clearest examples of ground-level corroboration beyond witness testimony alone.