A French poster once attempted the impossible: cataloguing every shape of unidentified craft ever reported, from 1946 onward, one vivid illustration at a time.
The poster, titled Tous les ovnis (“All the UFOs”), was produced by illustrator Christophe Verdier and spread across Europe as a kind of visual field guide to the unexplained. Dozens of incidents are listed, each with a date, a location, and a shape that witnesses swore was real. Looking at it now, what’s striking isn’t the variety of the craft. It’s how many of those cases involved credible, sober witnesses, physical evidence, and investigations by official agencies that came back empty-handed.
Here are seven of the most compelling cases illustrated on that poster, and the stories behind the shapes.
1. The Crescent That Started It All (Washington State, June 1947)
On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine shiny unidentified objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds he estimated at more than 1,200 miles per hour, roughly three times faster than any aircraft then in existence. He described their motion as like a saucer skipping across water, and that offhand comparison changed everything. Newspapers ran with it and coined the term “flying saucer” overnight, even though Arnold never said the objects were shaped like saucers. He actually described them as shiny and mostly circular, though one appeared crescent-shaped.
Arnold had accumulated over 4,000 hours of flight time and was known for his reliability. He wasn’t chasing a story. He was searching for a missing Marine Corps transport plane when a flash of light caught his eye. An Army Air Force intelligence officer who interviewed him afterward wrote that if Arnold had fabricated the account, “he is in the wrong business and should be writing Buck Rogers fiction.”
The Air Force eventually concluded he saw a mirage. That explanation has never fully satisfied anyone.
2. The Cigar Over a New Hampshire Highway (September 1961)
On the night of September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from a vacation when Betty observed a bright point of light in the sky that began to move strangely. Through binoculars, Barney claimed to have spotted non-human figures inside a cigar-shaped craft hovering over their car.
What followed has become one of the most studied cases in UFO research history. The next thing either could recall was being 35 miles farther down the road. Two hours of their drive were simply gone. Betty’s dress was stained and torn, and Barney’s shoes were badly scuffed, with no memory of how it happened.
Two years later, under hypnosis with Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, both independently recalled similar details of being walked aboard the craft and examined. Gray beings with large eyes had walked them into a metallic disc, Betty said, as wide as her house was long. Once inside, the beings examined the couple and erased their memories.
A historical marker now stands on New Hampshire Route 3 at the site of the alleged craft’s first approach, marking it as “the first widely-reported UFO abduction in the United States.” The Hills were credible, respected community members. Barney sat on a local board of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Neither had anything to gain from the story going public, and it was leaked to a newspaper without their knowledge four years after it happened.
3. The Egg That Scorched a Lavender Field (Valensole, France, July 1965)
Near the French village of Valensole, farmer Maurice Masse was smoking a cigarette just before starting work at 5:45 a.m. on July 1, 1965, when an object came out of the sky and landed in a lavender field 200 feet away. He assumed it was an unauthorized helicopter. It wasn’t.
The object was shaped like an egg with six thin legs and a central pedestal. Standing near it were two beings less than four feet tall, dressed in grayish-green one-piece coveralls, with large hairless heads, smooth white skin, large slanted eyes, pointed chins, and small mouths with no lips. They appeared to be collecting lavender samples. When Masse approached, one pointed a small tube at him and he was instantly paralyzed where he stood. He remained conscious, watching them work. They re-entered the craft, which rose off the ground and vanished.
Masse reported the encounter to local authorities including the mayor of Valensole, his parish priest, and the gendarmerie. The site was thoroughly inspected, and symmetrical marks were found in the ground exactly where he said the craft’s legs had been. Lavender would not grow on that spot for ten years.
Ufologist Jacques Vallee described the case as “the best-authenticated close encounter incident in continental Europe.” Masse was a World War II resistance fighter, well-known and respected by local police. He wasn’t alone in his experience, either — a decade earlier, a strikingly similar encounter in Dinan had left another French witness watching suited beings methodically collect samples from the ground.
4. The Oval Over a New Mexico Road (April 1964)
Not on every list, but illustrated on the Verdier poster: the Socorro, New Mexico sighting of April 24, 1964. Police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car when he heard an explosion and saw a blue flame descending in the desert. He drove toward it. What he found was an oval, egg-shaped object sitting on four legs in a gulley, with two small figures nearby in white coveralls. As he approached, the figures disappeared inside the craft, which lifted off with a loud roar, blasted blue flame from beneath, and vanished.
The New Mexico State Police, the FBI, the Army, and Project Blue Book all investigated. No conventional explanation was ever officially accepted. Blue Book listed it as “unidentified,” one of only a few hundred cases to receive that designation out of more than 12,000 reviewed. Zamora never changed his story.
5. The Diamond on Fire Over Texas (December 1980)
On December 29, 1980, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and Vickie’s seven-year-old grandson Colby came upon a huge diamond-shaped object just above the trees near Huffman, Texas, about 130 feet away. The object was intensely bright and a dull metallic silver, shaped like a huge upright diamond with its top and bottom cut flat. Small blue lights ringed the center, and periodically flames shot out of the bottom, flaring outward like a cone. Every time the fire dissipated, the craft floated a few feet downward. When the flames blasted again, it rose back up.
The heat was strong enough to make the car’s metal body painful to the touch. Betty Cash said she had to use her coat to protect her hand from the door handle. When she touched the dashboard, her hand pressed into the softened vinyl, leaving an imprint visible weeks later.
Then came the helicopters. As the craft ascended, a formation of military-style helicopters appeared from all directions. Cash and Landrum counted 23 of them. Other motorists reported seeing the object and the helicopter formation from a distance.
In the days after, all three suffered severe health problems resembling radiation poisoning. Betty Cash was hospitalized. She later developed cancer and died in 1998, eighteen years to the day after the encounter. The government denied any knowledge of the event. No military branch admitted to operating those helicopters. The case went to federal court and was dismissed for lack of official acknowledgment of the craft.
6. The Glowing Disc Over Oregon (May 1950)
The McMinnville, Oregon sighting of May 11, 1950 produced something most UFO cases never do: photographs. Paul Trent was working on his farm when his wife Evelyn spotted a slow-moving disc-shaped object in the sky. Trent grabbed his camera and took two photos before the craft disappeared. The images show a clearly defined metallic disc tilted slightly against a plain sky.
The photos were examined by the Condon Committee, a government-sponsored scientific study of UFOs at the University of Colorado. Their analysis concluded the objects were “real” and not a model or hoax. A later analysis by optical physicist Bruce Maccabee determined the object was distant, large, and not a fabrication. The Trents were described by all who knew them as quiet, reliable people who showed no interest in fame or money. They kept the negatives in a drawer for years and nearly forgot about them.
The McMinnville case remains one of the most analyzed UFO photographs in history. No definitive conventional explanation has ever been established.
7. The Hemisphere Over Scotland (November 1979)
The Livingston, Scotland incident of November 9, 1979 added something most cases don’t have: physical injuries and a criminal investigation. Robert Taylor was working alone in Dechmont Woods near Livingston when he encountered a large, dark spherical object hovering above a clearing. Two smaller spiked spheres dropped from it and rolled toward him, attaching themselves to his trousers. He felt a strong pulling sensation, smelled something acrid, and lost consciousness. When he came to, the objects were gone. His trousers were torn at the thighs where the spikes had grabbed him. He could barely walk and couldn’t speak for hours.
Police who investigated found a series of unusual marks in the ground in the clearing, consistent with Taylor’s description of the craft and the smaller objects. The incident was recorded as a criminal assault, the only UFO encounter in history to be formally documented as such by a police force. No suspect was ever identified.
The Shape of the Unknown
What the Verdier poster captures, consciously or not, is the impossibility of pattern. Crescents, cigars, eggs, diamonds, discs, hemispheres. If these sightings share an origin, it isn’t showing up in the shapes. What they do share is the profile of the witnesses: farmers, pilots, police officers, military personnel, couples on late-night drives. People with nothing to gain and, in many cases, a great deal to lose.
The shapes remain unidentified. So does whatever was making them.
Have you seen something unexplained in the sky? Send your report to Reports@ParaRational.com.
