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Unidentified Flying Object
Jathaa sungliders

BBC News 24 reports on UFOs, actually Jathaa sungliders, hovering over the Taj Mahal. (TV: End of Days)

You may be looking for the comic story.

UFO was, during the 20th and 21st centuries, a human designation standing for Unidentified Flying Object. Many UFOs were believed by some of the general public, such as Eugene Jones and Maxwell Edison, to be alien spacecraft. Particularly in the 1950s and into the 1970s, the public often reported UFOs as flying saucers, crewed by "Martians".

Alien defence organisations such as UNIT and the Torchwood Institute and insiders like Henry van Statten knew that many UFOs did, as suspected, come from planets other than Earth.

References and appearances[]

In 1941, Chris Cwej thought that a secret weapon the Nazis were working on was a UFO. (PROSE: Just War)

In August 1944, an American bomber crew spotted a foo fighter while flying over the Indian Ocean. This was the world's first ever reported sighting of a UFO thought to be a flying saucer. The Americans documented the sighting but it remained classified information. In December, another one was spotted by a fighter crew over Hagenau in Alsace-Lorraine, Germany. (PROSEAtom Bomb Blues)

In 1957, the Sixth Doctor and Melanie Bush investigated UFO sightings in the proximity of Hammerston, Louisiana and became involved in the production of the film Swamp of Horrors after attacking an actor in a rubber alien suit whom they mistook for a genuine alien. The Doctor, who used his pseudonym "Dr. John Smith", and Mel were assumed to be uncredited actors playing fictional characters by film critics. (PROSE: Swamp of Horrors (1957) - Viewing Notes)

In 1965, the Latter-Day Pantheon caused a UFO scare in New York City. (PROSE: Salvation)

UNIT noted frequent UFO activity centred around Tobias Vaughn's company, International Electromatics, and correctly suspected alien involvement. (TV: The Invasion)

In 1978, there were UFO sightings off the coast of New Zealand. Pictures of the Ninth Doctor, who was present at the time, were taken and published in a newspaper. (PROSE: Have You Seen This Man?)

On 6 March 2006, a UFO, actually a Slitheen craft, crashed into Big Ben. The Slitheen family had staged this crash to provoke World War III, only to be defeated by the Ninth Doctor. (TV: Aliens of London/World War Three)

In 2007, the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler went undercover at Deffry Vale High School after Mickey Smith and locals of the borough first noticed UFO activity - "lights in the sky" - around the area, later shown to be of Krillitane origin. (WC: Tardisode 4, TV: School Reunion)

Torchwood 3 briefly went on alert after UFO sightings in Cardiff airspace. They discovered it was only an excursion by a non-threatening Arcan leisure crawler, with Captain Jack Harkness instructing Toshiko Sato to send a request for the Arcans to leave. (TV: Cyberwoman)

When the Cardiff rift fractured, mixing space and time periods, Jathaa sungliders appeared and hovered over the Taj Mahal, being reported by BBC News 24 as UFOs. (TV: End of Days)

In her attempts to find the Tenth Doctor after meeting him on Christmas of 2007, Donna Noble investigated, among other things, UFO sightings. (TV: Partners in Crime)

In the 2000s,[nb 1] Sarah Jane Smith investigated some UFO activity which later turned out to be caused by a Sontaran known as Kaagh. (TV: The Last Sontaran)

In 2020, BBC News reported on a Transit Station appearing around the moon, describing it as a UFO. (PROSE: At Childhood's End)

Brainwave TV21 189

A U.F.O. flies over a building in New Jersey, 2068. (PROSE: Brainwave)

In 2068, several U.F.O.s were sighted over New Jersey for little over half a minute. Spectrum Shade William Schaible photographed them with his camera, and sent the pictures into TV 21, including a photo featuring one U.F.O. in particular. Colonel White of Spectrum looked over these photographs and decided to take one with him to Unity City for analysis by the World President and government scientists. (PROSE: Brainwave)

In 2400, a crewman on an observation satellite orbiting Earth reported seeing hundreds of flying saucers (actually Daleks on transolar disks) on his scanner. A physician told him that flying saucers were a myth of the 20th century and advised sick leave. (COMIC: Invasion of the Daleks)

Footnotes[]

  1. No on screen date is given for the first two series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, outside of The Day of the Clown from the second series being set shortly after 9 October in an undisclosed year. While Donna Noble's present from the fourth series of Doctor Who is set around the same time as the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith from the second series of The Sarah Jane Adventures is explicitly described as being set a year after Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? from the first series, Doctor Who's fourth series is not consistently dated, with TV: The Fires of Pompeii, TV: The Waters of Mars, and AUDIO: SOS setting the present of the 13 regular episodes in 2008 (heavily implied by TV: The Star Beast and TV: The Giggle as well), and PROSE: Beautiful Chaos setting them in about April to June 2009.
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