You may have heard of the Tic Tac UFO encounter or the Gimbal and Go Fast videos.
But years before these now world-famous ship sightings became popular, a little-known research group was analyzing them over and over again.
MUFON – the Mutual UFO Network – has 700 investigators across the US and has been collecting evidence of strange encounters since the 1960s.
One of its top analysts, Bob Spearing, told DailyMail.com: “Our motto is: ‘Doing the Air Force’s job since 1969.'” MUFON now has 137,000 reports of UFO encounters in its archives.
Searing reveals today the strangest cases that he says could be the catalyst for further government investigations and congressional hearings.
Flying squids
The idea of ”jellyfish” UFOs first came into public consciousness thanks to a video at an Iraqi military base, posted by journalist Jeremy Corbell.
MUFON has denied that video, which Spearing describes as “very flawed,” but has searched its archive to find others.
“What we found was astonishing,” Spearing said; there were dozens of similar cases, both of large squid-like vessels and smaller floating squids, some of which appeared to “suck the life force” out of victims.
This floating squid was photographed in Denmark in 1975 (MUFON)
This ‘squid’ was spotted in Rhode Island in 2023 (MUFON)
‘We found many drawings and photographs of these giant cloud-shaped mushrooms dating back to Denmark in the 1970s and surviving to this day, but then we discovered that there is also a phenomenon of indoor jellyfish.
A strange encounter in Singapore found sleeping women being attacked by floating objects with bioluminescent tentacles.
This squid was sighted in Russia in 1977 (MUFON)
Spearing said: ‘They noticed in the corner of the room there were some squid-like objects with bioluminescent tentacles.
‘In one case, the creature, whatever it was, had attached itself to the woman’s back, and she felt pain, and that’s what woke her up.
“The object was conscious because it jumped away. She could hear it really disturbed in English, as if she could hear it telepathically.”
The squid attached itself to her as if it were sucking her life force.
Other squid encounters included one in Vancouver in 2016 and another in 2024, as well as two other encounters in Iran.
The MUFON log of one of the Iranian encounters says: ‘The witness is a 45-year-old woman, married with two children.
‘A few nights ago, on October 24, the witness heard a sound again. She knew something was coming for her again. She woke up feeling a pressure on her chest. She said out loud: What is happening?’
A witness outlined what he saw for MUFON (MUFON)
Iranian woman woke up with scars on her abdomen (MUFON)
‘That’s when she saw what looked like a jellyfish with lots of short legs, half blue and half red on its stomach. It looked like a sea creature. It was right on top of her and then it got up and sat on the ground.
“He then disappeared after a few minutes. The next day she saw a scar several centimetres long on his abdomen. It was itchy and burning from the inside out. The witness is very worried.”
The octagonal spaceship
In 2023, interest in MUFON was sparked after the US military shot down three suspected Chinese spy balloons, one of which was octagonal in shape.
The search for the octagonal object was called off by Royal Canadian Mounted Police after it was shot down by a Sidewinder missile.
“They were able to find the Titan submersible at 12,000 feet down, but they couldn’t find anything at 142 feet down?” Spearing says.
MUFON accessed its database of 137,000 cases and found many reports of octagonal objects, some of which were strikingly similar.
Spearing said: ‘They are mainly drawings. They are all drawings by witnesses, but there were a huge number of cases and all the objects looked the same.
‘They were octagons between 30 and 60 feet long. They all had patterns of yellow, orange and white lights on the bottom.’
An octagon-shaped UFO sighting map in the U.S. (MUFON)
A witness drew a picture of what he saw (MUFON)
Many had been spotted near strategic military bases, and one was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on Lake Huron, where the U.S. Air Force shot down the first Octagon.
A sighting in California in 2014 was described in a MUFON UFO report: ‘…I thought it might be a helicopter or a new plane, but… it was neither of these… it had no propellers or wings.
‘There was no sound… Marsh Air Force Base is several miles away, and I took that into account as well. I counted the dots on the figure, which were eight.
‘It was dark outside, but there were lights surrounding the craft in white, yellow, red and orange.’
The cases date back to 1976 and were found in countries in Europe and elsewhere, often around military bases and other high-security facilities.
In August 2023, a witness saw an octagon over Fort Knox at 4.23am, triggering a reaction from a UFO detection device known as a MADAR detector, built to detect changes in pressure and magnetism.
A UFO detection device known as a MADAR detector built to detect changes in pressure and magnetism (MUFON)
MADAR devices are built to detect pressure changes (MUFON)
Spearing said: “They are all over the country. Volunteers have them installed everywhere.”
The witness wrote: “The entire object and the lights appeared to be underwater, changing shape ever so slightly, but still very visible. I was totally scared from the moment I saw it and was totally paralyzed when the object passed over me and my house.”
The sighting was described and outlined in detail by a witness (MUFON)
The Octagon sighting coincided with a pressure change that Spearing believes is related to a craft entering or leaving Earth’s atmosphere.
The Delaware Meeting
One of the most disturbing encounters in the MUFON archives involved a cylindrical craft that appeared to “suck” a coyote into the sky and then turned its attention to human prey.
Spearing said: ‘We have a drawing, basically a young girl was on vacation in Delaware, near the Atlantic Ocean, a summer community, and behind her, about 100 yards away, there’s a pine forest.
“He saw a silver cylinder with violet lights descend. It went down to about three feet from the ground. It was four feet long.
At the 1980 encounter, a coyote was “sucked into the sky” (MUFON)
“And he sees something falling from the bottom of the cylinder. And it turns out that it appears to be a piece of meat.
‘The coyote approaches the meat that is being sucked into the cylinder. It vibrates again, incredibly loud, and about three minutes later, he hears something like bones crunching, plop. The coyote gets out and the thing is gone.’
The girl ran into the house to grab a camera and went outside to take a photo, Spearing said.
Spearing said: ‘So she comes home and her mother asks her: Where have you been?
“She says, ‘I just went out to take a picture of something.’ She says, ‘You’ve been gone for four hours.’ It’s one in the afternoon, so the girl has been missing for four hours.”
Spearing says it’s possible the girl was abducted and under investigation, but she may have been “very, very lucky.”