From a future president’s glowing orb to a shaved monkey in a jar, these are the strangest UFO sightings ever reported in the Peach State.
Say “Roswell” and most people picture the New Mexico desert and little green men. I grew up in the other one (Roswell, Georgia), but I’ve always liked the idea that my home state might have gotten a few extraterrestrial visitors of its own.
As it turns out, we have more than our share of strange-sky stories. The National UFO Reporting Center has logged more than 2,900 UFO sightings in Georgia. In the late 90s, a Roswell police officer named Michael Hitt spent three years going through archives and declassified records for his self-published book, “Georgia’s Aerial Phenomenon 1947-1987.” He turned up at least 234 reports from those four decades alone.
While most recorded sightings end up as a footnote in history, these seven are worthy of a chapter all their own. Ranked from tamest to freakiest, here are the UFO stories that still have Georgians looking up.
1. A WWII vet’s “V-2” over Valdosta
One July night in 1949, a local engraver named Ed Hopkins spotted something over the southeast edge of Valdosta’s skyline and reached for his binoculars. For several minutes, he followed a reddish-orange glow that raced across the sky, then slowed.
The spectacle was eerily familiar. As a soldier in Europe during World War II, he’d seen two of Germany’s V-2 rockets—the notorious Nazi missiles that no Allied plane could catch—lift off. He later told The Valdosta Daily Times that the thing in the sky behaved “very much like a V-2.”
Hopkins wasn’t the only one watching. The next day’s paper reported that local police officer J.B. Hughes said he and several fellow officers had seen it too, right in the middle of a shift change at the station. Earlier that month, a local woman also reported an anomaly hanging over the sky on the southeastern side of town.
The Air Force took the Hopkins case seriously enough to open a file, but eventually shrugged it off as “insufficient evidence.”
The file also logged a rumor going around town that the government had a secret experimental lab on the Florida coast. As the Times later pointed out, the rumor was true: A missile proving ground had just been established at Cape Canaveral.
Dig deeper: The original Project Blue Book files, along with the Air Force’s other UFO investigation records, are held by the National Archives, and many have been digitized in its online catalog.
2. The airliner and the glowing torpedo
When Eastern Air Lines pilots Clarence Chiles and John Whitted landed in Atlanta before dawn on July 24, 1948, they had something to report to the Air Force.
Around 2:45 a.m., somewhere over Alabama, Chiles had spotted a dull red glow ahead of their DC-3 and figured the Army had a new jet out. Seconds later, it tore past the right side of their plane. Both men put it at roughly 100 feet long, shaped like a torpedo or the body of a B-29 bomber, with flames pouring from one end. Whitted described a row of brightly lit windows.
The whole encounter lasted maybe 15 seconds before the object shot up into the clouds and vanished.
Air Force investigators plotted the object’s likely path and found it would have crossed over Macon. The same night, a crew chief at Robins Air Force Base, just south of Macon, reported a bright light racing overhead.
According to Edward Ruppelt, who later ran Project Blue Book, the case shook Air Force investigators even more than the infamous Mantell crash, in which a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot died chasing a UFO earlier that year. It helped persuade them to send a top-secret assessment to Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg concluding that UFOs were interplanetary. Vandenberg rejected it.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, an Air Force consultant, argued the pilots had seen an unusually bright meteor during a busy stretch of meteor activity, and in 1959, the Air Force made that its official statement on the incident. Not everyone bought it. Physicist James McDonald interviewed both pilots in the 1960s and came away convinced it wasn’t a meteor.
Dig deeper: Ruppelt tells the story in his 1956 book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” which is available on the Internet Archive.
3. A future president’s glowing ball of light
In 1969, Jimmy Carter was in Leary, a small town in Calhoun County, waiting outside a Lions Club meeting where he was due to speak. Just after dark, someone pointed out a light in the western sky, and Carter and about 10 others watched it for 10 to 12 minutes.
In his own account, he wrote that it seemed to come toward them, stop, pull back, return, and then leave for good. It glowed, shifting from bluish to reddish, and never made a sound.
Four years later, as governor, Carter filled out a formal sighting report for the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City. He later called it “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen” and said the experience cured him of laughing at other people’s UFO stories.
The details don’t line up perfectly. Carter’s report dates the sighting to October 1969, but Lions Club records put his Leary speech on Jan. 6, 1969, and the Leary club had disbanded months before October.
Skeptics have suggested he saw Venus, which was near peak brightness that January. Carter, an amateur astronomer, rejected that idea. A Carter relative who researched the sighting later concluded it was most likely a luminous chemical plume from a rocket test out of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, bright enough to spot from southwest Georgia.
Carter promised on the 1976 campaign trail to release the government’s UFO files, then backed off as president, citing national security.
Dig deeper: Carter’s handwritten sighting form and a copy of the family’s Eglin report are both on file at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. They aren’t on display, but anyone can ask to see them through the library’s Ask an Archivist form. In-person research visits are by appointment only.
4. Georgia’s most famous UFO hoax: the “Martian” in a jar
Not every story about UFO sightings in Georgia is a mystery. This one was solved in less than a day, but it’s far from boring.
Before dawn on July 8, 1953, a police officer driving on what was then Bankhead Highway came upon three young Atlanta men, barbers Edward Watters and Tom Wilson and butcher Arnold “Buddy” Payne, gathered over a small, hairless body in the road.
Their tale was a doozy. They’d come upon a red flying saucer parked on the pavement, crawling with little beings about 2 feet tall. Their truck struck one, they said, and its companions piled back into the ship and shot off into the night. A burned ring on the asphalt seemed to prove it.
The timing couldn’t have been better for the trio. A night earlier, people around Atlanta had called in about a big, colorful light in the sky. Within hours, the dead “Martian” was international news.
The story didn’t hold up long. When Emory University scientists and Herman Jones of the state crime lab examined the body, they found that the “alien” was a monkey that had been made hairless with a depilatory, dyed green, and stripped of its tail. The scorch mark in the road came from a blowtorch.
Emory anatomy professor Marion Hines summed it up for the Associated Press: “If it came from Mars, they have monkeys on Mars.”
The three men confessed. Watters ended up with a $40 fine on a charge of blocking the highway, and Wilson and Payne were never charged.
The motive? A bet. An Air Force file on the case says Watters wagered he could get his picture in the paper. He won.
Dig deeper: The monkey is still around, floating in a jar of preservative at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s small crime lab museum in Decatur, where it shares space with other forensic curiosities. The museum sits in the lobby of the Herman Jones Memorial Forensic Science Complex, named for the same scientist who helped expose the hoax. The museum isn’t open for walk-in visits; call GBI headquarters at (404)-244-2600 to ask about access.
5. The treetop parade over Jesup
On the night of April 26, 1984, close to 30 people called the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office about objects in the sky. Callers included a sheriff’s deputy, a local mechanic, and Warren Purvis, a former county commissioner.
Most described large amber lights moving silently over the treetops at close to 100 mph. All were adamant it wasn’t an airplane or helicopter.
Purvis said the one he saw was as tall as a skyscraper. When someone later suggested it was the northern lights, he wouldn’t hear it, and made a point of addressing his state of mind in the moment to The Atlanta Journal: “I was not drinking, but I did shortly thereafter.”
Sheriff Jim Poindexter checked with Fort Stewart, about 30 miles away, to see if the Army had been conducting any tests. The base said it didn’t believe so. Poindexter was convinced his callers had seen something real, but his office couldn’t say what.
Dig deeper: Jingle Davis’s story ran on the front page of The Atlanta Journal on May 17, 1984, under the headline “Jesup up in the air over UFO sightings.” It’s available on Newspapers.com.
6. Something parked on Highway 133
Nineteen-year-old Dennis Craft was on his way home from the county fair, where he’d been staffing the 4-H booth as part of his job as a farm program assistant with the Colquitt County Extension Service. It was around 11 p.m. on Oct. 24, 1973, on Georgia Highway 133 when his headlights hit something blocking the Ochlockonee River bridge.
Craft braked hard and came to rest roughly 10 feet away. What he initially thought was another vehicle turned out to be something truly bizarre. He later compared it to the cap of a grain silo: a plain gray shape six or seven feet high, with no openings he could make out.
Then it lit up, flashing a ring of colored lights one shade at a time, all in total silence. Craft’s instinct was to get out and grab the gun he kept stashed under his seat. He never had the chance to use it. The object rose, crossed slowly above his car, and floated off over the trees along the river.
A driver coming the other way stopped when Craft waved him down, and he saw it leave, too. Craft even put the car in reverse and rolled back to the bridge for a second look, wanting to be sure his eyes hadn’t tricked him.
About half an hour later, Rosie Allen of Doerun was riding with friends on Sylvester Road when something that sounded a lot like Craft’s object showed up ahead of them, hanging low over the pavement. When it appeared to move toward them, they ducked into someone’s yard and turned off their headlights. Folks inside the house came out, and the whole group watched it climb into the sky and vanish.
Craft later admitted to the local paper that he’d nearly kept quiet, worried people would make fun of him. His father convinced him to go to the authorities. When a weather balloon was floated as the explanation for other sightings that week, Craft wasn’t convinced. “What I saw was definitely no weather balloon,” he told the paper. He said he’d started driving with his rifle and a camera, ready to back up his story if it ever happened again.
Dig deeper: The Weekly Moultrie Observer covered both sightings on Oct. 25, 1973, under the headline “Farm Agent, Doerun Woman Report UFO Experiences.” The issue can be read in the Moultrie-Colquitt County Library Digital Archives. Hitt later included the account in “Georgia’s Aerial Phenomenon.”
7. Chased down I-75 before dawn
The woman at the center of this story asked to stay anonymous, so the writer who first reported it called her Sally.
One cold November morning in the 1960s, Sally got up at 4:30 to make it to her 6 a.m. shift as a switchboard operator at the Valdosta telephone exchange, more than 25 miles from her parents’ house north of Adel.
Rounding a curve close to her I-75 on-ramp, Sally found the road blocked. Her first thought was farm equipment that someone had abandoned for the night, so she steered off the pavement to squeeze past it.
Up close, the thing glowed. It was about as tall as a truck and shaped like two bowls joined at the rims, with a ring of white lights and one red light. As she passed, she saw a dome on top with two large, glowing eyes, and she said they followed her. Her radio, which had been playing loudly, cut out.
She got onto the interstate and drove as fast as the car would go. The object followed, sometimes directly overhead and sometimes far enough back that she could see it in her rearview mirror. She said it felt like it was trying to swallow the car.
After about two miles, a tractor-trailer’s lights appeared ahead, and the object veered off and disappeared. Sally stopped at a phone booth near Adel, too shaken to keep driving, and her parents came and took her the rest of the way to Valdosta.
Strangely, other sightings were reported in Colquitt County the same night. A few nights later, a couple from Sparks saw a similar object near the same high-voltage power lines and turned around instead of driving past it.
Dig deeper: Mona Darden first reported Sally’s story on the front page of the Adel News on Feb. 12, 1969, and it later appeared in Fate magazine. Darden wrote that the Air Force kept the case quiet for months, but no record of it has turned up in Project Blue Book. The Adel News Tribune revisited the story in a two-part series in 2026.
