Of the many UFO sightings in Utah history, these three are the wildest.
From the “Tremonton Swarm” to Skinwalker Ranch, Utah has historically been a hotspot for UFO activity. A search for “Utah” in the Project Blue Book archives brings up a huge collection of declassified government UFO reports.
People are still seeing strange lights in the sky—but now they post the sightings to YouTube instead of reporting them to the U.S. Air Force. In fact, Utah has its own UFO Festival and a store completely dedicated to aliens.
Whether you believe—or just want to believe—here are some of the most striking experiences with sky-borne anomalies in Utah.
The 1952 “Tremonton Swarm”
One of the most famous UFO sightings in Utah is still in the news—in September 2026, the Pentagon declassified never-before-seen footage of the “Tremonton Swarm,” a strange cluster of lights moving across a bright blue daytime sky. Captured on July 2, 1952 by U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, the short 16mm film was turned over to Project Blue Book, a U.S. Air Force Program investigating UFO phenomena. Newhouse, who was a professional photographer, claims the government returned a poor (and poorly edited) copy to him, with the most relevant footage missing.
As Newhouse told PBB investigators, it was his wife who first noticed the lights. “She asked me to stop the car and look,” he recalled. “There was a group of about ten or twelve objects—that bore no relation to anything I had seen before—milling about in a rough formation and proceeding in a westerly direction….There was no reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude or distance. Toward the end, one of the objects reversed course and proceeded away from the main group.”
As the BBC reported on Sept. 18, 2026, the Air Force concluded that “the film’s limited detail and lack of fixed reference points meant investigators could not reach a definitive conclusion,” meaning it is one of the 701 unexplained cases out of 12,618 total Project Blue Book investigations.
This isn’t the only dramatic account of UFO contact in Tremonton—in 2017, Utah State University student Katie Francis recorded an oral history interview with her mother, who described a UFO sighting by her grandmother Mildred Stone sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
As Stone and her sister drove back to the family farmstead—at a time when few families in their rural town owned a car—they saw mysterious lights. Then, something “came straight at them and then it went up in the air and up over the car” and then “went behind them…they just watched it come up and lift over the car and up over them, and when they turned around to see where it was, it was gone.”
The Gerry Irwin Case
In February of 1959, Pvt. Gerry Irwin woke up in a hospital in Cedar City, Utah. He’d been found unconscious on the side of the road, and hospital staff had no clue what’d happened, other than their patient had murmured things about a “jacket on a bush.” As Irwin slowly emerged from his disoriented state, he asked about “survivors.”
Irwin had been driving back to Fort Bliss in Texas when he witnessed a bright glow on the horizon, and assumed there had been some kind of accident. After writing STOP on his car with shoe polish, he scribbled a note. He was going to investigate a possible plane crash. Please call police. Then he walked toward the glow, and that’s the last thing he remembered.
After being escorted back to Texas, he was briefly committed to the Fort Bliss psychiatric facilities, then labeled fit for duty. He disagreed: He began to suffer from insomnia, blackouts, and general psychological distress. Then, in what was described as a “trance-like state,” he left Fort Bliss without authorization and returned to the place where he’d first seen the glow on the ridge in Utah.
After that, he went AWOL—disappearing completely.
Irwin’s case attracted the attention of psychologist Carl Jung as well as legendary Ufologist Jacques Vallée, who wrote the foreword for the 2017 book “No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story,” by David Booher.
As Booher told the “St. George News,” UFO abduction stories were not in the collective in the late 50s: “There were no recorded events of that type in 1959. It could not have been a preconceived notion.” Though Booher is not convinced it was a UFO encounter—his other theory is that Irwin was a victim of a government mind-control program such as MKULTRA.
The case remains an enigma, and a frequent topic for people interested in anomalous phenomena.
Vernal’s Skinwalker Ranch
According to its website, Skinwalker Ranch in Vernal, Utah, is “the world’s most studied paranormal spot.” Well before it became the subject of a long-running History Channel series, the 512-acre ranch was known as a vortex of weird happenings.
In the mid-90s, Terry and Gwen Sherman purchased the property and stayed for only 18 months. They reported, according to the “Las Vegas Sun,” strange lights “emerging from circular ‘doorways’ that seemed to appear in mid-air,” found their cattle surgically mutilated, and discovered “unusual impressions in the soil and circles of flattened grass in a pasture.”
Fully spooked, they sold the ranch to Vegas millionaire Robert Bigelow, who purchased it (for only $200,000!) for the express purpose of UFO research through his organization, the National Institute for Discovery Science. He installed a full-time research team there, and though there were many equipment malfunctions, they never captured any truly significant video or audio. But scientist Colm Kelleher, a member of Bigelow’s research team, did claim to have seen a large, odd creature watching him from a tree; the Shermans said they had encountered an enormous wolf that did not go down after being repeatedly shot with a rifle.
The property is currently owned by Salt Lake real estate magnate Brendan Fugal, who is a recurring character on History Channel’s “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.” Fugal describes himself as an “open-minded skeptic” who, like Bigelow, uses a team of scientists to explain the ranch’s anomalies.
Of course, the entire Uintah Basin has long been described as a paranormal hotspot—its nickname is “UFO Alley,” and it’s where the UFO and paranormal convention Phenomecon is held every fall, giving you the opportunity to go to panels like “UFO Encounters: Pilots and Police Speak Out,” and “MUFON Cases of Interest Vol. 2: The Encounter Files”—and then head out at night to scan the dark skies in search of your own close encounter of the Utah kind.
