Strange Lights, Circling Objects, And Backyard Aliens – The 1926 Wave Of UFO And Humanoid Encounters

Throughout the summer of 1926 in Maitland, Canada, multiple residents reported seeing bizarre lights moving across the sky overhead. These reports came from all over the region, with several witnesses claiming to see strange searchlight-like beams shining down to the ground, and at least one witness claiming to have seen a humanoid figure in one of the curious aerial vehicles.

While the Maitland sightings attracted significant newspaper coverage at the time, there are many other, similar sightings and encounters on record around the same time, offering proof that, whatever might be behind them, many strange events were taking place throughout 1926, long before the start of the Modern UFO Era.

Of course, just how these encounters might fit into the big UFO and alien picture of the contemporary era, and just what respective authorities might have known about such a potential presence is a debate for another time. What is certain, though, is that the high strangeness that fascinates many of us today has likely been with humanity for a long, long time.

Silent Lights Searching For Something On The Ground

Perhaps the best place to start would be with a series of bizarre sightings and reports of strange lights moving over Maitland in Canada. ^[1] The first documented report of these strange lights appeared in the July 7^th, 1926, edition of the Courier and Freeman newspaper, which detailed the number of sightings in the previous weeks, as well as offering details of the lights that resonate nicely with reports of similar aerial activity decades later.

In the weeks before the newspaper article, reports had come from residents across the entire region of Maitland, with the first reports coming from locals who lived in the villages on the city’s outskirts. The details in these reports were all very similar, although, remarkably, some witnesses attested to seeing “searchlights” appear from the underside of these glowing lights and sweep across the ground below as if they were looking for something, or someone.

One particular witness, a farmer named Peter Cunningham, who witnessed the strange lights with another farmer, offered that they “moved rapidly” and appeared to be “attached to a flying machine of some description!”

Another farmer from the nearby town of Prescott who wished to remain anonymous claimed he had seen the lights moving over the top of his farm late one evening. He elaborated that “the head one” seemed to have some kind of “powerful searchlight” that was “turned downward.” Moreover, like other witnesses, he claimed he had the impression that the searchlight was being used to look for something on the ground. He continued that this searchlight was so bright that it caused significant anxiety to his cattle and horses.

One detail that showed up in almost every report was that the lights made no noise at all and moved in complete silence. Not only is this another detail that can be found in UFO reports from across the decades that followed, but it dismisses the suggestion that the lights belonged to some kind of terrestrial aircraft.

The Humanoid Figure “Enveloped” In The Light

Of all the reports, there is little doubt that one of the strangest and thought-provoking came from an anonymous woman from the Brockville region of the city. She claimed she had seen the bizarre lights on two separate occasions. Each time, the lights hovered in the same place directly over her home, approximately several hundred feet from the ground. Most bizarre, though, she claimed to have seen a strange humanoid figure who appeared to be “enveloped” within the light itself. Moreover, this figure appeared to be holding something similar to a rifle.

This last detail perhaps lent credence to another possible explanation put forward to explain the strange lights – that they were the lights of airships under the control of smugglers looking to smuggle alcohol into the United States, which was still under the Prohibition laws. Was the figure witnessed by the woman in Brockville a smuggler who was holding a weapon? It is perhaps possible. However, when placed alongside the many other sightings and details that can be found in other UFO reports, it is unlikely.

It is worth mentioning, though, that just over a decade earlier, in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, there was a wave of strange airship sightings – sightings which many researchers have looked back on as a UFO incident. Similarly, in the United States at the end of 1896 and much of 1897, similar airship sightings were reported, often by hundreds of people at a time. Could there be a connection between these waves of sightings and the strange lights reported over Maitland? It is certainly worth considering.

Reports Of Object Circling Aircraft

As perplexing and intriguing as the Maitland Lights encounters undoubtedly were and are, there were other similar encounters of strange objects and humanoid entities around the same time – and these are just the ones that were documented, there are likely many more that were never reported and are, as such, lost to the ravages of time.

While the exact date is not known, for example, a man named Nicholas Roerich reported seeing a bizarre disc-shaped object in the middle of the day in northern China while exploring. Even more remarkable, on the same journey but this time in Mongolia, he reported seeing another strange aerial object, this one oval-shaped. Once more, this sighting took place during the day, although this time several members of his team also witnessed the curious craft.

In January 1926 in the United Kingdom – several months before the Maitland Lights encounters – a stunt pilot claimed that six “flying manhole covers” appeared out of nowhere and “circled his plane!” They did so several times before it disappeared into the distance. Three months later, in March, a local resident of Rockland St. Mary, also in the United Kingdom, reported seeing an inexplicable craft moving across the sky with great speed, an object that the witness said was unlike anything he had seen before.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Salt Lake City, Utah, in September 1926, an airmail pilot made a similar report, stating that a “long, cylindrical object” had appeared out of nowhere and circled his plane several times, even coming as close as 50 yards at one point. The incident concerned the pilot so much that he made an emergency landing in a field below. When he had exited the plane, he looked up to the sky and saw the object speed off into the distance as if it had been “shot out of a gun!”

The Encounter Of The Lancashire Humanoids

According to an account in the book UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue by Peter Brookesmith, a particularly interesting encounter took place in Lancashire in England in November 1926. On the cold, wintery night in question, a young boy, Henry Thomas, was in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek with several of his friends. It was his turn to seek, and as he made his way around the housing estate, he noticed that one of the back gates into one of the houses was open. He immediately suspected one of his friends had chosen the yard to hide in and headed toward the open gate. He pushed it fully open and stepped into the yard.

Rather than seeing one of his friends hiding there, though, he instead saw “three strangely clad figures” who were lined up at the back windows of the house. They were each pressed against the glass as if trying to look inside the property. Each of the strange figures wore some kind of “bulky suit made from silver-grey tubes” and had a “transparent dome-like helmet” on their heads and black boots on their feet. Several tubes stretched from the glass-like helmets to a pack or tank on their backs.

Henry did his best to remain quiet and watched the three figures. However, without warning, they suddenly turned around to face him. When they did, he could finally see the figures’ faces. He later described their heads as being “shaped like lightbulbs” with large dark eyes and extremely small noses (a description not a million miles away from a typical grey alien). Of more concern to the young boy, however, was a strange “gurgling” sound that suddenly came from one of the figures. A moment later, the three figures suddenly moved in Henry’s direction. As soon as they did, he turned and ran from the yard as fast as he could. He would later tell his parents of what he had seen, and while they were understandably skeptical, they also insisted that Henry was not prone to making things up.

Proof Of A “Presence” Here On Earth Long Before The Start Of The Modern UFO Era

Although not impossible it is unlikely that any further information will surface on the Maitland Lights encounters or any of the other incidents we have explored here. The reports do offer proof, though, that strange objects were navigating the skies of the planet decades before the start of the Modern UFO era following the end of the Second World War – vehicles that were seemingly highly advanced and unlikely to have been a terrestrial aircraft. Moreover, as well as these vehicles, it appears that the occupants behind them also had a presence here almost a hundred years ago – and most likely long before that.

These cases, however, will continue to be researched and studied by UFO enthusiasts and investigators, meaning there remains a chance that some details is spotted that has previously been missed, or that connections to other more recent cases are made. In that sense, such reports from decades ago remain of great importance to the big UFO picture. It would appear the dots are there to be connected, we simply need to discover where they are, and in which order they will mesh together.

Indeed, we might ask just how these sightings of the years before the start of the Modern UFO Era connect to those of contemporary times. Was the intelligence behind these older sightings a different race of extraterrestrials to the one behind more modern sightings or has the same alien civilization had a presence on our planet for longer than we might think?

The short video below explores some of the best UFO and humanoid encounters on record.