If every UFO sighting is taken into account then it would make for an unending list. Isolated incidents, especially those that do not have any visual or tangible evidence and sightings reported by one individual or those not backed by any other eyewitnesses are usually not taken into account. Putting aside the hundreds and possibly thousands of claims of UFO sightings, there are some which were encountered by hundreds of people. Such sightings often spanned several miles in area and multicity or multistate sightings are also documented.
It is difficult to figure out the largest UFO sighting in history because the shape and size of the objects has often been debated. Then there are the factors of area and how many people had the same encounter. Thus, instead of talking about the sheer largest UFO sighting in history, here are some that can be defined as the largest.
Burritt College, Tennessee
On June 1, 1853, students of Burritt College in Tennessee saw luminous objects hovering in the sky. The incident was reported to Scientific American by professor A.C. Carnes who explained the lights as a small new moon and a large star. In that account, the smaller object was reported to have disappeared while the larger object transformed into a globe and then became elongated when the other smaller object reappeared and the two consistently fluctuated along the horizon, changing shapes and positions.
In 1897, an unidentified airship crashed in Aurora, Texas. There wasn’t much documented evidence of the incident but residents of the area had seen the debris and had even found the pilot of the craft who was an extraterrestrial. The incident was considered a hoax but Mary Evans confirmed the UFO sighting and the subsequent burial of the pilot’s remains in the town cemetery. She was interviewed by a reporter with the United Press International in 1973. At the time Mary Evans was 91 years old.
The Phoenix Lights
The Phoenix Lights is possibly the largest UFO sighting given the number of people who had encountered the lights and the area the lights were visible from. Thousands of people along the border towns of Nevada and Arizona reported seeing V shaped object flying in the sky with seven lights outlining its body. There are some inconsistencies in the reports as some people saw triangles and some saw orbs. But the thousands of residents across 300 miles reporting the same unexplained incident is surely the largest UFO sighting in history.