What kinds of unexplained or paranormal experiences have military personnel and veterans reported, and are there any doc

There is no single official record that proves every spooky story is true, but the evidence does include a lot of first-person accounts, some official UFO records, and at least one formal government program that studied psychic abilities. Taken together, the reports fall into a few big buckets.

Ghost and haunting stories

Military Reddit threads contain personal accounts of unexplained experiences. One common scenario is a "soldier ghost" in full kit appearing during a staff duty shift and asking if you have seen his rifle [55]. Another military thread includes a user who says they saw unexplained "stuff" when they were younger [1].

Military.com collected reader-submitted ghost stories from service members and veterans, saying the military is full of "tales of terror, hauntings and things that go bump in the night" [2][3]. The stories include:

• A room at Vandenberg Air Force Base where people reported strange noises and shadowy figures after staying more than ten minutes [4].
• A neighbor's video, described by an Army service member, showing soldiers in old uniforms marching at night toward a cemetery near Fort Sill [5].
• An Air Force KC-135 navigator whose aircraft auxiliary power unit started by itself [6].
• A Marine Corps story about a burning stagecoach that appears on the same route and frightens Marines on patrol [7].
• An Air Force member working on C-141s who heard combat boots walking in a cargo bay, found nobody there, and felt a cold chill [8].
• An Army account of a military policeman firing at an intruder at Fort Devens who kept walking and passed through a wall [9].
• A Coast Guard member who saw a moving apparition at a historic house near Ocracoke [10].
• An unexplained radio call requesting a tire for a C-5, with nobody ever learning who made the call [11].
• An Army volunteer who saw figures in colonial uniforms carrying flintlocks during a night training exercise at Fort Frederick State Park [12].

The Military Ghost Stories podcast covers similar reports at military locations [13]. Episodes describe ghost children, ghost horses, and a ghost sergeant major at Fort Douglas [14]; ghosts in Room 4714 at West Point, including one called "The Crusher" or "The Pusher," a mischievous ghost named "Molly," and a broken-hearted woman known as "The Lady," with paranormal investigators Eric and Lorraine Warren looking into the case in the 1970s [15]; and a spirit at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor trying to help her imprisoned husband escape [16].

These are personal accounts presented by the people involved, not scientific studies [2][13].

UFO and UAP encounters

There are also official UFO records. Project BLUE BOOK was a U.S. Air Force investigation whose records were later retired to the National Archives [17]. From 1947 to 1969, the project received 12,618 sightings, and 701 of them remained "Unidentified" [18]. The project was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, whose personnel no longer receive, document, or investigate UFO reports [19].

The Air Force's official conclusions were that no reported UFO threatened national security, none showed technology beyond current science, and none were extraterrestrial vehicles [20]. The Air Force also stated there have never been extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base [21]. The National Archives found no documentation in the Project BLUE BOOK records about the 1947 Roswell incident, and Air Force research found no indication that Roswell was a UFO event or a government cover-up [22][23].

In a 2023 congressional UFO hearing, three military veterans testified [24]. Former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch claimed the U.S. government ran a secret multi-decade reverse-engineering program for recovered vessels and recovered non-human "biologics" from alleged crash sites [24][25]. He also said he had not personally seen alien vehicles or alien bodies, and that he based his claims on interviews with more than 40 witnesses during his time with the UAP task force [26].

Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves testified about an F-18 encounter with an object he described as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere, about five to fifteen feet across [27]. He said his squadron submitted a safety report but received no official acknowledgment [28], that encounters in that region were not rare or isolated [29], and that military and commercial pilots have seen objects performing maneuvers unexplained by current technology [30]. He later founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a group that supports aviators who report UAPs [31].

Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor testified about an encounter off the San Diego coast in which he and three other service members saw a white "Tic Tac"-shaped object [32]. He said it had no rotors, rotor wash, or visible flight control surfaces [33]. When they tried to get closer, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared without leaving detectable turbulence [34]. He testified that the technology was far superior to anything the U.S. had [35].

There is also broader reporting context. Since it was formed, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office received 366 reports of UAPs [38], and the Pentagon received hundreds of new UFO reports in 2022 [39]. Many sightings have been explained as weather balloons, drones, airborne trash, and birds [40]. Graves estimated that only about 5% of UAP sightings are reported [37], and there are calls to remove the stigma for aviators who report UAP sightings and to ensure oversight of government programs investigating them [36].

Government-backed psychic research

The evidence also includes a formal U.S. military and intelligence program that studied psychic phenomena. The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency and Stanford Research Institute to investigate psychic phenomena for military and domestic intelligence applications [42]. Its work involved remote viewing, the claimed ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a distance [43]. The CIA and DIA funded the research after reports that the Soviets were actively researching parapsychology [44].

People connected to the program reported or claimed a range of unusual experiences:

• Remote viewers claimed to sense future events, meaning precognition [45].
• A claimed success was locating a lost Soviet spy plane in 1976 [46].
• A key Army sponsor, Maj. Gen. Stubblebine, was convinced of psychic phenomena and required his battalion commanders to learn spoon bending, while also attempting psychic feats such as walking through walls [47][48].
• Remote viewer David Morehouse claimed hundreds of assignments, including searching for a Soviet jet that crashed in the jungle carrying an atomic bomb [49].
• Joseph McMoneagle reported childhood visions and later became an Army remote viewer [50].
• Another remote viewer, Ed Dames, ran sessions on subjects including Atlantis, Mars, UFOs, and aliens [51].

The official reviews were not supportive. A CIA-commissioned report by the American Institutes for Research found that remote viewing had not been proved to work by a psychic mechanism and had not been used operationally [52]. According to the review, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation [53]. The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a CIA review concluded it was never useful in any intelligence operation [54].

Bottom line

Military personnel and veterans have reported ghostly soldiers, haunted rooms, unexplained sounds and equipment events, unusual UAP encounters, and psychic experiences [2][14][27][42][55]. Some of these appear in personal story collections and podcasts [2][13], while others come from official records or congressional testimony [17][24][42]. The official UFO and psychic reviews did not find proof of extraterrestrial vehicles or proven psychic ability [20][52][53][54], and the ghost accounts in these sources are presented as personal stories rather than verified investigations [2][13].