What has the IDF said about UFOs? Israel's official record

We know of no IDF unit that investigates UFOs, and the IDF has published no policy on them. That sets Israel apart from the US, which created a dedicated Pentagon office, AARO. What Israel has instead is a pattern: a strange light appears over the country, thousands film it, reporters call the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, and the answer is that the military knows of no unusual event.

It helps to read that line carefully. "Not known to us" means there was no Israeli military activity and no threat was detected. It is not an admission that something unexplained happened, and it is not a denial that people saw something. The explanation usually comes later, from astronomers or from another country's announcement.

June 7, 2012: the spiral. Around 9 p.m., thousands of people from Rosh Hanikra in the north to Beersheba in the south reported a bright light that curled into a spiral and dissolved into smoke within two or three minutes. According to Israel's Mako news site, the IDF checked with the Air Force and Northern Command and said the event was not known to it. That same evening Russia's Defense Ministry announced a successful long-range ballistic missile test, and a near-identical spiral over Norway in 2009 had turned out to be exactly that: a Russian missile test.

End of Independence Day, 2020: the convoy. Dozens of points of light crossed the sky in a line, seen from almost the whole country. The Times of Israel reported that the Israel Space Agency and the Air Force were called in to look into it. They were about 60 Starlink satellites launched the week before, still bunched together.

July 2022: the trail over the north. On a Saturday night a "glittering trail" crossed the northern sky, also seen in Lebanon and Turkey. The IDF said it knew of no unusual event that could have caused the sight. Again it was a Starlink train, passing a few hundred kilometers west of Israel.

Military language is full of unidentified objects. During fighting on the northern border, IDF statements often read like this one from May 4, 2026: after alerts about a "hostile aircraft infiltration," an interceptor was launched at a "suspicious aerial target." On February 25, 2025, the IDF said interceptors fired over the Golan Heights at "two suspicious aerial targets" had turned out to be a false identification.

These are unidentified aerial phenomena in the literal sense, picked up before anyone knew what they were. But they are drones, rockets, and sometimes nothing at all. None of these statements has ever hinted at anything non-human.

Israel's most direct government statement on aliens came not from the military but from the Science Ministry. On January 22, 1997, Knesset member Avi Yehezkel submitted a parliamentary question to the science minister: what did the ministry know about "alien visits," were Israeli scientists studying the subject, and did the ministry check citizens' reports?

The reply, written by the ministry's then director-general Tzvi Yanai and published by the Israeli science site Hayadan, said the ministry had no authoritative information about alleged visits by beings from space and that the testimonies could not be verified scientifically. Yanai added that the existence of other civilizations cannot be ruled out statistically, but that an unexplained phenomenon cannot serve as evidence for any hypothesis.

A year earlier, in 1996, Science Minister Benny Begin had turned down a proposal that his ministry set up a committee to study UFOs; Haaretz reported that the ministry preferred to stay away from phenomena "beyond science." We could not find any later Knesset debate in the protocols available online that produced a different official position.

Israel's most famous UFO claim came from a person, not an institution. Prof. Haim Eshed founded the Defense Ministry's space program directorate in 1981 and led it for about three decades. On December 2, 2020, in an interview with Raanan Shaked of Yedioth Ahronoth ahead of Hagar Yanai's book "The Universe Beyond the Horizon: Conversations with Professor Haim Eshed," he said the US government had an agreement with aliens from a "Galactic Federation," that Israel was in contact with them too, that there is an underground base on Mars, and that President Trump had been on the verge of revealing it but was asked to wait to avoid mass hysteria.

In English translations he was quoted as saying, "There is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens," and, "If I had come up with what I'm saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized." He offered no documents, images or other evidence. No Israeli or US official body confirmed his account. Eshed had left the post almost a decade earlier and spoke for himself.

Shaked himself later told the outlet The Debrief that the federation remarks had been overblown and taken out of context, and that Eshed was essentially repeating an old ufology story about a secret Eisenhower-era treaty. He described Eshed as a UFO believer, but lucid.

Israel's best-known UFO stories have no official position either. In the 1990s the town of Kadima became a hotspot: in 1992 a retired engineer, Yoram Turbatian, reported a "landing circle" in a field, and resident Tziporet Carmel described a figure about three meters tall next to a glowing orange "crate." A long 2025 Ynet feature on the case contains no comment from the IDF or any other government body.

The 2011 Temple Mount video, which seemed to show a light descending onto the Dome of the Rock and shooting upward, was a hoax. By early February 2011 analysts had shown that the movement was too perfect, the city lights never flickered, and nobody else filmed it at one of the busiest sites on Earth. Our guide to checking UFO videos shows how to run the same checks.

Start by assuming it is not a UFO: most lights over Israel turn out to be Starlink, the space station, a planet, a meteor, a launch from Palmachim or an interception. Our guide to strange lights in the sky goes through each one, and the sky checker compares what you saw with what crossed the sky at that minute.

During an alert, follow Home Front Command instructions and don't post the locations of interceptions or impacts. If something still looks unexplained, film it with a landmark in the frame and share it in the sightings feed.

If the IDF or the Israeli government ever comments officially on UFOs or aliens, the status line at the top of this page will change first, with the exact words and a link to the source.