Hoia-Baciu: The UFO Forest of Photographs, Radar Signals, and a Missing Archive

On 18 August 1968, technician Emil Barnea stopped with his girlfriend and two friends in a clearing in Baciu Forest, just west of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Around one in the afternoon they saw a large, round, flattened, silvery metallic object moving slowly above the treetops toward the south-west. Barnea grabbed the FED-2 camera lying on the blanket and exposed several frames before the object tipped over, flared, and accelerated out of sight.

One day earlier, Captain Beniamin Gabrian of the Romanian airline TAROM reported that the crew of an Il-18 had seen an oval object giving off a green light at about 7,600 metres near Oradea. Two sightings in the same Transylvanian region moved quickly from witness statements into newspapers, radio programmes, and UFO organisations. In September 1968, the AGERPRES news agency reported the Baciu photographs, and the forest's name began to appear in international UFO publications.