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In fiscal year 2022–2023, Japan's Air Self-Defense Force scrambled fighters against unidentified aerial phenomena 53 times, more than quadruple the prior year's total and the highest figure since JASDF record-keeping began. In September 2020, Defense Minister Taro Kono had already issued standing orders requiring SDF personnel to photograph and document any unidentified object and to immediately halt training exercises if one is encountered.

In August 2023, the U.S. Defense Department's new UAP transparency website formally designated Japan as a global hotspot for unidentified aerial phenomena, based on trend analysis of sightings logged between 1996 and 2023. Japan's parliament responded by forming an 80-member bipartisan research group in 2024, including former defense ministers, to lead the country's first systematic institutional investigation.

On September 14, 2020, Japanese Defence Minister Tarō Kōno announced that the Japan Self-Defence Forces had adopted a formal protocol requiring SDF pilots to photograph, record, and report any encounter with unidentified aerial phenomena. The directive was Japan's first standing order on UAP encounters and was modelled in part on the U.S. Navy's 2019 reporting guidelines.

In late 2014, three former U.S. Army cavalrymen reported observing eight bright objects hovering and accelerating at extreme speed from a Multinational Force observation post in the Sinai Peninsula on the Israeli-Egyptian border. The Times of Israel reported the accounts with the veterans' names; all three stated the objects moved in silence and performed maneuvers beyond known aircraft capability.

Between August and October 2012, an Indo-Tibetan Border Police unit near Pangong Lake, Ladakh, logged over 100 sightings of luminous yellowish spheres rising from the Chinese side of the line and traversing the sky for three to five hours. A mobile radar unit and spectrum analyzer deployed to the site detected no metallic signature and no electromagnetic emissions. Indian astronomical observers confirmed the objects were 'non-celestial.'

On July 7, 2010, an unidentified aerial object forced Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport to halt all departures; 18 flights were grounded or diverted to Ningbo and Wuxi. A flight crew first detected the object at 8:40 p.m. during approach. Chinese authorities concluded it 'may have been an aircraft, possibly military,' but never issued a definitive identification.

Between 2007 and 2009, night security guard Yalcin Yalman filmed roughly 25 video sequences of unidentified objects over the Sea of Marmara near Kumburgaz, Turkey. Turkey's national scientific authority TÜBİTAK and the national observatory TUG reviewed original footage and stated it showed 'a physical structure' inconsistent with CGI, balloons, or known aircraft.

On October 19, 1998, four Chinese military radar stations in Hebei province simultaneously tracked an unidentified object hovering above a PLA aviation training base near Changzhou. A Jianjiao-6 interceptor pursued the object for nearly an hour; when the jet closed to 4,000 meters, the craft shot upward at a speed that outpaced the fighter entirely. At least 140 ground observers reported a mushroom-shaped craft with rotating multicolored lights.

On September 19, 1976, two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom jets scrambled to intercept a luminous object over Tehran. Both aircraft suffered complete electronics and weapons failures at close range; a declassified Defense Intelligence Agency cable rated it an 'outstanding' case and circulated findings to the White House, Joint Chiefs, NSA, and CIA.

On February 23, 1975, two seven-year-old boys in Kōfu, Japan, reported watching a domed silver disc approximately 15 feet wide land in a vineyard behind their housing estate. Physical traces found at the site included overturned concrete posts, soil impressions, and what one investigating teacher described as radioactivity traces. The Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau attributed the sighting to a YS-11 propeller plane, a conclusion that drew immediate criticism for not addressing the physical ground evidence.

Throughout spring and summer 1968, U.S. Marine Corps forward observers, Navy patrol crews, and intelligence officers reported slow-moving unidentified lights hovering near the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone and over the sea toward Tiger Island. In June 1968, USS PCF-19 was destroyed and HMAS Hobart was hit by missiles in the same operational zone on a night when 30 anomalous lights had been reported; a U.S. Navy Board of Inquiry confirmed no hostile aircraft was ever identified in the area.

On January 29, 1952, crews of two separate B-29 Superfortresses operating over North Korea, one over Wonsan, one over Sunchon, independently reported orange globe-shaped lights pacing their aircraft for up to five minutes. Far East Air Forces commander Lt. Gen. Otto P. Weyland publicly acknowledged an ongoing investigation, and the incident was logged in Project Blue Book as among the earliest multi-crew, multi-aircraft Korean War-era UAP cases.

In May 1951, near Chorwon, South Korea, PFC Francis P. Wall and his Army company reported a pulsating orange object descending through active artillery fire undamaged. Wall fired his M1 rifle at it and heard metallic ricochets. Three days later the entire company was evacuated with elevated white blood cell counts, rapid weight loss, and severe dysentery, physiological effects that baffled attending Army physicians.