Charles Fort: A Fortean Chronology, 1880.

The year 1880 (MDCCCLXXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar.

January

• January 23: Something like a lunimous cable, or like a shining wall, was seen in the lunar crater of Aristarchus. (Books443)

Fenruary

• February 2: The first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana.

March

• March 22: At Kattenau, Germany, about half an hour before sunrise "an enormous number of luminous bodies rose from the horizon, and passed in a horizontal direction from east to west." (Books222)
• March 31: Wabash, Indiana becomes the first electrically lighted city in the world.

April 

• April 18: William Ewart Gladstone defeats Benjamin Disraeli in the United Kingdom general election to become Prime Minister for the second time.

May

• May 13: In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway.

June

• At High Easter, Essex, England, there were poltergeist disturbances in the home of a family named Brewster. Furniture wandered. A bed rocked. Brewster saw, or thought he saw, a shadowy shape...(Books995)
• June 5: Off the coast of Malabar at 10pm upon a calm sea were seen waves of brilliant light, with spaces inbetween. (Books276)
• June 14: According to Prof. Schwedoff, there fell, in Russia red hailstones, also blue hailstones and also grey hailstones. (Books40)
• June 20: A "thunderstone" fell down the chimney of a house at 180 Oakley Street, Chelsea, London. (Books111-112)
• June 29: France annexes Tahiti.
• June 30: In the province of Entre Rios, Argentina, fell a substance that "resembled certain types of lignite and boghead coal." (Books76-77) 

July

• July 14: Dorchester Penitentiary opens in Canada.
• July 22: Abdur Rahman Khan becomes Emir of Afghanistan.
• July 28: People in Louisville, Kentucky, saw in the sky "an object like a man, surounded by machinery, which he seemed to be working with his hands and feet." (Books640-641)
• July 30: Near St. Petersburg in the evening were seen a large spherical light and two smaller ones, moving along a ravine. (Books295) 

August

• August 18: A swarm of long, black flies descends on harbour of Havre, France. (Books738)

September

• September 4: The steamboat Martin encountered, on the Hudson River, between New Hamburg and Newburg, a vast cloud of flies. (Books739)
• September 5: A cloud of flies, half an hour in passing, appeared at Guysboro, Nova Scotia. (Books739)

October

• October: The "Blizzard of 1880" begins in North America.
• October 15: Mexican soldiers kill Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists.

November

• November: U.S. presidential election, 1880: James Garfield defeats Winfield S. Hancock.
• November 4: The first cash register is patented by James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio.
• November 11: Australian bushranger and bank robber Ned Kelly is hanged in Melbourne.
• November 22: Vaudeville actress Lillian Russell makes her debut at Tony Pastor's Theatre in New York City.
• November 30: Signor Ricco, of the Observatory of Palermo, saw at 8:30 in the morning, slowly traversing the suns disk, bodies in two long, parallel, and a shorter parallel line. The bodies looked winged to him. (Books224) 

December

• December 20: First Boer War: The Action at Bronkhorstspruit results in a Boer victory over the British.
• December 30: The Transvaal becomes a republic and Paul Kruger becomes its first president.