Watch the skies! Florida has 2nd most UFO sightings in the U.S. Here are the biggest ones
Finally, we have found a topic that both political parties can agree on. They want to know about the aliens.
So do many Americans. A survey reported by StudyFinds revealed 78% of the people they asked believed in the existence of life beyond our planet, a third believed aliens have abducted human beings in the past, 1 in 6 fear an alien invasion, and 37% think that scientists and U.S. officials have already made contact with them.
These beliefs may have ramped quickly this year after January release of a declassified version of an annual report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence verifying that the U.S. government has received more than 500 reports of UFOs or "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP) between late 2004 and mid-2022. In May, NASA held a public hearing on UFOs after its 16-person team studying "events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena" was subjected to online harassment from conspiracy theorists.
And the biggest bombshell: three former military members appeared before Congress this week for a whistleblower hearing on national security threats from UAPs to testify on their own experiences and their understanding of how the federal government has suppressed reports of strange encounters documented by pilots.
"The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies," former Navy pilot Ryan Graves said in prepared remarks during the hearing. "It is long overdue."
If aliens are real and on the move, they seem to like Florida.
From the House UFO hearing: Witnesses call for increased military transparency on UFOs during hearing: 'Long overdue'
More than 8K sightings in Florida
According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there have been 8,068 UFO sightings in the Sunshine State, with the first one in 1944. That makes Florida second only to California, with 15,849 sightings. It should be noted that Florida also has the third most Air Force bases in the U.S. (56) after California (123) and Texas (59), which also has a large number of UFO sightings. Oddly, Nevada, home to the famous classified U.S. Air Force base “Area 51,” is just 27th on the list.)
Here are some of the notable Florida sightings.
P-38 sighting: July 15, 1944
The earliest known UFO sighting in Florida, according to the National UFO Reporting Center, was in the summer of '44 in Tampa when someone reported seeing "a black cylindrical object" that appeared over some P-38 aircraft as they were "dog fighting." The cylinder was seen for three or four minutes, the report said.
The 1967 Cuban Jet Incident: March 31, 1967
According to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), in 1967 two U.S. military air defense radar operators 100 miles apart at Homestead Air Force Base and the Army Air Defense Battery on Key West tracked a total of eight unidentified objects over South Florida for about four hours. A member of the Army Air Defense launch crew said that one object was "moving so fast it was like a meteorite but was flying level," MUFON said.
"It was also noted that civilian observers had now sighted the objects and the sighting was being reported on local commercial radio," one of the operators stated.
In 1978, after a security specialist attended a lecture on UFOs, he told the speaker that on March 31, 1967, Spanish-speaking operators at Key West Naval Air Station intercepted communications between Cuban air defense radar controllers and two MIG-21 jet fighters. The fighters had been scrambled in response to an unidentified craft approaching Cuba at about 33,000 feet that sped off at nearly Mach 1 (660 mph), according to a report by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. The flight leader said the object was a bright metallic sphere with no visible markings or means of propulsion, the report said.
Since it did not respond to radio contact, the fighters were ordered to fire on the object. One reported they were locked on and armed, and then, according to NICAP, the pilot began screaming that the other fighter had exploded and disappeared with no smoke or flame. Cuban radar indicated the object then accelerated, rose to 98,000 feet, and sped toward South America.
NICAP said all records of the incident were sent to NSA headquarters. A young Army fire control operator in Key West later told author Jack Roth he was informed it was part of a NORAD drill.
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The Gulf Breeze Six: 1987-1988, Gulf Breeze
In 1987, Gulf Breeze building contractor Ed Walters claimed he shot photos of eerie, circular UFOs and kicked off a national craze of watching the skies. The photos, which he claimed he shot at different times during the fall and winter, showed a well-defined craft shooting a blue beam toward him. These "Gulf Breeze Sightings" became some of the best-known sightings in history, featured on The History Channel, name-dropped by Fox Mulder on "The X-Files" and combed over on countless online sites.
Walters' photos were later dismissed as a hoax after he moved from his home and the new owner found a model of a "flying saucer" in the attic made out of foam pie plates, cardboard, paper and tinted plastic gel. Pensacola News Journal reporters and photographers later used that model to stage their own photographs that seemed identical to the ones taken by Walters.
Walters claimed the model was planted to discredit him. And according to UFO researcher and physicist Bruce Maccabee, many other witnesses, including some local politicians, claimed to see UFOs in the Gulf Breeze area. Nighttime UFO watching became something of a fad in the area for years afterward.
"You had politicians reporting seeing objects,'' Maccabee told the News Journal. "There were so many sightings that you have to account for, unless you believe there was massive collusion on the part of the residents of Gulf Breeze and Pensacola."
Gulf Breeze, close to both Pensacola Air Force Base and Eglin Air Force Base, is a frequent location in the National UFO Reporting Center database of sightings.
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The Golden Knights: Feb. 16, 2012, Homestead
Multiple people looked up into the night sky over Homestead in February 2012 to see an inexplicable sight. According to one person who shot cellphone video of it, "It was a huge fireball at first that broke up into smaller pieces.
"They were coming down hard and fast and then they just stopped in mid air and started hovering back and forth slowly in curved S like movements," the viewer said, who admitted to being shaken. "They then just disappeared. They were very similar to the El Paso UFO sightings."
This sighting was debunked fairly quickly. It wasn't aliens, spaceships or extradimensional invaders, It was the Army's Golden Knights parachutist team, based at Homestead Air Force Base. The team often adds flares to their boots during night jumps.
The Knights have triggered multiple UFO alerts over the years, including over Sun Devil Stadium at Arizona State University, Fort Bragg in California and in Las Vegas. They were spotted again in Homestead in February of this year.
Mysterious object: January 2018, Palm Beach County
Spottings are not always blurry video. Sometimes they're blurry satellite images.
Excitement rose in the UFO community when a Google Earth satellite photo seemed to show a futuristic arrow-shaped airplane or spacecraft at Pratt and Whitney's airfield in Palm Beach County.
No one at the private aerospace facility commented. Pratt & Whitney spokesman Matthew C. Bates told the Sun-Sentinel in an emailed statement that "the aerospace company is a world leader in delivering propulsion solutions for commercial and military customers.
“We routinely conduct engine and component testing for a variety of programs at our West Palm Beach facility. As a general rule, we do not comment on proprietary programs,” Bates wrote.
The Sun-Sentinel contacted experts for their opinion, and the consensus seemed to be the craft could have been a stealth drone or a non-flying engine test rig. “If this was some super-secret thing," said former aerospace engineer Charles Huber, "I would think that they wouldn’t leave it out in the daylight like that, such that anybody could photograph it.”
Flagler County: May, 2021
Retired detective William Fuentes of Palm Coast caught video of what appeared to be two orbs of light flitting around the sky over his yard.
FOX 35 (no relation to Mulder) also reported that another Palm Coast had recently spotted what looked like a "baby dinosaur" running across her yard.
Are any of the alien sightings real?
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, told Politico, “I should also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” The vast majority of sightings, he said, "demonstrated mundane characteristics of balloons, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources.”
“I want to emphasize this loud and proud: There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with” unidentified objects, NASA’s Dan Evans said after the May hearing.
Of course, that's just what people behind a secret decades-long global UFO coverup conspiracy would say.
In 2017, the New York Times revealed a secret Pentagon program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, that tracked and studied UAP reports. In 2020, the Pentagon itself released three grainy videos of those UAPs.
UFO legislation introduced
This year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that would require the Pentagon to release any information it has gathered about the objects.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told NewsNation that other people, some in high positions in government with security clearances, have come forward to share information over the last few years.
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz spoke at the congressional UAP security hearing about radar data and images from a UFO encounter with U.S. Air Force pilots off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico he was shown earlier this year.
Gaetz said from the images he saw of the object, he was “not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.”
This week, Gaetz, R-FL, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-FL, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-TN, and Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-FL called on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to create a congressional committee to investigate UFOs
How do I report a UFO sighting?
Anyone can report an unusual light, object or shape in the sky to the National UFO Reporting Center on its website or through its phone hotline, 206-722-3000.
According to the site, the center deals only with objective sightings and asks that you not report:
Starlink satellites: These are usually seen as a line of lights in the sky.
Sightings of Venus and Jupiter. "Our Center receives many, many reports of Venus and Jupiter."
Objects in photos not seen with the naked eye. "If you see something in a photo or video you took that you did not see with your naked eye, it's probably a camera anomaly or artifact such as a lens flare."
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Florida UFO sightings number second most in United States
