UFO Sightings In Arizona: What You’ve Witnessed In 2020

ARIZONA — While it may feel like tempting 2020 to look at the skies for signs of an alien invasion, others in Arizona and around the country are doing it anyway.

So far, the only result is thousands of new witness accounts of unidentified flying objects submitted to the National UFO Reporting Center. In fact, 3,046 reports of UFOs have been filed so far this year in Arizona.

The idea that we’re not alone and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft has long fascinated us, and most of the reports on the National UFO Reporting Center’s website are filled with colorful accounts of the sightings.

Take this one from Mesa for example:

"I was walking back to a residence from a fast food place on Mesa Drive and Southern Avenue, and as I passed a line of two story townhomes, from the direction of Phoenix, I saw what appeared at first to be a fast moving jet aircraft, but it made no sound, and for an aircraft pushing the speeds it was going, usually you'll hear some kind of roar, and it went fast as it flew by and over me at about 15-20,000 feet. Once it got above me, I noticed it was circular in shape, a puffed out oval-like craft, similar in appearance to the smaller spacecraft seen in the film, Independence Day, but without the protrusions on top of it. It had a small trailing blue light nestled in the tail, and it reflected the setting sun off in a brilliant gleam from its metal. I could literally see the sun shining off its body. After it flew over the roof of a nearby townhome, to disappear from sight, I rushed to an adjacent road that had a better view, only to find it was gone!"

Intrigued? Don’t be jealous of those folks in Mesa. Here’s what others in Arizona have reported:

"On June 17th, 2020 at approximately 2130 hours while taking a night drive to the area of Pena Blanca Lake, about 10 miles west of Nogales, Arizona my wife and I observed about 5 white to yellowish lights in the western sky drifting what appeared to be north. The lights appeared to be hovering over a ridge. No engine noise or airplane noises were heard. The lights just seemed to vanish as we came around a bend in the road."

Plus, this story out of Phoenix: "I was on a roof watching the sky and saw a yellowish circular light appear at the top of the sky and shoot directly into the ground at a very high velocity. This was shortly followed thereafter by another similar or identical light shooting into the earth in the same manner. I have never seen anything like it and it cannot be explained due to the speed and direct trajectory into the ground. The angle at which it entered was 90 degrees with the ground, bee-lining into the planet's crust."

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”

Although the objects Arnold claimed to see weren’t saucer-shaped at all, his analogy led to the popularization of the term “flying saucers.” And since then, Americans have been more or less obsessed with the idea that alien life is among us.

It may be easy to scoff at some of the eyewitness accounts on the National UFO Reporting Center, but the idea of intergalactic travel got a boost when information emerged from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million, multi-year program that began in 2007 to investigate "unidentified aerial phenomena," according to reports by The New York Times and Politico.

Related: UFOs Are Real, Retired Navy Pilot Suggests Of Weird Aircraft

Now-former Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid slipped in an earmark for the program into the Pentagon budget. Nevada, of course, is the home of a U.S. Air Force facility known as Area 51, the source of multiple alien conspiracy theories, including claims that interstellar visitors are held there; that the 1947 Roswell crash wasn't a weather balloon at all but a Soviet aircraft piloted by mutated midgets; and that the 1969 moon landing was filmed by the U.S. government in one of the Area 51 hangars.

The Pentagon program was defunded in 2012. But in a report released in late 2017, the investigators detailed an account by retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, who was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004 when he saw an oblong craft flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics.

Fravor described the wingless object, about 40 feet long and shaped like a Tic Tac, as other-worldly.

“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor told ABC News in 2017. “I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

Fravor's account is convincing. When he saw the object from the air, controllers on one of the Navy ships on the water below reported that objects were being dropped about 80,000 feet from the sky, then headed "straight back up."

He could see the disturbances on the water below and breaking waves on the surface, "like something's under the surface," he told ABC.

The radar jammed, and as Fravor flew closer, the craft rapidly accelerated and zoomed upward and disappeared. Once the object was gone, the ocean below was a still sheet of blue with no evidence of disturbance. Infrared scanning also showed no evidence of an exhaust trail, he said.

"I don't know what it is," he said. "I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."