'Whitest Light': The Latest Strange And Unexplained Sightings In CT Skies

CONNECTICUT — World UFO Day 2025, celebrated on July 2, commemorates the 78th anniversary of what became known as the “summer of the flying saucers.” It started with the first widely publicized U.S. sighting of an unidentified flying object by a civilian pilot searching the Cascade Mountains of Washington for a crashed military aircraft, followed by the crash of a mysterious object near Roswell, New Mexico, on July 2, 1947.

Ever since we have known what to look for, it has been clear that Connecticut gets better than its fair share of visitors from strange planets. The National UFO Reporting Center takes thousands of reports a year from people who can’t explain what they’re seeing, whether a bright light, a peculiarly shaped object, or an aircraft that rapidly accelerates and decelerates just as quickly, seemingly exceeding current understanding of propulsion.

This year alone, 13 reports have been made about unusual sightings in the skies over Connecticut.

Just last week in Hamden, a skywatcher reported "at least 6 craft" bathed in the "whitest light … changing directions and formations/colors flashing at times." The sky show lasted for 25 minutes, ending just after 4 a.m.

Two weeks ago, a couple driving northward just past the National Guard Armory "looked up and saw what I would describe as a large automobile front-end. It had red and blue lights where the headlights would be and spanning between them was an array of 4 to 6 very bright white lights. The red and blue lights were not pulsating … It was so big, I compare it to standing a few feet away from the front of a semi-truck's cab."

Shortly after 9 p.m. on May 1, Trumbull residents caught on video "something flying towards us that wasn’t normal" in their backyard. The 8-second clip uploaded to NUFORC shows "six lights in a teardrop formation and a very loud noise kinda like a helicopter but sounded like waves."

Related: UFO Fever Hits CT: Skywatchers Report Weird Lights, Orbs & Cigars

We know they're there, but do they know we know they're there? Their bold, recurring shenanigans above a couple of Connecticut towns this year suggest they just might.

In January, a Norwalk resident of 57 years extended an open invitation to like-minded skywatchers to visit Couch Street any evening and see the alien parade for themselves:

"These objects come every evening, some look like small fixed wing aircraft with strange lighting, hardly any sound for something flying as low as they do. Some of these things are much higher in altitude, those I observed with binoculars, and seem to be orbs of various forms, some one ball of light, some multiple balls connected to one another. We also observed some very small dots, these appeared to be possibly in orbit, but moving very unusual, fast, and making turns that would seem impossible by our standards. This has been every evening, for months, even in high winds, they stay stable."

Another concerned citizen reported to NUFORC in January that they had "been seeing star like flying things" every clear night for a month, over a pond in the middle of some woods in Killingly.

‘Summer Of The Flying Saucers’

On June 24, 1947, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier, Washington, when he saw nine crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at about 10,000 feet at about a nearly impossible speed for the times of 1,200 to 1,700 mph. .

Related: Why Has There Been An Increase In UFO Sightings In CT?

It wasn’t the first sighting of a UFO, but the public quickly became fascinated — and slightly terrified — after Arnold’s sighting was reported worldwide. News coverage often included references to a “flying saucer,” a play on Arnold’s statement that the object moved “like a saucer would if you skipped it over water.”

More reports followed during what became known as the “summer of the flying saucers,” including the Roswell incident. The Roswell Army Air Field announced in a July 8, 1947, news release that it had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disc” from W.W. “Mac” Brazel’s ranch about 75 miles north of Roswell.

The release was straightforward, noting:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.

“The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.

“Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The Roswell Army Air Field mentioned nothing in its press release about alien life, but people were already growing uneasy about what might be circling overhead. Brazel was among them.

He thought the object he found on his ranch was similar to what Arnold had seen, or to the objects described in stories about flying saucers and discs, so he gathered some of the material from the wreckage, including rubber strips, tinfoil and thick paper, and deposited them with Sheriff George Wilcox, who in turn turned it over to the commanding officer of the Roswell Army Air Field.

Military Said It Was Mistaken

Within 24 hours of the original press release, the military backtracked and said a mistake had been made and the “flying disc” was in reality a crashed weather balloon.

The story was widely accepted, and the Roswell incident might have become a forgotten chapter in history if not for a 1978 conversation between physicist and ufologist Stanton T. Friedman and Marcel, by then retired, according to an account in BBC’s Sky At Night Magazine.

Marcel said the weather balloon story had been a cover, the photos had been staged, weather balloon debris had been substituted for the real wreckage, and that everyone involved in the retrieval believed it to be an extraterrestrial craft. The story was corroborated by a number of other retired military personnel who had been at Roswell at the time.

Some skeptics dismissed it as a tall tale, saying Marcel and others were seeking attention or writing themselves into the story. Regardless, Roswell became embedded in pop culture books, documentaries and movies.

One story that captured the attention of conspiracy theorists was that the wreckage had been seized by the military to reverse-engineer an extraterrestrial flight at Area 51 — a highly classified Air Force military installation in the Nevada desert primarily known for its role in developing and testing experimental aircraft and weapons systems. And a fake film clip purported to show “an alien autopsy” connected to Roswell.

Bowing to public pressure about the incident in the 1990s, the government launched a retrospective investigation that concluded the object that crashed was a Project Mogul weather balloon carrying top-secret equipment designed to search the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.

A Government-Fueled Conspiracy?

2025 brings an interesting new twist to the story.

According to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal published on June 6, the government fueled the UFO conspiracy theories, especially during the Cold War, to hide its true mission at Area 51. Specifically, the Pentagon wanted to conceal the development of advanced aircraft, such as the otherworldly-looking F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, according to the report.

Related: Pentagon Releases New UFO Report; See Latest Reported Sightings In CT

The disinformation campaign was uncovered by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, established by the Pentagon in 2022, to investigate UAP reports. A report last year dismissed the notion that the government covered up the existence of extraterrestrial life But, The Journal reported, “public disclosure left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”

As an investigation of the possibility of deliberate misinformation to hide secret programs continues, the government continues to take UAP and other unexplained phenomena seriously, The Associated Press reported.