UFO Sightings In FL: What Witnesses Saw

FLORIDA — Whether you call them UFOs or UAPs, Tuesday is World UFO Day, and Floridians don't hesitate to report UFO sightings.

So far this year, Sunshine State residents have filed 74 reports about unidentified flying objects or, as the Pentagon calls them, unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAP.

After decades of denying their existence, the Pentagon has acknowledged UFOs are real and may explain what you’ve seen in the skies over Florida.

All of that is interesting to ponder in a review of reports on the crowdsourced National UFO Reporting Center about strange sightings over the state. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll find:

• June 19 in Jacksonville: "Black triangle very low no noise."
• June 10 in Ocala: "Group observed a helicopter circling a lighted object for several minutes. Object changed shape and departed rapidly to the east."
• May 28 in Ormond Beach: "Oval-shaped, no wings, shiny chrome, flying higher than the airplanes."
• May 13 in Sarasota: "It was flying like a plane but was flat as a pancake."
• March 9 in Jupiter: "I was driving north bound on 95 coming home from a camping trip and my son and I saw a floating orb. No mistaking it as balloon or plane."

After reviewing hundreds of new reports of UFOs, a task force required to report annually to Congress has concluded there is no evidence of alien life.

Not everyone agrees. Whistleblower David Grusch, a career Air Force intelligence officer, claims the government is hiding information on a covert program to retrieve crashed alien spacecraft and reverse-engineer the technology. Asked in testimony before Congress if the government had retrieved bodies from the crashed UAP, he replied, “Biologics came in with some of these recoveries, yeah.” When asked if they were human or nonhuman, he said, “Non-human. And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to.”

The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claim.

World UFO Day on July 2 commemorates the Roswell, New Mexico, crash that more or less made it safe for Americans to talk about strange occurrences in the sky. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field said in a 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 crash occurred at the dawn of the Cold War, a time of escalating tension over the arms race when school children were taught duck-and-cover drills to protect themselves in a nuclear attack, fueling wild speculation about the object’s origins.

Earlier that summer, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington, according to History. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”

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.

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.