As World UFO Day Approaches, See What’s Been Spotted In IL Skies

ILLINOIS — Whether you’re a believer or skeptic, World UFO Day on July 2 is an occasion to ponder unexplained phenomena seen over the skies of Illinois over several decades.

World UFO Day 2025 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.

Together, those incidents more or less made it safe for Americans to talk about strange occurrences in the sky.

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.

Sightings In Illinois

This year alone, 34 reports have been made about strange sightings in the skies over Illinois. Some examples:

• June 15 - Witnesses saw a triangle shaped UFO hovering above the high school football field in Johnston City
• May 18 — Chicago resident recorded a strange sound during sleep, and a crystal sphere appeared in the bedroom window.
• April 27 — A solid metal offset stacked flat cylinders was seen over Lake Michigan watching over Chicago
• April 8 — Witness in bed saw outside their window saw an orb shaped craft about 300 feet away in Gurnee.
• Jan. 26 — A Steeleville resident said they had stepped out of the garage heading to the house, and it floated above the house heading NW. "It was dead silent and had glowing lights on the bottom," they said.

‘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.

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.

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.

• Related: Pentagon Again Rejects Extraterrestrial Life; Testes ‘Gremlin’ UFO Kit