Brookline UFO Sightings: Here's What They Said They Saw

BROOKLINE, MA — On Aug. 15, 2009, someone reported seeing a cluster of 12 to 15 white lights shining in the sky in formation around 3 a.m. somewhere over Brookline.

The close encounter lasted 3 to 4 minutes, and was the last time someone reported seeing a UFO in Brookline to the National UFO Reporting Center. The center has hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects, piquing the curiosity of folks fascinated by the possibility that aliens from another world are visiting the planet.

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

The notion of intergalactic travel got a boost earlier this year when the Pentagon released previously classified videos that reinforced information that had emerged in 2017 that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The purpose of the shadowy $22 million Defense Department program was to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena and began in 2007 and was reportedly shut down in 2012.

The Pentagon acknowledged the secret program to investigate UFO sightings in 2017, the same year as retired naval Cmdr. David Fravor recalled a confounding encounter with a UFO when he was on a training mission off the coast of California more than a decade earlier.

He said a wingless oblong craft about 40-feet long was flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defied accepted principles of aerodynamics. Fravor didn't know what to make of it but said it was not like anything he had seen.

He described the UFO as other-worldly.

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor told ABC News. "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."

Not all accounts are that dramatic, but there are more than a few head-scratchers among the accounts. The database includes 1,774 UFO reports that have been filed from Massachusetts, including more than 70 from Boston and just four from Brookline:

You can read more UFO sightings from Massachusetts on the National UFO Reporting Center site here, including some 70 reported sighting in Boston.

Your chances of seeing a UFO are better in some places than others. According to the ranking of states, Idaho has the most sightings, and the state with the fewest sightings is Texas.

UFO hunting has been popular 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."

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.

Yet among the most intriguing reports is Fravor's account of seeing the unidentified aircraft zipping through the sky: 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 some 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 at the time. "I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."

Related: MA Logs 100-Plus UFO Sightings In 2019

-This article includes reporting from Patch staff writer Max Bennett.