Chelmsford UFO Sightings: Here's What They Saw

CHELMSFORD, MA — On Jan. 12, 2020, someone saw a cylindrical object over North Chelmsford and couldn't explain it.

The close encounter lasted 10 minutes, and was the last time someone reported seeing a UFO in Chelmsford 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 we're not alone here on Earth and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft.

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

The notion of intergalactic travel got a boost when the Pentagon released UFO videos earlier this year confirming information that emerged earlier that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a shadowy $22 million Defense Department program, began in 2007 to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena. Official have claimed the program was shut down in 2012, but

The Pentagon acknowledged the secret program to investigate UFO sightings in 2017, the same year as retired naval Cmdr. David Fravor dramatically recalled a confounding encounter with a UFO when he was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004.

He said he saw a wingless oblong craft about 40-feet long was flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics. Fravor didn't know what to make of it but said it was not like anything he had ever seen in nearly 20 years of flying.

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 witness accounts.

The database includes 1,774 UFO reports that have been filed from Massachusetts, including eight from Chelmsford:

You can read more UFO sightings from Massachusetts on the National UFO Reporting Center site here, including some 30 reported sighting in Lowell.

Though, your chances of seeing a UFO are apparently better in some places than others. According to the ranking of states, those with the most sightings are:

1. Idaho
2. Montana
3. New Hampshire
4. Maine
5. New Mexico

The states with the fewest sightings are:

1. Texas
2. Louisiana
3. New York
4. Maryland
5. Illinois

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."

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 here.

Yet among the most intriguing report 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.