UFO Sightings In Michigan: What You’ve Witnessed In 2020

While it may feel like tempting 2020 to look at the skies for signs of an alien invasion, others in Michigan and around the country are doing it anyway.

So far, the only result is thousands of new witness accounts of unidentified flying objects submitted to the National UFO Reporting Center. In fact, 2,406 reports of UFOs have been filed so far this year in Michigan.

The idea that we’re not alone and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft has long fascinated us, and most of the reports on the National UFO Reporting Center’s website are filled with colorful accounts of the sightings.

Take this one from Birmingham, Michigan, for example. A family of four saw a single bright white circular object in the daylight, followed by a small group of objects moving south to north.

Here's what they said:

"Family of four. Two adults and two children ages 9 and 11 were eating dinner in the back yard. A comment was made about the beautiful sky and the dad looks up and sees a stationary single bright white round object at very high altitude almost directly over head. Everyone saw it. A few took a minute or so to located it. It then appeared to vanish and reappear slightly northwest of its originally location. Shortly after that, we all observed a variety of objects all moving from south to north about the same spot as the original object. They appeared to move at constant altitude and speed. A few of the objects seemed to flash brighter and dimmer. We observed them until they went out of site beyond the trees."

Intrigued? Don’t be jealous of those folks in Birmingham. Here’s what others in Michigan have reported:

Wyandotte:

"To the west, a singular light could be seen hovering high in the sky. Shape appeared to change colors and slowly drift, but kept similar location in the sky. Upon extended observation, smaller dimmer lights seemed to "drop" from object...almost like floating stars that would drift down and dim. Viewer continued to observe object until it disappeared behind cloud cover."

St. Clair Shores:

"I was laying on my swing on the porch, and suddenly I noticed 4 bright, Squarish lights spinning in a circle very slowly for about one turn. Suddenly it shot north towards New Baltimore area, and had a white trail left that I couldn't see reappear anywhere on the horizon. It showed up almonst around 90 degrees from where I was sitting, and the streak when it left probably went about 10 degrees before disappearing. Couldn't really tell a size on it, if I held my hand up, it was about the size of my pinky finger nail, which would put the distance between where helicopters fly and airplanes fly.

There was only the one, and I didn't see what else it could be.

I do live near Selfridge Airport, and by a Lake coast, so we do see lots of planes and helicopters. But this was like nothing I've seen before. I've never been opposed to thinking something else exists, but I also never went looking for answers until I saw that.

It was not any light like a meteor, it was not like a shooting star, it wasn't like a satellite going by since it was way too big. I just couldn't tell what it was."

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit 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.”

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.

It may be easy to scoff at some of the eyewitness accounts on the National UFO Reporting Center, but the idea of intergalactic travel got a boost when information emerged from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million, multi-year program that began in 2007 to investigate "unidentified aerial phenomena," according to reports by The New York Times and Politico.

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

Now-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.

The Pentagon program was defunded in 2012. But in a report released in late 2017, the investigators detailed an account by retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, who was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004 when he saw an oblong craft flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics.

Fravor described the wingless object, about 40 feet long and shaped like a Tic Tac, as other-worldly.

“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor told ABC News in 2017. “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.”

Fravor's account is convincing. 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 about 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. "I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."