39 UFOs Were Spotted In New York City In 2017

NEW YORK, NY — The truth is out there – and it might have visited the Big Apple in 2017. New Yorkers reported 39 sightings of unidentified flying objects across the five boroughs during the year, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.

Most reports came out of Brooklyn, where 15 people spotted unusual lights or shapes floating through the skies. Ten sightings came from Queens, nine from Manhattan, three from Staten Island and two from the Bronx.

UFO sightings are down this year compared to 2016, when the city reported 47 sightings to the NURC's online database. Manhattan saw 18 UFOs that year, Brooklyn saw 14, Queens saw 11, the Bronx saw six and Staten Island three.

New York City's sightings accounted for about 23 percent of the 169 reported across the state this year, NURC's database shows.

New Yorkers reported seeing flashing lights or objects of varying shapes in the sky for as little as 30 seconds to as long as 30 minutes. Lots of the events came late at night or early in the morning, though some were reported during daylight hours.

"All of the sudden, I see 2 triangles made up of lights floating by in the sky," wrote one Astoria, Queens, resident who was looking out of a fifth-floor apartment window over the East River at 9:29 p.m. on Oct. 20. "There 1 second gone the next. One triangle was made of red lights and the other craft made of blue."

New York City is far from alone in seeing UFOs. The NURC has reports from every U.S. state and other nations. Sightings are most frequent in California and Florida — sky-watchers there have reported 13,033 and 6,190 UFOs respectively since the database's inception in the 1990s.

The U.S. government became interested enough in flying saucers that in 2007 it launched a Department of Defense program to study sightings of them, according to a bombshell report in The New York Times this month. Former government officials, including the program's former director, say the effort is still active, though federal funding for it ran out in 2012.

Experts, though, told the Times that there's probably an earthly explanation for any UFO sighting — though it's not unusual for some phenomena to remain unexplained.

"Lots of people are active in the air and don't want others to know about it," James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer, told the Times. "They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage."

Though he's admitted many UFO sightings can be explained, Peter Davenport, the director of the Washington state-based NURC, thinks it's important to keep studying them.

"I know that this is the greatest scientific question that has ever confronted man. And that question is whether we are alone or not," Davenport told Seattle Weekly in 2011. "And I submit to you that we are visited on a frequent basis. This is the biggest story in the world."

(Lead image: People watch the partial solar eclipse in New York City on Aug. 21, 2017. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)