UFO Sightings In VA: What Witnesses Saw

VIRGINIA — Whether you call them UFOs or UAPs, Tuesday is World UFO Day, and Virginians don't hesitate to report UFO sightings.

So far this year, Commonwealth residents have filed 20 reports about unidentified flying objects or, as the Pentagon calls them, unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAP.

After decades of denying their existence, the Pentagon has acknowledged UFOs are real and may explain what you’ve seen in the skies over Virginia.

All of that is interesting to ponder in a review of reports on the crowdsourced National UFO Reporting Center about strange sightings over our state. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll find:

• March 29 in Virginia Beach: "Silver Cylinder moving slowing in the sky."
• March 11 in Richmond: "5-8 orb-shaped lights, in a perfectly straight row heading SE then suddenly disappearing."
• March 3 in Ashburn: "Black square was hovering, and then it disappeared and reappeared again."
• Feb. 14 in Falls Church: "Large, steadily moving light over Falls Church, VA toward DC. At 7:25pm, approximately when it was over DC, released a spray of liquid."

After reviewing hundreds of new reports of UFOs, a task force required to report annually to Congress has concluded there is no evidence of alien life.

Not everyone agrees. Whistleblower David Grusch, a career Air Force intelligence officer, claims the government is hiding information on a covert program to retrieve crashed alien spacecraft and reverse-engineer the technology. Asked in testimony before Congress if the government had retrieved bodies from the crashed UAP, he replied, “Biologics came in with some of these recoveries, yeah.” When asked if they were human or nonhuman, he said, “Non-human. And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to.”

The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claim.

World UFO Day on July 2 commemorates the Roswell, New Mexico, crash that more or less made it safe for Americans to talk about strange occurrences in the sky. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field said in a 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 crash occurred at the dawn of the Cold War, a time of escalating tension over the arms race when school children were taught duck-and-cover drills to protect themselves in a nuclear attack, fueling wild speculation about the object’s origins.

Earlier that summer, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington, according to History. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”

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.

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.