UFO Sightings In Wisconsin: What Are Witnesses Seeing?

WISCONSIN — There are plenty of great reasons to sit out and scan the skies over Wisconsin, and World UFO Day on Sunday is just one of them.

Whether or not you believe in aliens over Wisconsin, the state's residents have filed over 2300 reports so far this year about unidentified flying objects (or, as the Pentagon calls them, unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAP).

The Pentagon only acknowledged the existence of UFOs after decades of denying them, in case you think that helps explain what you saw in the sky the other night. An important note, however, even though a task force reviewed hundreds of new reports of UFOs in 2022, there’s no evidence of alien life, officials said in a required report to Congress earlier this year.

The new All-Domain Anomaly Office did leave some intrigue, ending its report with a teaser: “Additional information is provided in the classified version of this report.”

And if that wasn’t enough to pique your curiosity, a career Air Force intelligence officer turned whistleblower claimed a few weeks ago that the U.S. government is withholding information about a covert program to retrieve crashed alien spacecraft and reverse-engineer the technology.

“We are not alone,” Jonathan Grey, a U.S. intelligence official with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center who confirmed former intelligence official David Grusch’s claim, told Debrief, an outlet that reports on science, technology and defense news.

The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claim.

The House Oversight Committee plans to convene hearings on the whistleblower’s report. In a statement to ABC News earlier this month, Oversight Committee spokesman Austin Hacker said the panel plans to look at the whistleblower’s claim, but also reports of other UAP that have recently surfaced.

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

One report with photos from around 11:30 p.m. on April 23 noted a massive orange glowing spot in the sky over Waukesha. The person who made the observation admitted it may have looked like the moon, but asserted the moon was in the other direction. At one point, the report said flame-like orange could be seen in the sky and the light disappeared.

Other reports from around Wisconsin are a bit more ambiguous (or can we say, alien-like.) One reported observation was of two disc-like UFOs hovering near Hartford in February. Another report from December 2022 in Kaukauna noted a huge, fast ball of light that looked like a tic-tac.

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.

Related: No Aliens, But Hundreds Of New UFO Reports: Pentagon

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.