Tag: close encounters

Mysterious ‘orbs’ demand scientific study

President Trump interviewed Air Force pilots who were utterly baffled by the objects. They seem to chase Navy fighter jets and have been captured on radar and video. The Pentagon’s UFO analysis office is perplexed by them.

What is behind the enigmatic “orbs” reported by countless credible observers since at least World War II?

The scientific community must abandon the nearly century-long anti-scientific stigma surrounding UFOs — which the Pentagon likes to call “unidentified anomalous phenomena” — and investigate this enduring mystery. This is especially so since the Pentagon now admits openly that it is baffled by “several dozen” “true anomalies” and “really peculiar” UFO incidents, including some involving unknown “orbs.”

On July 24, the Senate confirmed former Air Force fighter pilot Matthew Lohmeier as the under secretary of the Air Force, the department’s second-highest civilian position. While in high school, Lohmeier had a remarkable UFO encounter.

According to Lohmeier, a “ball of light” descended upon him and a friend as they were in the wilderness outside of Tucson, Ariz. The object came so close that Lohmeier recalls that “it seemed to be buzzing with life, but it wasn’t man-made.”

“It was very well-organized, very spherical,” Lohmeier said, “and it seemed to be very conscious of the two of us that were sitting there in the Arizona mountains, like it was observing us … there was a level of interest from the orb to us.” Frightened, the two ran to their car. The object “zipped up and disappeared in the sky.”

Lohmeier is not the only Air Force fighter pilot left baffled by such an object. In a September appearance on Fox News, Trump stated that he interviewed several Air Force pilots who encountered spherical objects performing extraordinary maneuvers. According to Trump, the pilots told him, “All I know, sir, there was a round object that was going four times faster than my F-22.”

“Four or five guys [that] I’ve interviewed, solid people, great pilots for the U.S. Air Force,” Trump continued, have “seen things that they cannot explain, so there’s something.” Trump also told podcaster Joe Rogan that the pilots observed objects “like a round ball, but it wasn’t a comet or a meteor.”

Timothy Phillips, the former deputy director of the Department of Defense’s UFO analysis office, stated in June that the Pentagon is perplexed by “fiery orbs.”

Such phenomena have been reported since at least World War II. “Balls of Fire Stalk U.S. Fighters” read the headline of a frontpage Jan. 2, 1945, New York Times article describing the mysterious “foo fighters” that toyed with American pilots in the European and Pacific theaters.

The late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), as a wartime transport pilot in Asia, encountered such an object, which conducted extraordinary maneuvers around his plane. The experience led him to enthusiastically support then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) establishment of a secret Pentagon UFO program in 2008. A 2017 New York Times story revealing that program spurred a sweeping congressional investigation into the UFO phenomenon. This led to the introduction of extraordinary legislation and the establishment of the Pentagon’s analysis office.

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Canadian Government Releases Report on UFOs

A new report issued by the Canadian government details the results of its three-year-long investigation into the UFO phenomenon. According to a local media report, the paper was produced by the Sky Canada Project, which was launched in 2022 under the auspices of the country’s Office of the Chief Science Advisor to examine “current practices surrounding public reporting of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) in Canada.” Following a preliminary report released earlier this year, a more robust version of the group’s findings was issued to the public earlier this week and contained some interesting insights and recommendations.

Not unlike similar government projects conducted in the United States, the exhaustive study of how and where UFO reports are collected in Canada identified “several gaps and areas for potential improvements” in the process. Specifically, the report noted that all manner of agencies and offices receive sighting accounts because there is no centralized body responsible for the sizeable task. The paper also observed that these cases are rarely investigated “unless they are deemed to pose safety or security risks,” and scientists are generally not enlisted to help. Additionally, the report lamented that there is no public-facing government platform dedicated to the oft-ridiculed subject.

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Surge in UFO Sightings: Over 2,000 Reports in First Half of 2025

More than 2,000 unidentified flying objects have been spotted across the United States in just the first six months of 2025, according to data from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).

This marks a significant uptick from the 1,492 sightings logged in the same period last year.

The NUFORC, a nonprofit dedicated to collecting and investigating these mysterious reports, tallied exactly 2,174 sightings from January through June 2025. That’s slightly higher than the 2,077 reported in early 2023, signaling a potential escalation in unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs), the government’s preferred term for what many believe could be extraterrestrial visitors or advanced secret tech.

Witnesses have described a wide array of shapes and behaviors that defy conventional explanation, such as glowing orbs zig-zagging at impossible speeds, massive triangle-shaped crafts hovering silently over homes “the size of a tennis court or a football field,” metallic discs, cigar-like objects, and even shape-shifting lights that accelerate sharply or make right-angle turns.

The Hill reports:

Whistleblower David Grusch came forward in 2023, alleging a secret UFO-retrieval program was being operated by the Pentagon. His testimony sparked congressional hearings and increased public attention to the issue of unexplained sightings.

Since then, others connected with the government have come forward to support Grusch’s claims, saying the Defense Department has not been honest with the public or Congress about the subject.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has remained firm in saying that there is no evidence unexplained sightings are extraterrestrial in nature and disavowing the existence of UFO-retrieval programs.

NUFORC’s chief technology officer, Christian Stepien, estimates that only about 5 percent of actual sightings ever get reported, due to lingering stigma and fear of ridicule.

“There are so many things being seen by so many people. And if it’s a secret block project, you’re not flying it over highly populated neighborhoods where everybody can see it, and even these days, have pictures of it,” Stepien said, according to The Hill’s report.

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FOIA Crack Opens: ‘Mosul Orb’ UFO Video Finally Goes Public

A four-second clip of the ‘Mosul Orb’ Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) has finally surfaced after investigative journalist Dustin Slaughter won a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and its National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC).

In 2023, journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp released a still image from the four-second video, showing the UAP above the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in 2016, reportedly from a CIA spy plane.

The video was filmed at 9:47 am Coordinated Universal Time on 16 April 2016, according to its timestamp.

During an appearance on Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp’s WEAPONIZED podcast, Slaughter said his 2023 FOIA filing hadn’t singled out the Mosul Orb; instead, he’d submitted a broad request for any UAP-related videos.

After what he described as stonewalling by the USAF and NASIC, Slaughter and his legal team filed suit in 2024.

The footage captures a mysterious sphere gliding right-to-left above Mosul’s rooftops. 

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Massachusetts Woman Records Unidentified Object Falling From the Sky

This week, many strange things have been reported in the skies throughout the United States, and the trend continues.

A woman in Massachusetts recorded an unidentified object falling from the sky near her home.

Pembroke, Massachusetts, resident Colleen McCormack told Boston 25 News that on Wednesday night, as she was sitting in her hot tub, she noticed an object falling from the sky.

McCormack quickly took out her phone and was able to record the object.

She stated, “It looked like it was on fire or something and it was just coming down really fast.”

Per Boston 25 News:

A woman captured a video of an unidentified object falling from the sky in Pembroke Wednesday night.

Colleen McCormack said she was sitting by her hot tub around 9 p.m. when she saw a strangely shaped object in the air.

“I pull out my phone and I zoomed in and it was right about there,” McCormack explained.

She recorded the object headed straight down in an eight-second video.

The FAA said they did not get any reports of debris in the area and was not able to comment on the video, saying they don’t comment on any third-party videos.

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Roswell UFO incident facts and history

During the Roswell incident, believers say an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in the New Mexico desert, with debris – and possibly alien bodies – recovered by the US government, marking the beginning of a decades-long cover-up.

What really happened at Roswell, and why does this mystery still attract such interest and controversy, decades later?

The Roswell UFO story begins

The Roswell UFO incident begins on 24 June 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in the US, helping to search for a crashed military aircraft.

He saw 9 crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at a height of around 3km (10,000ft) and an estimated speed of approximately 1,900km/h: seemingly impossible at the time.

Arnold described the jerky movement of the objects as being, “like a saucer would if you skipped it over water.”

The media got hold of the story, coined the phrase ‘flying saucer’ and a modern mystery was born.

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Alleged Declassified Air Force Footage Shows Disc-Shaped UFO Navigating the Clouds

Some believe UFOs are nothing but figments of people’s imaginations, or at best atmospheric ilusions; others think they are earthly secret technology; while some are convinced that these unidentified craft are of alien origin (or at least reverse-engineered alien tech).

But whatever these objects may be, the unidentified aerial phenomenon is a reality, and public interest in the matter does not seem to wane.

So, another week, another ‘big reveal’, with alleged US military personnel footage capturing a ‘flying saucer UFO’ being released yesterday (17) to the public.

Daily Mail reported:

“Investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp say the video was recorded by government personnel over the Afghan-Pakistan border in November 2020. They released it to the public on Tuesday.

It shows a massive disc weaving in and out of cloud cover.  The Department of Defense labeled the disc a UAP – unidentified anomalous phenomena – and it looks markedly different to other ‘tic-tac’-shaped UFOs seen in recent military footage.”

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UFO sleuths want fewer secrets in Trump-era investigations

After generations of stigma and secrecy around sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), or what the public calls UFOs, investigators probing hundreds of unsolved cases say the second Trump administration could be a turning point for transparency.

“We’re trying to get as much of the raw evidence out as we can without putting our partners’ equities at risk,” said Jon Kosloski, director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the government-wide task force leading research into mysterious sightings.

“The office has hired additional personnel and we’re investing in automated security review software that can redact the sensitive information from videos,” he said of an effort to release more currently classified material related to the probes.

Congress established the Resolution Office in 2022 to “detect, identify and attribute” mysterious objects of interest in the air, outer space, and underwater, with special focus on mitigating potential threats to military operations and national security.

More than 1800 cases have been reviewed by the Pentagon so far, with the vast majority ultimately resolved as likely balloons, drones, debris or animals based on a comprehensive review of available data.

Kosloski says “several dozen” cases remain anomalous even after rigorous analysis of evidence. They continue to receive new reports of anomalies by military service members and the general public every month.

“It’s a potential problem, a national security problem, safety of flight issue,” Kosloski told ABC News. “We seem to have the full support of the administration” in pursuing answers.

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Another Layer of Nuance to the UFO Mystery: Baffling Otherworldly Encounters with Military Naval Vessels

Whereas many people might imagine a scene over a quiet country road, or possibly from the balcony of a high-rise apartment building in a metropolis-like city, or even from a moving aircraft, the fact is there are many sightings on record that occur over the seas, oceans, and other vast water networks of our planet. Although actual statistics differ, it is widely agreed that more than half of all UFO sightings occur over or near water. With this in mind, we might imagine that many of the ships and submarines, particularly military ones, would have encountered these otherworldly vehicles – and we would be right.

As usual, we will not have the time to explore every case; in fact, we only have time and space to scratch the surface of such encounters here, which could fill up entire volumes in their own right, and those are just the sightings from the modern UFO age. We will, though, explore some of the most interesting and detailed UFO encounters that have involved naval vessels in various stretches of water around the planet.

Without a doubt, one of the strangest and thought-provoking of these marine encounters was relayed in the book Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials: The Real War of the Worlds by Frank Joseph, and occurred in the late 1980s when the Cold War, albeit reduced in tensions, was still very much unfolding. According to the report, which came through an anonymous crew member of the US Navy submarine, the USS Memphis, the incident occurred ahead of a NASA space shuttle launch, with the submarine patrolling the waters around the launch site ahead of the mission.

On this particular night – October 24th going into October 25th, 1989 – the USS Memphis was around 150 miles off the coast of Florida, cruising at a depth of around 500 feet. While the mission had been completely textbook so far, on this particular evening, they were experiencing all manner of problems with their electronics. As the witness recalled, the crew quickly realized the “ship was malfunctioning…the tanks were blowing” and the “navigations ability and communication (were) totally lost!” Eventually, an order was given to bring the submarine to a stop so the crew could assess what was happening. However, moments later, the controls in the reactor began to malfunction, and orders were issued to shut it down, switch to diesel engines, and surface immediately.

As soon as the vessel broke the surface of the water, the witness made his way to his watch station. He looked out and could see that the night sky was now glowing “red like a neon sign” as heavy rain came down from above. Then, only moments after first looking out, he noticed a “large, inverted V-shaped” object moving on the port (left-hand) side of the submarine. The witness turned to the executive officer who was with him, who told him to remain at his post while he informed the captain. Several moments later, the captain arrived at the watch station.

By this point, using a laser range finder, they had determined that their vessel was around 600 feet from the nearest point of the strange craft, which was approximately 650 feet from their location. Moreover, they estimated that the furthest point of the object was around 3500 feet from them, suggesting that it was, in total, around half a mile wide.

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UFO striking fighter jet is among swarm of mystery objects spotted near US military sites in Arizona: reports

A UFO that struck and damaged a US fighter jet is just one of a swarm of mystery objects buzzing around Air Force training ranges in Arizona, according to multiple reports.

One of the unidentified flying objects hit the clear bubble “canopy” over the head of a pilot in a $63 million F-16 Viper jet in January 2023, damaging it and temporarily grounding the plane, according to Federal Aviation Administration documents first reported by the War Zone.

The military jet was struck midair by “an orange-white UAS,” or “uncrewed aerial system,” the FAA documents said. The term refers to drones.

Three more UAS encounters were flagged a day later, the outlet reported.

“What I can tell you is that there has been a lot of activity, a lot of people reporting a lot of things out of Arizona, particularly on the border” with Mexico, former Pentagon investigator Luis Elizondo told News Nation this month.

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