2019 Brought A Bumper Crop Of UFO Stories

Most of us probably see 2019 as a banner year for weirdness. We’ve had a string of Florida man stories, a $120,000 banana, and the third year of the Trump presidency. As if that weren’t enough, it turns out that 2019 also yielded a bumper crop of UFO sightings and news.

If you’re like me, you probably figured that UFOs became an endangered species when cellphone cameras became ubiquitous. “Pics or didn’t happen” is enough to kill many tall tales, but UFO sightings seem to be persisting even though photographic evidence is often lacking.

As the New York Post reported this week, credible UFO sightings represented a veritable bumper crop in 2019. Among the credible UFO stories this year were:

·        The revelation that the navy is studying UFOs and has captured them on video

·        The claim by naval officers that “unknown individuals” confiscated videos and data of a 2004 UFO sighting involving the USS Nimitz

·        An announcement that the army is partnering with the founder of Blink-182 to study “alien metals”

·        A Sept. 21 Ohio sighting by former law enforcement officer and his scientist wife who came within 50 feet of a mysterious light that was estimated to be 20 feet in size. The husband experienced paralysis when he tried to grab his gun.

·        A Sept. 1 sighting in New Mexico in which elk hunters saw 7-foot tall “figures” and an apparent spacecraft that resembled a circus tent

·        An August 12 sighting on the Garden State Parkway near Atlantic City, N.J. in which a married couple reported seeing a “40-foot triangle craft”

·        A viral video of a strange cluster of lights filmed off North Carolina’s Outer Banks in September

You might be tempted to think that the surge in UFO sightings is par for the course in a country where large numbers of people think the moon landing was fake, that vaccines cause autism, and reject the evidence on the lack of Russian collusion and Deep State conspiracies. However, simply writing off all sightings as fantasies ignores the fact that there is compelling data, such as pictures from naval targeting systems, in a number of the cases.

I’ve always had a curiosity about UFOs and aliens, going back to the 1970s television series based on the air force’s Project Blue Book, a show that really creeped me out, if I’m to be totally honest. However, I’m also a UFO skeptic. The small likelihood of life arising elsewhere in the universe combined with the even smaller likelihood of an extraterrestrial species developing interstellar travel present long odds against alien visitors. The vast majority UFO sightings – probably 99.9 percent -can be explained away as misidentified aircraft, natural phenomena, or hoaxes.

But that still leaves the difficult tenth of a percent that aren’t easily explained away. After the revelations of 2019, however, one thing is certain: The US government is taking UFO sightings seriously. If naval aviators can lock onto “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP),” the navy’s preferred term for UFOs with advanced targeting systems such as the F/A-18 Hornet’s forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR), it is strong evidence that some sort of physical object is out there.

These flying objects that are unidentified aren’t necessarily flying saucers or alien spacecraft. We don’t know what they are and alien technology is simply one explanation. Another interesting theory is that UFOs are spiritual. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, proposed in his book, “Lights In The Sky And Little Green Men,” that UFOs could come from other dimensions and may be connected with angelic and demonic beings. As evidence, Ross notes a link between UFO sightings and the occult.

You can use an online map of UFO sightings by state to see how plausible you think this and other theories are as well as to judge your own likelihood of a close encounter. Interestingly, the South has few UFO sightings compared with the rest of the country, challenging the stereotype of backwoods, Southern rednecks as the typical UFO witnesses.

You may wonder if I’ve ever seen any strange aerial phenomena in my primary occupation as a pilot. The only example that I can think of in my thousands of hours was a little over 15 years ago as I operated an airline flight over the northeastern US. It was a clear winter night and I think that we were over upstate New York when the other pilot and I both witnessed a vivid red streak in the sky above us. The streak lasted only for a second or so before it disappeared.

What was it? We weren’t sure, but our best guess was that it was a meteor, although it didn’t look like any meteor that I’ve seen before or since. It was both larger and more colorful. This may have been because of our altitude and the atmospheric conditions that night, although I’ve seen shooting stars from aloft since then and none resembled what we saw that night. Neither of us jumped to the conclusion that it was an alien spacecraft.

No one knows what the truth is behind UFOs but the new evidence that emerged in 2019 makes the phenomena a little more real. And while the government is cracking down on illegal immigration, a wall and ICE raids won’t deter these particular illegal aliens in their saucer, triangular, or circus tent craft.

Originally published on The Resurgent