Community Corner

Pentagon Releases New UFO Report; See Latest Reported Sightings In CT

More than 40 percent of Americans think UFOs are alien spacecraft from other planets or galaxies. What do you make of these CT sightings?

CONNECTICUT — The government on Friday again dismissed the notion that U.S. authorities covered up extraterrestrial life aboard unidentified flying objects, a perhaps disappointing conclusion for Connecticut residents seeking explanations for lights and other things they’ve seen in the sky.

In its 63-page report, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office offered numerous other explanations for the strange sightings in the sky. “Investigative efforts determined that most sightings were the result of misidentification of ordinary objects and phenomena,” according to the report of “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP.

Related: 'Clearly Not Something Normal': New Report Shows CT A UFO 'Hotspot'

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More than 40 percent of Americans think UFOs are alien spacecraft from other planets or galaxies. The report from AARO, as the bureau investigating unidentified aerial phenomena is known, acknowledged that many people “sincerely hold versions of these beliefs” as truth.

The report noted a consistent theme in popular culture is that the U.S. government, or a secretive organization within it, “recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.”

Find out what's happening in Across Connecticutfor free with the latest updates from Patch.

Related: UFOs Over Connecticut: Circles, Fireballs And A 'Cube-Like Craft'

So, what is the explanation for sightings Connecticut residents have reported to the crowdsourced National UFO Reporting Center about strange sightings over Connecticut skies? Here’s a glimpse into what they’ve seen:

  • A "Ferris wheel-like" object was witnessed by a neighborhood of skywatchers in Plymouth on Jan. 2. The large display of multicolored lights put on a show for three hours, according to the report filed with NUFORC.
  • That same night in the sky over Newtown, a resident reported "red and blue lights in a line They were either strobing quickly at different intervals or possibly moving laterally, like a line of lights on a blimp."
  • A "stationary orb of flashing lights in the sky surrounded by an aura-like electric looking mist" descended above Stamford on Feb. 16, according to another NUFORC post. At first the skywatcher thought it was likely an airplane, until they "realized it wasn’t moving — it was completely still except for a hazy, mist-like aura that surrounded it that seemed to be flashing with an electric charge."

Although many UFO reports remain unsolved, “most of these cases could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena” if additional, reliable data were available, the AARO report said.

For example, the unidentified object may be a satellite or other data-gathering craft developed in secret by the government or private industry, the report noted.

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