Where Are All The UFOs? Sightings Over CT Drop In Recent Months

CONNECTICUT — Maybe the night skies are getting less crowded, or maybe the coronavirus has scared too many of us inside, but the state has fallen off its pace for UFO sightings.

In the first half of 2020, the National UFO Reporting Center had received 176 UFO reports from Connecticut, according to an analysis of the witness accounts by Satellite Internet, which also factored in data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Patch poked around the NURC's data and could find only find 22 sightings reported in July and August, about a 38 percent drop-off compared to the monthly pace from January to June.

UFOlogists typically expect more sightings in the northern U.S. during the warmer months, not fewer, confounding the skywatchers even further. But then, the unexplainable is a UFOlogist's stock-in-trade.

Take, for example, this jaw-dropper reported from Waterbury on July 24:

Egg shape ufo, very bright red lights at a way too fast speed in the sky, started to bounced up and down then side to side in a speed that it is not possible, then like a car made a left turn and disappear right in front of my eyes. I try to record the event but I was shaking and didn't want to lose the ufo.

The whole sighting lasted between 2-3 minutes.

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour "like saucers skipping on water." And with that, our collective fascination with "flying saucers" was born.

Last month the Pentagon quietly formed the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the military's first UFO hunting division (that we know of). Back in April, the Pentagon released videos that one pilot acknowledged moved in ways he couldn't explain.

The fact that this may be the first time you are hearing that the government has finally admitted UFOs exist? Chalk it up to 2020.

"X-Files" admissions aside, it's not all smooth sailing and open hailing frequencies for UFOlogists lately. SpaceX has been launching payload after payload of Starlink satellites, and they are cluttering up the view. They're part of Elon's Musk's plan to build a megaconstellation of at least 12,000 satellites — some reports place the number as high as 42,000 — in low Earth orbit to provide better, worldwide internet access. Skywatchers are frequently mistaking the small orbiting crafts for something more mysterious.

The UFOs showing up in the latest Connecticut reports in the NURC database don't appear to have moved like Musk's suborbital data ring. For the most part, the objects' flight paths seem physically impossible, and the reports are short, sweet, and occasionally stunned.

From Wallingford, on Aug. 8:

Three objects with red flashing lights following one another in a path traveling from south to north. Objects did not produce sound. Lights turned off or were no longer visible shortly after passing by, but black objects were still visible. Have video if interested.

...or this, which lasted for 15 minutes over Bridgeport on July 29:

We saw the UFO reflecting off the moon. It was a saucer shapes metallic craft. It was going up and down left and right really fast it was amazing about 15 people saw it.It had no lights the only reason we saw it is because it was reflecting off the moon.

Some of the reports, like this one about a fireball spotted over Hartford on Aug. 18, border on the prosaic:

It was a clear, dark night in The Connecticut sky around 10PM when my friend and I were on the way to get me home when what I thought at first was a shooting star, but then it was beyond too big to be that. It’s was hurling across the sky in a speed I’ve never seen before leaving a trail blazing behind it. The object appeared green like a gas like green glow was around it and I eventually saw it disintegrate as the atmospheric pressure could have caused that. My friend and I were in shock and had never seen anything like it. There were no posts, nothing from NASA, just nothing that was bringing up the potential sighting of this object. It was unreal.

If you aspire to one day submit your own UFO sighting to the NURC, study up now so you don't make any rookie errors. Get up to speed on Starlink launches by checking out their launch schedule, and study up on your basic astronomy (there's an app for that) so you don't mistake Venus for a Klingon Bird of Prey.

Even though the Pentagon is now all in, and most of the reports have that uniquely UFO-ish patina of the impossible-but-plausible, we did find a few new entries in the NURC database that made us go, "hmmm." Our favorite involved a mysterious flying triangle-shaped object seen above New London on July 23 around 7:15 in the evening.

Note that we were right there with them, all the way up until the "skin" part:

We were sitting outside and a triangle shaped craft came from the east and moved very slowly with flashing lights on the craft, and a beam of light directly under the craft, as if it were searching for something . It went slowly then suddenly disappeared from view. This happened as lightning flashes have been going off in the same southern portion of the sky, with no noise, for over an hour. I also am experiencing strange objects coming from my skin and small unknown creatures scattering around our house at night between midnight and five a.m.