31 UFO Sightings In IL So Far This Year: Find Out Where

ILLINOIS — If you need another reason to scan the skies over Illinois, here’s one: Sunday is World UFO Day, and so far this year, Illinois residents have filed 31 reports about unidentified flying objects or, as the Pentagon calls them, unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAP.

After decades of denying their existence, the Pentagon has acknowledged UFOs are real and may explain what you’ve seen in the skies over Illinois. And although 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 Illinois skies. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll find:

Last month, on May 17, someone reported they saw an extremely fast moving object moving toward Chicago Midway International Airport. The object was seen for about two seconds, according to the witness.

On April 27, a witness says they saw a flying object with a bright white illuminated on the top and a blinking light on the bottom in Woodstock.

On Feb. 21 in Bloomington, a photographer said they were taking photos of the moon and stars, but did not see a UFO in the sky until an image of one appeared in one of their photos.

On January 11, for a duration of 10 minutes, a person said they saw an object floating and strobing brightness. After some time, it moved and changed colors. They said it wasn't normal, and not the movements of a helicopter, plane or drone.

Check out more Illinois sightings at the National UFO Reporting Center website here.

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.