UFO Sightings In MD: What Witnesses Saw And Where

MARYLAND — If you need another reason to scan the skies over Maryland, here’s one: Sunday is World UFO Day, and so far this year, residents have filed 25 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 Maryland. 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.

All of that is interesting to ponder as you review reports on the crowdsourced National UFO Reporting Center about strange sightings in the skies. Here are a few of the UFO sightings reported in Maryland:

Bowie May 13 at 9:53 p.m.: Lights reported f0r 25 to 30 minutes. Circular, strobing spotlights in the clouds accompanied by periodic lightening. "Me, my neighbor and two adult kids saw and I recorded strobing, white colored spotlight patterns in the sky that would spread apart and then come back together."

Baltimore April 15 at 9:08 p.m.: An orb was seen for 30 minutes. "My daughter and I looked up and saw four orbs moving in circular motion then come back to the middle, then spread back out. Above the clouds "four orbs" were moving in a circular motion, then they would come back to the middle to meet each other, then spread back out in a circular motion. At one point you could see a fifth smaller order jetting around as if it was chasing the other four orbs. They were visible to the naked eye."

Silver Spring Feb. 22 at 8:15 p.m.: Report of a disk in sky with bright turquoise colored ring light. "It was a clear night sky, no clouds in sight, and as we were getting off the highway in a fairly rural part of Maryland, we saw an oval shaped object outlined by a bright turquoise colored ring light that was flying over us. This object was clearly the shape of a disk, as outlined by the blue light it was emitting, and you could see its disk form because the sky was clear enough to do so. It also flew across much faster than a plane, and it was too rural for anyone to operate a drone, so it wasn't a drone either."

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.

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.