Barnstable UFO Sightings: Here's What They Saw

BARNSTABLE, MA — On June 8, while the sun was low in the horizon, someone said they saw a craft flying possibly higher than that of a typical commercial plane.

The encounter lasted just 1.5 seconds and was the last time someone reported seeing a UFO in Barnstable, according National UFO Reporting Center. The center has hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects, piquing the curiosity of folks fascinated by the possibility that we're not alone here on Earth and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft.

The notion of intergalactic travel got a boost when information emerged from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a shadowy $22 million Defense Department program that began in 2007 to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena. The multi-year program was shut down in 2012, but the Pentagon released UFO videos earlier this year.

The Pentagon acknowledged the secret program to investigate UFO sightings in 2017, the same year as retired naval Cmdr. David Fravor dramatically recalled a confounding encounter with a UFO when he was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004.

The wingless oblong craft about 40 feet long was flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics. Fravor didn't know what to make of it but said it was not like anything he had ever seen in nearly 20 years of flying.

He described the UFO as other-worldly.

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor told ABC News. "I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close."

Not all accounts are that dramatic, but there are more than a few head-scratchers among the witness accounts.

The database includes 1,774 UFO reports that have been filed from Massachusetts, including 32 from Barnstable:

• June 5, 1994: "Boomerang sliver shiny shaped object"
• Aug. 10, 2003: "Silver, triangular/oval, 1 huge obj., moving from N to S, over Route 6 in Hyannis, MA, right over the highway, low and at a slow pace."
• May 22, 2006: "Large triangle craft with large white dome at the bottom."
• July 30, 2006: "Glowing orange craft zips away like a shooting star in Hyannis, Ma at around 3:30am 7/30/06."
• Sept. 14, 2007: "Bright light - focused individual"
• Nov. 2, 2007: "My sister saw something highly unusual from the windows of her second floor apartment in Hyannis, Massachusetts."
• March 6, 2008: "Fast moving bright object moving horizontally with a blue white trial"
• Sept. 1, 2009: "Bright round object"
• Aug. 6, 2012: "A very fast moving orange object with a black shadow around it at a high altitude and then disappeared."
• Jan. 6, 2013: "UFO seen in downtown Hyannis on two occasions within the hour of January 6, 2013."
• April 21, 2013: "Low flying/gliding diamond, three white lights, one blinking red."
• Aug. 5, 2013: "Bright sphere seen two nights in a row moving across the sky!"
• Aug. 20, 2013: "Bright white sphere above Cape Cod. ((NUFORC Note: Possible sightings of ISS??"
• Aug. 23, 2013: "I have once again seen the same craft again in the skies above Cape Cod, Ma. This will be my 4th report of seeing the same object."
• Oct. 27, 2013: "At 7:05 my 28 yr old son and I were walking our dog. We have been keeping our eyes to the sky ever since our last sighting this past summer"
• June 22, 2014: "Silver sphere hovered in the air with a bright light in front over Rt 28."
• June 26, 2014: "Total 5 orange objects."
• July 26, 2014: "Three Triangular Glowing Craft."
• August 3, 2014: "Two red/orange fireballs over Nantucket Sound seen from Hyannis."
• August 20, 2014: "Hyannis- Red light seen from Ocean St."
• August 27, 2014: "Again the orange orb appeared; sighting number two."
• Spet. 26, 2014: "8:15pm, Cape Cod, 3 round orange lights, with a denseness to them, traveling slowly but steadily from the northeast to the south."
• Oct. 3, 2014: "Very bright "star" and then vanished!"
• Oct. 20, 2014: "Possible UFO or military drone over residential neighborhood"
• June 1, 2016: "Dark Red Sharks Tooth shaped UFO over Hyannis. Flew across night sky in 5 seconds"
• July 24, 2015: "Observed across Lake Wequacket (Centerville MA) a bright vertical line dropping from the Western Sky, just after sunset."
• Sept. 15, 2016: "Bluish-green spheres over Cape Cod"
• Dec. 6, 2016: "Bright light traveling horizontally low across the sky south to north"
• July 16, 2017: "Shooting star that suddenly made a broad curve that was in effect a 180 degree turn toward the horizon"
• July 30, 2017: "Spherical objects travel across the sky."
• April 21, 2018: "Small orange shooting metior travelling Northeast direction direction. ((anonymous report))((NUFORC Note: Meteor?? PD))"
• June 8, 2020: "SUN WAS LOW ON HORIZON, CRAFT WAS AS HIGH OR HIGHER THAN COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT. IT WAS EAST OF ME TRAVELING NORTH TO SOUTH"

You can read more UFO sightings from Massachusetts on the National UFO Reporting Center site here.

Your chances of seeing a UFO are better in some places than others. According to the ranking of states, those with the most sightings are:

1. Idaho
2. Montana
3. New Hampshire
4. Maine
5. New Mexico

The states with the fewest sightings are:

1. Texas
2. Louisiana
3. New York
4. Maryland
5. Illinois

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."

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

Former Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid slipped in an earmark for the program into the Pentagon budget. Nevada, of course, is the home of a U.S. Air Force facility known as Area 51, the source of multiple alien conspiracy theories, including claims that interstellar visitors are held there; that the 1947 Roswell crash wasn't a weather balloon at all but a Soviet aircraft piloted by mutated midgets; and that the 1969 moon landing was filmed by the U.S. government in one of the Area 51 hangars.

Yet among the most intriguing is Fravor's account of seeing the unidentified aircraft zipping through the sky is convincing.

When he saw the object from the air, controllers on one of the Navy ships on the water below reported that objects were being dropped about 80,000 feet from the sky, then headed "straight back up."

He could see the disturbances on the water below and breaking waves on the surface, "like something's under the surface," he told ABC.

The radar jammed, and as Fravor flew closer, the craft rapidly accelerated and zoomed upward and disappeared. Once the object was gone, the ocean below was a still sheet of blue with no evidence of disturbance. Infrared scanning also showed no evidence of an exhaust trail, he said.
"I don't know what it is," he said at the time. "I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."

This article includes reporting from Patch staff writer Max Bennett.