40 UFO Sightings In MI So Far This Year: Find Out Where

MICHIGAN — If you need another reason to scan the skies over Michigan, here’s one: Sunday is World UFO Day, and so far this year, Michiganders have filed 40 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 Michigan. 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 Michigan skies. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll find:

Livonia, May 9 at 9:20 p.m.

• A person was in line at Taco Bell drive through near Five Mile and Middlebelt Road where they reported a "small craft with one large red light in center traveling in pairs 30-40 miles per hour; they were evenly spaced apart about 20-30 feet; there were a dozen or more traveling in north/northwest direction."

Roseville, April 9 at 11 p.m.

• While sitting in bed, a person noticed a very bright glowing orb very high in the sky. "It has sparks occasionally flying off randomly at any side; one minute there would be several sparks the next few minutes there would be only a few. It moved in all different directions - up, down, left, and right - and often hovered in one stationary place. Over the 45 minutes that I watched it, it moved slowly in the west direction until it was out of view. Got a small video of it but couldn’t see any of the sparks with my camera quality."

Shelby Township, March 5 at 9:33 p.m.

• A person reported seeing a bright single round light up in the sky that was falling faster than free fall speed while driving. "As it got closer to the ground it just disappeared, almost as if behind clouds. As it came down I was like “what is that? A bomb or something?” I have never seen a shooting star like that, it looked larger and clearer and just a different kind of light. Hard to explain but it just seemed very different, and I tend to stargaze a fair amount. It did sort of fade out I guess, but not like a shooting star, and it was slower than a shooting star, way slower."

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.