21 UFO Sightings In NJ So Far This Year: Find Out Where

NEW JERSEY — If you need another reason to scan the skies over New Jersey, here’s one: Sunday is World UFO Day, and so far this year, New Jersey residents have filed 21 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 New Jersey. 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 New Jersey skies. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll find:

The most recent report was May 15 in Ramsey (Bergen County). The spotter woke up at 4 a.m. to what they thought "was a star" out their bedroom window, but decided it couldn't be a star or airplane because of the "bizarre motion of the orb-like object that is hovering and zig zagging."

On April 13, a Mount Ephraim resident reported a "magnificent triangle craft" flew slowly overhead while they were outside enjoying the weather with their partner in Camden County.

The object had "lights of colors I’ve never seen before, on each of the corners of the triangle they were this gorgeous and brilliant red color," wrote the reporter. The two people watched the craft, even calling for it to come back when it passed by around midnight. "Profoundly has changed my perspective on life and the universe," the resident wrote.

Another interesting sighting happened March 22 in Barnegat, as a driver was getting onto the Garden State Parkway in this Ocean County town. They reported seeing "2 fixed things in the sky with bands of light," and tried to take a photo but they "suddenly blinked out of vision."

While driving, the person called their husband "when suddenly one was just outside my driver's window not further up than the treetops. It was a very large disk shape with bright lights on either side at the center I could see a very large window. The window looked to be multiple stories high and I could see beings moving around in the window," they wrote, noting that the craft appeared to keep pace with their pace of 75 miles per hour on the Parkway.

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.

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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.

This story contains reporting from Patch's Beth Dalbey.