UFO Sightings In VA: What Witnesses Saw And Where

VIRGINIA — If you need another reason to scan the skies over Virginia, here’s one: Sunday is World UFO Day, and so far this year, residents have filed 34 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 Virginia. 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 Virginia:

Fredericksburg March 26 at 11:01 p.m.: A resident reported an aura or haze around the object, described as a translucent/cloaked craft that passed overhead in the backyard. "I was in the back yard doing some astrophotography work and I looked up to see a form flying in a straight path over my house from the east to the west. ... It looked as though it was a translucent boomerang shape with the curved part as the leading edge. But it also could have been the leading edge of a circular shaped craft with some kind of cloaking device on as the leading edge shape had a rippling/rippled effect along with the translucent appearance. It made no sound."

McLean April 5 at 10:40 p.m.: A triangle shape was seen for about 5 minutes. "Me and my friends decided to go up to the top of our apartment and chill out and star gaze. Then around 10:30 our dogs are barking and our phones and all of our music playing devices just shut down. Then my friend (whose name doesn't want to be said) pointed out 3 Bright triangular objects hovering about 500 ft. above us. Then the crafts start lowering themselves on top of us and everything went black. We all woke up at around 2 am with marks on our bodies."

Alexandria Feb. 10 at 7:10 a.m.: "Saw two flying objects flying in circles and erratic movements then they disappeared (after about 3 minutes.) I was talking my daughter to the bus stop this morning and we were looking up at the moon. I saw two white oval like objects up in the sky. I said "I wonder what those are" and my daughter replied "They’re probably just planes." They looked way too high up to be a plane. When we first spotted them they were flying close together and then they began moving in various directions. One moved in a circle like motion the other more erratically and covered more distance very quickly. I was able to snap one photo and when I looked up to take another one they both had disappeared. Shortly after they disappeared I saw a plane fly over and it confirmed the previous two objects were much too high to have been planes."

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.