Have you ever seen a UFO?

[jpak]

I did in 3rd grade

Like all my friends, we knew about nuclear war and survived the Cuban Missile crisis.

Duck and Cover Yup

We could identify all the bombers and refuelers
and sonic boom fighters over our heads.

And ate the radioactive snow we told not to eat.

I had a seat next to the window and day dreamed alot.

What saw was this.

A circular object with a white interior and a purple exterior.

Scared the the shit out of me and I have never mentioned this to anyone.

To this day.

Yup

[Gidney N Cloyd]

1. I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

Seriously, though, I've seen things in the sky that seemed to be moving in unusual manners but nothing up close. I'm willing to believe but so far haven't seen anything that couldn't be explained away.

[jpak]

2. Yay!

Motherfuckers

Yup

[Celerity]

35. Attack Ships On Fire

Revolting Cocks - Attack Ships On Fire

Wax Trax (Black Box Vol.1)

Cabaret Metro, Chicago, September 4, 1987

Revolting Cocks, also known as RevCo, are an American-Belgian industrial rock band, and sometimes supergroup, that began as a musical side project for Richard23 of Front 242, Luc van Acker, and Al Jourgensen of Ministry.

[colsohlibgal]

3. Yes

This was many years ago, when my parents came to visit. They were leaving about 10:30 PM, we’re standing in the front yard, I happened to look up and saw something moving incredibly fast in an upward direction.

[tavernier]

4. Sure

But just because they were unidentified by me doesn’t mean they weren’t something quite common and explainable.

[jpak]

7. That's why they are called UFOs

Not judging

[ProfessorGAC]

42. That's My Take

Around 20 years ago, I was driving the band truck home from Dyer Indiana.
The light guy & I saw what we were sure was a meteor (who knows how far away) glowing brightly; but...
It changed direction.
I surmised if fractured and the smaller parts burned up behind the big piece which changed angles from the high energy of the fracture.
So, we saw something in the sky moving fast, that clearly suddenly change direction, until we couldn't see it anymore.
We couldn't positively identify it, and it was in the sky.
Hence, a UFO, but we even had a guess as to what it really as we were seeing it.
We didn't jump immediately to aliens, even though both of us were huge Star Trek fans!

[jpak]

54. I've seen lots of fire balls and spectacular meteor events

Including one at UGA with my beautiful GF.

It was a slow moving flamer that flamed out over our heads and glowed out.

It probably hit somewhere.

But we took it as a sign to smooch.

Which we did

Passionately

Hee hee

Yup

[Paper Roses]

5. Years ago, long since I left home my sister saw something strange.

We lived in a big farmhouse on a hill. There was also a big barn attached by an "L" to the house.
Sometimes on a summer eve, family members would go outside to enjoy the breeze on a warm evening.
One evening my sister went out about 9PM, it was hot in the house and she wanted some fresh air.
She was scared to heaven at what she saw.

Quite high above the barn was a strange light with a solid looking center. She watched for a few minutes and the thing suddenly zoomed away. She told everyone in the family and all of them thought she was out of her mind.
I was in college at the time and was not at home. My parents told her that she was lying, there was no such thing, it was not possible.
It was not Northern Lights, she said the middle looked solid, the surrounding area was yellowish.

I wondered all these years about this event. I never disbelieved her. This was back in the 1960's.

[bluestarone]

6. i'm in the yes column

When i was a teenager,(late 50's) saw object lot brighter that a star moving and doing things i felt was impossible. Right turns, left turns, up, down! High in the sky BUT will never forget that night.

[Throck]

8. Yes

Alcohol was involved.

[marie999]

12. With me it was hashish.

[jpak]

13. Did you chew her arm off?

[OhZone]

9. I've seen a few odd things on my way home -

on the Garden State Parkway at night.

A strange sparkling object that hovered for the longest time (but it was probably a helicopter in the distance)

Shooting starts (I think)

And little puffs of fog around the street lights that were very ghost like (one year the night before Halloween)

Also rainbows and sunsets. Ha

Oh, but my car pool friend says, a few months before 911, he saw a strange object slowly floating from Jersey City across the Hudson River toward lower Manhattan and the Twin Towers. He worked in Jersey City and had a view of lower Manhattan, obviously. He said it kept floating until it disappeared near the Twin Towers.

But he says it was probably just some tar paper that blew off a building under construction.

Oh well.

[Captain Zero]

57. I've been around a few blocks too

[EYESORE 9001]

10. Five lights in a V-shape

Near dusk. White lights weren’t intensely bright, but enough to notice in my peripheral vision. Hard to estimate altitude, but I’d say 5,000 ft or less. Utterly silent. I’m chalking it up to terrestrial aircraft, as this sighting was within 10 miles of the NASA Glenn Research Center. I couldn’t identify it, so it qualifies as a UFO, right?

[-misanthroptimist]

29. My guess

And it is a guess, is it was a flock of birds. I had a similar experience that I posted about: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1017&pid=657146

Your experience sounds fairly similar. Low light and our tricksy brains can do some very interesting things together.

[EYESORE 9001]

32. Not birds

It was low enough to discern that the lights were round. It was most definitely a flying craft - not birds.

[Dale in Laurel MD]

11. Yes, at a distance

I think it was something terrestrial, but I haven't seen anything like it before or since. But it was moving through air, and seemed to be material.

[chia]

20. Wow. What an experience!

The not being afraid part is interesting to me too.

[roamer65]

15. Yes.

[colsohlibgal]

16. The Air Force Just Confirmed The Reality Of It

They used another acronym than UFO but released more video showing a craft doing things we can’t do.

Jimmy Carter saw one I believe when he was in the Military. Several Astronauts reported “bogeys” following them. And one Astronaut, I believe on or around the Shuttle, is clearly heard saying “We still have the Alien Spacecraft under observation.”.

Think about it. Less than 200 years ago if you wanted to communicate with someone it had to be face to face or you had to write it down and physically bring it to the recipient.

Imagine a civilization that gets by petty bickering and advances 500 years past where we are.

There are limits on how fast you can fly. But Warp Drive could be developed as in Star Trek, which is shrinking the space in front of you and spreading it back out behind you. As Einstein figured out, Time and Space are related. His thoughts on time: “The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a particularly persistent illusion.”

[MANative]

17. Yes, about 20 years ago

Around 9:00 on a summer night, hubby and I were hanging out with another couple on our front porch. No alcohol involved. The human eye tracks to movement naturally, and I saw something moving in the sky above us. Couldn't make out a shape, but the lights were a bright green. It was moving very quickly, then stopped dead for about a second, making a sharp right angle turn parallel to the ground, then appeared to go straight up at incredible speed. We all saw it. Three of us were really stunned and lots of "WTF??" comments were flying around.

The fourth person in the group worked at the Sikorsky helicopter plant and she was VERY quiet.

[BluesRunTheGame]

18. Yeah, but it was over the White Sands Missile Range

[Hoyt]

19. Unidentified, yes. Alien, not likely.

[Greybnk48]

21. Yes, the triangular ones. In summer of 1967.

Out parking with my then boyfriend we saw 3 triangles flying, then hovering in a triangular formation. They zigged one way, hovered, zagged another, hovered, and then zip. They were gone so fast it was like they disappeared.

[jpak]

37. Parking

We need details

[Demsrule86]

22. I did see a ghost not long ago...my daughter saw it too...full on apparition.

We were visiting my sister-in-law in the nursing home and we saw this woman walking around in a nightgown in the parking lot...it was freezing so we reported it to the nurse who gave us a funny look, and then we saw a picture of the woman on the memorial page hanging on the wall. She had died the night before.

[Victor_c3]

41. I've seen several ghosts, but I'm still not a full believer

Early in my deployment to Iraq in 2004, we were occupying what used to be an Iraqi military hospital. My platoon was given a section of dorm room looking rooms to occupy and live in and, since I was the platoon leader, I got my own room (even with its own bathroom!) luxury like that is unheard of for an Infantry unit.

Anyways I was sleeping in my bed on my back when at about 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, as the sun was beginning to rise, I woken by a heavy shove on my chest. I opened my eyes and standing on my mattress just by my feet I saw the ghost of a little girl. She was staring at the window to my left and didn’t move. I remember her having short hair, cut just above her shoulders and she was wearing a white nightgown with lace around the neck that had little colored flowers on it. I just looked at her and didn’t move for 30-60 seconds and I decided to close my eyes. I fell back asleep and went on with my day.

I didn’t say anything to anyone about the ghost I saw. A day or two later a couple of my Soldiers started to tell me “sir, you know this place is haunted, right?” I still said nothing and a bunch of the guys proceeded to tell me their own ghost stories of things they saw late at night. The reason I’m still a skeptic is because we were given a large dose of quinine - enough to protect us For an entire year+ from malaria a few days before. One of the prominent side affects is lucid dreaming and hallucinations. I suspect that was what had happened. However, they did find a mass grave on the hospital campus and one evening when I was walking to the main building I kicked a weird looking rock only to discover that it was a human hip bone.

Many months later, while I was still in Iraq, 5 of my Soldiers were killed violently when I lost a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. For weeks after the event my Soldiers and I all kept seeing the ghosts of our dead friends. I’m still skeptical about those sightings as I’ve heard that people who suffer trauma and/or lose people close to them sometimes have similar sightings. This is sometimes associated with PTSD.

On the lighter side of things, I’ve been telling my two daughters that when I get old and die that I’m going to haunt them. I’m mostly just going to mess with them and do things to annoy then like make fart noises and moan a lot.

[cbdo2007]

23. Yes around the early 90s in the Kansas City area.

there was a glowing circle up in the sky...it wasn't moving but was too high to be a balloon or anything and it was at night and the colors changed like red and white and green and blue.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

24. Yes, in the sense that it was unidentified by me.

Although I strongly suspect it wasn't extraterrestrials.

I was fishing/camping at a lake in Southern Ohio on a night that was incredibly clear for Ohio, like a cloudless desert sky. It became very cold that night, the Moon wasn't out and there were no nearby city lights. I could easily see the Milky Way, which is a rare event around here.

I was looking at the stars and noticed one of them was slowly moving. So it clearly wasn't a star, and I assumed it was an airplane. Then it stopped moving. Then moved slowly again. Then stopped. Then moved again. It kept doing that until I looked away long enough to lose track of it, never seeing a "star" behaving that way again.

Maybe a satellite that was repositioning? No idea.

[miyazaki]

25. They're here making home movies for the folks back home.

[Binkie The Clown]

26. The government has done a very good job of training us to ridicule what they don't want us to know.

[Hekate]

45. Thank you, Mulder

[Binkie The Clown]

49. Hmmm. Is that ridicule? :) nt

[Hekate]

50. Never

[PurgedVoter]

27. Our perceptions of reality are not and have never been reality.

No knock to science at all, science is wonderful. But science is based on repeatable and controllable experiments. Science is built on tests. To say science knows everything demonstrates a lack of understanding of what science is.

Our eyes, in a way act like science. We see red when we see light but the blue and green are not there. So our mind makes up the red. This is usually fairly accurate and lets us know more about our environment but we have to see things by determining what we can and can't see.

So when I say something isn't scientific, that does not mean it isn't real. If you understand science, you understand the need to keep an open mind.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

28. Most of our interactions with the world are...

... probability based, even the act of stepping into an elevator and feeling mostly assured that it won't crash to the ground floor.

Heck, the pandemic has been a recent exercise in probabilities too.

Richard Feynman on the subject of flying saucers.

[Ohio Joe]

30. Just about every day...

I don't know shit about flight.

[highplainsdem]

31. Decades ago, in Iowa farm country. Saw 4 dull brown craft

Last edited Fri May 21, 2021, 12:06 PM - Edit history (1)

shaped like triangles or arrowheads descending, in an irregular V, two behind the lead craft on one side, one following on the other. Not maintaining formation very well, moving back and forth noticeably, constantly, in relation to each other. Coming in fast as they descended. This was in daylight, mid-morning. I'd watched them for at least 10-15 seconds when I was asked for the map in the glove compartment. I got that and handed it over to the backseat driver, then looked toward the craft again, and they were gone. I looked around, couldn't see them anywhere, and it seemed impossible that they'd vanished so quickly. I was asked what I was gawking at and told the other two people in the car, neither of whom had seen the aircraft I'd seen, but they couldn't spot them either. Then suddenly 3 military jets, fighters, came in very fast from different directions and when they neared the point where I'd last seen those 4 unidentified craft, they suddenly climbed steeply. We all saw that. The jets left contrails; the 4 craft I'd seen earlier had left no trails. We stopped at a gas station/convenience store soon after that and I asked the manager if he'd seen anything odd in the sky, like what we'd seen. He told me he hadn't, but customers who were farmers had sometimes mentioned seeing odd lights in their fields. Later that day we called military bases in the area and asked if there'd been any training exercises with military jets at the location this had happened, and we were told that no military jets had been there.

[MFM008]

33. Yes

Around early fall 1980 around 9pm or so.
Close up.
Never forgot.

[SwannieK]

34. Yup...

My dad was in the Air Force and we were stationed at Malmstrom in the 50s...had UFO sightings quite often. One was a huge orange-glowing cigar-shaped ship hovering over one of the smelters in Great Falls. The pilots were scrambled and began a chase, but, were left in the proverbial dust when the ship took off at an unbelievable speed and disappeared. There was a rash of visitations back then...have done a lot of research over the years in an attempt to ascertain just what was going on then and discover why they were so damned interested. Have not figured it out yet. I do have a theory that it may have had something to do with the smelter, though....maybe they were trying to warn us of dangerous levels of toxins leaking? Anyway, that was quite an experience.

[highplainsdem]

56. Article on one of the Malmstrom sightings:

https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2017/02/26/mansch-montana-ufo-sighting-still-resonates/98452858/

[SwannieK]

65. My sighting was in the 50s

I have read all those reports, but cannot locate one for my sighting. I was eleven or twelve when I saw the "cigar"...I was born in 1947, so it was around the '57-'59 timeframe

[brooklynite]

36. I think we can safely say everyone has seen something they can't identify...

[neverforget]

38. A couple years ago I was walking back to work on my lunch when I looked up to see a 737 flying under

the cloud deck. In the line of sight I saw what I thought was a bird of prey circling. Watching it for a couple seconds I realized it was not a bird but a cylindrical shaped object going in circles. It stopped and then moved off to the southwest making no sound. When I got back to the office, I checked to see what the cloud ceiling was and it was 6500'.

The object looked similar to this.

[DFW]

39. A Ukrainian Finger Organ?

Sure! They‘re tricky to play, but great to listen to. Ukies call them „bayan.“

[jpak]

60. LOL!!122

Need pics

[DFW]

66. Just follow the bouncing ball...........

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayan_(accordion)

The article mostly refers to the Bayán as a Russian instrument (cultural imperialists!), but gives as a reference: Ukrainski narodni muzychni instrumenty (Ukrainian folk musical instruments).

[nolabear]

40. Yes, and was close to one of the most famous sightings.

Mine? I’m pretty sure it was ball lightning. Some weird shit happens in Southern storms.

But I actually vaguely knew these guys, who frequented my grandparents’ cafe. I lived in New Orleans when it happened, but grew up largely in Pascagoula. Hard to believe because the place they claimed it happened was easy to see from a bridge but boy did they seem to believe it. Btw it was in the midst of a spate of sightings along the Gulf Coast.

[Kid Berwyn]

44. What were they like?

Did Mr. Hickson and Mr. Parker talk about what they experienced to their friends — expressing ideas, feelings, experiences that are different from what they told the press and investigators?

Their story is one of the all time great Close Encounters III. I have held both men in the highest esteem since first learning of what they reported. I mourned the passing of Mr. Hickson.

[nolabear]

46. Afterward I only know what everyone else did. My grandmother didn't believe them.

But that was my grandmother. Her assessment was only about Hickson, whom she said was “a drunk.” I remember Parker more, probably because he was my age, but we didn’t interact.

At the time they were soundly ridiculed in the area, but Parker’s absolute freakout, then and later, seemed to make a lot of people wonder. And the sheriff’s dept. was rather impressed with them.

[Kid Berwyn]

52. Dr. J. Allen Hynek found their story credible.

Thank you for the heads-up, nolabear. Here’s a report on the case which includes Dr. Hynek’s thoughts. The astronomer was a scientific consultant to the Air Force’s Project BLUE BOOK.

Something I read, I believe from Jacques Vallee, but am unable to source, is the old man/young man pairing — contrasts in age, race, beliefs — may echo in similar cases reported through history.

[nolabear]

58. Oh, that's interesting. I've heard of Dr. Hynek but don't know much about him.

Never heard of the pairing.

[Kid Berwyn]

59. Hynek and Vallee applied science to things at the frontier of reality.

Hynek started with UFO reports, as there weren’t any objects available for hands-on study. His thinking evolved as more and more “credible people reported incredible experiences.”

https://anomalyarchives.org/collections/files/hynek-josef-allen/

Vallee applied information science to the phenomenon. He wrote the data show a more complicated explanation than extraterrestrial hypothesis. While he would be disappointed if UFOs turned out to be alien visitors, he fears humanity may get the visitors we deserve.

[hurl]

43. Twice

First time I was a kid on a hunting trip with my family and Dad's work friends. At night in the early 1970s, one of the guys was talking about seeing a UFO in the dark night sky. My mom said he must be drunk (probably true), and nobody else was paying him much attention. I went over where he was, and we did see something we couldn't identify. Something that initially looked like the rest of the stars was moving in ways that defy known physics, going very fast then suddenly stopping. It was just a single light, but I can't explain it.

Second time was as an adult, I saw several glowing objects moving in formation, also in ways that didn't jive with my knowledge of physics. I even pulled over and tried to capture video on my phone, but of course it didn't come out. My wife at the time also witnessed the phenomenon.

I'm a hard-core skeptic and not one to easily believe such stories - not saying they were unearthly, but definitely unidentified and not behaving like any aircraft I know about.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

47. They're all just dragons.

They're wiser now, not making themselves as noticeable as a millennium ago when people didn't know about other planets. Yet the glow of their inner fire is sometimes seen despite their efforts to be inconspicuous.

[ironflange]

48. Plenty of times

However, upon closer inspection, they were all identified.

[Iggo]

51. Yep.

But I’ve never seen any alien spaceships.

I did see an international one, though. That was awesome.

[jpak]

61. One 4th of July in Pensacola

We all saw Mir and the ISS fly over us just before the fireworks went off.

Pantomime

Yup

[Iggo]

64. I wasn't aware until the last five years or so that you could see the station with the naked eye.

Wondrous to behold, and I ain’t kidding about that.

Now I can set alerts on my Sky Guide app for that and other heavenly events. Amazing times we’re livin’ in, eh?

[krispos42]

53. Pretty much any time I go out at night

The sky is full of blinking lights moving across the sky. I'm assuming the blinking lights are airplanes or helicopters but of course, being nighttime, I can't confirm this.

Also "of course", if extraterrestrial starships were flying in our atmosphere and wanted to blend in, they would make efforts to emulate our navigation-light regulations for aircraft.

I should note that I'm on the Connecticut coast, with NYC's three biggest airports reasonably close by and a slew of smaller ones scattered around. I see a LOT of blinking lights moving across the sky, at all right ascensions and declinations, moving in all directions.

[jpak]

55. When I was Pot smoking teenager :) we would get stoned

Lay down and watch the night sky.

Satellite!

Plane!

Massive fireball

WOW DUDE!!!!!

Nother joint

[eShirl]

62. Yes. And then it was identified the next day.

Had nothing to do with aliens.

[jpak]

63. When I was in HS the Maine Air Guard deployed some flares

Everyone saw them

And the local 6 o'clock news reported about them the next day.

Was that it?