UFO Sightings In MD: What Witnesses Saw

MARYLAND — Whether you call them UFOs or UAPs, Tuesday is World UFO Day, and Marylanders don't hesitate to report UFO sightings.

So far this year, Maryland residents have filed 13 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 Maryland.

All of that is interesting to ponder in a review of reports on the crowdsourced National UFO Reporting Center about strange sightings over Maryland skies. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll find:

• May 22 in Annapolis: "Blue Angels were flying over Annapolis. Noticed a quick 'blip' for exactly one frame on watching the videos back."
• March 29 in Timonium: "Rectangular object with many colored lights on the bottom moving from one side to the other."
• Feb. 10 in Wolfsville: "I was driving on route 17 south of Wolfsville, MD. While on the road my wife and I had notice 3 triangle/cone like objects hovering."
• Jan. 11 in Owings Mills: "Green orb sitting in sky and then drops suddenly and disappears."

After reviewing hundreds of new reports of UFOs, a task force required to report annually to Congress has concluded there is no evidence of alien life.

Not everyone agrees. Whistleblower David Grusch, a career Air Force intelligence officer, claims the government is hiding information on a covert program to retrieve crashed alien spacecraft and reverse-engineer the technology. Asked in testimony before Congress if the government had retrieved bodies from the crashed UAP, he replied, “Biologics came in with some of these recoveries, yeah.” When asked if they were human or nonhuman, he said, “Non-human. And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to.”

The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claim.

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.

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.