UFO Sightings In FL: What Witnesses Saw And Where

Jul 01, 2023

FLORIDA — If you need another reason to scan the skies over Florida, here’s one: Sunday is World UFO Day, and so far this year, residents have filed about 110 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 Florida. 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 Florida:

St. Petersburg Jan. 15 at 11:57 a.m.: A metallic disk appeared for 5 seconds and disappeared. Saw it again moments later, further west, and disappeared in the same manner. "While heading towards the Skyway Bridge I noticed a glimmer of light in the sky in the east. Definitely a solid object that reflected sunlight, like a metallic reflection. ... From my perspective, it was longer than it was tall, with curved top… or domed top. The bottom was not being lit up with sunlight, so it was dark. The bottom seemed to look flat. When it appeared, it held its location for 5 seconds, then disappeared again. I must note that when it disappeared, it faded away… as if it slowly disappeared, instead of disappearing suddenly. It reappeared two more times the same way, each time heading further west. My wife was in the car with me and witnessed the last two times it appeared."

Sarasota Feb. 22 at 9:10 p.m.: "There were lights on the object, there was an aura or haze around the object, the object emitted other objects. My son spotted it I told him it was a helicopter but then realized it was pushing a cloud and had no sound moved in such a way I have never seen before also pulled the cloud , this experience we will always remember some people will say this and that but I have never seen a object pull and push a cloud and illuminate the cloud , that night the only cloud was out was this one."

Tampa Feb. 6 at 8:35 p.m.: "I was sitting in my living room staring out the patio slide door when I noticed fireball object shooting straight towards the moon. Within seconds the fireball disappeared but i could still see a object which appeared to go up for about 20 seconds more after the fireball disappeared , This object appeared to be white with lights and going upward before disappearing."

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.

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.