There are UFOs in my neighborhood. Should I be concerned?

I’ve always been fascinated by UFOs. It may have started as a young boy, when visiting my Aunt Honey’s shore house a few miles from where I now live. She used to tell me about the “ghost lights” that appeared in the sky some nights. One night I saw it for myself, a light dancing against a dark sky, but my memory is vague as I was only six or seven at the time.

So when a new book on UFOs by journalist Leslie Kean came out, I devoured it. Titled UFOs. Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials go on the Record, it points out that 95% of UFO reports are routinely dismissed. Kean decides to take a closer look at the 5% that can’t be overlooked, the ones that aren’t weather balloons or atmospheric conditions, and are witnessed, as her title suggests, by people of impeccable character.

One of the more interesting facts that comes to light are the great number of sightings that take place around military bases and nuclear power plants. I can relate to that, because my aunt’s house was on the Barnegat Bay, where the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant sits. It appears UFOs haven’t stopped visiting either, as a Google search revealed a plethora of sightings in the area. Take this one from a UFO reporting site:

At 4 AM on June 20, 2009, I was traveling east on Michigan Avenue and could clearly observe a large extremely bright ball of light hovering above Barnegat Bay, a quarter mile west of the Barnegat Inlet. I would estimate the ball to be 80 to 100 feet wide. The object was projecting a direct reflection onto the water, and was hovering 300 to 400 feet above the water. It was the brightest light I have ever observed, At 5 AM, the object instantly vanished.

More people have seen UFOs than you might imagine, as the book also states that 90% of sightings go unreported. I recently heard of one myself, at a party where the subject of UFOs came up and a woman who overheard the conversation jumped in. 40 years earlier, a few miles from where I live, she and her husband witnessed a UFO landing in their backyard. They went outside to investigate only to have the brightly lit craft take off and disappear in little more than the blink of an eye. Not only did they not tell the police, they did not tell their children, who heard the story for the first time that night.

The fact is there are an amazing amount of UFOs spotted every day, they often just don’t make the mainstream press. But I can almost guarantee you, if you type in “the largest town/city near you + UFO” into a Google search, you’ll come up with sightings. Take Boulder, for instance, where several You Tube videos come up in the search. One is from a very believable electrician with a sighting over Wonderland Lake, who retells his experience here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBg-BMbxUK8

It all begs the question what are they and where might the come from? While some truly believe they are beings from another planet, in the book Angels and Aliens, author Keith Thompson compares UFOs to visionary experiences like angelic visions, shamanic journeys and folkloric encounters with fairies. He posits the theory that UFO encounters may come from somewhere deep within our psyche, the result of a society that has veered to close to a scientific worldview, removing the myths and mysteries from our lives.

But who knows, the answer may lie somewhere in the middle. As an anonymous reviewer at amazon.com writes: Sometimes a UFO, with beams of light, hard cold metal, sounds, visible and physical effects on people, animals, and environment, is just that: a real, actual craft. However, it may be that the responses of witnesses, culture, society and the actions of the UFO and its occupants play out mythic scenarios. The two different settings do not cancel each other out.