Witnesses to Strange Things: UFO Sightings

What should we think of reported UFO sightings? (The term UAP—Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon—is now used in place of UFO. I will use both terms interchangeably.)

Are people really seeing incredible aircrafts maneuvering at impossible speeds?

There are two easy options: (1) be completely gullible and believe all reports or (2) be completely skeptical and reject all reports.

But those are the lazy options.

The New Testament includes this instruction: “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 Jn. 4:1). Instead of believing everything we hear, we should be discerning and examine the claims.

Additionally, loving our neighbors means listening to them. If your neighbor told you about a UAP they saw, would you listen to their account or accuse them of being crazy and walk away?

Moreover, Christians should acknowledge that our faith is based on the testimony of witnesses. And these were witnesses to an impossible event—a dead man raised to new life. Peter declared, “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this” (Acts 3:15). The first Christians made a mind-blowing claim and that claim continues to be made wherever the gospel is preached.

I am not attempting to equate the significance of UFOs with the resurrection. The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ not the good news of flying saucers. I am saying that of all people Christians should not automatically dismiss accounts of something extraordinary because that type of testimony is the foundation of the Christian faith.

If, at this point, you are willing to consider a few UAP reports, I must warn you that this topic will take you down a rabbit hole. There are thousands of reports from all over the world and this subject spans a variety of fields: physics, psychology, history, astronomy, technology, etc. Consequently, ufology is a distinct field of study.

Twelve Incidents

To help you not get lost in the rabbit hole, here is a list of twelve UAP incidents. (I am skipping over the Roswell incident in 1947 because that is a major controversial story. Click on the links for more detail.)

1. May 11, 1950: Mcminnville, Oregon. Paul Trent and his wife see a UFO flying near their farm. Paul captures some of the best photos ever of a UFO. According to the official Air Force report, “This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication.” However, others have argued that it was “a model hanging from a thread.”

2. July 19 & 26, 1952: White House and Capitol Building in D.C. On July 19, strange bright lights were seen flying flying over the White House and the Capitol Building for six hours. A week later, they returned and were seen by pilots and tracked by radar.

3. April 24, 1964: Socorro, New Mexico. Police officer Lonnie Zamora says he saw a white egg-shaped object with two people wearing white beside it. He also watched as the object flew away. At the site investigators found landing pad marks on the ground, fused sand, and oddly-shaped footprints. Zamora was a respected police officer and member of his church.

4. September 1964: Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Dr. Robert Jacobs filmed the launch of a dummy nuclear warhead. He was then called in by his commanding officer to view the footage. As they watched the missile ascend they saw a UFO enter the scene and shoot lasers at the missile causing it to fall away. This was confirmed by Major Mansmann.

5. April 6, 1966: Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia. About 200 students and teachers saw several UFOs hovering near their school. Some followed a UFO to where it landed in a grassy area. About twenty minutes later it flew away.

6. March 16, 1967: Maelstrom Air Force Base in Montana. A glowing red UFO was seen hovering outside the front gate of one of the missile launch sights. Shortly afterward, several ICBM missiles were inexplicably knocked offline, becoming inoperable. Robert Salas, who was on duty that day, has shared his firsthand experience.  

7. December 26, 28, 1980: Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, England. A strange triangular shaped aircraft with lights landed in the forest of a military base. Military officials saw the craft up close. The base commander has given his official statement.

8. September 16, 1994: The Ariel School in Ruwe, Zimbabwe. Sixty-two children ages 6-12 claimed to have seen a landed UFO with aliens standing outside.

9. March 13, 1997: Phoenix, Arizona. Thousands of witnesses, including the Governor of Arizona, saw unusual lights silently hover over the Phoenix area at night for several hours.

10. November 14, 2004: Pacific Ocean near San Diego. During a training exercise, Navy pilot David Fravor and his co-pilot were ordered to engage a real-world scenario. The scenario involved chasing a white Tic Tac shaped object that performed unthinkable maneuvers at astonishing speeds and showed signs of being intelligently directed.

11. November 7, 2006: Chicago O’Hare Airport. Airport employees report a disc-shaped object hovering over gate C17 at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport for several minutes.

12. Early 2015: Atlantic Ocean near Jacksonville, Florida. Pilots record a fleet of strange looking UAPs. Known as the Gimbal video, a few seconds were released in December 2017. In addition, Lieutenant Ryan Graves says he saw UAPs on a regular basis during his flights over the Atlantic Ocean and believes they are a safety threat.

Observations

Here are four observations from these incidents.

• The sightings occurred over a wide variety of locations: military bases, schools, farm, city, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, White House and Capitol Building, the U.S., Africa, and Australia.
• The sighting occurred during the day and night. The nighttime occurrences on the list are D.C., Maelstrom, and Phoenix. Paul Trent’s photo was taken around 7:30 p.m.
• The sightings span several decades.
• Many of the witnesses are known to be credible and they include police officers, pilots, educators, etc.

Possible Explanations

How can we explain these strange sightings? Chris Taylor at Mashable summarizes the possible explanations for UFO appearances into four categories:

• Astronomical explanations: planet, star, meteor, satellite
• Civilian explanations: balloon, kite
• Natural explanations: flocks of birds, ice crystals, ball lightning
• Human brain explanations: the autokinetic effect—a stationary light in a dark environment appears to move

We can add military explanations to the list, which include jets, drones, and flares.

If this is an exhaustive and accurate list, people who have claimed to see a UFO did not see any sign of intelligence greater than human intelligence.

However, many of the details in the events don’t seem to fit any of these explanations.

What about the possibility of a hoax?

Who is conducting convincing hoaxes with Navy fighter jet pilots? Was someone like David Fravor hoaxed?

Obviously we cannot categorize thousands of sightings the same way. They cannot all be hoaxes or astronomical events or civilian equipment and that’s part of what makes this topic complicated.

For the incidents that don’t seem to fit any of the above explanations, I can only think of two major possibilities: advanced top-secret human technology or non-human technology.

Advanced top-secret human technology. The sightings of triangular shaped objects correspond with the U.S. military’s top-secret projects known as the Aurora and Black Manta, which are both triangular in shape. (I should note that the U.S. government denies that these are official aircraft projects.) There is also talk that the U.S. is working on antigravity propulsion systems, but this is also officially denied. Along the lines of human technology, it is important to recognize that rockets can cause highly unusual visible phenomena. For example, consider the launch of Elon Musk’s Falcon 9.

While top-secret government technology is a possibility, the location of these events poses a serious challenge to this view. First, some of the sightings occurred in public areas, i.e., hovering over Phoenix for hours, landing at a school, etc. If you wanted to keep something top secret, why would you display it to the public in those places? Why not just fly it over Area 51, hidden from public view? Second, some of these UAPs frequently engaged military jets. If, for example, these are U.S. aircraft, why would you run this kind of surprise scenario on your top pilots with the best fighter jets in the world? Third, as noted by Robert Hastings, UAPs seem to have a special interest in nuclear weapons. I can’t imagine why any government would run this end-of-the-world risk of testing advanced technology over nuclear bases.

Could these be advanced top-secret foreign human technology. Maybe one country is messing around in the airspace of another country. That would mean the U.S. is way behind in technological development and has been since the 1950s. How could the U.S. be that far behind? And why have these adversaries not caused any damage? What’s the point of these incursions into U.S. airspace with highly advanced technology?

This leads me to the second major possibility.

Non-human technology. What does that mean? It means extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional, supernatural, or whatever term you want to use. Admittedly, this is the most bizarre explanation and raises many questions. (I have briefly elaborated on the theological implications of aliens in a previous post.) For many the sheer size and long history of the universe means there is a good chance life exists elsewhere. Others consider these sightings to be demonic in origin. Either way, we are dealing with non-human technology.

Of course, this extraordinary claim requires evidence. Some point to the other-worldly speed and G-forces that the craft demonstrate as witnessed by the pilots and recorded on radar. This convinced David Fravor and his co-pilot that the craft they observed was not “from around here” and they are expert witnesses to phenomena in the sky. Unfortunately, most of the evidence is not open to the public. For example, only a few seconds of the Gimbal and Tic-Tac videos have been released, but we know the footage is much longer.

So we have some evidence, but at this point the limited release of evidence, leads some to rely on the process of elimination. To put it simply: If it’s not advanced human technology, what else could it be? It certainly is not animal technology, at least not animals we know of on Earth.

What do you think?

What have I missed?

Now it’s time for me to leave the rabbit hole.

*If you are just beginning to investigate UFO sightings, I recommend the following resources:

• list of 25 sightings
• Wikipedia – a list of about 100 sightings
• 900-page list of sightings
• Out of the Blue (2003) – documentary
• The Phenomenon (2020) – documentary
• Moment of Contact (2022) – documentary
• Interview with James Fox, the director of The Phenomenon
• Wonders in the Sky – ancient sightings to the 1800s
• In Plain Sight – modern sightings since the 1940s
• The Basement Office – YouTube Playlist

Les Bridgeman

After graduating from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I served as a high school Bible teacher in Asia. I enjoy traveling, writing, and playing the drums. For a deep dive into church history and the character of God, see my book Surprised by Hell.