Public interest growing in UFO sightings

The Michigan Mutual UFO Network, which records and investigates UFO sightings, reported 233 sightings across Michigan in 2020 – including two in Monroe County.

Kristy Mariano was inside her Detroit Beach home late last Sunday night when she happened to notice something peculiar outside of her window. Many of her neighbors were outside gawking up at the sky.

Taking her dog with her, Mariano went into her backyard to see what all the fuss was about. When she looked up, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

“I see three big, like huge lights in the sky, and they’re dancing around,” she said. “It was really strange. I was thinking it’s not an airplane, and it wasn’t a drone either because it was really, really low, and when it was passing by the clouds kept moving and moving and the stars were so bright…

Mariano said the lights disappeared after exactly 45 minutes.

“It was so crazy,” she said. “I never believed in this kind of stuff before, but now I kind of do.”

Like Mariano, Monroe native Carl Walcz wasn’t really a believer in flying saucers or little green men. But one night this past October while he was taking photos of the moon, he stumbled across something he just could not explain: in just one of his pictures, there appeared a bluish-green object floating in the sky.

“I never did see it when I was taking a picture of it,” Walcz said. “For all I know it could be something (that got stuck on) the camera or anything… But it’s too well-defined to be, and none of my other pictures that I took (had it). I took like two pictures right in a row of that same shot, and in one of them it was there and the other one it wasn’t.”

Mariano and Walcz are certainly not the first people who have ever claimed to see Unidentified Flying Objects, and they certainly won’t be the last. But those who are dedicated to proving that we are not alone in the universe say it’s getting much more difficult to separate examples of truly inexplicable phenomena from the more common cases of mistaken identity.

The Michigan Mutual UFO Network (MIMUFON), a nonprofit organization that records and investigates UFO sightings, reported 233 sightings across Michigan in 2020 – only two of which were located in Monroe County. Both of those cases have been identified, meaning that MIMUFON investigators determined a known explanation for the sightings.

Many of the 233 reports across the state, and at least one of the local cases reported to MIMUFON, were in fact determined to be misidentified Starlink satellites, says the MIMUFON Director Bill Konkolesky. The brainchild of Elon Musk, the satellites live in low Earth orbit and are designed to provide global satellite internet access.

“They’ve been sort of the bane of our existence since late 2019, because everybody has reported them as flying saucers…” Konkolesky explained. “It’s a chain of satellites, they are in a formation in a single line… It’s a cool idea, but they look really eerie and people report them as UFOs.”

While the annual number of UFO sightings reported to MIMUFON can fluctuate, Konkolesky said his organization averages around 160 reports a year. He attributed the higher number of reports for 2020 to not only the Starlink satellites, but the fact that the pandemic kept people at home more often than normal and left them with more time on their hands to pay attention to the world around them.

“One think I often say is that if the moon disappeared for a month, how many people would notice?” Konkolesky quipped. “I just don’t think people are looking up.”

While there are more logical explanations for a supposed UFO sighting now than ever before, public interest in extraterrestrial life is at an all-time high thanks, in part, to some recent developments at the federal government level. In August the Pentagon formed a task force dedicated to investigating UFOs observed by US military aircraft. And buried in the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill signed in December by then-President Donald Trump was a stipulation requiring US intelligence agencies to disclose any and all information they have regarding UFOs to Congress within the next six months.

“You can totally feel it, a lot of moving parts all moving things in the same direction towards acceptance,” Konkolesky said. “One is the government’s openness about it… Also the number of planets that are being discovered that are potentially habitable, and that is always increasing. (That’s) another piece of it as well.”

Niether Mariano nor Walcz’s experiences were reported to MIMUFON, and the organization does not make a determination about an incident without an investigation. But when told about Mariano’s experience specifically, Konkolesky said that it sounded intriguing.

“It’s a case worthy of investigation,” he said. “I’d go so far as to say that.”