U.F.O. Reports Surged During the Pandemic

“They come up toward the Hudson Valley, it’s beautiful up there, you get clear skies and then all of a sudden you see this thing zipping through the sky, that stopped on a dime, goes straight up, takes off again, stops, comes back — we’re talking incredible speeds,” said Mr. DePerno, a retired police detective.

“With the Covid thing, more people are looking up,” he said.

The seeming uptick in reports has come as a relief to some who say they’ve seen mysterious floating craft, but feared they were alone.

“Because of the Pentagon being outed, there is more news now, there is more reporting now,” said Ms. Stringfellow, who goes by Cookie. “People aren’t so afraid to say, ‘Oh, jeez, I was in the woods now, or I was by the lake, and this thing came down.’”

But for a 65-year-old retired New York State Park Police officer from Granville, along the state border with Vermont — who asked not to be named because he worried about going public with his belief in U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial life — full acceptance still feels a ways off. The lingering fear of ridicule may be suppressing the true numbers of U.F.O. sightings, he suggested; there might in fact be more out there.

He urged city folks to stay calm should they see a U.F.O., just as he did one evening about 30 years ago, when, he said, he spotted a football-fields-long object floating beside the Taconic State Parkway as he finished a patrol shift. And most importantly, he said, people should not let fear of being mocked prevent them from reporting what they see.

If enough people report U.F.O.s when they see them, the retired officer added, the world will believe they are telling the truth.

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