Where were you when the cigar-shaped Unidentified Flying Object appeared over Beach Park on Aug. 7, 2008?
Or when a fireball-style UFO was witnessed by at least seven people in Volo on Sept. 8, 2011?
If you don’t recall your whereabouts on those critical dates, then you are obviously participating in the conspiracy of silence. Or maybe you were just sitting in a windowless basement watching “Breaking Bad” reruns.
Whatever the case, you obviously were not among the people who reported those incidents to the “National UFO Reporting Center,” a Washington-based organization — as in, Washington state, not Washington, D.C., which admittedly would make it sound more authoritative — that describes itself as “America’s foremost UFO Reporting Agency,” having been “in continuous operation since 1974.”
A vigilant reader alerted me earlier this month to the presence of a spinoff website (metrocosm.com) that has compiled “the most credible UFO sightings” amassed by the Reporting Center over the decades, complete with an interactive map that allows us to zoom in and see exactly where little green men in their interplanetary spacecraft and/or some dude’s quadcopter drone have been spotted.
This map has the possibility of becoming exhausting, considering the center has fielded more than 90,000 reports since the Nixon/Ford years, including those from a single individual. Clicking around a “report database” at nuforc.org, we learn that there have been 3,116 tales fielded from the State of Illinois alone, which ranks us well ahead of Wisconsin (1,623) but far behind Texas (4,419).
The state with the most reports? California, with 11,368 — the only state in five figures. Feel free to argue if the reason is because California is a) the most populous state in the union; b) home to military and NASA test flights at Edwards Air Force Base; or c) something much more dramatic and cool than those logical, boring explanations.
Anyway, clicking around the aforementioned interactive map reveals multiple Lake County UFO sightings that, of course, were never reported in the mainstream media, because we’re neck-deep in the effort to keep The Truth from getting out:
In the 2008 Beach Park case, a report summary states that two witnesses reported seeing a “disappearing cigar shape” for two minutes near Green Bay and Kenosha roads. No word on if a discarded El Producto was found at ThunderHawk Golf Club.
The 2011 fireball over Volo was reported by seven people, including one who said “I saw an orange fireball in the sky that looked like a sphere with two blades one on front and one in back” and another who described it as “about the same size as a small plain (sic).” Maybe there was a problem with the grease pit outside Fratellos Hot Dogs on Route 12.
A March 2010 report from Waukegan tells of a “black helicopter at local airport.” I scoured our News-Sun archives to see if this shocking vision produced any mass hysteria, and I came up empty. Of course, it could be that government agents hacked in and erased all stories involving a “helicopter” at a “local airport.”
In January 2012, six people are reported to have seen a “triangle” shape in Winthrop Harbor west of Sheridan Road. One witness reported that “when I tried to get a video of with my cell phone the screen became very blurry and my phone froze up, (and) by the time I restarted my phone the shapes were gone.” We can gather from this that space invaders have the ability to jam our communications, or someone needs to upgrade their cell.
But don’t take my observations as having any kind of authority on this controversial subject. Feel free to explore this interactive map and its accompanying reports for yourself.
But be prepared: You might question your entire world view after reading about the “super bright white light, all-lit-up flying saucer” that appeared over Mundelein in 1973.
Twitter @NewsSunDanMoran
