UFOs in Illinois
Your neighbors have seen them.
Your friends have seen them.
Some have reported seeing them. Perhaps you have seen them, too. After all, more have seen UFOs than care to admit — never mind file a
report. If the database held by the National UFO Reporting Center in Washington State (est. 1974) is any measure, the first official sightings in Illinois began in the mid-1920s, when a farm boy near Moline spotted an otherworldly “disc.” The Illinois chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (est. 1969 on the western border with Missouri) knows of stories of “airships” in the Midwest dating to 1896. But the majority of sightings are more recent. You might even say, it’s a boom time for UFOs in Illinois.
During the past year alone, someone in Spring Grove reported a large flying Tic Tac-like craft traveling rapidly toward Wisconsin. In early June, a flashing, red-and-white flying something was reported high above Winnetka, at roughly the altitude of a plane, but then “started to descend before going below the tree line and out of sight.” In March, a “solid ball of white light” was seen moving fast over Dixon. In May, a diamond-shaped object was spotted above Chicago, stopping, changing course, vanishing. Around Easter, “two blue glowing triangles” were observed loitering over a Meijer in St. Charles. And those are just four picked randomly out of dozens of reports from Illinois.
What was new about that study was the government’s posture toward UFO sightings, the remarkable concession that it can’t explain everything being seen. The report was seen as inconclusive, so inconclusive that intelligence officials are expected to update it by Thanksgiving. It considered known U.S. technology, the technology other nations have, weather balloons, swamp gas. Of the 144 cases examined for the report, 18 objects appeared to move using a technology that neither the government nor its adversaries were known to possess. No evidence of otherworldly beings was offered (and only one deflating balloon was identified from the 144 cases). But those 18 red-flagged flying objects required “additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize.
