He went on to become chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University and founder of the Center for UFO Studies in 1973. Allen Hynek, who started as a staunch debunker of alien craft but eventually came to sympathize with the citizens he investigated. One of the leading forces behind Project Blue Book (which was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton) was J. “Its whole mission was gather and quell.” “Blue Book was really all about appeasing the public,” said Maranto. Such as Project Sign (initially “Project SAUCER”), Project Grudge, and most famously, Project Blue Book, which was shut down in 1969. The databases maintained by MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center are the scrappy, homegrown descendants of the defunct bureaucracies once tasked with UFO investigations. Since November, I’ve especially had more pilots from airlines filing reports.” Now it’s chevrons, boxes, triangles - now it’s overt (unidentified objects) where they used to be concealed.

I’m a one-man operation, I run this out of my house and if we had a staff and a budget then we could handle more cases, but I’m just getting endless calls these days. He sounded very, very exhausted when we spoke: “I can’t keep up with the UFO workload anymore. And that number is probably low, said director Peter Davenport, who’s been reassembling years worth of old data that was accidentally dumped during a recent computer meltdown. The National UFO Reporting Center - which has 21 reports from Illinois since January - has collected roughly 3,000 sightings from Illinois that date back to the 1940s. This year, so far, it’s had about 50 reports. In the past year alone, MUFON has had 122 reports from Illinois, and that’s down from the 141 received in 2017. The observer of the Batavia crash pleads for urgency from the National UFO Reporting Center: “You need to get off your lazy ass and find out what came down over Batavia.”) Plus, anyone can report anything, so actual investigations are a matter of triage. Oak Lawn, 1946: “5 silver discs” in a V-formation, in daylight, shoot toward Indiana.īatavia, 2010: A UFO crash! (Note: The keepers of these databases often leave the names of witnesses off the report for privacy’s sake. Rockton, 2001: A large “burnt orange egg” hovers for 30 minutes above an open field. In fact, to pick through the databases of MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center - the nation’s two primary gathering spots for data on everyday UFO sightings - is to be reminded of just how common it’s been is for Illinois residents to see UFOs.Īrlington Heights, 1972: A UFO the size of “a small car” descends at a stop sign, hovers over the hood of a vehicle, backs up, remains still for three minutes, then zips away.ĭecatur, 1980: During a snowstorm, “a dark object” flying “very low” in the middle of a road, at roughly 5 m.p.h., and making no noise, is watched casting a kind of searchlight. There are even enough UFO reports from the wider Chicago metro area to generalize: We see triangular formations.Ī mysterious point of light is also popular. From 1999 to 2001, the Rockford area became a hotbed of sightings. Sam Maranto, director of the Illinois chapter of MUFON, said there are UFO reports near the North Shore Naval Station that stretch back years. But even we have greatest hits: The Tinley Park Lights of 2004, the mysterious football field-sized triangle of Southern Illinois in 2000 in 2006, a dozen United Airline workers at O’Hare reported a disc above the airport that abruptly climbed, punching a perfect hole in the clouds. Historically, Illinois has been a relative UFO lightweight - at least compared with the Area 51 wastelands of the Southwest or the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest.

This image made from video shows unidentified objects in the skies over southern Campeche state filmed by Mexican Air Force pilots on March 5, 2004.

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