By Matthew Loffhagen
Then, there are the other reports. The small yet not insignificant number of accounts that come from military professionals, astronauts, and scientific experts.
These reports are numerous enough (and trustworthy enough) that the US government has been cataloging them, and with good reason—there are things out there that we can't explain, and it's only through reading these accounts that we can begin to try to figure out the mysteries surrounding them.
We've put together a list three of the most intriguing UFO sightings of all time. These aren't just unverified reports by country bumpkins; these are firsthand accounts from seasoned professional pilots that no one can explain to this day.
These aren't definitive proof that aliens exist and are visiting Earth, but they do hint that there might be more going on in the night's skies than we realize.
1) The White "Tic-Tac" UFO
The first on this list is a commonly cited example of a credible UFO report—an account, recorded on video, from a pair of Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets from 2004 in San Diego, which spotted "a whole fleet" of mysterious flying artifacts that managed speeds that have never been seen before.
Fravor went on to say:
"As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it's gone. Faster than I'd ever seen anything in my life. We turn around, say let's go see what's in the water and there's nothing. Just blue water."
Not entirely dissimilar reports have come from other, similar experts.
2) The Unexplainable Blue Lights
An airline pilot flying between Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, reports having seen blue lights in the sky that looked entirely unlike anything he'd ever seen flying before.
Said the pilot:
"The two lights were approximately an inch apart in the windscreen and the size of normal stars. One of the 'stars' just dimmed out over about a 10-second time span followed by the other one dimming out completely in about 10 seconds also. We were flying in crystal-clear skies and were not flying though any clouds whatsoever. These two lights were not following the typical west-to-east orbital path as most satellites do and were just sitting there kind of like ships hiding in plain sight.
3) The Mysterious Orange Balls of Light
Experts don't always spot these kinds of things while in the air. In 2013, a retired airline pilot, military pilot, and astronaut spotted a series of unusual orange balls of light in the sky that defied all explanation. He and his family attempted to film it with their phone cameras, but alas, the iPhones of the day weren't able to get a good picture of the black night sky.
According to the pilot:
"When I looked up into the sky, I saw a fairly large, orange, glowing orb moving rapidly overhead [at] right about 90 degrees of elevation. They moved much faster than orbital satellites (International Space Station, for example) or airplanes, but much slower than meteors and did not change brightness as a meteor would upon entering the atmosphere. I have no explanation for what we saw."
So, then, case closed, right? If these professional pilots have all spotted weird lights in the sky, that's proof that aliens have been visiting Earth with their advanced technology!
Well, not necessarily.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson is eager to point out, just because the US government is investigating aliens, it doesn't mean that there really are aliens to investigate. This is a case of the old zebra analogy at play: sometimes, when we hear galloping hoofs, we like to hope that we'll see something exotic like a zebra, when the more logical explanation is that the approaching animal is a more mundane, commonplace horse.
There are plenty of possible sources for mysterious glowing lights, from secret military tests to bizarre weather patterns, and, more commonly in the modern era, unmanned drones in various shapes and sizes. Until we actually find some incontrovertible proof for the existence of alien spaceships, it's worth assuming that all UFOs are more terrestrial in origin.
It may be boring, but it's unfortunately the truth: the simplest explanation is almost certainly the most logical one; and that generally doesn't involve flying saucers.
