Michael Hall of Edmonds shows off the photos he took in January 2012 of a UFO over his home in Edmonds.
Michael Hall grew up in the community, opened his law practice here in 1988 and served a stint on the Edmonds City Council. His mom, Laura Hall, served as Edmonds mayor between 1992 and 1995. Semi-retired now, Hall still practices law, still in Edmonds. But today other interests are taking center stage. And these extend beyond the borders of Edmonds, and beyond even the known universe.
Hall heads up the UFOiTeam (or on Facebook here), a group he describes as “paranormal field investigators who follow up on UFO sighting reports.”
“I’ve always been interested in the paranormal,” he explains. “And the recent uptick in reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the fact that the U.S. government is finally officially ‘disclosing’ their existence is giving these sightings a new legitimacy.” (UAP, by the way, is fast replacing UFO as the preferred term to describe these types of sightings.)
Hall is referring to a December 2017 front-page expose in the New York Times documenting the long-running efforts of the Defense Department’s multi-million dollar program to study, investigate and document UFO sightings and reports.
According to Hall, this knowledge has been there for decades, but has been kept under wraps and only recently is coming to the fore.
“Most folks have heard about the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico, that reportedly found parts of downed alien craft and even bodies of alien life forms” Hall explained. “But what many don’t know is that earlier that same year there were two sightings right here in Washington state, one on Maury Island involving six donut-shaped craft, and the other over Mount Rainier where nine crescent-shaped craft were seen flying in formation.”
It got personal for Hall on a clear chilly January evening in 2012.
“It was about 9:30 p.m. and I was coming home from the monthly parent-teacher meeting at Maplewood School,” he recalls. “As I was walking into my house I couldn’t help noticing the bright, clear moon. I took out my iPhone and snapped a few photos of it. The next day I looked closely at the photos on the big computer screen, and saw a strange red dot in the corner by the moon.”
Using several photo-enhancing apps, Hall zeroed in on the dot and what emerged was nothing short of amazing.
One of the enhanced images taken on January 10, 2012 by Michael Hall showing a cone-shaped UFO in the skies over Edmonds.
“I saw a cone-like shape just below the moon that just didn’t seem to belong there,” he said. “Now I don’t like loose ends. As a naturally curious individual, I found myself driven to get to the bottom of this.”
And the deeper he got, the stranger things became.
All iPhones keep a photo stream folder, where photos are stored in sequence based on the time they were taken. Examining the photo stream folder in his phone, Hall was amazed to discover that his moon photos were out of sequence. Specifically, according the file metadata, they were taken not at 9:30 p.m. when he actually took them, but 17 hours earlier, shortly after 3 a.m. that morning, when the moon was in an entirely different position in the sky.
Following the trail, he sent the photos to Bruce Maccabee of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), for further analysis. MUFON has access to sophisticated analytic tools that can determine a wide array of information from an image, including the exact coordinates, altitude and direction.
The results only deepened the mystery.
According to Hall, Maccabee found that the photo appears to have been taken from inside a vehicle that was hovering approximately 40 feet above his backyard, showing the image of a second vehicle as seen through a window of the first.
So how did these images get on Hall’s iPhone?
“I can’t explain that,” he confesses. “As far as I know I was asleep at the time. But the images are unequivocally there, and metadata doesn’t lie. Right now the only explanations that fit involve some sort of intercession by others employing knowledge and techniques beyond our current understanding. And it’s a good bet that these others are not of this world.”
With increasing reports of similar incidents coming in from around the globe, and the disclosure by the U.S. government of the existence of these phenomena, “the whole question of whether these exist is fast becoming moot,” says Hall.
“Think of the implications,” he continued. “We could gain access to superior technologies that could solve our terrestrial problems of energy supply, clean air and water, aging, cures for diseases and more. Things that could benefit our everyday lives, cure famine or even cure Aunt Betty of cancer.”
Hall invites anyone interested in learning more or becoming part of this adventure to drop in at any weekly UFOiTeam meeting (meetings are held Wednesday evenings 6-8 p.m. at the Lynnwood Denny’s, 4109 196th St. S.W.), visit the UFOiTeam website or Facebook page or contact him directly by phone at 425-245-4661 or email at michaelhall3200@gmail.com.
UFO sightings should be reported to the National UFO Reporting Center, 206-722-3000. Visitors to their website can also view data on recent sightings and reports.
