Post by JoannaL on Apr 27, 2021 0:34:11 GMT -5
Maine: UFO Hotspot
In August 2014, a man looked up at the night sky over Portland, Maine, and saw a group of white lights, brighter than stars and moving faster than satellites, skimming the tree-lined horizon just behind his apartment building. He watched as the orbs abruptly changed formation, pivoted 90 degrees and streaked away. They were gone in five seconds. “I have never seen anything like this and, until now, have been skeptical of UFO sightings” the man wrote in his report to the National UFO Reporting Center.
With official reports stretching back to at least the mid-1940s, UFO sightings are nothing new in Maine. They’re not even rare. In the past 40 years, UFO investigators, the federal government and the Bangor Daily News recorded almost 1,000 such reports. One of the most recent was in January 2021 and current data show a steady increase in sightings since 2018, with a noticeable spike during the initial pandemic lockdown. An additional increase is expected this year. One analyst ranks Maine fourth in the nation in UFO visitations.
Whether you believe or not, the numbers don’t lie. Maine is a UFO report hotspot and it’s getting hotter.
According to the Reporting Center archives, Maine’s earliest unidentified flying object sighting dates to the first summer after World War II. A woman and her husband were eating lunch near the shore in South Portland when she had an overwhelming feeling of being watched. She then saw a hovering, dark oval shape in the blue sky above the sea. As she watched, the object shot straight up and out of sight. “I felt at the time, and still do now, that this was a ‘flying saucer’ and have never forgotten the incident,” she said when she finally told her story in 2008.
Over the years, online freedom of information activists at The Black Vault obtained 713 files, containing 3,493 pages, of declassified CIA documents surrounding UFO investigations and research. In 2020, they finished scanning the often badly photocopied pages, converting them into searchable text. Now, the information can be downloaded for free.
Among the documents is a 1952 memo to the CIA director detailing a UFO sighting over Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine. The sighting was one of those that resulted in Project Blue Book, the government’s third and final in-depth investigation into unexplained aerial phenomena that continued until 1970.
The Limestone event occurred on the night of October 10, 1952, from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. Weather observers at the base saw a “circular orange object with four green lights nearby.” Their sighting instruments recorded the object at an altitude higher than any known aircraft at that time could fly. Some suggested the airmen were looking at Saturn and its moons, however, consulting astronomer J. Allen Hynek concluded it was another planet. “It would be an outrage to probability theory to consider the object observed was anything other than the time-honored planet Jupiter,” he wrote to the CIA in a document released 50 years later. “The prosecution rests its case!” Hynek went on to become a highly-respected scientific UFO researcher, founding the still-operating Center for UFO Studies.
In the 1960s and 70s, nighttime mystery sightings were regularly reported in the Bangor Daily News. For example, on February 18, 1961, two front page headlines read: “Sportsmen Mystified by Red, White Beams in Sky,” and “Is Air Force Hiding UFO Data?”
The March 24, 1966, edition carried a story concerning John King, a local man who fired four .22 caliber pistol shots at a UFO in Bangor, then walked into the police station and made a report. King told police it was orange, shaped like a deflated football and he could hear it scraping across nearby bushes as it passed at low altitude. King later told the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena that as the craft got closer, his car lights dimmed and the radio went dead. Police received two other reports of similar sightings that night. The newspaper contacted nearby Dow Air Force Base, where an unidentified captain indicated he was not at liberty to confirm nor deny any information he might have related to the sightings.
One of the most infamous cases of outright alien abduction allegedly took place in August 1976 when four college students – twin brothers Jack and Jim Weiner, Chuck Rak and Charlie Holtz – spent four days on a canoe trip in the Allagash Wilderness. Rak later recanted the abduction aspect of the story, but admitted seeing the unidentified flying object, which he described as a “very, very bright globe of light in the sky ... changing color from white to red to green in a liquid kind of melding motion.” The other three men have stuck to their original claims.
In the 1980s and 90s, Maine UFO reports decreased, with a few notable exceptions such as the November 1981 sightings in Starks. For the most part, such reports no longer made the news or spurred official investigations. But this changed with the dawn of the digital age.
In 2000, the Reporting Center received just three sighting accounts from Maine, however, by 2014, the number had risen to 52 – a 1,633-percent increase. “There’s a reason for this, said Cheryl Costa, co-author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, a rigorous, 371-page compendium of statistical charts and graphs analyzing 121,036 sightings around the country between 2001 and 2015. “The vast majority of sighting reports prior to 1995 were mailed in, or came via TV reports about Joe Blow seeing something on the local news,” she explained. “By the 90s, major cities were getting broadband – and between 2003 and 2005, both major reporting organizations launched websites where you could fill out a report online.” The other major reporting and investigating organization is the Mutual UFO Network, founded in 1969.
Costa, and her partner, Linda Miller Costa, are now at work on an updated version of their book. It will include data through 2020. They hope to have it ready this spring.
The Costas are not interested in the narrative details of UFO encounters and they neither seek to prove or disprove sightings. Their analysis centers on what the detailed statistical data reveals for every state, down to the county level. They contend UFO sightings, including those in Maine, are driven by four factors: Hours of darkness, population levels, weather and leisure time. In other words, more UFOs are reported at night, in population centers, when the weather is good and people have time to spare. In Maine, numbers show most incidents come in the summer, in York and Cumberland Counties – where most of the state’s population lives. As for nighttime sky-gazers killing time, Costa added, “If it wasn’t for smokers and dog walkers, we wouldn’t have 40 percent of the reports we have. The patterns are as much about human behavior as they are about UFOs.”
Another number cruncher, online science and technology writer Kristin Cooke, took population into account when looking at the Reporting Center’s sighting numbers for the first half of 2020. Looking at raw data, heavily populated states like Texas and Florida are at the top of the list. But when Cooke took into account sightings-per-100,000 residents, more sparsely populated states emerged as visitation hotspots. In the analysis, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire and Maine ranked one through four. New Mexico rounded out the top five.
Costa is still wrangling and analyzing her 2020 data, but has already detected a large spike in reports at the time initial COVID-19 lockdowns went into place throughout the country in the spring. “Numbers went through the roof,” she said. “I mean, what else did people have to do besides stream movies, sit on the deck at night and drink.”
In her detailed, 20-year national overview, Costa sees a regular – though unexplained – six to eight year cycle of up and down report numbers. Maine, and the nation, are currently three years into an upswing. Maine-generated Reporting Center accounts increased from 26 in 2018, to 56 in 2019, to 71 in 2020. “What’s 2021 going to look like? If the pattern holds, it’s going to escalate,” she concluded.
Sources: Troy R. Bennett, The Bangor Daily News, February 5, 2021; Jessica Potila, Fiddlehead Focus, September 10, 2016; and Unsolved Mysteries.
