To Report or Not to Report?

August 1, 2011

I have seen two UFOs in the past two weeks. They were not really anything to get excited about since one was only a bright white light in the sky that blinked on for one second then disappeared, and the other just looked like a big, giant, silent exploding firework. They are both still unidentified so I call them UFOs. Since the two sightings occurred I have been struggling with a question; should I report them or not?

The first answer that might come to mind is that of course they should be reported. We are never going to solve the mystery of the UFO phenomenon if it is not thoroughly investigated and each sighting helps increase our knowledge a little bit more. Looking at it from that perspective, no matter how insignificant it may seem, a report definitely should be made.

There is another side to the argument however. Actually, there are several arguments in opposition, the first being, who would I report the sightings to?

MUFON, the largest and most established of all the civilian UFO investigative organizations, is in the middle of an implosion and the resulting civil war between the members has left them far from competent. In recent times they have gotten so unorganized that they have not even kept up with the sighting reports on their website which is languishing several days behind. MUFON still has a lot of good people, and there are still some excellent investigators there but they are being shackled by poor decisions and bad leadership from the upper management. This has caused a lot of people, including myself, to lose faith in them.

EPIC, the Extraordinary Phenomena Investigations Council, is still a fairly new organization and is still struggling to establish itself. Made up largely of disenfranchised MUFON investigators it has much of the training and enthusiasm that MUFON used to have but without the established infrastructure or a fully functional data collecting system. In a few years EPIC may be one of the best paranormal investigative organizations in the world but right now they are still learning the ropes.

The same can also be said of ARIRA, the Aerospace Research Investigation Reporting Agency. They are even smaller and less established than EPIC is with even fewer investigators and less infrastructure. ARIRA is a very young agency that once again has a lot of potential but it will take a while to develop it. Besides, it would probably be a waste of time to have them investigating a simple light in the sky report. I am sure they have much bigger and better cases to invest their time in.

That doesn't leave many options for having my two little UFO sightings investigated, and there is not really much investigating that could be done anyway. Like I said, they were just a couple of anomalous lights that mysteriously appeared in the sky. There is not much that anybody could learn from them.

Being an investigator myself, albeit an amateur one, there are a few things that I could deduce from my sightings on my own, and since I am the one who saw them I am probably the best person to conduct the investigation. At least I won't have to worry about whether or not I am a credible witness or if I am telling the truth.

I know the first sighting was not a meteor because it did not move and it had no tail. I know it was not an airplane because the sky was clear and I could have seen a plane if there had been one. Also the fact that the light was much brighter than a plane and only blinked once pretty much eliminates a terrestrial aircraft as an explanation.

The light was not a satellite because like I said before it did not move. We can also rule out weather balloons, swamp gas and Chinese lanterns because none of those fit the description of what I saw. I think we can also eliminate Venus, the Moon, or other planets or stars as potential explanations because those do not blink on and off.

So what does that leave us with? Not much really. The truth is, I don't know what the thing was, but I doubt anybody else would know either. There just is not a lot of evidence to go on in this particular case.
The second sighting is pretty much the same as the first as far as potential explanations. The thing it most closely resembled was a giant sparkling firework display, except that there was no noise nor any other fireworks being shot off at that time. The sparkles did not actually sparkle either, but kind of slithered like lighted snakes or a school of minnows flashing in the sunlight. I'm still not sure what it was.

So the question still remains, should I file a report or not? Well, after much deliberation and weighing the pros and cons over the past few days I finally decided that they should be reported. If for no other reason than to have them on file, they should be reported. That way if other people happened to witness them and file reports also than they could be cross-checked against each other. Maybe there really is a simple explanation for them that I am just overlooking. Or maybe not. We will never know if I keep the info to myself.

So which investigative agency did I decide to file the reports with? Believe it or not, none of them. Instead I am going to report them to NUFORC, the National UFO Reporting Center. That way they will be on file but they won't cause any serious investigators to waste their time pursuing them. That sounds like a win-win situation all around. Now I can go back to staring at the sky with a clear conscious, knowing that I did my duty as a UFO witness. Maybe I'll see something more than lights in the sky next time...and if I do I won't have to ask whether or not It should be reported.