UFOs Over Illinois? Double Digit Sightings Reported This Year

If you were watching "60 Minutes" Sunday night, you saw a segment detailing how the U.S. government is pretty much acknowledging the existence of what they call "UAPs," or what the rest of us call UFOs.

If you're unfamiliar with the term "UAP," it stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It seems that the reason for the change is that when the term UFO is used, the tendency of most people is to dismiss claims as some tinfoil hat-wearing lunatic's ravings. UAP gives the topic more credibility, at least in the eyes of government types who name things.

I've found this topic to be fascinating for years, and the last few years of video releases of UFO/UAP encounters and interviews with extremely credible witnesses have been unlike anything we've ever seen before.

You've got Navy pilots who've captured video of their encounters, former Defense Department employees who've worked at top-secret laboratories, and even Luis Elizondo, the former head of the U.S. Government's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP, the secretive Pentagon unit that studied UFOs), saying that these things are real.

And I believe them. I'm not about to claim that aliens are all over the place, only that some things from somewhere having been flying around all over the planet, doing things that our current level of technology is incapable of doing. I don't know if they're from another world, and at least from what we've seen from these credible witnesses, neither do they. All I know is that the discussion has certainly ratcheted up over the last few years.

Which brings us to our state of Illinois.

Patch.com reports that there have been over 5,500 reports from around the world made to the National UFO Reporting Center in the last 15 years, and there have been 17 UFO/UAP sightings reported here in Illinois this year alone.

For example, according to the Patch.com story:

• "Shortly before 5 a.m. on Feb. 23, an Illinois resident saw a "triangle of 3 lights moving west in the sky just west of Normal Illinois for about 10 minutes."
• On the evening of March 11, a person in Quincy saw a "small orb of bright light" they said was "moving very fast and seemed to disappear into thin air."
• On April 4, "three lit objects [flew] below the cloud line" in Palatine, according to another report.

I'd love to tell you that I've seen something too, but I haven't. However, I'd be willing to bet that someone reading this post has seen something in the Illinois skies and they just had no idea what it was.

Have you?