PORTLAND, Maine – In August 2014, a man walking his dog looked up at the night sky over the city. It was then that he saw the mystery: a group of white lights, brighter than the stars, traveling faster than satellites, glided over the wooded horizon just behind his building.
He watched as the orbs abruptly changed their formation, rotated 90 degrees and disappeared. They disappeared in five seconds, but his dog kept looking at the sky, where the lights disappeared for another half minute.
“I have never seen anything like this and, until now, I have been skeptical of UFO sightings,” wrote the man in his report to the National UFO Reporting Center.
With official reports dating back to at least 1946, UFO sightings in Maine are nothing new. They are not even rare. In the past 40 years, UFO investigators, the federal government and Bangor Daily News have recorded nearly 1,000 such reports. The most recent was last month and recent data shows sightings steadily increasing since 2018, with a noticeable increase during the initial pandemic blockade. The numbers are expected to rise even further in 2021. An analyst ranks Maine fourth in the country on UFO visits.
Whether you believe it or not, the numbers don’t lie. Maine is an important spot for UFO reports and is getting hotter.
Maine’s first unidentified flying object report in the Reporting Center archives dates from the first summer after World War II. A woman and her husband were having lunch near the coast in South Portland when she had the overwhelming feeling of being watched. The unidentified woman then looked up at the daytime blue sky over the sea. She saw a dark oval shape hovering. When she laid eyes on him, he shot up and out of sight.
“I felt at the time, and I still feel it now, that it was a ‘flying saucer’ and I never forgot the incident,” she said when she finally told her story in 2008.
Over the years, online freedom of information activists at The Black Vault have obtained 713 files, containing 3,493 pages, of declassified CIA documents involving UFO investigations and research. In 2020, they finished scanning the often poorly photocopied sheets, converting them into searchable text. Now, they are on the internet for free download.
Contained within is a 1952 memo to the CIA director detailing a UFO sighting at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone. The sighting helped trigger the Blue Book Project, the government’s third and final in-depth investigation into unexplained aerial phenomena. It lasted until 1970.
The Limestone event took place on the night of October 10, 1952, from 11 pm to 3 am. Climate observers at the base saw a “circular orange object with four green lights nearby”. His sighting instruments registered the object at an altitude higher than any known aircraft could fly. Initial explanations indicated that the aviators probably saw Saturn and its moons. Later, consultant astronomer J. Allen Hynek concluded that it was another planet.
“It would be an outrage for the probability theory to consider the observed object to be anything other than the venerable planet Jupiter,” Hynek wrote to the CIA in a document released 50 years later. “The prosecution closed your case!”
But Hynek became the most respected UFO scientific researcher in the country, founding the UFO Study Center still in operation.
In the 1960s and 70s, nighttime sightings of mystery were regularly reported in Bangor Daily News. On February 18, 1961, two front-page headlines shouted “Mystified sportsmen with red and white rays in the sky” and “Is the Air Force hiding UFO data?”
The March 24, 1966 edition published a story about John King, a local man who fired four .22 caliber pistol shots at a UFO in Bangor, then entered the police station and made a report. King told the police it was orange, shaped like a withered soccer ball and that he could hear it scraping in the nearby bushes when passing at low altitude.
King later told the National Committee for Investigations on Aerial Phenomena that as the ship approached, the lights on his car dimmed and the radio stopped playing. The police received two other similar UFO reports that night.
The newspaper contacted nearby Dow Air Force Base, where an unidentified captain indicated that he was not at liberty to deny or confirm that he had information related to the sightings.
One of the most infamous cases of total alien abduction allegedly happened to four men on a canoe trip on the Allagash River in August 1976. One of the men later retracted, but the rest maintained their harrowing history of enduring unpleasant polls and tests extraterrestrials.
In the 1980s and 90s, UFO reports in Maine declined. They were no longer news stories or encouraged official investigations. That changed with the beginning of the digital age.
In 2000, the Report Center received only three reports of sightings from Maine. In 2014, that number rose to 52 – an increase of 1,633 percent.
There is a reason for this, said Cheryl Costa, co-author of the “UFO Sightings Desk Reference”, a rigorous compendium of 371 pages of statistical tables and graphs that analyze 121,036 sightings across the country between 2001 and 2015.
“The vast majority of reports of sightings prior to 1995 were sent by post or came from TV reports about Joe Blow seeing something on the local news,” said Costa. “In the 1990s, major cities were getting broadband – and between 2003 and 2005, the two main reporting organizations launched websites where you can complete an online report.”
The other major reporting and investigative organization is the Mutual UFO Network, founded in 1969.
Costa and his partner, Linda Miller Costa, are now working on an updated version of their book. It will include data by 2020. They hope to have it ready by spring.
The Costas are not interested in the narrative details of the UFO encounters. They do not seek to prove or disprove sightings. His analysis focuses on what the detailed statistical data reveals for each state, down to the county level.
They claim that UFO sightings, including those in Maine, are motivated by four factors: hours of darkness, population levels, climate and leisure time. In other words, more UFOs are reported at night, in population centers, when the weather is good and people have plenty of time.
In Maine, figures show that most incidents occur in the summer in York and Cumberland counties – where most of the state’s population lives.
As for night watchers killing time, Costa said: “If it weren’t for smokers and dog walkers, we wouldn’t have 40% of the reports we have. The standards are as much about human behavior as they are about UFOs. “
Another numbers analyst, online science and technology writer Kristin Cooke, took the population into account when looking at the Reporting Center figures for the first half of 2020. Looking at the raw data, densely populated states like Texas and Florida are in the top of the list. But when Cooke took into account sightings by 100,000 residents, less populated states emerged as visitation points.
In this analysis, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire and Maine rated one to four. New Mexico completed the top five.
Costa is still discussing and analyzing his 2020 data, but he has already seen a huge increase in reports by the time the initial COVID-19 blocks came into effect across the country in the spring.
“The numbers have skyrocketed,” she said. “I mean, what else did people have to do besides watch movies, sit on the deck at night and drink.”
In his detailed 20-year national panorama, Costa sees a regular – though unexplained – cycle of six to eight years of reporting figures up and down. Maine and the nation are currently on the rise for three years.
Reporting Center accounts generated in Maine increased from 26 in 2018 to 56 in 2019 and 71 in 2020.
“How will it be 2021? If the pattern continues, it will increase, ”said Costa.