Salem UFO Sightings: Here's What They Saw

SALEM, MA — On Sept. 24, 2019, someone saw several balls of light over Salem power.

The close encounter lasted 10 minutes, and was the last time someone reported seeing a UFO in Salem to the National UFO Reporting Center. The center has hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects, piquing the curiosity of folks fascinated by the possibility that we're not alone here on Earth and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft.

The notion of intergalactic travel got a boost when information emerged from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a shadowy $22 million Defense Department program that began in 2007 to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena. The multi-year program was shut down in 2012, but the Pentagon released UFO videos earlier this year.

The Pentagon acknowledged the secret program to investigate UFO sightings in 2017, the same year as retired naval Cmdr. David Fravor dramatically recalled a confounding encounter with a UFO when he was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004.

The wingless oblong craft about 40 feet long was flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics. Fravor didn't know what to make of it but said it was not like anything he had ever seen in nearly 20 years of flying.

He described the UFO as other-worldly.

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor told ABC News. "I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close."

Not all accounts are that dramatic, but there are more than a few head-scratchers among the witness accounts.

The database includes 1,774 UFO reports that have been filed from Massachusetts, including six from Salem:

• Sept. 24, 2019: "Several Balls of light Observed of Salem Ma."
• Oct. 28, 2017: "3 UFO’s. Triangular, silent , 6 lights and fast. ((NUFORC Note: Report submitted by aviation mechanic. PD))"
• Aug. 14, 2017: "Saw a a light start glowing bright blue then suddenly vanish."
• Sept. 27, 2015: "Sighting while watching the eclipse."
• Oct. 5, 2013: "Three orbiting lights visualized in western sky over Salem, MA."
• June 8, 2013: "5 orange circular objects in shape of right faced cheveron to the right of the Salem Powerplant. Two of the objects joined at one point"

You can read more UFO sightings from Massachusetts on the National UFO Reporting Center site here.

Your chances of seeing a UFO are better in some places than others. According to the ranking of states, those with the most sightings are:

1. Idaho
2. Montana
3. New Hampshire
4. Maine
5. New Mexico

The states with the fewest sightings are:

1. Texas
2. Louisiana
3. New York
4. Maryland
5. Illinois

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour "like saucers skipping on water."

Although the objects Arnold claimed to see weren't saucer-shaped at all, his analogy led to the popularization of the term "flying saucers." And since then, Americans have been more or less obsessed with the idea that alien life is among us.

Former Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid slipped in an earmark for the program into the Pentagon budget. Nevada, of course, is the home of a U.S. Air Force facility known as Area 51, the source of multiple alien conspiracy theories, including claims that interstellar visitors are held there; that the 1947 Roswell crash wasn't a weather balloon at all but a Soviet aircraft piloted by mutated midgets; and that the 1969 moon landing was filmed by the U.S. government in one of the Area 51 hangars.

Yet among the most intriguing is Fravor's account of seeing the unidentified aircraft zipping through the sky is convincing.

When he saw the object from the air, controllers on one of the Navy ships on the water below reported that objects were being dropped about 80,000 feet from the sky, then headed "straight back up."

He could see the disturbances on the water below and breaking waves on the surface, "like something's under the surface," he told ABC.

The radar jammed, and as Fravor flew closer, the craft rapidly accelerated and zoomed upward and disappeared. Once the object was gone, the ocean below was a still sheet of blue with no evidence of disturbance. Infrared scanning also showed no evidence of an exhaust trail, he said.

"I don't know what it is," he said at the time. "I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."

This article includes reporting from Patch staff writer Max Bennett.

Dave Copeland writes for Patch and can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).