With the holiday season in full swing, I thought we’d look back at some random UFO sightings from Decembers past. Here we go!
White House Christmas Card UFO (December 18, 2011)
On December 16, 2011, a woman named Dawn posted a video on YouTube about an odd artifact she noticed on that year’s official White House Christmas card. No other versions of the card contained the UFO (which you can see circled in the image above), leading Dawn to believe that she possessed a copy of the original photo. All subsequent cards, she mused, had been edited to remove it.
It was a Christmas UFO mystery! The original video has since been deleted. Was this just a hoax? Were aliens visiting the White House for Christmas. Or was this just an ordinary glitch in the photo, perhaps during printing?
Tokyo, Japan Sighting (December 25, 2013)
On Christmas Day, 2013, a number of white UFOs were spotted in the skies over Tokyo, Japan. A journalist captured video of the sighting, and it soon went viral. The objects, described as disc- or rod-shaped, were all tilted at the same angle, and some appeared to be in formation.
However, while the videos became popular for their UFO mystique, the more mundane explanation was that these were simply contrails from passing jets illuminated by the Sun…or were they?
White Light in Nixon, Texas (December 28, 2012)
Three days after Christmas in 2012, a deer triggered a game cam within a forested area in Nixon, Texas. Over a series of three photos, a strange light can be seen moving upward from left to right.
“The game cam has taken dozens of pictures prior to this incident, from the same mounted position; no light or reflections have ever been recorded before. My first thought was that someone was headlighting. But the third picture shows the light to be above any human height…I have no explanation for the lights on the game camera. A reasonable conjecture is made that it is not an airplane due to the time lapse.”
Read the MUFON report here.
Pulsing Red Light in Boise, Idaho (December 24, 2011)
The MUFON report accompanying this submission is particularly long. In it, the witness describes a scene that took place on Christmas Eve in 2011, during which a glowing red “plasma ball” hovered in the air for some 40 minutes. According to the report, the sighting was also corroborated by a friend of the witness who lived “4-5 miles away” who could also see the object.
“I am convinced this is some sort of plasma formation,” states the witness in the report, and later, “I had the impression that this was under control of some intelligence of some sort.” You can read the entire report here.
A video uploaded to YouTube on December 24, 2011 also shows a red orb in the sky:
What’s curious about this sighting is that similar objects – if not the same one – were seen over a number of years, often in December (the report also mentions the sighting of a similar red orb in 1978 in McCall, Idaho). Here’s another from December 2013.
Bright White Light Disappears in Hayward, Wisconsin (December 26, 2010)
On December 26, 2010, this UFO witness was riding a Skid Steer loader (a small tractor thing) in Hayward, Wisconsin when he noticed a bright light appear “seemingly out of nowhere.” He quickly grabbed his phone and took a picture, in which you can see the starry light.
The object then zoomed off to the west, then (presumably) disappeared. The two pictures submitted with the report show a before and after of the experience. Check out the report here.
Floating Rectangle in Raleigh, North Carolina (December 30, 2009)
Now this one’s interesting. On the evening of December 30, 2009, this witness was riding down a road in Raleigh, North Carolina when a dark square craft passed overhead.
“We were first caught off guard that a plane would be flying so low at night with no ground lights, but then noticed how slowly the craft was moving.The craft traveled exactly due west (we returned later that night with a compass) about 50-60ft off the ground and 40 yards to our left over a field at about 30mph. The craft had two dim lights, one was definitely red. I thought the other light was a dim green, but the other eyewitness remembered it as a dim white light.
I pulled over, rolled down my window and noticed no sound coming from the low flying craft. I turned around and followed the craft for a few minutes, but it was traveling too low to the tree tops that I soon lost sight of it through the trees.”
The image here, of course, is a recreation of the event. The report can be found here.
UFOs form Triangle in Andover, Massachusetts (December 19, 2013)
Glowing lights were spotted in the skies of Andover, Massachusetts on the evening of December 19, 2013, complete with the above video. Three of the lights appeared in a triangular formation, with a fourth straggler traveling behind them. But then things got serious:
“I then witnessed light after light come off the horizon from the North and travel the same pattern, the same speed, probably about 12 more lights total. Some came off the horizon at a constant rate, I would guess they were about 30 seconds apart from each other and seemed to be equidistant from each other coming one-by-one.
Others came out perhaps at a 45 or 60 second interval. All lights traveled at a constant speed, at the same speed as the other lights, and all traveled on the same linear path and seemed to eventually disappear. I would estimate it took about 75 to 90 seconds from the time it came from the horizon until it fully disappeared.”
A few lights remained, but eventually they too faded from sight.
Rendlesham Forest Incident (December 26, 1980)
3:00 a.m., December 26, 1980. A light descends into Rendlesham Forest near RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, UK. Servicemen from Woodbridge enter the forest, thinking it was a downed aircraft, but instead find a glowing metallic object moving through the trees.
One witness, Sgt. Jim Penniston, would go on to claim that he touched the object’s surface, describing it as “warm,” and that the craft’s triangular landing gear had left indentations in the ground. But Penniston denied the craft was of extraterrestrial origin; during regression hypnosis, he would instead reveal that they were time travelers from the future, our own descendents “returning to obtain genetic material to keep their ailing species alive.”
Police later arrived to investigate, but by then the mysterious object had vanished. However, according to Wikipedia, in the light of day they did find something peculiar: “After daybreak on the morning of 26 December, servicemen returned to a small clearing near the eastern edge of the forest and found three small impressions in a triangular pattern, as well as burn marks and broken branches on nearby trees.”
The incident would later become known as “Britain’s Roswell.”
Do They Have Holidays On Mars?
And, well, that about does it. Who knows what strange sights await us this year? Keep your eyes open. (And also don’t forget last year’s mesmerizing reports of a jolly red craft flying across the sky…watch out for that one!)
