A national organization that records and investigates reports of unidentified objects in the sky said it has been seeing an uptick in people contacting the group, in the wake of the U.S. military shooting down three suspicious objects that have yet to be publicly identified.
“We’re pulling in a higher number of cases than usual,” said Rob Swiatek, a board member with the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON.
The group received some 50 reports from across the U.S. over the past three days.
Swiatek said that was on track to outpace the roughly 80 reports that the group had been receiving weekly, before the latest incidents occurred.
“There’s a certain nervousness going on,” Swiatek said. “They want some answers and some clarity from the government and we’re not getting that.”
Even though MUFON is often associated with the paranormal, Swiatek stressed that “we don’t know what is going on, so we’re not going to speculate.”
Rob Swiatek’s wife, Sue Swiatek, heads the Virginia chapter of MUFON.
“Whatever these objects end up being, it certainly has people watching the skies and seeing things,” Sue Swiatek said. “I think people get out of their houses more and try to see these things, and then they see something unfamiliar.”
She said she’s been seeing an increase in people wondering how they can join the organization and become “field investigators” who look into reports that come in.
With few confirmed details from the White House, the downing of the three unknown objects by U.S. fighter jets prompted wild speculation about what they were and where they came from.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that there was no indication of “aliens or extraterrestrial activity.”
President Joe Biden offered little reassurance or explanation of what to make of it all, following the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon crossing the country and the unprecedented peacetime shootdowns that followed, The Associated Press reported.
U.S. officials said they still know little about the three objects downed Friday off the coast of Alaska, Saturday over Canada, and Sunday over Lake Huron. But those shootdowns have been part of a more assertive response to aerial phenomena following the balloon episode blamed on an ongoing Beijing espionage program, The Associated Press reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
