UFO Sightings. Increasingly. Everywhere. 

I’ve been discovering that regular people, like my filmmaker/digital artist pal Stephen Zoller and I, aren’t the only ones who’ve witnessed UFOs. Celebrities like Russell Crowe, Dan Aykroyd, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Will Smith have reportedly witnessed unidentified sightings. 

In 1997, former Arizona Governor Fife Symington and actor Kurt Russell witnessed one of the most seminal incidents, the Phoenix Lights. Russell claimed he saw the “Lights” while flying his private plane. In fact, he may’ve been the first person to officially log the sighting. (Click on Aykroyd, Symington and Russell).

So, how many sightings are seen on average and what public groups do the tracking? US-based MUFON is the oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization that collects sighting reports from the public, and then investigates them. Its goal is to answer the biggest question, Are we alone in the universe?

MUFON reports it gets 500-1000 reports a month from around the world, and then its field investigators review the case, and try to come up with an hypothesis. MUFON executive director Jan Harzan tells us: “In 75-80% of cases it’s an IFO, an identified flying object, maybe a natural phenomenon like planet Venus, there’s also man made phenomena like balloons, planes. But when you crawl through it all, there are cases that are extraordinary...We have a science review board made up of scientists from around world and the US to review significant cases and try to render an opinion on them. We want to be the truth-seekers of the UFO field.”

In a previous article, “The Reality of UFOs May Be Hiding in Plain Sight,” my Ufologist friend and digital artist Steve Zoller suggested that “they’re not little green men from a far-flung part of the galaxy. It’s just way too much of a scientific leap. Interstellar travel from Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star at a mere 26 trillion miles away, would fly in the face of Einstein’s theory of mass-energy equivalence.”

So, I asked him some more questions for BBN Times:

Q. Next month, tens of thousands are expected to head to Nevada and “storm” Area 51 in an attempt to pressure the government to come clean about UFO’s. What do you make of it?

A. I wish I could be there. A growing number of people – at least those with half a brain – are starting to look at UFOs as our last possible hope of surviving the self-induced environmental and social catastrophes that are headed our way.

Q. Could you reiterate your thinking about these “aliens” actually coming from our own future?

A. Personally, I don’t believe they’re extraterrestrials. I think it’s more likely that they originate from right here on good ‘Ole Planet Earth’ — albeit from a far-flung future. They’ve developed the ability to move freely through Earth’s timeline but are forbidden to alter the past in any substantial way otherwise they would initiate temporal annihilation back in the future.

Q. So, because of this timeline conundrum, these futurians can’t change the course of history otherwise their future could cease to exist, right?

A. Unfortunately, yes. But I hold out hope that I’m wrong.

Q. What do you make of the fact that, over the years, thousands claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials from all over the galaxy?

A. Yes, but when those cases were put under closer scrutiny the majority of the abductees happened to be well-to-do women from Upper East Side Manhattan and had on average ten years of psychoanalysis under their belts. I jest.

Q. Fair enough, but you agree that there’ve been several incidents of contact with the occupants of UFOs that ring true. Three in particular are the Barney and Betty Hill Incident in 1961, the Travis Walton abduction in 1975 and the Phoenix Lights appearance in 1997. [For those unfamiliar with the details, check out Wikipedia and learn more.  The accounts are compelling and genuine.]

A. They are. Maybe there is a glimmer of hope, after all, and the futurians have solved the timeline conundrum.  

Q. But both the Hills and Travis Walton claimed that they were abducted by aliens from Zeta Reticuli, a star system about 45 light years away, so doesn’t this fly in the face of your theory?

A. Any civilization that has conquered the space-time continuum could find a way to scramble brains.

Q. Also fair, so how do the Phoenix Lights fit in?  Thousands in the Phoenix area watched a giant V shaped craft (estimated to be a mile wide) glide slowly overhead at a low altitude. There were thousands of witnesses, including two pilots, Hollywood star Kurt Russelland former Arizona Governor Fife Symington III. Yet as far as I recall there were no reports of contact.

A. Except there was a retired shuttle astronaut who watched the ship silently sail over his backyard. He made a very astute observation about the event – that it wasn’t an accident. The beings inside that flying city were making a statement. We are here and we are real! I don’t care whether they’re from the future or Pluto, I want to know what brings them to our present reality in such great numbers. I’m not the only one who sees this convergence of catastrophes heading our way as epoch changing. If I were religious, I might interpret it as biblical in nature.

And that will be the heady topic of our next installment in our UFO series. 

For my other BBN Times stories on UFOs, check out: “Regenesis & the Secrecy Surrounding UFOs Starts at the Gas Pump” and “Filmmaker says Truth About UFOs is not About Little Green Men but is Hiding in Plain Sight.”

All graphics by Stephen Zoller. Author/blogger Ashley Jude Collie’s new sci-fi, dystopian novel, REJEX, is available on Amazon (US)and Amazon (UK), and Amazon worldwide.