Flying objects and shrunken heads: World UFO Day feted amid surge in sightings, government denials

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — For those of you who don’t celebrate World UFO Day, consider this:

A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer told Congress last summer about a government program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects.

The Mexican Congress held an unprecedented session in September during which supposed mummies were presented as “nonhuman beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution.”

And NASA now has a director of research for unidentified flying objects, or what it calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena.”

Never mind that the Pentagon denied the former intelligence officer’s claims; that Mexican researchers said the mummies “made no sense;” and that a NASA study found no evidence of extraterrestrials.

There’s still never been a better time to mark World UFO Day.

A look at the history of World UFO Day:

Aliens? Or just balloons and crash test dummies?

World UFO Day has its roots in the so-called Roswell Incident on July 2, 1947. On that date, something crashed at what was then the J.B. Foster ranch in New Mexico. There were reports that the U.S. military had recovered a “flying disc.” But officials later said the debris was merely the remnants of a high-altitude weather balloon.

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