Hoosiers On High Alert For UFOs
Carson Gerber
CNHI State Reporter
INDIANA — A Cass County resident stood outside around 2 a.m. Sunday watching as an unidentified flying object “bounced around” above her house flashing blue, red and green. After 20 minutes witnessing the incident, she decided to call 911.
The deputy who responded also seemed befuddled by what he saw. He reported to dispatch that the closer he got to the object, the further away it appeared.
When Sunday night arrived, more reports of UFOs came in. Terry Tolle, who runs a Facebook page called Indiana UFO Reporting Center, said he fielded multiple calls from Hoosiers witnessing something strange in the sky.
As it happened, there most definitely was something out of the ordinary visible over Indiana on Sunday — but it wasn’t extraterrestrials from a distant galaxy.
It was a SpaceX rocket and 55 Starlink satellites launching into orbit just after midnight Sunday from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“In my opinion, in the last three days, anything seen in Indiana is most likely Starlink,” Tolle said.
The company owned by billionaire Elon Musk has been frequently launching satellites into space since 2019 to provide internet and phone service around the globe.
The big difference this time, Tolle explained, is people in Indiana actually noticed.
That’s because Hoosiers are on heightened alert following a weekend in which the U.S. military shot down three UFOs in Alaska and Canada. On Saturday, the government also temporarily shut down airspace in central Montana after the military saw something unusual on radar.
President Joe Biden and other top Washington officials have said little about the repeated shootdowns, which began with a suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this month. Pentagon officials said the three objects taken down over the weekend posed no security threats, but have not disclosed their origins or purpose.
That led newly elected U.S. Rep. Erin Houchin of Indiana to push Biden to release more details on the incidents.
“Four incursions into our airspace in a matter of days is beyond concerning, and the Biden administration owes the American people a full explanation of what these objects are and what their purpose is,” she said in statement released Monday. “We shouldn’t have more questions than answers right now.”
The lack of information is helping fuel conspiracy theories and conjecture on the internet. One popular claim circulating suggests, with no evidence, that the U.S. deployed the airborne devices as a way to frighten and distract Americans.
Online searches for the term “UFO” also shot up as some people suggested the devices may be from another planet. Online posts mentioning extraterrestrials increased by nearly 300% since the first balloon was identified, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press that reviewed millions of posts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
Even before the weekend’s incidents, Hoosiers have been talking more about UFOs since the U.S. intelligence community began releasing once classified reports in 2020 of sightings and other encounters with flying objects, according to Neil Ainslie, director of the Fort Wayne Astronomical Society’s StartQuest Observatory.
The most recent drop of declassified UFO reports came in June from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“People want to see UFOs,” Ainslie said. “The excitement of being able to encounter somebody from another star system is on people’s minds.”
It also makes sense that people are seeing more of what they think are unidentified objects simply because there really are more satellites and other human devices filling the sky than ever before, Ainslie noted.
“I think that with the increased number of SpaceX launches, and also other newer commercial launch companies, there is an increased number of sightings that people get to encounter,” he said.
For some, it can be tempting to tie those sightings to conspiracy theories, explained Tolle, who runs the UFO Facebook page. He advised that although U.S. officials are staying quiet on the weekend’s events, there’s almost always a reasonable explanation for what someone sees in the sky.
“You’ve got to be skeptical when you’re dealing with this,” he said. “The majority of the stuff is identifiable, and I really don’t think that people are seeing that many real unidentified flying objects. From my own perspective, I just don’t believe that.”
