Big City Sightings: Philadelphia by National Geographic

Big CitySightings: Philadelphia

Bucks County UFOs

Philadelphia (View larger version)

SeanPavonePhoto

By: Patrick J. Kiger

Published June 8, 2012

It was 10:25 in the evening on January 1, 2011, and in the Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, PA, a  man and his girlfriend were riding in his car near the Doylestown train station. Suddenly, though the light fog and faint drizzle, they spotted numerous bright lights in the night sky. Their curiosity aroused, they pulled into a parking lot behind a bank and got out of the car to get a better look, and were astounded to see twenty objects moving north to south across the eastern sky.

“They were following a semi-circular trajectory, appearing out of the dark in the southeastern sky, moving towards our position slightly while continuing north,” the man recalled in an anonymous report filed in the database of the Mutual UFO Network, an organization that collects information and investigates possible sightings of extraterrestrial visitors. After covering much the length of the sky, they began gaining altitude and moving away from us before disappearing again into the darkness. They continued in a constant stream like this for about ten minutes, with new ones appearing in the south east as they disappeared to the northeast.” 

The couple watched in amazement for the next 15 minutes or so, as the objects moved across the sky in what appeared to be intricate formations, with all of them maintaining what appeared to the same constant speed. 

“The objects themselves looked like balls of fire,” the man wrote in his online report. “Some were slightly larger and brighter than others. They ranged in color from a deep red to bright yellowish-orange. However all had an appearance similar to that of a campfire at a distance. They almost looked like bioluminescent deep sea creatures moving in the pitch dark of the ocean.” While he was unable to pinpoint their altitude, the objects seemed to be flying lower than commercial jetliners travel.  

The man noted in his report that he became upset with his girlfriend, because she was unfamiliar with the camera function on her BlackBerry phone, and had difficulty taking pictures. “However, we did get it working and managed to snap a couple pictures. The pictures by no means do justice to what we saw, and the actual objects appeared much brighter, larger, and in greater numbers.” 

While seeing a pack of UFOs is always an extraordinary experience, it’s perhaps less so in Bucks County. In recent years, the populous suburb has become nearly as famous for prolific possible sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft as it is for its picturesque covered bridges.

According to a 2008 Bucks County Courier Times article, MUFON sent investigators to the area that summer, after a cluster of startling UFO incidents. On January 27 of that year, residents made two separate reports of what appeared to be alien spacecraft near the Oxford Valley Mall in Middletown. One was a object “with six lights in the shape of a boomerang,” while the other object reportedly was “hovering like an octopus” over the now-defunct Don Pablos Mexican restaurant in Middletown. That same day, a pizza deliveryman in Vermillion Hills reported seeing a UFO hovering over the tree line, which he described as having “blinking red, white and green lights.”

Since the unidentified man and his girlfriend spotted the UFO formation in January 2011, there have been 44 additional reports of UFO sightings in Bucks County, according to the MUFON database.