In the spirit of this news, I decided to ask the BuzzFeed Community if they've had first-hand experiences with aliens, UFOs, or experienced any other inexplicable extraterrestrial phenomenon. As always, they had some out-of-this-world stories. Here are 13 that they shared:
Note: submissions have also been pulled from this Reddit thread.
1. "When I was driving home from work one summer night in high school, I looked outside my sunroof and saw an object changing colors pretty rapidly in the sky. I immediately called my mom and told her to look outside at the sky and tell me if she saw what I was seeing. She did and when I got home, she was outside in the driveway, waiting for me. We both stood in the middle of the driveway looking at this object still in the sky when it suddenly disappeared. Then out of nowhere, I saw this MASSIVE — and I mean massive — triangular object with red lights at each corner. It was at least as long and wide as a football field and made zero noise slowly going over the top of us, not even a hundred feet up."
"Suddenly it accelerated off into the night sky at a speed that definitely wasn’t humanly possible. I mean like zero to a thousand, it seemed like. It disappeared into the night sky."
—Anonymous
2. "I grew up in Iowa, and there are a lot of people here who have stories about aliens or UFOs. I always heard things from my family about lights in the sky or weird noises in fields at night, but while I believed in aliens, I was always skeptical of my family. That was until I was 16 (around 2015). We lived on the edge of town, and it was just fields past that. I took my dog outside through our garage late at night. He was excited as usual, but before I opened the door, the hair on his back stood up and he tried to go back inside. I didn’t think much of it, so I took his leash, opened the door, turned on the light. About 10 feet away was something green. It was crouched down, knees bent backwards, looking down."
"It stood immediately at maybe 7 or 8 feet tall. As soon as it saw me, it ran. I’ve never seen anything run that fast on two feet. I’ve replayed that in my head so many times and told a few people I trust about it, but it’s not something you can really believe just by hearing about it. I have lots of other stories about my experiences, but I think most people still need time and evidence before they’re willing to believe it."
—Anonymous
3. "It was1997, in Colorado Springs, CO. I was 8 years old, playing in the sand volleyball court at the park down the street from my house. I was engrossed in my activity — burying my collection of Happy Meal toys in the sand, then digging them back out, and repeating. I was looking down, but decided suddenly that I needed to look up, because the world around me had lost all sound. There was no longer any ambient noise. No traffic noise from the busy streets just a block over, no more dogs barking, no more birds chirping, nothing. I looked at the street that bordered the park, and that is when I saw it."
"It looked like a stealth bomber turned sideways (nose leading, one wing down toward the road and the other pointed up at the sky). It was completely a shiny black in color, as tall as a house, and was shaped like an arrowhead. It was cruising the street at maybe 3 mph, just gliding over the road. I watched it for maybe 20 seconds. As soon as it had passed behind some two story houses and out of my sight, I got my hearing back full force. I ran home with my piss-soaked pants and never spoke a word of it to anybody."
Here's a visual of what the whole thing looked like, according to Redditor u/NegativecapS.
4. "I can't say for sure what happened to me that night, but here is what I do know: I was driving home for the weekend from school at Indiana University. It takes me about two hours to get home, and I left Bloomington around 10 p.m. At exactly 10:53, I was on a rural stretch of the two-lane highway I take home, and I noticed what appeared to be flashing lights behind me. I thought, 'Great, I'm getting pulled over,' so I turned onto the next country road about a quarter mile from where I noticed the lights. As the car came to a stop and I started to open my glove box to get out my registration and proof of insurance, the lights suddenly disappeared, and no car drove past."
"Now here is where the story takes a turn for the weird, and I am sure you guys will think I'm just making it all up because it really does seem like something straight out of a typical UFO movie or story. The electronics in my car started to go haywire. The radio was randomly changing stations while the volume kept going up and down. The dome light and headlights started to flicker, turning off and back on. This was at 10:56 p.m.. I started thinking to myself that my battery must be failing, or that I had a short somewhere in the electric system of my car. So, I leaned down to pop the hood to take a look at the battery...and that was the last thing I remember doing.
The next thing I knew, I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the night sky full of bright stars. It was a cold night and it seemed like I had never seen stars that bright in my life. I sat up and looked around, and I saw absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. I was in the middle of a field, surrounded by corn stalks left over from the recent harvest. As I began coming to my senses, I started to freak out. Where was I? Why the fuck was I asleep in the middle of a field? Where the fuck was my car? I got up and started walking toward the distant headlights I could see from a road about half a mile away.
When I got to the nearest intersection, I looked at the signs which read 350N and 50W. I was half a mile away from my car, which was just right off the main road. I started walking toward the headlights I could see on the main road. I can't say how long it took me to walk the half mile, but it couldn't have been more than 10 or 15 minutes. When I arrived at my car, all the lights were out — my battery had died, which struck me as odd because I couldn't have been gone for that long. I looked at my phone, which was sitting on the passenger seat, and the time was 2:17 a.m.. Over three hours had passed since I turned off onto the side road for the flashing lights behind me.
I remember sitting in my car completely dumbfounded, wondering what the hell had just happened to me. After about half an hour of just sitting there, I remembered that my battery was dead, so I got on the phone and called AAA to come out and give me a jump. It took about an hour for them to get out to me since I was a good distance away from the nearest town; during which time I just sat in silence, running through the possible scenarios in my head concerning what had just happened. To this day I couldn't tell you what really happened to me that night. All I know is I can't think of any plausible explanation as to why I woke up over half a mile away from my car in the middle of a corn field more than three hours after I had stopped. I have only shared this story with one other person — my uncle. I'm sure people would either look at me like I've got three heads or would call bullshit on the whole story. I can't blame them...if somebody came to me with a story like that, that so closely mirrors the stereotypical encounter story, I probably wouldn't believe them, either."
5. "I’ve seen a UFO twice. The first time was in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’m from. I was out with a neighbor in the street at night time when a big green light came across the sky, got huge, and left. We lived by an airport, so I knew what planes looked like — this was no plane. My neighbor and I stood there in shock until he said, 'You just saw that, right?' It was wild and unforgettable."
"Fast forward to about 2013-ish and I was in Montana, where I went to undergrad. I was outside in the middle of the day with a friend and another friend’s mom. We were on the patio when a pink light came across the sky, got HUGE, then exited the sky. It was the EXACT same phenomenon, but in a different color, different time of day, in a different part of the country.
I know what I saw was aliens, and it wasn’t scary; more like fascinating to watch. I just stood there staring in awe both times. I hope I see it again sometime, it was absolutely beautiful and unlike anything else. I would love to observe it again if I’m lucky enough."
—Anonymous
6. "This was in Edray, West Virginia. One night a few years back, my friend was driving home when he decided to take the 'long way home.' As we were driving along this fairly deserted back road, I began to zone out and stare at this blinking red light off in the distance. I casually thought to myself, 'I wonder when they built a cell phone tower all the way out here?' Suddenly, the light blinked and was dramatically closer than it had been just a moment earlier. At this point, my friend pointed it out and stopped in the road. It blinked once more and was directly in front and over top of us. The red light was so bright, it flooded the car in a deep scarlet hue."
"I leaned forward so that I could see directly into the light and in that brief moment, I feel a flood of negative emotions hit me. The closest description I can offer is that I felt like I was naked under a giant microscope and having every single pore examined, thoroughly.
I looked away from the light and asked my friend to drive. He barely responded, apparently in a similar state. Then he snapped out of it and started driving. A little ways down the road, I noticed that the red light wasn't fading and the interior of the car was still clearly lit by it. I looked out the window and, to my horror, the light was following us. It did so for approximately a mile or two.
Then, the light unexpectedly veered off to the left and came down to ground level in a patch of trees adjacent to the road. My friend stopped the car again and continued to stare at it. Abruptly he, declared he was going to get out of the car. He looked like he was in some sort of trance. He opened the door, and I grabbed his arm and told him that if he got out, I would get in the driver seat and leave him. We had to leave that instant.
He looked at me and seemed to come to. He punched the gas so hard, the tires lost traction and spun. The light remained stationary as we rode away, but I've never looked at the night sky the same."
7. "This is not my story, but my dad's. He grew up in western Oregon and one time when he was around 12, he was playing with his brother by a river near his house. It was the middle of the afternoon and sunny out. They looked up and saw a very large, round craft that was unlike anything they had ever seen before. It was completely silent. The next thing he remembered was feeling like he had just woken up, but he was standing by the river and it was now dark out. He and his brother ran home and his mother began yelling at them for being out so late and missing supper. He had no recollection of what happened during this missing time and neither did his brother."
—Anonymous
8. "One night at about 4 a.m., I went down to the kitchen to get a drink of water and heard this weird, kind of low-pitched buzzing sound coming from outside. I went out to the backyard and, I shit you not, I saw this fucking bright, rounded object hovering about 600ft above me. I just froze there. I almost felt like I was paralyzed for a moment. I watched it ascend higher into the air and take off at an incredible speed, disappearing into the wintery clouds. That night I had a dream that I was abducted. Now when I think about it, I wonder if the dream was real, but was purposely made to seem like a dream? I obviously don't know for sure, but it was terrifying!"
9. "I was in my dorm room at Michigan State University in 1994 or 1995. The blinds were half-closed and I was sitting in my room studying. Suddenly, there was a weird green glow coming through the blinds. I looked out and there was a glowing green oblong object just hanging there in the sky. I watch it for about three minutes and then it just shot away at high speed. I’m a HUGE skeptic, so I thought I was maybe imagining things, but the next morning in the university newspaper there was an article about it and a bunch of other people saw it, too."
—Anonymous
10. "In the early Spring of 2011, my brother and I were sitting in my car in a strip mall parking lot on the north side of Terre Haute, Indiana. We had just exited a Chinese restaurant and were getting ready to drive north to the cemetery where my mother is interned. We simultaneously noticed a large, dark, blimp-shaped object just below these thick, dark clouds. It was silently still, below the clouds. My brother and I looked at each other and blurted out loud at the same time, 'What the hell is that?' As we said this, the object slowly began to move toward us, just a little."
"Then it stopped again in midair and slightly turned sideways. It straightened out again, with the front of it facing directly toward us, and began moving slowly up and into the clouds. As it did this, you could see a magnetic field or something like that, fluctuating above the object. But the most astounding thing that we saw was how the object began shrinking into a pinpoint, then disappeared into nothing, up and into the clouds. There was no sound, no normal aircraft-type of movement, nothing that fit what one would expect to see from a man-made object. There was moderate traffic just below the object, but we couldn't tell if anyone else was seeing what we saw.
I called the police, the weather stations, and the airports. No weather balloons were out in that area, nor would they look and behave the way the object we saw did. I reported our sighting to MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), who had my story on their website for a time after someone from MUFON interviewed me. Not long later, though, I could no longer find my story. Seemingly, it was removed.
To this day, my brother and I are baffled by our encounter and will never forget it. We knew the object was not a plane or a helicopter, or anything of the like. None of what we saw made sense, but we both know that we saw it. So my conclusion is, my brother and I unequivocally witnessed a UFO that day."
—Anonymous
11. "I was a young teenager in Surry, Maine in the mid-1970s. I was sitting by the bigger window in our house that faced across the driveway to our older house one early evening when I watched a beam of light come down from the sky and hover noiselessly behind a cherry tree at the end of my grandmother's flower garden. It stayed there for several minutes and then receded the same way, again without sound. We lived out in the country and there was no traffic noise or even the sound of a plane or helicopter. I still have no idea what it was."
12. "Like 17 years ago, my family and I were in a state in south Mexico. Due to an accident, the whole city had lost power for a few hours. It was the middle of the summer and the sky was dark and starless, thanks to the rain clouds covering the sky. My mom and I were on one of the balconies of the house, enjoying the cool breeze before the storm started. Out of nowhere, something appeared way up in the sky. It was an oval shaped, with orange lights circling very fast around its edges. It hovered for a few seconds, then began moving in seemingly impossible ways."
"It was so fast it almost seemed like it teleported itself. It moved in sharp angles, almost like it was forming triangles, but it never finished the shape before starting a new one in another direction. It lasted for like a minute or two, and then as fast as it arrived, it went away. I don’t know what it was, not even drones today are able to move that way. Either some government had some extremely futuristic technology 17 years ago and decided to test it in the south of Mexico, or something far more advanced decided to vacation near the golf of Mexico along with us."
—Anonymous
13. And finally, "My mom tells a story of her and her friend. Let's call her friend 'Lisa.' When my mom and Lisa were teenagers, they were up on the roof of Lisa's house when they saw a bright light in the sky. Next thing they know, the light was gone. Thing is, they thought they'd only been on the roof for like 15 minutes, but something like three hours had passed. Mom doesn't remember anything about what happened during that time, and Lisa simply refused to talk about it. She would answer my mom with things like, 'I dunno' and 'Just drop it' for a long time. A couple months later, mom moved away and lost contact with Lisa for about 10 years. Eventually, she finally met up with her again and immediately noticed that something is odd about Lisa."
"Lisa appeared very 'distant' to her, with a very 'dreamy' demeanor. Like she was really happy and at peace, but for no good reason. After they talked for a bit, Lisa brought up the incident on the roof. Mom said she still doesn't really remember anything about it, but Lisa remembered. She remembers everything. She said that at first, it was all in bits and pieces and she couldn't remember any of it clearly. She was confused and scared and wanted to avoid discussing it. Then, as time passed, she began to remember more of it.
She remembered the other three times she claimed to have been abducted after that clearly as well. At first, they paralyzed her somehow and did all sorts of invasive experiments on her, but by the most recent time, they stopped probing her and began to talk with her. They didn't speak English or any other human language, but she could understand everything they said, even though she couldn't speak their language herself. Apparently they told her all sorts of things — stuff about space, Earth itself, and, most shockingly, predicted years beforehand that she would get pregnant in a specific year and that it would be a stillborn, as well that she would never be able to have children again. They told her that it was not their fault and they had even made an attempt to save her from this fate, but they were unsuccessful.
They also told her that they had abducted my mother another time, after that first incident. Mom says she has no recollection of any other potential abductions, but she does have recurring nightmares of being abducted. Still, she's 'almost sure' that they're just that: nightmares.
Anyway, Lisa told mom that every time she spoke with them, she came to understand 'the truth' more and more. When mom inquired what 'the truth' was, Lisa just said, 'You will know eventually,' and she said that once she learned of 'the truth,' then 'everything became wonderful.'
Mom has seen her a few more times over the years (we still live in another state from her), and she apparently has a pretty normal life, and doesn't like, obsess over alien stuff (like some supposed alien abductees do). She only ever brings it up in passing, not like it's a central part of her daily life."
Have you ever had a UFO or alien encounter like these? If so, tell us about it in the comments below or via this anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.