UFOs? Lights in the sky? Flying saucers? York has a long — and ongoing — history of sightings

One witness watched a bright light shift in the night sky just a few weeks ago.

“What appeared to be a full moon abruptly moved across the sky,” the witness account stated, indicating the object traveled from south to southwest as they watched, stunned, below.

The object hung there for about two hours, according to the Oct. 21 report from Spring Garden Township in that thumb between York City and Springettsbury Township. Then around 10:30 p.m., the object dropped almost to the ground before shooting back up and over while shrinking in the process.

“At this point it’s a white dot that increased and decreased its illuminosity [sic],” the witness wrote.

This was the most recent account of a UFO sighting in York County and Pennsylvania posted on the National UFO Reporting Center’s website. It’s one of 170 submitted from across the county in the last 25 years.

But when it came to asking local police, with calls and emails to several departments, if they too had documents of calls reporting UFO activity?

The overwhelming response: No.

“I can confidently say that we have not received any UFO reports,” York City Police Capt. Daniel Lentz said.

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Lt. Adam Reed, the Pennsylvania State Police’s communications director, said anecdotally he didn’t recall receiving or hearing about any UFO-related calls in his eight years with the department.

If there’s an emergency, with potential danger to the public, he said troopers would be dispatched to investigate.

“Such would be the case if someone called in out of the norm ‘low flying lights,’ or some sort of crash of an aircraft, for example,” Reed said.

He also pointed out that PSP regulations say UFO reports can be directed to NUFORC.

The small organization is apparently the country’s prime collector of UFO data with more than 5,000 reports from Pennsylvania and more than 170,000 reports nationally and internationally, according to the site.

“If a crime hasn’t been committed, it’s not the business of law enforcement to investigate it,” said Peter Davenport, NUFORC director.

Communicating with NUFORC: The longtime head of what he described as a two-man operation based in Washington state said 911 centers across the country will direct callers to the organization’s hotline. He noted police aren’t set up to take information about UFOs or have time and resources to filter out crank calls.

They let NUFORC deal with it, he said.

The Federal Aviation Administration also keeps in contact with NUFORC about reports from aircraft, he added.

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Corroborating this, an FAA order on air traffic control procedures includes a section on UFO reports stating that people wanting to report UFO or unexplained phenomena should contact a data collection center like NUFORC, or police in emergencies.

Not that police around York have never been involved in UFO calls or sightings, at least according to archived newspaper clippings from the 1940s and ‘50s, as well as a few NUFORC reports.

“I saw a round orange object flickering like fire, it stopped, then made a right turn and headed away,” one report stated in 2012.

Shiloh sighting: The witness said they were at their mailbox in Shiloh when they saw the object coming in their direction and then stop in the sky around 9 p.m. on Aug. 14. They watched the light for about a minute calling 911, according to the report.

In the process of speaking to police, the witness reported the object started moving again, turned and faded into a cloud after about four or five minutes.

“All I know is it was either very big or it was close, because I could see it flickering,” the report stated.

Staff at York County’s Right-to-Know office said a record of the call doesn’t exist since the county’s 911 center only keeps records going back 10 years. The call reported on NUFORC is now more than 11 years old.

Even if there was a record, staff added that “Shiloh” would’ve been too vague a location without an address or street names to go with it.

West Manchester Township police did not return messages seeking information.

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In another account involving police, an anonymous person claimed on NUFORC that an officer from the now-Southern York Regional Police called them late one night in May 2008 to “advise of an unidentified object,” blue-green with orange flames, falling through the sky.

The report noted the light wasn’t a firework, and they believed it was either a meteor or a UFO. The report also stated the local emergency management agency was contacted.

Davenport noted on the report that the person didn’t give their identity or contact information.

The site shows a wide variety of accounts from York County. They range from simple notes about seeing lights, to longer, nuanced reports of activity, to elaborate descriptions of sightings and experiences.

Accounts not vetted: Reading the reports comes with a mileage-may-vary caveat, in that NUFORC posts the accounts or tips from how they’re received via the site, email or the organization’s hotline. They’re not vetted, Davenport said, though he added he does take time to screen reports, proofread them and edit out profanity or personal information, as well as scrutinize them for hoaxes.

“We are more a conduit of information,” he said. “We leave it up to the person reading the report to determine to his own satisfaction if it’s likely a genuine report or a case of mistaken identity or an out-and-out hoax.”

Davenport said he’s developed certain instincts over his decades in the field for when accounts appear to be hoaxes, and he’ll note his suspicions in reports.

A person in one account described seeing flashing lights in the middle of I-83 near Shrewsbury the night of Sept. 14, 2014 — “Crazy circle in sky 3 different colors.”

Davenport added the witness was anonymous with no contact information, and the summary includes a big “((HOAX??))” at the front.

‘Heavy burden’: He said NUFORC is pretty much him in Washington and a webmaster in California handling all the reports. And he’s getting old now as a man in his 70s who’s served as the center’s director since 1994.

He still keeps the torch lit, but he said the center doesn’t have resources to investigate accounts — that’s more a job for the Cincinnati, Ohio-based Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, with which Davenport has an affiliation.

“It’s a heavy burden of work,” he said.

He added he’s affiliating with other UFO investigators to try and follow up on some cases as he said the center recently started receiving 10 to 40 reports a day.

“The volume of reports has increased dramatically in recent months,” he said.

Davenport couldn’t pinpoint why the number had jumped. But he speculated it’s related to the federal government opening up more in the past few years about UFOs — or to use the new term, UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomenon — and the subsequent media coverage.

Federal resources: The Pentagon has declassified and released videos and accounts from fighter pilots who reported witnessing objects in the skies, during the recent activity.

On Halloween, the Defense Department launched a new online portal for current and former military members, federal employees and contractors to report their information about government programs involving UFOs. The reporting form is through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which opened in 2022 to investigate activities by mysterious craft, according to a news release.

NASA also released the results of a study into UFOs in September.

A whistleblower and former Air Force intelligence officer alleged to a congressional subcommittee in July that the feds covered up a program to reverse engineer UFOs and that the U.S. has likely been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.

The Pentagon denied the claims.

‘People deserve the truth:’ The hearing came as the government is reportedly putting more emphasis on scientifically researching the situation and easing long-standing stigmas, much of it from the government since about the 1960s, on reporting UFO sightings.

Davenport still feels the stigma sting, saying he doesn’t trust “mealy-mouthed” bureaucrats to be honest. He also held the media culpable for not pushing the government harder on UFOs as a public information issue.

“It’s time for them to reveal everything they know, and everything they’ve collected should be made available to the public,” he said.

A desire for greater accountability is one of the key motivators for staying in his role, which he called sometimes thankless, hard work. People deserve the truth, he said.

“Why they’re shielding the American people from this information, I have no idea,” Davenport said.

Longtime interest: Davenport’s interest in UFOs started when he said he saw one as a boy in the 1950s. About 10 years later, he investigated a case in New Hampshire in 1965, his NUFORC biography shows.

That year is also the date for the earliest report of a UFO sighting in York County on NUFORC’s site.

The report, made in December 2003, gave an account from approximately May 1965.

“I was on my way home from work on a two-lane country road when I saw what appeared to be an airplane heading straight at my car,” the report states. “I stopped my car, confused as to why it wasn’t moving and watched it for quite some time.”

The person went on to say they were about 15 to 20 feet from the object and described it as nearly two car lengths across and made of what looked like “burnished aluminum.”

“There was a ‘seam’ in the center as you would see if you put two plates together in a () direction but on its side. Strangely enough, there was no sound coming from the saucer nor from anything else,” the report stated.

The person reported the object never moved until they lost their nerve and drove away.

That wasn’t their only encounter as the person reported they had two other sightings that summer “up close and personal.”

Earlier sightings: Archives at the York County History Center show the county had even earlier brushes with UFO activity. They include two newspaper articles from July 1947 that joined headlines nationwide about hundreds of “flying disc” sightings that summer.

A Gazette and Daily story from July 10, two days after the infamous Roswell incident was reported, said four residents reported seeing “flying saucers” similar to those seen by people “in most of the other 48 states.”

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An 18-year-old woman told the paper, according to the article, that she and a friend saw “the saucers” while they swam at Day’s mill near Brillhart.

Two other men from Stewartstown reportedly saw eight “mystery objects” over Conowingo dam the week before.

Then on July 12, the Gazette and Daily published a photo of a man named Joseph Kemper holding an aluminum disc with radio parts attached and some red “alleged Oriental characters painted over it.”

The caption says Kemper found the disc in a cornfield north of York City and brought it to police.

Nelson Schultz, the police chief at the time, was quoted as saying of the disc, “If that will fly, so will a cow.” The caption goes on to question whether a “practical joker” wanted in on the phenomenon from the summer.

The local history center showed copies of four more UFO stories from Gazette and Daily archives from the early 1950s.

“A light of the ‘flying saucer’ variety was reported north and west of York,” started a story from July 30, 1952.

The story cited several residents as seeing round lights moving in the sky the night before toward the areas of Emigsville and Mount Wolf.

Then-police captain William Farrell was among those cited, as he told the paper a friend told him that another person saw “an undetermined number of ‘flying saucers.’”

A follow-up article the next day cited a Shiloh man as explaining his certainty that the lights were beams reflecting off low clouds, and that teenagers had parked cars near Hershey Heights and played with spotlights there for some months.

Another story from January 1954 cited two Gazette and Daily reporters as among witnesses to an “unidentified object.” The reporters believed the object looked like a meteor or a streak of flame.

And a July 1954 article also cited sightings of “flying saucers” in the sky.

170 local NUFORC reports: Since then, York County communities are named in nearly 170 reports on NUFORC’s database, starting with that account from approximately 1965 on up to the report from Oct. 21.

Of that amount, “York” shows up about 65 times as the community name given on the site.

Hanover is named in 20 reports, followed by Dillsburg with 12 reports and Stewartstown with seven reports.

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Seven reports involve Stewartstown. Six involve Spring Grove, plus one in neighboring Thomasville.

Red Lion accounts for five reports, along with four in nearby Felton, one in Dallastown and one in Windsor.

West Manchester Township, through Shiloh, and Newberry Township each have three reports.

UFO reports on the site also include Mount Wolf, Fawn Grove, Wrightsville, Dover and Manchester, as well as Springettsbury, Fairview, North Codorus, Dover, Hellam and Lower Chanceford townships.

In nearby counties, Lancaster County and Lancaster City together show up in approximately 135 reports. Cumberland County, primarily involving Mechanicsburg, accounts for about 86 reports. And 24 reports come from Adams County, including about nine from Gettysburg.

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Hard to verify: What people saw, what the accounts describe, is debatable in most of the cases.

Davenport believes, from the reports NUFORC receives, that most people didn’t witness an alien spacecraft.

He estimated that maybe 10,000 to 20,000 of the more than 170,000 reports on the site involved legitimate sightings.  And that may be the tip of the iceberg since he said many people don’t report sightings or experiences, or they decline to go on the record.

Finding those nuggets of information, though, means weeding through accounts where people probably mistook different things for UFOs, such as lights from stars, nearby planets, radio towers, camera anomalies and satellites.

Launches of Starlink telecommunications satellites by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company tend to confuse people since they’ll appear in the night sky as chains of light. They show up in a lot of TikTok videos with UFO tags.

Both NUFORC and MUFON list the Starlink launches with other common misidentified phenomenon.

A SpaceX rocket launch last year confused several skywatchers on Sept. 24 last year. Reports were posted to NUFORC from Dillsburg, Hanover and Gettysburg, along with about eight other communities across Pennsylvania.

Still, Davenport is certain some things are out there.

“I believe we’re being visited routinely by a relatively small number of craft,” he said. “It’s been going on, I suspect, for a long time.”

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— Aimee Ambrose can be reached at aambrose@yorkdispatch.com or via Twitter: @aimee_TYD.