Independence Day UFO Sightings Flood NUFORC Hotline
Many of the UFO reports made each year end up inside a decommissioned nuclear missile complex in the scrubland of Lincoln County in eastern Washington state. That’s where NUFORC (National UFO Reporting Center) director Peter Davenport has lived and worked for the last four years.
Because Davenport’s 24/7 hotline receives so many reports each year, it’s notable when he flags a sighting or group of sightings for special attention. That, according to this July 6 NUFORC posting, is what's happening to many of the sighting reports received July 4:
Over the last 48 hours, NUFORC has received almost 100 similar reports of very peculiar events, which have been witnessed across the U. S. and Canada on July 4th, and perhaps on July 3rd, as well. The sightings are a phenomenon for which we have no ready explanation. Many of the reports from both days have been submitted by seemingly serious-minded individuals, many of whom apparently witnessed the events with multiple other witnesses present.
After announcing the wave of sightings on July 6 on Coast-to-Coast, a nationally syndicated radio program hosted by George Noory, NUFORC received almost 100 additional reports, many involving multiple witnesses across the U.S. and Canada.
According to Davenport, the reports "are similar, in that the witnesses have described seeing strange red, orange, or yellow ‘fireballs,’ which have been seen either to hover in the night sky or to streak overhead, sometimes individually, and on some occasions in clusters. In some instances, the objects were observed against a clear, cloudless sky, and in other cases they were observed below solid cloud cover or in broken overcast conditions.
“Our strong opinion is that the objects seen cannot be easily ascribed to any prosaic event of terrestrial origin that we have been able to identify.”
A Stanford alumnus with graduate degrees in genetics and biochemistry from the University of Washington, Davenport is the former president of BioSyn, a Seattle-area biotechnology company. He cashed out of BioSyn in 1994 with what the Seattle Times called “a small fortune” and that same year assumed the reigns of NUFORC, which he funds out-of-pocket.
Founded in 1974, NUFORC is known internationally as one of the world’s most comprehensive UFO databases. Reports to NUFORC may be made anonymously either online or, if the sighting occurred within the last week, by phone at 206.722.3000.
Photo of Ray Davenport by Ray-Paul Nielsen, Brier, WA
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