As reported

Cone over Arlington, MA

A witness account on file, unevaluated. Most of the archive rests here, and honestly so.

The report, as filed

Cone Shaped light from bright dot. ((NUFORC Note: Missile launch. PD))

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center. Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.

Ask for the records

What would the paper say?

For a dated, located U.S. sighting, FAA radar data and ATC communications are the records most likely to exist. Through Aletheca, the house instrument, anyone can commission the request — filed, chased, and published in the open, refusals included. The draft goes over already written: the records sought, and the date window they would live in.

Commission this request on Aletheca →

Routed to: Federal Aviation Administration · records window 2009-09-16 → 2009-10-03

From the same sky

Related entries

November 25, 2023 · 12:10 AM · TRIANGLE

Arlington, MA

I was driving east on Route 2 towards Boston a little after midnight when I saw a low flying craft in the sky a little ahead of me. It was heading in my direction over the highway. It had fairly nondescript blinking red and blue lights on it, and a very bright downward facing white light on the underside of its nose. I assumed it was a helicopter with a search light on, and turned my head up to look at it as I passed underneath. To my surprise, however, it had what appeared to be a V-shaped formation of maybe 4 or 6 lights on the bottom, with the brightest light serving as the center point at the front of the V shape. It did not appear to be moving in any sort of extraordinary manner, and everything that I saw aside from the V shaped formation seemed consistent with it being a helicopter. I was also near Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford/ Lexington, although the object appeared to be too slow moving for it to have been an airplane. I have seen things that I would generally classify as UFO’s on at least 2 previous occasions, and am generally accepting of the idea that there are things in our skies that we lack a solid understanding of. There is definitely a part of me that wants to be able to say that I saw something that we cannot explain through conventional knowledge, so I am fully accepting that there may be some cognitive biases at play here. That said, I’m mainly posting here on the off-chance that someone else saw the same thing and was similarly unable to identify it, as there were numerous other cars on the highway at the time and it is a fairly densely populated area. [NUFORC annotation: Helicopter - Possible]

August 28, 2021 · 7:00 PM · OTHER

Arlington, MA

It looked like an upside down skeleton key shape, my first thought was that it was someone wearing a jet pack. It moved steadily across the sky and disappeared from view. It was still daylight.

May 26, 2017 · 10:30 PM · LIGHT

Arlington, MA

I looked out my bedroom window at around 10:30 PM Friday, May 26th, 2017, to see a large series of lights rotating counter clockwise. It appeared as though the lights were forming a very large circular craft. There appeared to be a secondary craft about half the size of the first rotating in the opposite direction than the original series of lights and hovering adjacent. I ruled out search lights as the sky was very cloudy, and no streaks of lights indicating a ground level light were seen, just large pull shaped lights slowly circling. There was no sound to be heard. The phenomenon lasted an hour and a half after I had originally seen it through my window, there is no telling whether or not it had started earlier. At 12:00 midnight I returned to the window to check on the position of the lights and they had completely disappeared without a trace. Another thing worth nothing: during the time that the lights were visible, three conventional aircrafts were heard. I heard one helicopter, and two planes. I live close to Logan Airport, commercial flights are very common to see and hear, but the two planes sounded distinctly louder and were only breifly heard. The lights remained well after the conventional aircrafts had left earshot.

June 7, 2014 · 10:03 PM · FIREBALL