When Night Falls Silent: A Survey of Strange Sky Phenomena
Recent Encounters and the Growing Mystery Above Our Heads
A Massachusetts woman’s quiet evening turned into a moment of wonder and confusion when she captured something unexplained floating through the darkness — just one of countless similar reports surfacing across the nation as more eyes turn skyward.
Something’s happening in our skies. Whether you’re a backyard astronomer, someone who occasionally glances up during an evening walk, or just trying to relax in a hot tub after a long day, the chances of witnessing something unexplained overhead seem to be increasing. These aren’t just the usual suspects of aircraft lights or satellites — people are reporting objects that defy easy explanation, moving in ways that don’t match anything we readily recognize.
The Pembroke Puzzle
Colleen McCormack had no intention of becoming part of an ongoing mystery when she slipped into her hot tub that Wednesday evening in late June. The Pembroke, Massachusetts resident was simply trying to unwind around 9 p.m. when she spotted something small floating in the sky above her home.
“I was chilling in my hot tub, I look up in the sky to see something tiny, floating,” she told WHDH-TV. Her first instinct was curiosity rather than alarm: “What is that?”
McCormack grabbed her phone and started recording. The object “looked like it was on fire or something and it was just coming down really fast,” she later explained to WFXT-TV. What struck her most wasn’t just the visual — it was what she didn’t hear.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed they’d received no reports of debris in the area that evening. Even more puzzling was the complete silence that accompanied whatever McCormack witnessed. “It was really quiet. You couldn’t like really hear anything. That’s why I was just like more confused. When stuff flies over all the time, you hear it,” she noted.
McCormack expected some kind of impact sound when the object disappeared from view. Nothing came. No crash, no rumble, no indication that whatever she’d recorded had touched the earth at all.
The Meteor That Wasn’t Silent
Just three days before McCormack’s quiet encounter, the southeastern United States experienced something dramatically different. A massive fireball streaked across the sky in broad daylight on June 26, 2025, generating over 215 reports from witnesses across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
NASA later confirmed this was an asteroidal fragment weighing over a ton and moving at more than 30,000 mph when it entered Earth’s atmosphere at 12:25 p.m. ET. Unlike McCormack’s silent mystery, this one announced itself with authority — creating pressure waves that reached the ground and generated booms heard across the region.
The contrast between these two incidents highlights just how varied unexplained sky phenomena can be. In Henry County, Georgia, residents reported that a piece of meteorite actually crashed through someone’s roof, piercing the ceiling and cracking the laminate floor before coming to rest inside the home. Radar systems tracked falling debris, and multiple weather satellites captured the event.
Yet for all its drama and scientific verification, this fireball began much like McCormack’s sighting — with someone looking up and noticing something that didn’t belong.
Jellyfish in the Night Sky
Among the more unusual reports surfacing in recent years are sightings of jellyfish-like objects drifting through the atmosphere. In January 2024, investigative journalist Jeremy Corbell released footage of what appeared to be a jellyfish-shaped object gliding over a U.S. military base in Iraq, captured in 2018.
The object demonstrated an unusual characteristic — rapidly changing color from black to white as it moved, suggesting significant temperature variations. According to Corbell’s account, the phenomenon didn’t stop there. The object allegedly moved over water, performed a controlled descent, submerged for 17 minutes, then reemerged and disappeared at high speed.
A Marine intelligence officer who was stationed at the base, Michael Cincoski, confirmed he’d seen the footage, though personnel there called it the “spaghetti monster” rather than the “jellyfish.” Cincoski noted that the object “crossed my mind because the theories we had didn’t fully explain it” when asked whether he considered non-human origins.
But “jellyfish UFOs” aren’t limited to military footage. In February 2020, video emerged from São Paulo, Brazil, showing a similar jellyfish-like object with a round top and white tentacle-like appendages trailing behind it. The shape has become common enough that witnesses now use it as a point of reference.
The Numbers Game
What’s particularly striking about current sky phenomena isn’t just the variety of reports, but their increasing frequency. Pentagon data shows that between May 2023 and June 2024, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) received 757 UAP reports, compared with 291 reports for the period between August 2022 and April 2023 — more than doubling year over year.
Of those 757 reports, 485 related to incidents during the yearlong reporting period, while 272 reports covered older incidents from 2021-2022. This suggests not only are more incidents occurring, but people are becoming more comfortable reporting older sightings they’d previously kept to themselves.
The trend extends beyond civilian reports. In a February 2025 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, General Gregory Guillot stated that 350 drone incursions were reported over 100 U.S. military bases during 2024 alone.
California has become something of a hotspot for reports. By mid-2024, the state had already accumulated more than 138 sightings reported to various databases, with incidents ranging from triangle-shaped objects moving silently across Western skies to green glowing orbs hovering above apartment buildings.
Regional Patterns
The data reveals interesting geographic clustering. Nevada’s Lincoln County recorded the highest rate of UFO sightings among U.S. counties between 2000 and 2023, with 820.9 reports per 100,000 residents. That’s followed by Arthur County, Nebraska, and Alpine County, California.
Pentagon analysis identifies four main global hotspots: the southeastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico; the West Coast and Pacific Northwest; the Middle East; and northeastern Asia near Japan and the Korean peninsula. However, officials note this distribution likely reflects “geographic collection bias based on locations near U.S. military assets and sensors operating globally” rather than any special attraction these areas hold for unexplained phenomena.
Shapes in the Darkness
The variety of reported shapes has expanded beyond the classic “flying saucer” archetype. AARO data shows that “unidentified lights or orb-shaped objects were mentioned most frequently,” but reports also included “cylinders, disks, triangles, squares or exotic objects such as a ‘green fireball’ or ‘a jellyfish with flashing lights'”.
During the 2024 drone incidents over New Jersey, witnesses described objects “sometimes as large as SUVs, occasionally emitting a loud hum, and sometimes seen alongside fixed-wing aircraft”. Some experts reviewing footage categorized these as either quadcopters or fixed-wing aircraft, but many cases remained unexplained.
Explanations and Investigations
AARO has successfully resolved 118 cases over the past year, with 70 percent attributed to balloons, 16 percent to drones, 8 percent to birds, 4 percent to satellites, and 2 percent to additional bird sightings. Yet these conventional explanations don’t account for all reports.
Skeptics like Mick West suggest many jellyfish-like sightings could be weather balloons or helium party balloons viewed under unusual conditions. The movement patterns often align with wind directions, and the “tentacle” appearance might result from partially deflated balloon material.
For fireballs like the June 26 southeastern U.S. event, astronomical explanations often prove accurate upon investigation. Advanced satellite monitoring and radar systems can now track and verify many such incidents in real-time.
The Technology Factor
Modern reporting has been transformed by technology. Smartphones mean more people can instantly capture video evidence, while improved satellite monitoring provides verification for many sightings. AARO notes it’s receiving “an increasing number of cases that can be traced to sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites” as commercial space launches become more frequent.
The National UFO Reporting Center, established in 1974, continues collecting public reports through its telephone hotline and online systems. Their database now contains nearly 99,000 reports from the continental United States alone between 2001 and 2020.
Moving Forward
Government agencies are working to reduce the stigma around reporting unusual sightings, recognizing that pilots or citizens might have valuable information about potential threats in U.S. airspace. The term “UAP” (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) was coined partly to bring scientific rigor to investigations that were previously dismissed.
As 2025 progresses, researchers emphasize the need for “publicly and transparently engage in and encourage hard data collection from sensor systems and careful scientific analysis of that data” to move beyond speculation toward understanding.
Whether these sightings represent advanced foreign technology, natural phenomena we don’t yet fully understand, or something else entirely, they’re capturing attention from serious scientific and military institutions. The key may lie not in any single dramatic incident, but in the patient accumulation of data from thousands of witnesses like Colleen McCormack — people who were simply looking up at the right moment and decided to document what they saw.
For now, the skies remain full of questions. Each silent object drifting overhead, each unexplained light changing course, each mysterious shape caught on camera adds another piece to a puzzle that grows more complex with every passing night.
COVER PHOTO: YouTube / Colleen McCormack / Boston 25 News
SOURCES:
General Sky/Astronomy Information:
https://www.space.com/16149-night-sky.html
https://www.planetary.org/night-sky/night-sky-what-to-see-this-month
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/stargazing-tonight-what-see-night-sky
UFO/UAP Databases and Reports:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_drone_sightings
https://www.amsmeteors.org/
https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/browse_reports
https://fireball.imo.net/members/imo_view/browse_events
Recent Fireball/Meteor Events:
https://www.foxweather.com/earth-space/daytime-fireball-sighting-southeast-june-2025
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/26/us/fireball-sky-georgia-southeast-us
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/meteor-fireball-southeast-carolina-georgia-rcna215341
https://abcnews.go.com/US/fireball-sightings-southeast-us/story?id=123244133
https://www.newsweek.com/fireball-reports-over-georgia-south-carolina-tennessee-what-we-know-2091237
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/meteor-fireball-reports-georgia-reaction-meterorite-debris
“Jellyfish UFO” Phenomenon:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a46755634/why-jellyfish-ufo-is-not-aliens/
https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/335306/strange-jellyfish-ufo-filmed-over-sao-paulo
Leaked ‘jellyfish’ UFO video leaves the internet enthralled and baffled
https://vocal.media/futurism/the-jellyfish-ufo-a-mystery-in-the-sky
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/jellyfish-uap-video/
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/jellyfish-ufo-video-pentagon-response/
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/marine-speaks-jellyfish-uap/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ufo-revolution-docuseries-shows-uap-flying-over-military-base-blows-up-decades-conspiracies-expert
UFO/UAP Sightings and Statistics:
https://patch.com/california/palmdesert/138-ufo-sightings-ca-have-us-looking-skyward-world-ufo-day-2024
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/12/mystery_objects_us/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-the-uap-disclosure-act-of-2024-means-for-ufo-sightings
https://ess.utah.edu/blog/posts/2024-2025/11-2024-uap-sightings.php
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/what-has-to-happen-in-2025-to-move-the-uap-story-forward
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/08/ufo-uap-sightings-us-hotspots-2000-2023
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/pentagon-ufo-hotspots
News Sites (Limited Content):
https://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/article/ufo-san-antonio-19953695.php
https://www.nbcnews.com/ufos-aerial-phenomena
NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.
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