2011's Top UFO Sightings And News (VIDEO)

2011 was a very -- watch out, here it comes -- out-of-this-world year for UFOs. Every month of the year gave us UFO stories to digest, wonder about, or laugh at -- depending on your point of view or belief about UFOs.

Ancient UFOs; scores of videos and photographs; military and government officials offering credible testimony; thousands of pages of previously classified documents; disk and dorito-shaped craft; an official state highway marker erected to commemorate the most widely publicized UFO abduction story in history; petitions sent to the White House asking the Obama administration to release all UFO information; an alleged alien spaceship hiding near the planet Mercury; an ET reportedly photographed standing in a Brazilian rainforest; and a theologian who says religious believers are ready to share a pew with aliens.

These and much more were all there for the taking. With the proliferation of so many video cameras and phone cams, it's not surprising that, according to the Mutual UFO Network -- the largest privately funded UFO research organization in the world -- there were 67 percent more reports of unidentified flying objects in 2011, compared to 2008.

As 2012 looms with the promise of a new year of UFO events -- where believers hope the government will finally acknowledge that some UFOs are extraterrestrial vehicles -- let's step into the wayback machine and re-visit the top 11 UFO stories of 2011.

CHECK OUT THE TOP 11 UFO STORIES OF 2011: (story continues following slideshow)

Wow, a truly amazing year for UFO believers, skeptics and those in-between.

With the first annual Women's UFO Symposium scheduled for May 2012 in Texas, we can't wait to see what else the new year has in store for us.

Keep looking to the skies and collecting those pictures and videos!

Comments

[Gloriousbastrd]

08:34 AM on 04/26/2012

I guess aliens watch the game too

[John Shuck]

06:09 PM on 01/27/2012

If there is intelligent life out there, it is in a galaxy far, far away.

[Pamla Perez]

10:11 AM on 01/03/2012

You know with all of the high tech cameras that we have, you would think that a better pictureof an alien would have been taken by now.

[shanesdad]

04:39 PM on 01/01/2012

UFOs are real, the mathematical probabilities of intelligent life on other planets is overwhelming, so what's the big deal. They've probably been here for many years observing us and are terribly underwhelmed, or think that we just don't taste that good.

[flyinghigh0905]

09:26 AM on 01/27/2012

I think was annoys me is all the people who are just so sure that there cannot be life that exists ANYWHERE else in the Universe. We haven't explored the entire univerise. No one knows how different it might be in other places. I wish they wouldn't be so quick to discount the possibility of life on other planets.

[John Shuck]

06:11 PM on 01/27/2012

You'd think they'd harvest. They've grown over seven billion of us so far. The posit that there must be intelligent life out there because of mathematics sounds like creationism to me. It must be so because it must be so.

[gx5000]

06:23 PM on 12/31/2011

P. T. Barnum said it best !!

[ChicagoBob]

04:52 AM on 12/30/2011

I have every confidence there are "unknown" flying objects. And they all come from earth. Any other expectation is just silly.

[gx5000]

06:24 PM on 12/31/2011

AT least it keeps some people out of the way, y'know ?
Plus looking up at the stars IS fun....

[John Shuck]

06:14 PM on 01/27/2012

Exactly. When they started talking wormholes, I said, "Oh, so that's where all the worms came from. Lucky for us." If the speed limit in the universe is the speed of light we'll be extinct long before they get here.

[jrsurferboy]

12:10 AM on 12/29/2011

your government.big fat lier! www.mufon.com www.unknown country.com www.coast to coast.com
www.the black vault .com www.earth files.com utube nasa ufo's and now new hampshire going,
off.

[Jonathan Kenny]

07:36 PM on 12/28/2011

if they ever land here my i suggest a landing zone south lawn white house that is until jan 21,2013

[John Shuck]

06:16 PM on 01/27/2012

Is there nothing Tea Partiers aren't willing to politicize? Apparently not.

[salamanca1]

01:26 PM on 12/28/2011

Project Blue Book, which concluded that UFOs don't exist, compiled thousands of cases from witnesses of all types. What is not generally known is that those cases were subjected to a statistical analysis by Battelle Memorial Institute. Google Blue Book Report 14.
About 69% of the cases were judged known or identified (38% were considered conclusively identified while 31% were still "doubtfully" explained); about 9% fell into insufficient information. About 22% were deemed "unknown", down from the earlier 28% value of the Air Force studies.
In the known category, 86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations. Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases. A "miscellaneous" category comprised 8% of all cases and included possible hoaxes.
The higher the quality of the case, the more likely it was to be classified unknown. 35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases. This was the exact opposite of the result predicted by skeptics, who usually argued unknowns were poorer quality cases involving unreliable witnesses that could be solved if only better information were available.
In all six studied sighting characteristics, the unknowns were different from the knowns at a highly statistically significant level: in five of the six measures the odds of knowns differing from unknowns by chance was only 1% or less. The probability of a match between knowns and unknowns was less than 1 in a billion.

[farmerlady]

05:38 AM on 12/29/2011

And the conclusion is.......................?

[salamanca1]

03:13 PM on 12/30/2011

Pretty obvious, my friend. UFOs exist. What they are, where they come from, who knows? But they definitely exist, and they don't behave like anything we can make that can fly.

[John Shuck]

06:17 PM on 01/27/2012

The most cogent fact is...we're awful liars and we make a lot of stuff up.

[Gronkie]

10:45 AM on 12/28/2011

We are alone in the universe or not - either one is an amazing thing to consider.

[gx5000]

06:32 PM on 12/31/2011

Looking up at the sky when we should be taking care of where we step as a society....

[Vanderbil Covington]

01:17 AM on 12/28/2011

Well folks, that settles it! There are no UFOs -- only timelapse photos, birds, planes, mirages, clouds, ET AL. In reality, all these mundane so-called explanations are no more than what comes out the south end of a bull. The media loves to pride itself with disinformation while ignoring very credible evidence by everyday eye witnesses that can not be so easily dis-missed. Strangely, officials are willing downplay UFO witness testimony as being mistaken while using those same witnesses to determine whether a person being tried in court should live or die

[salamanca1]

01:14 PM on 12/28/2011

Great point. To all the skeptics out there, I say this: Guess you've never seen one, then. The day you do, your mind will change forever. Not saying I know what they are or where they're from, but I've seen three, years ago, in company with my brother and two friends, and we had binoculars. Not only were they not planes, but on that starry, moonless night, about 10 minutes after the UFOs had gone, three jet interceptors appeared high in the sky from due north (Niagara Falls AFB) and circled the area for another 10 minutes before going back north. Their silhouettes were easily visible and they, at least, obeyed the laws of aerodynamics, in stark contrast to the maneuvers we had seen a bit earlier.

[blumssgr]

06:20 PM on 12/27/2011

Whatever happened to crop circles. Supposedly done by "aliens" from other planets,

[jrsurferboy]

11:17 PM on 12/28/2011

hi,go to www.earth files.com linda,thats here site.she,is investigateing crop circles,ufo's etc
or listen to coast to coast am.www.coast to coast am.com or www.unknown country .com
the truth is out there..

[gx5000]

06:33 PM on 12/31/2011

Most of the perpetrators were found out or came forward, some still believe, ugh,....

[Tommygun264]

03:44 PM on 12/27/2011

I'm surprised they didn't include the London UFO sightings from June 24, 2011.  What appear to be the same objects recorded from three different areas of London at the same time. Bearing in mind that the "U" in "UFO" stands for "Unidentified", I've heard several theories, including alien craft, experimental military craft or elaborate hoax. Whatever it is, having the same thing recorded by different people in different parts of the city gives it a bit more credibility. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QSOJ5MhKI

[Tommygun264]

03:12 PM on 12/27/2011

undefined

[farmerlady]

02:28 PM on 12/27/2011

We have satellites that can take pictures of the numbers plate on your car, and we can hunt you down using your cell phone signals and target you from space that way, should we so wish.....BUT somehow, with all of this technological coverage for intelligence and spy purposes, we have never turned up credible evidence of alien visitation. There's something wrong there if you're trying to believe in aliens visiting Earth.

And as for coverups, please---thousands of people have the security clearance to view this evidence, and none of them ever talk?

Really?

I'm still a skeptic.

[Tommygun264]

04:00 PM on 12/27/2011

I'm skeptical as well, but you need to consider the fact that the people operating those satellites taking pictures of license plates know where those license plates are relative to the position of the satellite - it's much easier to find an object somewhere on the ground than it is somewhere out in space, or even in the open sky. For instance, when you are looking at the moon with a pair of binoculars or a telescope, you don't start by putting the binoculars or telescope to your eye and then look up, you first spot where the moon is with your eye, which has a wide range of vision, then you point your binoculars or telescope in that direction and then you look through it, train it on the moon and bring it into focus. In other words, you move from the general to the specific through a series of steps, most of which you preform without even being consciously aware of the steps you are taking. It would be much more difficult for you to find the moon if you put the binoculars or telescope to your eye first and then went outside to look up the sky. This is why you hear stories about amateur astronomers discovering new objects, like comets or distant supernovas - universities, the military and government research facilities have vastly more powerful equipment, but the amateurs with much less sophisticated gear sometimes beat them to the discovery because they just happen to be looking in the right direction before anyone else.

[ackeegrl]

01:05 PM on 12/28/2011

England gave up the pursue of UFO's many years ago because it's their belief that the visitors do not want to harm us and with that they closed thier xfiles........here we are in the US beating the same dead horse.....give it up people .....these creatures are here to visit the earth zoo and if they wanted to harm us they could do so and we couldnt' do anything about it......if they were announced as visiting species the stock market would drop and life would change because of crazy people who don't realize we are already sharing this planet with them.........