The Chronicles Of Grant County

UFOs Seen In Grant County
Part Five
MimbresA sunset in New Mexico. (The photograph was provided courtesy of Mary Alice Murphy.)

In the first four parts of this series of reports of UFOs Seen In Grant County, The Chronicles Of Grant County, detailed information about UFOs that were seen in the skies above Buckhorn, Cliff, Fort Bayard, Gila, Hurley, and San Lorenzo. This news column details information about a UFO that was reported in the airspace above Mimbres.

On January 12, 2023, as reported previously, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the United States Secretary of Defense, reported that it had submitted a classified report to the U S Congress detailing Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in 2022. The Office also released an unclassified report to the general public.

Please note that "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" is the term used by the U S Department of Defense for what Americans usually call "Unidentified Flying Objects" or "UFOs."

Also, as detailed in the previous parts of this news series, according to an unclassified report from the Federal government, no alien life from locales beyond the Earth was found in the U S in 2022. The unclassified report does not detail any specific incidents of a UAP being seen in New Mexico in 2022.

The National UFO Reporting Center, a private entity unrelated to the Federal government, publishes a database of reports from people who have reported seeing unidentified flying objects.

This database of self-reported sightings includes a number of reports of UFOs seen in the skies above Grant County in recent years. Please note that the reports listed here were lightly edited for spelling and punctuation for publication. In some cases, the National UFO Reporting Center indicated in notes that the sightings were actually of or possibly of specific military activities or scientific events.

One of those possible "other" activities/events may have taken place in the Fall of 2014, according to a note from that entity.

According to the initial report from a Grant County resident, "There were lights on the object. The object changed color. Multiple lights over Mimbres, New Mexico."

"Every night for the last two weeks, we have had some very strange lights in the sky," the report indicated. "They look somewhat like stars, but they were twinkling waaaaay too brightly. I walked out of my house in Mimbres, New Mexico, around 8:30 PM on the night of the 25th of September. We had just had a good rain and the clouds had cleared off. I looked up and saw at first 5 extremely bright and twinkling stars."

The report continued by stating that "As my eyes adjusted, I noticed there were more like 30 or 40 of these lights strewn about all the way from the east side of my house through the south and to the west. I went inside and got my wife to make sure I wasn't just seeing things and I also grabbed a pair of Leupold 10x40 binoculars."

"I looked at the closest 'star' with the binos and saw that there was no way these things were stars," the gentleman stated in his report. "They have extremely bright red, green, white, and blue lights that orbit around them at very high rate of speed. The orbital pattern of the lights looks like the way an atom is portrayed."

"The lights seem to rotate around the bright light at different angles, giving it the appearance that they 'twinkling' like stars but they are much too bright and the twinkling is much too obvious to be stars," he continued. "I didn't tell anyone because I was trying to rationalize this in my head."

"On the following Saturday, one of my neighbors approached and asked if we had seen the lights," the report detailed. "We confirmed the sightings to him. We then proceeded to do a 'group watch' of these lights over the next few nights. Note that I took the position of the formation that was the most obvious in the sky on the first night so that I could rule out any type of atmospheric phenomena. The objects were not in the same place the next night at the same time. They had moved to completely different locations but were still there."

The individual making this report indicated that the "objects" were "…around every night, but there are fewer each night. We peaked around 50 objects. They stay stationary wherever they are posted as you can actually watch the Big Dipper move past them. They are NOT celestial objects. I do not have any type of camera equipment that would capture them on a pic or video unfortunately."

As noted above, there was a note on this report: "High-altitude balloon. PD."

Additional reports of UFO sightings in the skies over Pinos Altos and Silver City will be detailed in the next editions of The Chronicles Of Grant County.

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© 2023 Richard McDonough