Fireball Falls From Sky. White dot of light traveled across the sky, very fast, then shot away. 6 or so bright lights hovering in a V shape with red on the end points then vanished. Grayish Large rectangle object in sky, looked to be floating. Dark triangular craft 3 blue lights, being followed by some type of HELICOPTER.
These are just a few of the 256 Bucks County UFO cases I read through this week. These all come from the NUFORC dataset that I modified to only include cases within 20 miles of Doylestown, PA over the past ten years.
The vast majority of reports come from people who spend a lot of time looking at the sky. They could be relaxing on their deck, or they are a pilot, or they are in the habit of looking up while walking their dog. Many of these reports boil down to strange lights or disks in the night sky that are out of the ordinary. Sometimes it was 20-30 orange lights floating across the sky, other times it was a fireball, and often it was bright lights that moved very fast.
In Trevose, people reported
Tonight we saw 10 fireball colored, round objects flying in a line going west to east about 9:00 PM. These objects flew in a nice pace,allowing us enough time to video these such objects. They were quiet but bright. We were sitting on our deck watching a NFL game and noticed the lighted objects in the night sky.
This is an example of what most people are seeing. These are out of the ordinary and reported in 2015 which is before any Starlink launches. Other accounts read much like this one from Richboro in 2021
Bright white light at high speed SE of Richboro Very bright white light traveling parallel to horizon at extraordinary speed in the sky SE of Richboro. Object headed south, then disappeared. Made no sound
A large chunk of reports fall into this bin; even in sightings that are not explicitly listed as "lights" you will find that the encounter is a variation of "seeing weird lights" that the person marked as a cigar or disk. I categorize these as Strange Lights In The Sky sightings.
These are less common but they still happen regularly. A witness will see a slow moving craft that is triangular, black, and has lights on it.
Much quieter than a jet or a propeller plane, yet not a glider. It made a mechanical sound. Shaped like a triangle with two white lights on the tips and two red blinking lights in the center.
Here is another typical sighting of a black triangle.
Then, when I finally parked at my house, I saw a triangle shape aircraft like moving very very low (no sound and it wasn't a helicopter).
These reports are very different than the lights in the sky stories. They are usually a large dark craft, with lights, and they move slowly. Sometimes these reports have a military connection. They will be near the old Willow Grove Airbase or witnesses will report fighter jets or helicopters nearby.
This is fascinating to me. On one hand, like the strange lights reports these craft don't necessarily show any behavior that would be impossible for our aircrafts to perform. They seem to behave like blimps or airships. They move slowly and make little to no noise. They are perceived as being large.
They are very strange and the tone of these reports is such that it doesn't seem likely that people are simply reporting flashes and lights that aren't normally in the sky. These seem like real physical objects.
There is also an odd connection with military activity. Many reports mention the old airbase or seeing military vehicles nearby. Could this be some kind of military platform? If so, what would it's purpose be? These are the Mysterious Black Triangle type of sightings.
There were a few cases that didn't fit into any particular category and were not really a UFO in the way most people would think of them. These cases are unique and interesting but obviously it's tough to see any patterns in a set of unrelated one-off cases.
In Norristown, someone reported
Around 6 pm that night, I was watching Law and Order. The tv screen started tracking, like the show was off, and it started scrolling up. A black screen came on, with an aqua bird (I want to say eagle), started rotating on screen. I sat up, thinking I would have to call comcast and go off, when this deep voice said, "The Time has come, we are coming." Screen scrolled again, show back on.
In 2019, near Yardley a mother and daughter report this sighting while driving over the I-95 bridge into PA
... It was hovering about 10-20 feet over the tree line directly over the bank of the Delaware River in Yardley, PA. It first reminded me of a drone about the size of a house but as we got closer, we saw that it was a solid silver colored pentagon shape. There was a small red line on one side and a small orange light on the other and then there were 3 or 4 super bright white lights under the object. It looked like a door was open on the side and white lights were lighting the inside. I saw steps coming down, but my daughter did not. She saw remembers something sticking up and out of the back end that looked like tail wing. We got off at the next exit and turned around to see it, but it was gone.
Over Lansdale in 2014 a person witnessed an interaction between a fighter jet and a metallic sphere.
...Once again, this plane was also leaving a cloud trail, and once again there was surely a silver sphere following the plane. I kept thinking, don't these planes see these orbs??? they are so close to them! Neither the silver orbs or the planes were blinking or showing any lights. All objects were close enough to make direct shape and design out of. So as this one goes off into the horizon also, the sphere NEVER blinking out of sight, surely a physical object, a fighter jet swoops in, no cloud trail, very fast, coming from more from the side of me, not the same exact direction as the previous planes. This jet plane had an extremely bright yellowish white light beaming out of the bottom of it. Ive never seen a light this bright on a plane, a fighter plane. The jet plane soars off into the horizon, the same location the other planes flew in. I watched t! he skies for another 10 minutes, nothing. another plane flew by several minutes after the sightings, also giving off cloud trails, but no spheres were noticed.
On that same day in the same general area another person reported,
Disk seen following fighter jet and intercepted by second fighter jet...
When you read through the accounts, it's clear that these witness were truly surprised about the event. However, often it is hard to see if these cases rise to a truly anomalous event based only on their reports. The reports don't generally present enough information to say that these objects defy the laws of physics or behave in a way that would be impossible for aircraft.
It's tempting to dismiss these reports quickly based on what they could have been. Clearly, Chinese lanterns, drones, satellites, shooting stars, and space junk are all things that would present in a similar way. At the end of the day, these reports don't contain enough information to confirm or deny anything really other than the events were out of the ordinary and compelling enough for witnesses to take the time to report them.
Something that I really think is interesting is the apparent military connection to a subset of these sightings. Black triangles are associated with helicopters and appear around an abandoned naval air station. Fighter jets are chasing metallic spheres. This aspect of the story deserves it's own investigation in the future.
Overall, it's hard to know what to make of these reports. 256 is a small number compared to the overall population of the Bucks County area. These sightings are very rare events. Many are potentially explainable for the usual reasons. None have enough information to be considered proof of something extraordinary. All are fascinating.
NOTE I created a data dashboard to help with this article. You are free to use this to do your own research on Bucks County UFOs. FYI It takes a few seconds to load and you want to click on the items on the map to see the detail for each sighting. Click here to view the Bucks County UFO dashboard.