How to Tell If You Really Saw a UFO, According to Experts

We arrived at the site a little after 2 PM, our group of amateur scientists and researchers fanned out along the dry brush of the Arizona wilderness. The sun was unrelenting, and the white light illuminated a hellish landscape around us: Dirt. And rocks. For miles. Jagged mountains dotted the horizon, giving way to deep red canyons with snaking rivers below. Locals call these mountains the Superstitions; they’ve been known to gobble up a person or two in the hidden sinkholes blotting their bases. 

We trudged through palo verde and cholla cactus until our instructor stopped us at a clearing marked with caution tape. This was the scene of the encounter, she said. To the untrained eye, it might have been desert. But if you looked a little closer, things would start to jump out: Weird imprints in the ground, piles of white powder, something resembling scorch marks on the arid terrain. A clump of green hair caught on a bush wisped in the wind like a flag. 

“We don’t know what that is,” the instructor cautioned, planting herself between us and the specimen. “I would never touch that without protective gear.” She took out a small gadget shaped like a TV remote—an Electromagnetic Field Meter (EMF)—and scanned the bush. The reading spiked. Before today, I had never seen a UFO landing site. And I still haven’t, because all of this was fake—all part of a spacecraft-hunting exercise, of course.

Last June, in a blockbuster report, the Pentagon dropped a disturbing fact: between 2004 and 2021, there were 143 separate sightings of unidentified aerial objects that the government still can’t explain. OK, cool. UFOs exist. And the US government was officially studying them. But they weren’t the only ones.

For the last 50 years, a collective of independent researchers and civilian enthusiasts has been intently studying UFOs, using a combination of science, pseudo-science, and good ol’ fashioned snooping. Boasting 4,000 members, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) claims to be the oldest organization of its kind in the world(s).

A few weeks ago, MUFON’s chapter in Phoenix hosted its annual Field Investigator Boot Camp, where I joined 40 trainees for a two-day crash course on UFO investigations. We sat through powerpoints, toggled with gadgets, and tested our skills at staged landing sites, all in the hopes of making us the best new saucer sleuths around!

Early on the first day, people were just getting settled when I walked into the Turquoise Room of the Mesa Country Inn & Suites. Over the course of a weekend, we would be spending half our time in seminars here and the other half doing fieldwork in the tumbleweeds of Apache Junction, 20 miles away. In order to become a MUFON Field Investigator, you need to pass an open-book exam and a background check, and my fellow trainees—who were eagerly seated at rows of folding tables—had flown in from all over to get a taste of what it’s like to be a real, official, unpaid UFO inspector.

After a brief introduction from Stacey Wright, MUFON’s Arizona State Director, we jumped straight into classes. First was a rundown on interviewing techniques. When someone reports a sighting, an investigator’s first task is to reach out and schedule an interview with the “reporting person,” also known as the RP. Usually, these are done over the phone—unless it’s a “Category 3,” where there’s some kind of physical evidence or contact, in which case MUFON will send one of its S.T.A.R. Team members for a face-to-face meeting.

Our instructor, Marianne Robb, is one of those elite inspectors, and from her six years with MUFON and 34 years investigating arson/narcotics cases with the Gilbert, AZ police department, she has a lifetime of interviews under her belt. Also under her belt—a gun! Something she never goes to interviews without. Much of her lecture to us centered on recognizing signs of “deception” in RP’s, a seemingly important skill for this line of hobby.

While you could identify the rest of the MUFON staff from their logo T-shirts, Dennis Freyermuth, the chapter’s Chief Investigator, looked right out of Space Force: Polarized aviators, a United States of America cap, a black button down embellished with MUFON patches. And for a look as loud as this, Dennis, who doesn’t do interviews, was a man of few words. Little to none, in fact. His presentation on the inner workings of cameras—crucial information, as you’ll see, for a Field Inspector’s toolkit—was a 55-minute video narrated by a text-to-speech program.

Celebrities were on the docket, too. Marc D’Antonio, who you may have seen on History Channel’s The Proof Is Out There and Discovery+’s Alien Invasion: Hudson Valley, led an astronomy lecture primarily consisting of a list of space apps we could download on our phones. Going into this, I had assumed that working a case was a lot more gonzo, but you can actually do most of it from your bed: Checking photos, GPS coordinates, satellite data, aircraft logs, and weather conditions for visibility. In the world of UFO-hunting, a MUFON Field Investigator plays the crucial role of the skeptic, ruling out reasons not to believe—even when believing is often the reason they began this journey in the first place.

Between the Pentagon report, dueling UFO documentaries on Netflix and Showtime, that whole ‘Storm Area 51’ thing, and whatever Tom DeLonge is up to, UFOs have been having a moment lately. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, another citizen group, there were record sightings in 2020—though, MUFON’s International Director of Investigations, Steve Hudgeons, actually said recent numbers are pretty average. What people are seeing more of, he said, is “found objects.”

Most people only see UFOs after the fact, usually when reviewing photos or videos. These are the found objects: Ordinary things like drones, lens flares, or even clouds that can look otherworldly in certain moments. Sure, satellites aren’t as sexy as an alien spacecraft, but a huge component of the gig is recognizing when stuff is completely normal. 

Nobody knows this better than Shane Hurd, the Arizona chapter’s assistant director and author of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: A Beginner’s Guide to Researching UFOs. Six years ago, before he joined MUFON, Shane filmed a strange light over his horse ranch north of Phoenix—an occurrence MUFON deemed was most likely a drone. He’s still not totally convinced, but since then, he’s looked into around 120 cases for others, and surmised that 90 percent had explainable origins. 

Rose Eckhoff, a sweet, middle-aged trainee with a passport full of unexplained encounters, told me about the UFO she saw in Leesburg, Florida in 1969: “Out the window, above the cow pasture, was a silver, round, metallic disc. Hovering, making no noise, not moving, just their lights going off,” she said. She was in a taxi at the time, and she hung out the back window for a closer look when “sparkly stuff came out from below the UFO, and it [shot] straight up and was gone.” The next day, she said, two men in black suits claiming to be “NASA agents” showed up at her door and threatened her to stay quiet. Fifty years later, the sighting—which she said left her body covered in blisters—still haunts her, and she now plans to pursue UFO research in the free time she’ll gain from retiring. 

Other attendees were just straight-up obsessed, like Christian Gutierrez, a film actor who I recognized from the Turquoise Room as the guy drinking cold beans out of a can. “I’m, like, a UFO conference addict,” he told me later, as he dangled his legs out the back of the U-Haul van he was sleeping in for the weekend. Christian was here with his partner, Nicolette Salvemini. Six years ago they matched on OKCupid, and after two days of talking they had their first date at a UFO conference in Santa Clara, CA. “I flew there [from New York] and started to have some interest and follow him to different conferences,” Nicolette said, though she noted that she was “more into paranormal.”

Throughout the weekend, conversation at MUFON often went far beyond UFOs: I heard about haunted houses, reptilian sex, glowing orbs, and disembodied voices. In one talk by Stan Milford and John Dover—two ex Navajo rangers dubbed “The Paranormal Rangers” for their time investigating paranormal cases on behalf of the Navajo Nation—I learned about a single case that included both Little Greys and Bigfoot. Other stories verged on QFOAnon: In our interview, Marc D’Antonio said an alien implant was surgically removed from his nose, and that the government was covering it up. 

Individual experiences and beliefs vary, I’m sure, and plenty of instructors and students had never had an encounter. But as a group, MUFON treats all such accounts seriously. One of our lectures even centered on its Experiencer Research Team (ERT), which meets with survivors of human-ET encounters and connects them to mental health experts and abductee support groups. If we ever wanted to join this lauded part of MUFON, we’d have to really work for it—starting with our Sunday practical.    

When classes were all done, I ventured out early to watch the organizers set up for our impending field test, where we would be investigating mock landing sites and applying our new wealth of knowledge. Everything—by which I mean the $150 it cost to attend the course—was riding on this. An instructor cordoned off six practice sites with caution tape, planting the areas with the kinds of evidence one might uncover at a landing. Those piles of white powder? Flour. The scorch marks? Coffee grounds. The green hair? Green hair—from Michaels, not space. 

Once the other trainees arrived, we split into six groups, each tasked with excavating a site and interviewing a witness. “It was over here somewhere,” our fake witness cried, revealing fake burns on her arm as she pointed to the horizon. She said she’d been walking her dog and smoking a cigarette—an all too common scenario, joked the MUFON staff members—when she noticed a strange craft in the distance. “It was this high off the ground, but it wasn’t… I don’t know. I could only see this much of it… But then my dog just took off!”

Next step was to survey the scene. We took to the dirt, checking for clues and cataloging anything that seemed a little wonky. We combed through desert plants and bushes, leaving those little numbered yellow plastic tent thingies next to every rock we saw. Immediately, the lions were separated from the sheep. The natural born leaders bagged and tagged at an aggressive rate, while other members joked about “alien poop” and walked indiscriminately over the scene, fake-contaminating it and not boding well for a rise within the MUFON ranks. 

Radiation is a good indicator of a potential otherworldly presence, but since none of us had invested in fancy alien-hunting gear prior to the camp, it was the App Store for us. We downloaded EMF detectors to our phones and craned low to wave them over boulders and cacti. “If a craft comes down and it’s running on anti-gravity of some sort, those readings are going to be higher,” said Katie Griboski, MUFON’s Colorado State Director. “In this case, it was actually a magnet, but in paranormal realms like Skinwalker Ranch and these high strangeness locations, they ping the charts of high magnetism.”

Being that Arizona has the seventh highest number of UFO reports in the country, I had hoped to have my own close encounter of the third kind. Or any kind—I’m not picky! Woe is me, I’m still a UFO virgin, so I turned my focus to the locals in the area. Maybe they had seen something that needed solving. So as the field practice wrapped, I peeled off from my group and scooted up the canyon to Tortilla Flat, a touristy town up the road, with an itching to solve my own real case. 

Nestled along the Apache Trail, Tortilla Flat—population: six—is a strip of old-timey buildings that includes a saloon, a general store, and another, smaller general store. In the saloon I met Ryan Wade, a.k.a. Stubby, a server in cowboy clothes. A year ago, Stubby was living in Kansas and had never seen a UFO. But that changed once he moved to Arizona.

“Superstition Mountain has a lot of history. Unknown things, people disappearing up here,” he said. “Me and my wife have both been up here, and a few times we've seen, like, lights going from one side over to here quickly.”

He wasn’t alone. Next door I met Lorraine Bell, a store clerk and longtime Apache Junction resident. On September 10th, she saw something of her own. Lorraine had been snapping pics of a standard sunset, but it was only after reviewing them that she noticed something strange. “This particular orb was eight miles up the road,” Lorraine said, pointing to a green dot on the bottom left side of an iPhone image. “As you can tell, it’s sunset, and I was just taking pictures. And you don’t know you’re taking pictures of orbs.” 

I still didn’t really understand what an orb was, but from what I could see, it was a perfect neon green circle, about the size of a felt pen dot. In some images, it had a lighter green oval emanating around it, almost like an aura. This is why I had come to Arizona. This is why I had done the boot camp. All those hours spent under the cruel sun, and in the Turquoise Room, were for this exact moment. Now was my chance: I decided to approach this analytically, utilize a scientific process of elimination, and drive back to the Country Inn so I could ask Shane Hurd. 

“Lens flare,” he said, after glancing at the phone for, like, two seconds. “It’s very apparent. The color green is also a big, dead giveaway.” A real orb, he continued, would be a self-contained ball of light. My orb—or lack thereof, unfortunately—had a light flickering effect; the noticeable aura around the green dot was a function of pointing the camera at a direct source of light. 

A found object? Well, you don’t say. For official purposes, we’ll have to categorize this one as “explainable.” Sorry to burst your orb, Lorraine, but at least I’d cracked my first case as a graduate from the Phoenix MUFON Field Investigator Boot Camp!