UFO sightings have been making headlines again lately, notably with The New York Times running an interesting article about several U.S. Navy fighter pilots encountering mysterious objects near the southeastern coast of the United States. That high-profile story remains unexplained and so do plenty of other UFO sightings reported by members of the public every year like strange lights crossing the night sky or orange disks hovering in the distance.

The National UFO Reporting Center which is based in the U.S. maintains statistics about global UFO sightings. Notably, they have declined since 2014. There were just over 8,000 reported sightings in 2014 and in 2018, there were 3,343. So far in 2019, 3,353 UFO sightings have been reported, suggesting a slight uptick for this year. Interest in UFOs has recently risen again, also in connection with the popular "Storm Area 51" meme, based on a Facebook event suggesting Americans team up to overwhelm Area 51 security personnel on Sept 20, 2019, to have a peep around the area.

Conspiracy theorists have long maintained that a secret U.S. base in Nevada known as Area 51 harbors alien life or parts of a crashed spacecraft. The event called for people to storm the base and find out and it attracted 1.4 million signatures. Entitled "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All Of Us", it also prompted the Air Force to issue a warning to stay well away from the facility. Facebook eventually took the event page down.