Is an alien invasion imminent? The past six weeks have seen a spike in UFO sightings in the United States, according to an organization that tracks reports of unidentified flying objects.

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) reports that there were 1,013 such sightings in August, up from an average of about 500 per month nationwide.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Clifford Clift, the international director of MUFON, told Life’s Little Mysteries last week. “[T]hat’s an interesting spike in sighting reports.”

There might be several different explanations for the increase in UFO sightings, according to Clift—an actual alien invasion is just one possibility.

Clift told Life’s Little Mysteries that UFO sightings periodically increase from time to time—when a big cluster of sightings happens in a short time, it’s called a “UFO flap.” One reason for this might be a psychological phenomenon called “priming.”

Three-dimensional image reconstruction using strontium barium niobate

Brian P. Ketchela) and Gary L. Wood

U.S. Army Research Laboratory, ATTN: AMSRL-SE-EO, Adelphi, Maryland 20783-1197

Richard J. Anderson

National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia 22230

Gregory J. Salamo

Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701

This latest discovery is no exception. Occurring early Wednesday evening (September 14) and continuing into the night, it’s actually a two anomaly event.

The first event was witnessed as an orange dot streaking across the sky that looks almost like horizontal lightning but different enough to know that it is definitely something else. The dot hovered over onlookers for a short time and then vanished.

Approx 40 minutes passed before the second anomaly appeared The second is an intense glowing light that some are thinking is a meteor. Witness Brien McElhatten described the UFO to ABC news as a horizontal “roman candle” with “smaller pieces falling off of it” as it moved. The brightly lit object was easily visible in the sky. One onlooker described as a “massive green ball, shooting through the sky with a big white tail”.