The Unexplained 2001 UFO Sighting Over The New Jersey Turnpike

If you, like many people, believe that these United States were visited by extraterrestrial life on July 14th, 2001, there are questions you'll have to ask yourself. Such as, where did they come from? How did they get here? What did they want? And why did they need to go to New Jersey to get it?

The story is all manners of funky: for around fifteen minutes, just over the New Jersey Turnpike near Carteret, a series of orange and yellow lights hung in a V-shaped formation. Over a dozen calls were made to the local police department. It's been reported that around 75 cars pulled to the side of the road, and witnessed the phenomenon. ABC News stated that one of the witnesses even stared down the freaky light show with an infrared rangefinder, determining that whatever he was looking at was less than 2,000 feet in the air. Then, with a slight flare, the lights were gone, and everybody was just standing around in New Jersey again.

Questions aside, here's what is known about the mass UFO sighting. 

Local air traffic controllers, according to History, flat out shut down theories that "any airplanes, military jets or space flights could have caused the mysterious lights." Luckily, when there's something strange in one's neighborhood, one can always call New York Strange Phenomena Investigators, or NY-SPI. This band of inquisitive minds claims to have discovered new evidence — "The FAA radar report," they state in their report on the sighting, "from Newark International Airport on the night in question indicates an enormous number of airborne objects, without transponders, beginning at 10:31 PM and ending at 12:51 AM EST."

On an unrelated note, in 2009, LiveScience reported that a pair of New Jersey men were fined $250 and sentenced to 50 hours of community service, after tying flares to weather balloons and releasing them as a way of proving that UFO investigators were really, really easy to mess with.