Best websites to take part in World UFO Day!

There’s a day for everything that’s for sure and today’s pays homage to our alien overlords.  As you can imagine the internet has, in no small part, helped the proliferation of UFO conspiracy theories, and, whether you believe in little green men or not – maybe you just want to believe, there is a wealth of fascinating information to back up your viewpoint or poke gentle fun at depending on where you stand.

It’s also nearly Independence Day so the temptation to make a load of Will Smith/alien invasion jokes is almost too much to bear.

Anyway, in an effort to publish a story that I can point to when we get taken over, highlighting that I am in fact, with you grey guys all the way let’s have a  look around the internet at some of the best resources if you have an interest in all things extraterrestrial.

A great website to start is the UFO Sightings Map if you are in the USA. Featuring 80,000 reported sightings between 1910 and 2014, filter down between the shape of the craft and also just let the map pass through its century of time so you can see hot spots develop in certain years and so on.

Using similar data taken from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) UFO Stalker brings everything bang up to date so you can see what that weird pattern of lights was over your garden last week, and explain where all the cows have gone.

There’s also an image gallery which documents peoples attempts to capture the phenomenon, largely by blowing up poor quality images to the point where the pixels make your eyes hurt but it can be difficult enough getting a decent selfie out of your smartphone at the best of times, let alone trying to capture a visitor from another galaxy traveling at 2000mph 30 miles up.

If you are interested in hunting out your own UFOs rather than researching other peoples, Forbes ran a piece on the best places to search for them.

It starts off recommending  Chile (which is the country with the highest number of recorded UFO sightings) the Atacama Desert is the place to head too. You will have seen the Observatory here on countless alien movies. Tourists aren’t allowed to stay overnight though, the onsite hotel is for staff and media so plan ahead, and if you ever get the chance, well, it’s a cool place regardless of whether you see anything.

If a trip to South American UFO hunting is out of the question, have a read and see if there are any spots local to you.

Another place worth a mention here is in Colorado. I actually visited this place two years ago. It’s about four hours drive from Colorado Springs and is one of the strangest yet most memorable places I have ever been. It also has potentially the worst website still in existence. To the point where I’m not sure if it’s deliberate.

The UFO Watchtower is basically a dome in the middle of the desert surrounded by a viewing platform where you can pitch up and scan the night skies for UFOs and they have a decent success rate apparently. The dome is a gift shop (naturally), but this is not some tourist trap. Everything is cheap and goes towards the upkeep for owner Judy. Plus it’s only $2 to get in. This is run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

The UFO Watchtower is situated near the Great Sand Dunes and is a crazy place. Check out the website and be convinced.

Recently the CIA has been releasing image files and footage of strange encounters. They certainly aren’t saying they are aliens, but they are saying they are unexplained. Now whether you believe as some do, that this is some kind of precursor to warm up the population to the idea that we are not alone or something more nefarious to distract from the problems the world is having at the moment, you can’t deny that they are a great addition to the conspiracy theory.

You can find a series of declassified images from the CIA right here

While we are on the subject of top-secret stuff the National Security Agency (NSA) has a section entitled UFO Documents, which are more declassified pdfs released after legal pressure dating back to 1980. Some of them are of poor quality (deliberately?) but still contain some interesting bits and pieces if you are prepared to wade through.

For more declassified documents (and we are talking millions), ranging from things the Apollo astronauts saw to in-depth Roswell crash info The Black Vault will have you hooked. It’s full of things pointing out anomalies in photos on Mars and the like so it wanders further into the field than simply UFOs but this is one big rabbit hole to go down.

This article on VICE is a great starting point and will point you to the best podcasts and documentaries currently out there.

Contact (Buy on Amazon)

Arrival (Buy on Amazon)

ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (Buy on Amazon)

Cloverfield (Buy on Amazon)

Super 8 (Buy on Amazon

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Buy on Amazon)

UFO Enemy Unknown

UFO: Enemy Unknown is a science fiction strategy video game developed by Mythos Games and MicroProse. It was published by MicroProse in 1994 for MS-DOS and Amiga computers and the Amiga CD32 console, and in 1995 for the PlayStation. Its European PlayStation release is titled X-COM: Enemy Unknown.

XCOM Enemy Unknown (Buy on Amazon)

XCOM: Enemy Unknown will place you in control of a secret paramilitary organization called XCOM. As the XCOM commander, you will defend against a terrifying global alien invasion by managing resources, advancing technologies, and overseeing combat strategies and individual unit tactics.

Xenonauts

Take control of a multi-national military organization defending our planet from alien invasion in this deep and challenging strategy game – tense, complex turn-based combat meets large-scale strategic management

No matter what you believe the internet houses a fascinating horde of articles on the subject matter. If you have any other great websites, add them in the comments below and keep watching out the window for anything that looks like it is about to make First Contact!