They say Kansas City is a UFO hot spot. Will Pentagon report help you believe them?

She used to send out press releases about what she considered credible UFO sightings around Kansas City, ones that had video or physical evidence to back them up. But UFO investigator Margie Kay gave up several years ago because the media just ignored her.

So maybe that’s why few people know that in UFO circles, Missouri is a Top 10 state for sightings. “The entire state, and Kansas City in particular, is considered a hot spot among UFOlogists,” said Kay.

Who knew that people have reported seeing unidentified objects flying in and out of Lake Jacomo near Blue Springs? That there is, allegedly, a lot of activity in the sky above the corkscrew spire of the Community of Christ Temple in Independence, where Kay lives.

Last year the UFO community recorded 142 sightings in Missouri, with quite a few in the Kansas City area, according to Kay.

“Historically, the media has followed what the government wanted everyone to believe, that people were seeing nothing, they were misidentifying something, or they were crazy,” said Kay.

“So there’s been this joke factor involved, where people just assume that if someone sees something like that, they’re a little bit off. But turns out that’s not the case. And now, the media is taking it seriously. Finally.”

UFOs have gone mainstream, thanks to a highly anticipated report from Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials about what they call unidentified aerial phenomena — UAP — seen over American airspace. Declassified videos show U.S. military jets encountering unknown aircraft that maneuvered unlike anything pilots had ever seen.

The report has inspired serious discussion from congressional leaders, mainstream media and the public. On Friday, the New York Times quoted unnamed sources who said no evidence was found linking the aircraft to aliens. On the other hand, no once can explain those unusual movements. The full report is expected by the end of the month.

Still, for people like Kay who say they’ve seen UFOs, the report is a “told you so” moment and was likely to come up during a two-day virtual conference about UFOs that Kay organized for this weekend.

“I cannot wait to see this report and see what’s in it,” said Kay. “We’re all cautiously optimistic that the release … is going to have some substantial evidence in it, just so the general public knows for a fact that there really is something going on here that we can’t explain.”

Kay might have more company than she thinks. A 2018 Chapman University survey of American fears revealed that 41.4% of Americans believe that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past, and 35.1% believe aliens are visiting now. And those beliefs have risen in recent years.

Hundreds of people belong to Kansas City and Missouri UFO Facebook pages, where they post photos and videos. The private Missouri UFO Hot Spot page alone has nearly 1,200 members.

“The entire UFO community, especially those of us who have been investigators for many years, we’ve been down this path before where they say they’re going to release something, or we get our hopes up because someone thinks when a new president gets in office things are going to be released, but they never are,” said Kay.

“But as of late, with these confirmations from the Navy and the Pentagon that a lot of these videos that were leaked, they are confirming, yes, we don’t know what these things are.

“That’s a huge step. Because those of us who investigate and see this on a constant basis know that the phenomena is real. There’s definitely something unexplained happening. Now what that exactly is, we don’t know. We just know it’s there.”

UFOs in Kansas City?

There was a time when UFO news made the news.

Newspaper readers in Kansas City were regaled with conjecture about extraterrestrials, specifically Martians, even before H.G. Wells wrote “War of the Worlds,” in 1897.

In 1894, a Kansas City Times story discussed a strange light emanating near or from Mars, prompting speculation “that the old idea that Martians are signaling to us will be revived.”

In an 1897 Times story, famed scientist Nicola Tesla suggested “that the day is not far distant, as science measures time, when a serious attempt may be made to transmit intelligence to the planet Mars.”

On Aug 4, 1947, amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold became part of UFO history when he reported seeing nine crescent-shaped objects in the sky while flying near Mount Rainier in Washington.

That sighting, and others that came later, prompted a government investigation of flying saucers a year later, according to Time magazine in 2009. “Arnold evoked images of ‘saucers skipping on water’ to describe how they flew through the air, but a local newspaper misquoted him, and the term flying saucer was born.”

But even just two years ago, The Star wrote about a possible UFO sighting:

“Kansas Citians had their eyes to the sky Thursday evening, trying to get a glimpse of two mysterious white, spherical objects floating over the city,” the Star reported on June 20, 2019. “So far, no one seems to have a definite answer, but Twitter users had some guesses for what they may be.”

Even the National Weather Service was stumped, tweeting that night: “We honestly have no explanation for the floating objects over Kansas City.”

The sightings attracted a larger-than-usual crowd at the next meeting of the Kansas City chapter of the Mutual UFO Network.

The sightings were explained away a few days later as weather balloons.

But Kay doesn’t buy that.

Flightradar24, a service that shows real-time information about aircraft around the world, didn’t indicate weather balloons in the air that night, said Kay. “And balloons don’t generally stay in one place for six hours. They float on the currents,” she said.

‘That wasn’t of this world’

Kay owns a chimney and fireplace contracting business, and a fire investigation service. She’s also a private investigator who has worked on unsolved crime cases.

She has written about a dozen books about UFOs and other unexplained phenomenon and is currently assistant director of the Missouri chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. (Kay said it will resume meeting in person in September at the VFW in Raytown).

She says she saw her first UFO as a teenager, driving with her family through Oklahoma. It was silver, shaped like a cigar, with no wings or tail, flying alongside them just above the treetops, about 1,000 feet from their car.

Years later while living in Seattle, she was with family again watching shooting stars when a bright light appeared high above their parked car. At first, Kay thought it was a satellite. But then, the object stopped.

Then another object came up behind it, then three more. And the instant that fifth object joined the others, “it shot off at a 90-degree angle to the right,” said Kay. “And at that point we just jumped off the car, got in and said it’s time to go because we all knew we had just seen something that wasn’t of this world.”

She says 2011 brought a bumper crop of 237 sightings in Missouri, more than 90 of them in Kansas City, she said. That October was especially busy. (And Kansas? Not big on sightings, she said.)

“We had so many bizarre things happen that month,” she said, some of which could be explained by stunt planes and a B-52 bomber flying over a Kansas City Chiefs game.

But that left many sightings unexplained, including a report of some kind of craft hovering over a water tower in Raytown, and tiny balls of white light that appeared out of a Lee’s Summit treeline and played with a dog.

And then there was a reported “close encounter” at 63rd Street and Interstate 435 involving a giant craft, screaming children and a man being sprayed with a green substance. “Two people were taking film of this, but during this time, when I got a hold of the film, there’s a 20-minute gap that neither of them can explain,” Kay said.

An issue of national security

The government’s report was spurred last year when Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, requested that the director of national intelligence and secretary of defense create “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting.”

Rubio told Newsweek, “We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters.”

John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, raised eyebrows in March when he told Fox News that when government officials reference sightings, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for, or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas told The Star in a statement that he’s interested in reviewing the Pentagon’s findings.

“As a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, I will continue to work to ensure our military has the technology and resources it needs to combat threats from adversaries around the world,” said Moran.

UFO — or Venus?

Daniel McIntosh and his scientist colleagues aren’t quite as interested.

McIntosh, chairman of the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, hasn’t heard any of his science colleagues mention the report.

“I think usually when it comes to UFOs, it’s like the media gets caught up, or the public gets caught up in the idea of extraterrestrial visitors and that’s the least likely explanation,” said McIntosh, an associate professor in the department.

But, McIntosh watched part of a “60 Minutes” story last month about the forthcoming report and came away thinking that “clearly there’s something, there’s more release of information than there has been in the past.”

He said some reports of these phenomena don’t have simple or well-understood explanations. But many sightings come from “average people … who just happen to be out and they see something weird,” that can be explained, he said.

Sometimes, people see something celestial they don’t recognize — a star, fireball or a meteor so bright it can be seen during the day. Sometimes high-altitude clouds can reflect light in odd ways — some are even saucer-shaped.

Venus has been known to trick many an eye.

“In the evening, either dusk or dawn, Venus is often just above the horizon because it orbits so close to the sun. And it’s so bright, it looks brighter than a star, brighter than a plane,” he said. “People might get caught up on that … the list goes on.”

As the skies get cluttered with more satellites and other bright objects, McIntosh expects reports of unidentified objects to climb. They already are, according to Kay, with 106 sightings reported in Missouri in 2018, compared to the 142 last year.

“Obviously the public’s fascinated with kind of the whole story, and probably the ET part,” said McIntosh. “Astrophysically we think about it in three different ways — the probability of life in the universe, the probability of intelligent life in the universe, and then the probability of ETs visiting Earth.”

Right now, scientists know of no other life anywhere other than on Earth, he said. “And it’s important to emphasize life as we know it.

“But scientists, including myself, are very confident that we will in the future. And probably not that far in the future. But that’s different from intelligent life and ET coming to planet Earth.”

Crop circles and Sasquatch

Part of Kay’s job in the local UFO community is to investigate sightings — interview people and look at any evidence, such as photos and videos.

Sometimes she has to drag stories out of people.

The stigma is strong, so much so that some people don’t even want their own families to know they’ve seen something odd in the sky. And goodness, what would the neighbors think?

“They don’t want people to think that they’re nuts,” she said. “Especially people who live in rural areas. They’re much more tight-lipped.

“I’ve gone on sites investigating UFOs, crop circles, cattle mutilations and Sasquatch on the same ranch and they will never go public with this. All over the state.”

She thinks that a dump of information from the government might lessen some of the anxiety of going public.

Then again, “It might cause more fear in some people,” she said. “But at least we’re getting closer to the truth, and closer to finding out what this stuff is. Because I guarantee you that our government knows much more about it than any UFO investigator like me.”

Includes reporting by The Star’s Jonathan Shorman.

This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.