LAKEWOOD, OH — On September 9, just before 7 p.m., a Lakewood resident was walking back to their house, with their 5-year-old son in tow. They were playing with dragonflies and fireflies when something caught the resident's eye. They saw a cigar-shaped burst of light moving south across the sky.

"My first thought was that it was a drone, based on its apparent size and distance away. We see small drones in the area from time to time, but they usually move somewhat erratically, slowly, and always seem to have blinking lights. As I tried to process what I was seeing, I realized that it was moving as if it was an arrow shot from a bow," the resident wrote in a report for the National UFO Reporting Center. The cigar-shaped light was only in the sky for 10 seconds, but it shook the Lakewood resident enough that they wrote a detailed post on its appearance and direction. "The speed that it was moving was much greater than anything that I have seen before," they wrote. It flew out of eyesight, behind a group of condos, before the resident could fully analyze what they were seeing.

Similar accounts of UFOs have been reported from across the state. In fact, more than 2,600 reports of UFO sightings in Ohio have been filed with the National UFO Reporting Center this year. Unidentified Objects

The National UFO Reporting Center gets witness accounts of unidentified flying objects every year from people in Ohio and elsewhere around the country. The idea that we're not alone and aliens from another galaxy are circling the planet in strange-looking spacecraft has long fascinated us. Thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, are filed every year. In the Buckeye State, 2,694 reports have been filed in 2019.

The National UFO Reporting Center's website is filled with accounts like this one, from Gallipolis, Ohio:

"A husband (former law enforcement) and wife (scientist), while sitting outside their recreational vehicle at a public campsite, witness a very bright light approach their campsite from the south in an erratic manner, appearing to slow or stop on several occasions as it drew near. It got within 50 yards, they estimate, of their campsite, at which time, out of a sense of alarm, the husband reached for his .45 caliber sidearm, but he felt unable to use his arm, or lift the firearm. The object, estimated by the witnesses to have been approximately 20 feet in diameter, hovered nearby for approximately 8 seconds, and then suddenly accelerated toward the west, and disappeared very quickly to the west."

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour "like saucers skipping on water." Although the objects Arnold claimed to see weren't saucer-shaped at all, his analogy led to the popularization of the term "flying saucers." And since then, Americans have been more or less obsessed with the idea that alien life is among us.