The Bay Area UFO files: Trump disclosures could fuel more reports of aliens

SAN JOSE, Calif. — It was the late 1950s when Ruben Uriarte saw his first UFO — a silvery, oval-shaped object hovering by the Oakland foothills.

“I thought maybe it was a blimp, because it was just hanging there. I thought it would eventually move. But it didn’t move at all, and that stayed with me, because I was puzzled,” says Uriarte, now 74 and living in Hayward, California.

In his life, Uriarte has encountered other unexplained phenomena, including balls of light that grouped into a triangle during a crop-circle tour of England. But his own experiences are a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of UFO reports he receives from people around the world. It’s his job to suss out the ones worthy of further study, as Northern California assistant state director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

The volunteer-run organization has collected more than 100,000 reports of UFOs worldwide since its 1969 founding. In an average year, it logs between 700 to 900 in California, with nearly 200 reported last year in Northern California. The shapes of these objects range from dumbbells to eggs to diamonds to fireballs, and behaviors include takeoffs and landings. Some people report seeing “entities” – blond-haired Nordics, bobble-headed Zeta Reticulans, little green men and more.

Uriarte, who signs his emails “THE TRUTH IS ABOVE OUR BACKYARD,” expects the pace of reports to soon pick up, due to recent media attention and the Trump administration’s declassification of military “UFO files.”

“Spielberg is going to be coming out with a new movie on UFO disclosure this June,” he says. “Then there are going to be more cases released by the Pentagon that I’m sure are going to spark a lot of interest. There might be new information like videos and pictures. I doubt they will release anything like a UFO crash or bodies of dead aliens – all that’s still going to be classified.”

Americans remain fascinated with UFOs, long after the first well-known report in 1947 of flying saucers on Washington’s Mount Rainier. Forty-one percent of Americans believe UFO sightings are evidence of alien spacecraft, as opposed to human or natural phenomena, according to a 2021 Gallup poll. And 2 percent believe they’ve personally been abducted by aliens, a 1992 Roper poll found, equal at the time to 3.7 million people.

But Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, says those numbers may not reveal what we think they reveal.

“All of this says much more about human nature and the human species than it does about the presence or absence of aliens,” says Diamond. “What it says is we don’t want to be alone. We don’t want to imagine that there isn’t life and intelligence out there.”

That may sound ironic coming from the leader of a group with a name that stands for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” But SETI’s legion of well-trained scientists, with cutting-edge instruments scanning the skies, have found zero evidence of alien visitation. The institute’s position is that life is statistically likely on planets far, far away – it just hasn’t made its way to us.

“You don’t work at SETI Institute if you don’t believe in life beyond Earth. But, I mean, the distances are extraordinary,” Diamond says. “They sure as hell also would not crash in our desert. It’s like, ‘Oh, we figured out how to travel light years through space and time, but we didn’t know how to fly around the planet. We crashed in the desert. And then we left somebody behind.’ That just doesn’t pass the straight-face test.”

Compared to places with eerie reputations like Roswell and Area 51, the Bay Area isn’t exactly a hotbed of UFO activity. The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) counts roughly 2,900 sightings since 1947 in an area from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

“Where we get more reports per capita are generally where the sky is clearer, so places like Northwest Washington or in the remote stretches of Nevada,” says Christian Stepien, chief technology officer for the Washington-based center.

Light pollution and fog account for fewer UFO sightings in the Bay Area, as does the high rate of tech literacy, says Mick West, a Folsom-based analyst for UAPs (unidentified aerial/anomalous phenomena).

“You’ve got a higher density of people who are thoughtful about science and technology because of the prevalence of the tech industry. It’s just something that pushes the needle a bit,” says West, who runs the skeptical site Metabunk.

That does not mean the Bay Area’s tech overlords are nonbelievers. A few years ago, a Peter Thiel-backed venture fund announced a “conference for thoughtcrime” called Hereticon for discussing things like UFOs and biological modification. And a former executive with Sam Altman’s OpenAI recently claimed the organization is “building portals from which we’re genuinely summoning aliens,” according to The New Yorker. (“It’s the most reckless thing that has been done,” he warned.)

In one 1990s case, a Silicon Valley CEO named Joe Firmage left his Internet-consulting company to pursue UFO investigations full-time. Firmage had “explicit confirmation that the UFO phenomenon is in fact occurring,” he told the Associated Press. He then related how a bearded interloper appeared in his Los Gatos bedroom and “produced a sphere, an electric blue ball about the size of a cantaloupe, which entered Firmage’s body, taking command of his muscles and producing unimaginable waves of uber-orgasmic ecstasy.”

If only all UFO encounters were so pleasant. Witness reports submitted to entities like MUFON, NUFORC and the U.S. Air Force’s defunct Project Blue Book range from curious to scary.

In 1896, newspapers reported that people from San Francisco to Sacramento witnessed an immense airship traversing the region – some say it was shaped like a bird. This was before zeppelins had made their way to America.

“Around 6:30 p.m., a light resembling an electric-arc lamp appears in the night sky above Sacramento,” reads one account. “Horse trainer David Carl notices it close to the ground and hears a voice saying, ‘We are too low down here. Send her up higher.’ Hundreds watch as it passes at low altitude for 30 minutes, avoiding buildings and hills. Some people claim to hear voices, either arguing or singing.”

In 1964, a bowhunter stalking deer near Lake Tahoe reported that he was approached by two creatures that attempted communication by cooing like doves. As it happens, there was a robot with them also. “They were garbed in a silver-like suit but visually had the complete absence of a neck. These strange (individuals) had unusual facial features especially in the region of the eyes that protruded extensively,” he later told a military investigator.

The encounter ended in a rude way, when the “beings emitted a vapor and the hunter said he blacked out.”

Also near Tahoe, a man claimed he was abducted from a cabin in 1977 in the Heavenly Valley ski resort by a trio of aliens who did nefarious things to him. They “materialized in the room like something out of ‘Star Trek,’ opened up a side of the cabin and took me to an illuminated room,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “There, he said, they extracted DNA for their own bizarre purposes, then deposited him back in his room ‘with a hell of a sunburn and two black eyes.’”

When asked why so many tales of alien abduction involve invasive medical procedures like probings, West cracks, “You’re going to have to ask Dr. Freud.”

Shortly after World War II ended, sailors on a fishing charter going under the Golden Gate Bridge reported silver objects flying faster than aircraft, in formation, over Alcatraz Island. A couple years later, in 1950, local newspapers relayed dozens of accounts of an odd-shaped object drifting over the region, leading to an indelible Chronicle headline: “Flying ‘Ice Cream Cone’ Reported Over Alameda.”

These type of accounts continue up to the present day. “My boyfriend and I went out to see the blue moon and we saw lights. We felt like we were taken and branded somehow with burns to our skin,” reads a 2020 NUFORC report from San Jose. In 2025, sightings on two different dates from Benicia and San Francisco’s Baker Beach described glinting, triangular crafts in the sky. “Using my pure, untrained estimation, I would say that, if the craft were the distance of Point Reyes from my location, it was hundreds of feet across,” wrote one witness.

As far as sightings go, flying saucers are out in the 21st century, and in their place are spheres, cigars and triangles. “It’s like when new models of cars come out. I think there are new models of alien spacecraft coming out,” says Stepien.

To believe the mountain of witness accounts, aliens are visiting the Earth as often as you might go to the store for a bag of chips. But there are ordinary explanations for what many people are seeing, says West, who’s analyzed footage of hundreds of UAPs.

“People misidentify planes. Starlink satellites are another common cause; satellites in the sky will reflect the sun, and they look like they’re crisscrossing and doing dogfights,” he says. “Then there are planets and stars – people are not used to looking in the skies. Balloons are the most common cause of sightings among military and commercial pilots. Drones themselves are a whole other ball of wax.”

In the Bay Area, UFOs have later been attributed to electrical storms, airplanes taking off from Oakland and San Francisco airports, test missiles launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County and a transformer fire on Mount Diablo.

The Pentagon started releasing declassified UFO files this spring – Donald Trump promised they contained “things that you wouldn’t believe” – but a search does not reveal much relevant to the California. One of the biggest things is Buzz Aldrin seeing a “fairly bright light source” while on an Apollo mission, but the astronaut said it could’ve been a laser. West has perused the Pentagon files, and says they don’t contain anything new or compelling.

“It’s a distraction, because it’s something that’s more interesting for people to talk about than, you know, the war and Epstein,” he says. “It’s being exploited for political games, essentially. And I think that the more sunlight you can put on explaining what these things are, the more people can see how they’re being misled by politicians who don’t always have their best interests at heart.”

Nevertheless, many continue to believe. Decades of working as a UFO investigator for MUFON have convinced Uriarte that aliens are real, and they’re here right now.

“I had an international case of a woman who had an encounter with these Nordics – blue-eyed, blond-haired beings that look very human – in Cuba when she was a younger lady,” he says. “I had another individual from Mexico who stated she felt a presence in her room, and was lifted and went through the wall to meet these four beings.”

Uriarte is happy aliens are finally being taken seriously at the highest federal level.

“Our executive director does meet with congressional members and other people in the U.S. government. He provides them with an update of what’s going on, so we’re working mainly behind the scenes,” he says.

“The fact we’re having contact with representatives and getting cooperation is what I find really unique. There was a lot of mistrust over the years, because there was denial that there were such things as UFOs. Now it’s like, there is something out there – just who and what they are, we don’t know yet.”

— Additional reporting by Veronica Martinez