So far, there have been 47 reports of unexplained things in the night sky over Illinois this year, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.

Several reports — including sightings in Carlinville and Skokie — are as recent as last week.

A resident reported seeing a UFO hovering above Skokie for more than half an hour on June 18, claiming to see “about 6 to 7 UFOs flashing bright lights often, a couple of were able to change the color of the lights to dark red.”

Two separate reports in Carlinville, not far from St. Louis, on June 19 detail seeing a “translucent ballon-like” object in the sky.

On May 29, a woman reports that she and her husband were driving on I-294 near O’Hare airport when they spotted something odd. “(I) was taking random pics there was at the moment, 1 commuter aircraft that had just passed going out of my pic to the right. Upon looking at the pic, I noticed what appears to be a disk like or hat-like metallic shape with a lighter color ‘underbelly’ outlined by a dark ring.” The woman said she recorded the same object in three different photos.

In Sparland, Illinois near Peoria, a resident reported seeing a fireball after their dog alerted them to something out of the ordinary. “I was getting ready to go to bed and my dog started whining,” the resident wrote. “I look outside and saw a huge orangeish red fiery light. I got pics and video.”

Other Illinois residents reported seeing lights in the sky, fireballs, disks and more. You can check out more Illinois UFO reports on the National UFO Reporting Center website.

President Donald Trump recently said he was briefed on UFOs. A group of Senate lawmakers received a classified briefing this week about such objects. And let’s not get started on that strange Facebook video that seems to show a creepy-looking alien doing some sort of jig down someone’s driveway.

Virginia Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner wants answers on UFOs, whether it’s “weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely,” Rachel Cohen, his spokeswoman, told CNN. And the Navy has drafted guidelines to allow pilots to report UFOs, and so that the military can track them, though the military branch prefers not to use the term “UFO.”

“So, we don’t actually use that term,” Joseph Gradisher, a spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told Patch last week. “We use ‘Unmanned Aerial System.'”

The term, shortened to UAS, refers to things like recreational flying drones people can buy at a store. For the “other” things, the Navy uses the term UAP, meaning “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.”

“We constitute anything unknown or unidentified in the airspace as an ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon,’ no matter what it is,” he said.

In that spirit, Patch took a peek at the most recent UFO — or UAP, if you prefer — sightings around the country using a database compiled by the National UFO Reporting Center. Spoiler alert: So far, no little green men have been seen running around.

Here are some other recent UFO sightings:

Atlanta, Georgia, June 13
Summary: “So honestly it didn’t look very odd at first it just looked like a plane but the more I looked at it the more I could see it looked more like a cigar (granted it was very far away). What really made me report it though was the distance it was covering. Like 15ish miles a second and when I did some calculations that would be close to 60000 mph. Which is ungodly fast, there also seemed to be some intelligent maneuvering going on which makes me believe it wasn’t a rocket. (It continually changed direction) although I’m no expert in weapon systems. It could have been nothing but it seemed odd, odd enough that I wanted to research and report it.”
Duration: 2 minutes

Oakwood, Georgia, May 25
Summary: “At approximately 9:30 p.m., I noticed an orange light moving in the night sky. I could not hear any sounds coming from it. At the height that it appeared to be, it seemed a lot larger than an airplane. It continued moving until it changed and got smaller. Then it disappeared. It occurred on May 5, 2019, at approximately 9:30 p.m. and lasted 15 or more seconds.”
Duration: 15+ seconds

According to data compiled by the Center, there were nearly 500 sightings across the country in May and more than 300 in January, March and April.

The Navy seems convinced of the existence of UFOs, telling POLITICO in a statement there were reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft “entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.”

“For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report,” the statement said.

And Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress, told The New York Times last month he was one of multiple pilots who saw UFOs. The pilots began seeing the objects in 2014 and 2015 after receiving upgraded equipment.

Initially they believed they were getting bad readings. But the sightings kept happening, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet and even at sea level. The objects could speed up, slow down and then reach hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” he said. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”