I Team: Florida is a UFO hotspot

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — On Halloween, we turn to spooky, mysterious things, and we open our minds, but here in Florida, UFOs are a regular occurrence all year long.

In fact, Florida is number two in the nation when it comes to UFO sightings – right behind California.

That’s part of the reason why Sen. Marco Rubio is pressuring the Pentagon to declassify everything it has on unidentified flying objects and the possible existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

The CBS12 News I Team took on this subject and learned that when people see things in our skies - many times, they're looking at military aircraft.

But that doesn’t explain everything.

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"There’s been rumors for years that the catholic church has all the information needed about alien visits and that its locked up in a vault in the Vatican," Denise Stoner told the I Team.

Stoner, who lives in Orlando, said she was taken aboard a spaceship as a child- then again several more times over the course of her life. She’s one of 3.7 million Americans who believe they’ve had contact with aliens. She even wrote a book about it.

"We have looked at blood types, there’s a possibility certain blood types have something to do with it," Stoner said.

Through her research and writing, Stoner is trying to chip away at the stigma around these experiences- so people who believe they’ve had a close encounter, can be comfortable sharing their stories with her and her group.

"In the probably 12 years that I’ve been holding these meetings, and I hold them once or twice per year, nothing has ever leaked," Stoner said.

Denise says a police officer and a coast guard captain are among those who told her their contact stories. But given what was reported by 60 Minutes earlier this year, perhaps its not unusual that a coast guard officer has seen something.

A group of fighter pilots and a naval radar operator went on the record with correspondent Bill Whitaker, describing a tic-tac shaped object that whizzed around U.S. airspace just off California. Not on just one occasion – but during multiple sightings.

In Florida, we know that defense contractors and the aerospace industry are working on secret, prototype aircraft every day.

Three years ago, CBS12 News tried to get an official answer about an image from Google Earth. It showed a pointy, oddly shaped craft - at Pratt & Whitney's facility on the Bee Line Highway. The company had no comment.

Also, no comment from Lockheed Martin regarding a video which hit TikTok a few weeks ago. It shows a futuristic craft on a flatbed truck at a company testing site in California's Mojave desert.

California is number one when it comes to UFO sightings, with Florida a close number two.

The group that keeps track of these phenomena is called MUFON: The mutual UFO network.

Denise Stoner is an Assistant Director for MUFON's three Florida chapters. And she has a theory mind you its her own belief, not MUFON's about where some UFOs come from.

"I tend to lean toward the Orion’s Belt constellation," Stoner said.

The most up to date stats on this- from 2020- reveal that in Florida there were 440 reported sightings. An increase of about 150 sightings from the year before. And that’s the trend.

Every year, all over America, numbers go up.

This past February, the CBS12 News Weather Team received videos and pictures from viewers curious about what they were seeing in the night sky.

"Is that a rocket?" one spectator exclaimed.

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Not a rocket, but close! According to the Navy- what so many of us saw was a missile test, launched from a submarine off our coast.

But for an example of an unexplained incident, we looked at an oddity from this past may; a doorbell camera in Palm Coast (Central Florida) recorded two fast moving orbs. The camera belongs to Bill Fuentes, a retired detective, who says he’s open to all possibilities:

"I don't know what that was. Ghosts? UFOs? Bugs maybe? If you look at the video... it looks like they’re flying in formation of some kind," Fuentes told the I Team via Zoom, and indeed his footage is peculiar.

"When I hold a meeting that is open to the public, individuals who attend who are naysayers- by the end of the meeting they have slipped a little closer to the line we stand on and they want to look for more," Denise Stoner says.

And we may be getting closer to more answers.

Another familiar Florida face, former Sen. Bill Nelson, is now NASA's administrator.

Nelson has said he believes we are not alone and has directed NASA scientists to examine UFO footage (that’s a first) and report their findings if they come up with anything.