On St. Patrick’s Day in 2006, the police in Nanuet, New York assumed that the high volume of calls reporting UFOs was just the result of too much partying on this festive day. In all fairness to the police, with the amount of green beer and other alcohol consumed every March 17, it wasn’t a completely unreasonable assumption. However, this sighting involved numerous sober witnesses, and there is also a curious history of mass sightings on St. Patrick’s Day in the Hudson Valley of New York stretching back 35 years.

“Lights in the sky” sightings easily comprise the majority of UFO sightings, and have just as easily been dismissed by skeptics as bright stars and planets, conventional aircraft, and—dare I say it?—swamp gas. Now, there is a new bane of a ufologist’s existence—drones. Every kid with an LED-covered quadcopter can spark a viral “UFO” video, even further muddying the already murky waters of “lights in the sky” cases.

We all know that dogs are man’s best friends, but could they also be our best UFO witnesses? With their vastly superior sense of hearing, smell, and ability to see in low light, perhaps every field investigator and researcher should consider getting a canine companion!

Ask any ufologist when strange lights were first seen by the residents of Phoenix and they wouldn’t hesitate to tell you it was somewhere around 8:30 pm on March 13, 1997. However, the correct answer might be earlier, by at least 88 years!