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UFOs Spotted over Ellison Bay

The U.S. government’s downing of mysterious flying objects in February may have everyone eyeing the skies more carefully these days. That’s not the case for Ryan Mueller – his eyes were already there.

“In fact, pretty much any night I’ve actually taken the time to look up or out into the sky for more than a few moments, I’ve witnessed a UAP,” Mueller told the Peninsula Pulse.

UAP is the formal name for a UFO, and it stands for “unidentified anomalous phenomena” as well as “unidentified aerial phenomena.” By any name, Mueller has seen them at least seven times since he moved to Ellison Bay from Milwaukee with Rebecca Whipple in late November 2021. The couple bought the iconic Uncle Tom’s Candy Store in the old Newport School House in Ellison Bay.

Mueller said he almost immediately began to see “odd, unexplainable things in the sky” from their Europe Bay Road address. 

“Typically, these objects have no recognizable form of propulsion; they make no noise of any kind; and they traverse incredible distances in the sky – faster than I can complete a blinking sequence,” he said. “The objects almost always appear as an orb with varying levels of brightness, but almost always their ability to shift directions and change speeds is incredible and unexplainable.”

Most of the time they are light orbs moving erratically on the western horizon over the bay of Green Bay. In one photo that Mueller took, the orb is hovering over the radio towers south of Ellison Bay. 

“After a few minutes, this bright, white light turned into three lights, and then in the blink of an eye, accelerated into the stratosphere and was gone,” he said. 

On a clear evening last July, Mueller observed what he believed to be a triangular shape behind the lights when the UAP moved near his location. On another occasion, he had an even closer encounter.

“The orbs were moving wildly and erratically,” Mueller said, “but as I watched, they started to move toward each other until they converged directly overhead. At this moment, the brightness of the orb became almost blinding and much larger. I distinctly remember the wind stopping and all noises of bugs or animals cease.”

Mueller also felt what he described as complete hopelessness.

“Total fright, coupled with the understanding [that] I have absolutely no control over my body or environment,” he said. 

Mueller said he considers himself a “well-educated, rational individual” with a business to run. He has lived on three different continents and has been to a lot of interesting places, “but I’ve never seen anything like what I’ve seen up here with relative consistency.”

With the experiences becoming more pronounced, corroboration and documentation became a goal. 

“At this point, at least for my own catharsis, I need to share this with somebody,” Mueller said.

He contacted neighbors during sightings to find out whether they saw in real time what he was seeing. 

“Each time, my position is corroborated by another witness,” he said.

Only one of those agreed to go on the record: Carol Kostka, a neighbor who lives about a quarter mile away from Mueller and is one of his employees at Uncle Tom’s Candy Store.

“He called me and asked me to look out my window toward Ellison Bay and tell him what I saw,” Kostka recalled. “Over the tree line, whatever this was, it was going up and down, up and down, left to right, left to right – it kept doing that. I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted, and all of a sudden, it was gone – completely gone.”

Kostka has lived at the location for more than 10 years and said she has never seen anything like that. Neither had two Door County natives who have also seen strange lights in the sky lately. Brad Ohnesorge and Kelly Scoon live on Highview Road south of Ellison Bay and east of the radio towers. For two nights in a row, they witnessed red and bluish lights that appeared oblong in shape toward Newport State Park over Lake Michigan.

“There were at least three,” Scoon said, and on the second night, five. “You’d see one dim out, then another brighten, and they moved back and forth. We couldn’t hear a thing.” 

They tried to get a closer look with binoculars, but the objects were too far away.

“I thought it was military planes looking for something,” Ohnesorge said, “but I thought it was weird to see the same thing the next night.”

Mueller had a particularly strong sighting on Jan. 31 and decided to report it by calling 911. Door County Chief Deputy and Undersheriff Pat McCarty said deputies were dispatched but “didn’t observe anyone or anything in the area.”

He said with deputies’ dash cameras and body cameras, there’s a greater likelihood of capturing images of suspicious sightings. If they did see something, what would deputies do?

“It would depend on the nature of it,” McCarty said. “There’s no protocol.”

He has worked for the Sheriff’s Office for decades and recalled a time in the past when they were required to call a federal UFO hotline whenever they received a report of an unusual sighting. 

“We used to get strange light sightings over the Baileys Harbor swamp and then the area of Peninsula Park golf course,” he said. 

McCarty said Mueller did the right thing in calling in the sighting and encouraged anyone else to do the same.

“By all means, call it in,” he said. “We want our deputies out and about and proactive.”

Proactivity is what Mueller is advocating: Bringing awareness to sightings might inspire more eyes in the skies, foster effective communication and better prepare us for the future.

UFO Sightings and Research in Door County

Founded in 1974 by UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble, the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) tracks, records and – to the greatest degree possible, according to its website, nuforc.org – corroborates and documents reports from individuals who have witnessed unusual, possible UFO-related events. The NUFORC log for Wisconsin shows 2,370 reports since records began in 1947. Of those, 20 sightings have come from Door County.

One little-known fact about Door County is that it’s home to pioneering UFO researchers Jim and Coral Lorenzen, who founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in January 1952 in Sturgeon Bay. The UFO research group stressed scientific field investigations and had a large staff of well-known, consulting Ph.D. scientists. APRO moved its base to Tucson in 1960 and remained alive until late 1988. 

Feds Take UAPs ‘Very Seriously’

The federal government’s study and tracking of UFOs – officially known as UAPs, for “unidentified anomalous phenomena” or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” depending on the agency – no longer take place in a windowless, government, X-Files-like basement.

Instead, UAPs are of interest for both national security and air safety, according to NASA, which has commissioned a study team to examine UAPs from a scientific perspective. The nine-month study, led by a 16-member team, kicked off Oct. 24, 2022.

“NASA has brought together some of the world’s leading scientists, data and artificial-intelligence practitioners, aerospace-safety experts, all with a specific charge, which is to tell us how to apply the full focus of science and data to UAP,” said Daniel Evans – the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and the man responsible for orchestrating the study – in a NASA press release dated Oct. 21, 2022. “The findings will be released to the public in conjunction with NASA’s principles of transparency, openness and scientific integrity.”

The study will focus on identifying available data, discerning how best to collect future data and deciding how NASA can use that data to move scientific understanding forward regarding observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.

The study is not part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which was established Aug. 4, 2020, then supplanted in November 2021 by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. That entity “synchronizes efforts across the department and the broader U.S. government to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in Special Use Airspace, and to assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security,” said Kathleen Hicks, U.S. deputy secretary of defense, in a November 2021 statement. 

“DOD takes reports of incursions – by any airborne object, identified or unidentified – very seriously and investigates each one,” Hicks said.