36-year-old Daniel Garcia recently contacted the Singular Fortean Society to report an encounter he’d had with an anomalous light seen in the sky near Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the summer of either 2006 or 2007.

Garcia was a college student in Deerfield, Illinois, at the time, and had travelled north to Wisconsin to visit a friend who worked at The Salvation Army Wonderland Camp in Salem, Wisconsin, just west of Kenosha.

In an interview with investigator Tobias Wayland, Garcia said that he had parked in the lot and walked down to a nearby beach on Center Lake to wait for his friend.

It was around eight or nine o'clock on what he described as a “normal summer night,” not too hot or too cold, with clear skies.

An overhead view of the beach where Garcia’s sighting took place, with a red dot showing approximately where he was standing during the encounter.

As Garcia stood on the beach, he noticed something unusual in the sky.

"There was one really bright star that stood out," he said. "I’d say after I’d noticed it, perhaps five to ten seconds later, it shot up, down, back to the middle, and then shot up into the air and just vanished. It was like a two second pause between each movement, it wasn’t like super-fast lightning speed or anything. It shot up straight in the air."

Garcia was not able to identify the object, although he did note that the maneuvers it performed seemed to defy anything one would expect from a terrestrial aircraft.

The unidentified flying object was brighter than the stars around it and it wasn’t twinkling, Garcia recalled, but otherwise it was the same shape and color as one would expect for a star.

Its approximate altitude was not something Garcia was able to easily discern, which is normal for sightings of aerial objects. It is very difficult to judge the relative size and distance of a flying object in the absence of anything with which to compare it.

"[The UFO] didn’t look like it was closer or anything," he explained. "Obviously, I’m not a specialist in this area. It looked like it was the same distance in the sky as the other stars. It wasn’t in an area that I could say, 'Oh, that star is closer to the earth.'"

Garcia told his friend about what he’d seen when she arrived, but she had never seen anything like that at the camp, nor had she heard of any other sightings in the area.

No fear resulted from the experience, Garcia said, “but it kept my mind curious of the unknown or what could be out there.”

Although neither Garcia nor his friend were aware of similar sightings in the area, the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) has recorded several dozen sighting reports of unidentified flying objects in Salem and Kenosha since 1973.

None of the reported sightings took place at the same time as Garcia’s experience.

However, most recently, in November of 2020, a witness in Kenosha reported a "super-bright, round object" that performed a "smooth, rapid turn" before disappearing.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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