The Lights Above the New Jersey Turnpike in 2001

Several news organisations revealed in 2017 the existence of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an American government-funded investigation into UFOs from 2007 to 2012. However, the $22 million program wasn’t the first of its kind.

Official government studies on UFOs officially started in the 1940s with Project Sign, gathering some of the most credible footages of the aerial phenomenon to date. Interest in UFOs and aliens across the world reignited with the revelation in 2017 that the American government was actively investigating UFOs.

One of the most credible modern UFO sightings took place in New Jersey Turnpike.

On July 14, 2001, motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike stopped alongside a highway and looked towards the sky. The reason for their strange action was the sighting of mysterious orange and yellow lights in a V formation above the Arthur Kill Waterway between Staten Island in New York and Carteret in New Jersey for around 15 minutes just after midnight.

One of the witnesses was Lt. Daniel Tarrant of Carteret Police Department. Many metro area residents from the Throgs Neck Bridge on Long Island and Fort Lee, New Jersey near the George Washington Bridge also witnessed the same.

Air traffic controllers denied any unusual sightings that night, but New York Strange Phenomena Investigators (NY-SPI) group claimed they obtained FAA radar data that corroborated the UFO sightings.