After spending decades trying to convince us that Unidentified Flying Objects were either figments of our imagination or any of many of other explanations, the Pentagon has finally acknowledged that, yes, UFOs are real, and many of you who have seen them but have been careful about whom you tell about them have finally found validation.

Me, too.

In case you missed it, Sunday, July 2 was World UFO day. It was a good time for those who have experienced these otherworldly phenomena to go public with what they saw and heard.

Of course, there have been any number of unconfirmed reports about how the government has covered up UFO sightings going back into the 1940s. Most widely known of these is the famous Roswell, New Mexico, incident from 1947 when there were widely circulating accounts that the U.S. Air Force recovered debris and extraterrestrial remains from a crashed UFO in the desert near Roswell.

An exhaustive report many years later claimed that the ``aliens’’ observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies carried aloft by high altitude balloons for scientific research.

By that time, more reports of UFO sightings were pouring in, and Americans have been obsessed with the idea that alien life is wandering among us.

A few years ago, the Pentagon officially released three short videos showing unidentified aerial phenomena that had previously been released by a private company.

The videos showed what appeared to be UFOs rapidly moving while being recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos feature military pilots reacting incredulously to how fast these objects were moving. The Navy said it was releasing the videos “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether the footage that has been circulating was real or whether there is more to the videos.

Statewide groups have been documenting UFO sightings for several decades. In one of the latest from Pennsylvania, one of the most recent sightings was in Brodheadsville, Monroe County.

According to information about the May 14 sighting, a Chestnuthill Township resident saw a “transparent, elongated object” begin to move above the planet Venus. The man, who wouldn’t allow his name to be released for fear of becoming the target of social media harassers, said he and his wife watched the object as it crossed the sky and noticed an airplane flying near it.

“The best thing to call it would be a saucer; the size was unreal. I’m guessing 150 feet long, maybe bigger. It finally started hovering above our yard, and we both agreed there were seven distinct lights in a line with even spaces.”

I have had two unexplained UFO experiences in my lifetime. The earlier one was in my hometown, Summit Hill, when I was 14 years old. I remember waking up during the night and seemingly being compelled to walk about six blocks from my North Market Street home to an area across from St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on West Ludlow Street.

I was telepathically instructed to board a cylindrical craft which had landed there. My next recollection was my mother’s voice waking me up several hours later. I was back in my bed. Was I dreaming or maybe sleepwalking? I didn’t even tell my best friends, because I thought they would make fun of me and figure that I made the whole thing up. After all, they knew the impact the motion picture “War of the Worlds” had on me. We had seen it just a few weeks earlier at the Palace Theatre in Lansford in 1953. It was the scariest movie I had ever seen to that point.

The second experience was about 20 years later. I had fallen asleep on our living room floor in our Stroud Township, Monroe County, home one evening after playing indoor football with my three young sons.

Suddenly, I was jolted awake. Still trying to get my bearings after having been awakened from my deep sleep, I felt this compulsion to go outside. I put on my coat. “Where are you going at this hour?” my wife asked. “I don’t exactly know,” I replied in a semi-daze.

When I stepped into our front yard, I was compelled to look up into the star-filled night sky. I saw this cylindrical object seemingly hovering just above rooftops on our street. “What the heck?” I muttered. I stared at it for about five minutes. Then, it moved straight up, made a right-angle turn and was gone in an instant.

The following day, I learned of numerous other reports of similar sightings throughout the Poconos and, especially, around the Saylor’s Lake area. I wrote a first-person account of my experience for the Easton newspaper for which I worked, and the episode was recounted in the book, UFO Exist by the late Paris Flammonde of East Stroudsburg.

By BRUCE FRASSINELLI| tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.