Taking the state motto “To the Stars” to its maximum advantage.
UFOs in the Heartland
UFO activity in Kansas may seem surprising, until you look more closely. Patterns emerge from repeated, well-documented encounters, careful investigation, and witnesses who didn’t set out to become part of a mystery.
That’s where our recent interview in the Wendy’s Coffeehouse Podcast archive comes in.
Mike McCord is a Kansas-based field investigator with MUFON, and an experiencer whose life includes both personal sightings and years of casework involving high strangeness. Over time, he has documented UFOs, UAPs, orbs, anomalous lights, and witness accounts that resist easy categorization. Some of the most compelling cases he shared involve what researchers increasingly describe as call-and-response phenomena.
Calling the Sky
Mike was assigned two separate MUFON cases in which witnesses claimed they could deliberately attract UFO activity.
The first took place in Norton, Kansas, in July 2024. The primary witness claimed repeated encounters and said the phenomena could be summoned from his home. To evaluate the claim firsthand, Mike traveled to Norton, where he joined the witness, two children, a neighbor, and observed from the patio. After roughly ten minutes, others noticed lights in the sky. When Mike was directed to the exact area, he observed a light appear around 80 degrees above the horizon. It moved slightly, then vanished. A second light appeared shortly afterward in a different position.
Subsequent checks of flight tracking and astronomical mapping tools showed no conventional aircraft, satellites, or known celestial explanations.
A second investigation occurred in Wichita, Kansas, in October 2025. In this case, the witness claimed to attract UFOs using a high-powered laser. After several minutes of scanning the sky, Mike observed a bright object, comparable in intensity to Venus, appear suddenly, move with deliberate changes in direction, pause, and then disappear. Again, no conventional explanation was identified through flight or star data.
Across both investigations, Mike personally observed three unidentified aerial phenomena.
According to the state MUFON director, reports involving apparent interaction or awareness between witnesses and UAPs are increasing, an observation echoed in other regions and by experiencers such as Chris Bledsoe, also known for his ability to call in UFOs.
Orbs, Streetlights, and the Edge of Explanation
Not all cases involved distant lights in open skies.
In Peabody, Kansas, a mother and her two children observed multiple glowing orbs moving around a streetlight roughly half a block from their home. One orb flew away into the countryside. Another descended to eye level, hovered, then dropped directly into the ground and disappeared.
Later that same night, as the family prepared to leave to assist a relative, they observed seven white orbs—each about the size of an orange—interacting near the same streetlight. As their car passed beneath it, both adults experienced strong electrical sensations: tingling skin and hair standing on end. The orbs matched objects observed at the same location days earlier.
Mike has also personally witnessed similar orb activity near a streetlight close to his own home in Olathe, Kansas. The activity appeared to increase during rainfall, raising unresolved questions about whether these phenomena represent unusual electrical effects, or something autonomous interacting with the environment.
A Small Town, a Long Memory
As if to underscore how deeply UFO history runs in Kansas, there’s an unexpected cultural footnote.
During the pandemic, the small town of Geneseo quietly rediscovered its own UFO legacy. Volunteers digitizing thousands of slides collected by local chiropractor and UFO enthusiast Elmer Janzen uncovered decades of reports, photographs, and artifacts stored away in attic boxes. As the material went on display, museum attendance increased, and Geneseo began embracing its role in UFO history, even inspiring events like the Dimension G Festival.
It’s a reminder that today’s sightings don’t exist in isolation. They sit atop layers of forgotten data, personal stories, and long-term patterns waiting to be reexamined. Link
What Kansas Is Telling Us
None of these cases arrive with definitive answers. What they offer instead is consistency: repeated observations, corroborated witnesses, careful documentation, and investigators willing to say I didn’t see it—until I did.
Kansas may not be the loudest voice in the UFO conversation, but it is becoming one of the clearest examples of how the phenomenon unfolds quietly, through call-and-response encounters, lingering orbs, and communities rediscovering their own anomalous past.
Documented Case: Columbus, KS
The location of the sighting seems to have a lot of unexplained phenomenon, and is one of points of what is known as “The Spooksville Triangle” — that runs from Columbus to Joplin, MO to Miami, OK. For many years, unexplained phenomenon has been reported in the area of the triangle, including the “Hornet Spook Light” SW of Joplin on the MO/OK border. The area is also on the 37th Parallel, along which an abnormal level of UFO activity has been reported over the years.
Witness experience and photographed multiple phenomenon at his home in Columbus, KS.
These include: Streaks of white light rapidly moving around his property. Change directions and one disappeared in the center of the field of vision. Lights in trees, some blinking some stationery. An object or ball of energy “walked” across his driveway before disappearing in the middle.
Apparent missing time when the witness and a friend went coyote hunting. The five minute return trip took two hours according to the clock. Basketball sized orb flitted around and through trees, witnessed by the witness and his girlfriend. An opaque object with an eye in the middle that the witness described as a hologram. It was oval shaped but became flat as it turned.
Lights moving across the sky. A triangular shaped object with two lights. An “aggressive orb”, shaped like a giant wasp that changed many colors and at times has a disco ball/rainbow colors that strobes very quickly. Its flight pattern was a swaying motion similar to a wasp as well. Main color was a shiny gold.one side photographed above a tennis court.
Documented Sighting: Lenexa, KS Triangle
Date: July 16, 2016
Location: 1162 Renner Road, Lenexa, Kansas
Witness was driving in her parking lot of her workplace when she noticed a triangular object in the sky on my left (east). “ I stopped my car, then got out my cell phone to take a couple pictures. I took two pictures, then parked my car so I could get out and take some more and the object was gone. There was no sound and the object never moved from where I could see it. I was not scared but more curious. I had never seen anything like it before.”
Sometimes the signal simply appears and waits to be noticed.
A Timely Anomaly. It’s Personal.
Worth noting: in the wider pattern of UAP-related anomalies, those subtle disruptions that often seem to cluster around periods of heightened attention, something unusual occurred the day after my interview with Mike.
I went to start my car and the key would not insert. I tried twice. There had been no prior issues. A brief surge of panic, then a pause, followed by an instinctive adjustment that somehow allowed the key to engage.
After arriving at my appointment, the key was difficult to remove. That’s when I noticed it had bent.
An impossible oddity. No explanation. Just a small mechanical failure appearing at an improbable moment, one that echoes a pattern many experiencers recognize immediately: everyday systems hesitating, misaligning, or briefly failing during or shortly after focused engagement with the phenomenon.
Some might call it synchronicity. From the inside, it feels different. Less symbolic. More functional. Information arrives, not through conversation, but through interruption.
The word key matters. Representing a mechanism. Access. Engagement. Timing. Something either aligns… or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, attention is required.
This is how the interface often works. With cues. A pause in the ordinary. A system that resists just long enough to be noticed. Meaning isn’t delivered fully formed. When recognized and acknowledged, it arrives. Sooner … or later.
For those who live with this terrain, no justification is needed. You know the difference between coincidence and contact. Between imagination and interaction. This was a marker that something had shifted just enough to be noticed.
The rest of that thread continues in the next post.
Conscious Living & Wendy's Coffeehouse 