It's UFO Season in Laguna Niguel and Dana Point!

UFOs are being spotted over Laguna Niguel again ... 

Not really surprising, since, after all, Laguna Niguel is clearly the capital of Orange County UFO sightings, which Patch has chronicled extensively over the last few years. Don't believe us? Check out our archive right here!

In the latest incident, a reader emailed Patch asking if anyone else Wednesday evening saw a "strange, vertical lighted object in the sky, approximately around 10 pm [last night] ...without moving for at least 45 minutes or so ... we could see it by looking up from Beacon Hill towards Crown Valley around the area of Clubhouse Drive, fairly high up in the sky ... about 30 degrees above the horizon from where we were looking across from Beacon Hill towards Crown Valley."

Well? Did you?

And last month, a man reported to the Mutual UFO Network's website (which chronicles all matters of unexplained freakishness in the sky) about something strange he saw while on a March 19 whale watching trip off Dana Point. He wrote:

My wife's digital phone cam was set to burst mode to capture pictures of the whales as they breached, and the dolphins as they jumped out of the water. Only after she returned home ... and we were reviewing the photos on her phone did I notice the disc-shaped object in one of the photos. Apparently nobody noticed it at the time because they were all focused on the water. I thought it was a joke and she had an app on her phone to insert UFOs in pictures....but it was no joke and my wife isnt even technologically savvy enough to fake the pic, nor would she have any desire to do so. The object did not show up in any of the other photos as far as I can tell. Im sure its not a seagull, airliner, frisbee, or lenticular cloud...what it IS I have no idea!

We're running the picture his wife snapped with this story. What do you think?

2013 has been quite a boom year so far for UFO reportings in Orange County. In addition to airborne weirdness in the sky over Laguna Niguel, strange objects have also been reported over Seal Beach (originally sighted in 1977), Orange, Westminster, Placentia, Cypress, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo. 

And last week, in a bit of serendipitous coincidence, Ben Hansen, the host and lead investigator on the SyFy channel's Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, spotted a UFO himself while working out on the track at Huntington Beach High School, according to OC Weekly. Hansen reported his sighting in great detail to the Mutual UFO Network's website, which logs UFO eyewitness reports. You can read his report and other recent OC UFO witness reports (including photos!) by clicking up the MUFON site and calling up "California" and "Orange" in the pull-down menus ...