100 UFOs Sighted in Jammu and Kashmir, Says Indian Army

The Indian Army units and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force (ITBP) stationed in Jammu and Kashmir have reported sightings of over 100 UFOS in the past three months, according to India Today.

The ITBP has sent a report to its Delhi headquarters and the Prime Minister's Office detailing the UFO sightings, said India Today

The report described the mysterious entities as "Unidentified Luminous Objects" and strongly ruled out the possibility of them being aerial vehicles (UAVS), drones or even low earth-orbiting satellites.

"These were not unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), drones or even low earth-orbiting satellites," say army officials who have studied the hazy photographs taken by ITBP, the India Today report said.

The army, on its part, made several efforts to identify the airborne objects. It has recorded the sightings of drones separately.

Unidentified Flying Objects have been seen over the region of Ladakh in the past too. But the continual sighting of the celestial objects forced the army to conduct a detailed study in order to understand the phenomena.

An army team tried to detect the object in early September with a mobile ground-based radar unit and a spectrum analyzer, but the effort ended in vain as the radar failed to identify the object.

Later in the same month, a group of astronomers from the Indian Astronomical Observatory, who observed the phenomena for three days, asserted the flying objects were "non celestial". A senior army official said, "Something is clearly wrong, if our combined scientific resources can't explain the phenomena."

In 2003, 14 Corps from the same region reported sightings of non-celestial objects but the report was rejected by the then army chief, General N C Vij, calling them hallucinations.

Though, there have been many reports of UFO sightings in India, in most cases this did not lead to further explorations. In 2004, an expedition led by Anil Kulkarni of the ISRO's Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, captured a robot-like object from the Lahaul-Spiti region of Himachal Pradesh. But this too has remained a mystery with no further explanations.