When Samantha Kelcinski was in high school, she wore Star Trek shirts and spoke in Klingon. So it probably came as no surprise that she was obsessed with the idea of UFOs, an interest sparked by a short documentary the now-26-year-old Staten Island native found on Netflix as a kid.

When she began her current job as a vet tech, she decorated her locker with UFO and alien stickers. Her peers and co-workers “thought I was weird, in a fun way,” she said.

But things changed when she announced that she had finally witnessed a UFO for herself.

It was a stormy day, which usually would have kept her hiding inside. “I’ve almost been struck by lighting three or four times,” she said. But something drew her out the door to a small crowd. She looked up.

“It looked like a saucer,” she said. “It was shiny, and it was right above the trees. It was reflecting the trees. … Then it just shot straight up into the sky. All of our jaws dropped.”

Skeptics might think what she saw was a weather balloon or another man-made object, but she said she knows what she saw. She submitted it to the National UFO Reporting Center.

She also called her boyfriend to tell him about it, then told her co-workers. None of them were particularly nice. It felt as if, in their eyes, she went from “quirky” to “nut job.”

“It was embarrassing. I was like, ‘Why am I even telling anybody?’” she said. “They probably just think I’m crazy.”

Now, she hopes the tide might be turning. On Friday, President Biden’s director of national intelligence is expected to release a report that will share everything unclassified that the U.S. government knows about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), as mandated by last year’s pandemic relief package.

Though it reportedly will not offer firm conclusions as to what the UAPs might be, it has had many in the UFO community buzzing with anticipation. Some think it could mark a sea change in how the public considers the possibility of UFOs and all the implications that come with them. Maybe, after decades and decades of being written off as kooks, the believers will have some government-backed proof.

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