Thursday is World UFO Day.
The holiday is a day for the UFO community to come together to celebrate their beliefs in extra-terrestrials, according WorldUFODay.com. The website says the day is also used to encourage governments to declassify their knowledge about sightings.
People can recognize the day by watching UFO movies and chatting with friends about the possibility of alien life.
“The most important thing is that people collectively open their minds to the subject for one day and send out the message mentally that UFOs are welcome on this earth,” the website says.
One popular topic among UFO enthusiasts is Area 51, where conspiracy theorists believe the U.S. government stores and hides alien bodies and UFOs.
The U.S. government's official name for Area 51 is the Nevada Test and Training Range, which is a unit of the Nellis Air Force Base. Today, it’s used as an open training range for the Air Force.
Just a few months ago, the Pentagon actually declassified three previously leaked top-secret U.S. Navy videos in an effort “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that had been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos,” Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough said.
Gough added that the “aerial phenomena” in the videos remains characterized as “unidentified.”
The National UFO Reporting Center, which maintains statistics about global UFO sightings, says there were just over 3,700 reported sightings in 2018 and more than 6,800 in 2019. So far in 2020, nearly 4,700 UFO sightings have been reported.
The center’s data shows an uptick in the amount of UFO sightings reported over the past 30 years.
Happy #UFOday! The National UFO Reporting Center reports that sightings are on the rise with 3,700 in 2018 and 6,889 in 2019. There have been 4,688 so far in 2020 but still no clear pictures despite everyone carrying amazing cameras... #iwantobelieve https://t.co/CYBoiOsGcf pic.twitter.com/tKsMbIgm13
— Statista (@StatistaCharts) July 2, 2020
CNN contributed to this report.