The first shout went up from a group of friends who were standing in a dark field and gesturing wildly upward. “Look! Do you see it? My God!” someone yelled. “No way that’s a plane!” I followed my friends’ gazes up to the summer sky. With minimal light pollution this far north in the Champlain Islands, the stars wheeled above us like a road map to the cosmos, thick with constellations and pulsing with light. Then I saw it. A glowing line, like an iridescent caterpillar crawling across the sky, moved through the cloudless firmament, inexorable and brilliant. I blinked and rubbed my eyes like some rube in a black-and-white film seeing a flying saucer. The lights weren’t gone when I opened my eyes again; they shone even more brightly against the blackness of space. I found myself breathing deeply, my stomach knotting and my mouth dry as I watched the line of golden lights unspool farther and farther. After a life of fascination with UFOs, was I finally seeing something unexplainable in the skies? My phone beeped with an incoming text, followed shortly by another. “Are you seeing this up there?” read the first message, from a friend in the southern reaches of Vermont. “You’re looking for UFOs, right? What are the odds?” I looked up from my phone to find the light in the sky fading, disappearing back into the ether. People were still shouting nearby, some laughing in disbelief. “C’mon, that has to be aliens!” someone exclaimed. I wasn’t so sure. But my friend was certainly not the first Vermonter to think they’d had a close encounter. It might come as a shock to learn that Vermont is a hotbed of UFO activity, with a long history of the inexplicable and uncanny in its skies. The Green Mountain State placed second in a recent stacker.com list of the most sightings per capita in the country. Those rankings derive from the National UFO Reporting Center, or NUFORC. Vermont ranks high on other, similar lists as well — though one survey slagged the state’s UFO-hunting turf as the fourth worst in the country. While the methodology behind all such lists deserves scrutiny, for such a small and sparsely populated place, Vermont does seem to offer more than its share of strange sights in the sky. Are Vermont’s UFOs really visitors from other worlds, though? Or are there more…