They did not see little green men. They do not claim to have been abducted. 

But several West Marin denizens—including very rational men and women—have noticed unusual objects in the sky that have them wondering about what might lurk in the great beyond.

None of them saw spacecraft like those made famous in 1950s movies such as “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” in which the United States military waged war against a fleet of space aliens zipping across the sky in hurtling, Frisbee-like discs. 

The sightings reported in West Marin are more subtle. Among them are a series of orange orbs silently arcing over the Inverness ridge and a cigar-shaped blip moving over the western edge of Tomales Bay way too fast to be a drone, a plane or a satellite. 

On a mobile phone, they look like blips on a screen. But to those who saw them firsthand, it appears possible that they could be more.

On Feb. 24, Heather Mickley saw two orbs gliding above a ridge in Inverness, moving from Tomales Bay toward Drakes Beach, then dipping out of sight beyond the trees. She had stepped outside to take some photos of the rising moon, one of her favorite pastimes, when she noticed the first one slowly moving across the sky. 

“I’m standing out on my deck, trying to get a few snaps on my phone, when into my frame comes this flying object,” she said. “I’m thinking, was it a drone?”

But she’d seen drones fly before, and they always made noise. This object was silent. Flying just above the tree line, it seemed too low in the sky to be an airplane or a satellite.

Suddenly, two more objects came into view, following the same path. 

“I thought, maybe it’s some sort of experimental craft, testing or something. I didn’t immediately go to, ‘Oh, UFO!’”

She spotted the first one around 6:30. By 10:30, she had seen about 20. She invited a neighbor over to have a look, and the neighbor agreed: This wasn’t the normal stuff you see in the sky.

Most of the orbs were gliding toward the Pacific, but a few came back from the other direction, moving above her home on Sir Frances Drake Boulevard toward the bay.

“I was temporarily obsessed with this for a few days,” said Ms. Mickley, who does marketing for the Bolinas Museum and is a co-owner of the Artiquity Gallery in Inverness.

She looked up the flightpaths of planes flying out of S.F.O. and Santa Rosa, but nothing seemed to correlate with what she had seen.

When she told her landlord, Chris Hulls, the plot thickened. He, too, had seen something mysterious in the sky, albeit several years earlier. And like Ms. Mickley, he had taken a photo and a video of the orb.

It appeared one evening while Mr. Hulls was in his Point Reyes Station yard with a friend who had claimed to have seen UFOs on various occasions. Mr. Hulls dismissed his claims as mere hallucinations at first.

But as they chatted about this and that, his friend saw another object in the sky. Sure enough, when Mr. Hulls looked up, he saw something, too. Probably just Jupiter in the early night sky, he figured. But then it started zigzagging in peculiar ways.

“Holy s—! It was moving!” Mr. Hulls said. “A plane would have to be moving in a straight arc, and this was not.”

When it appeared a second time, Mr. Hulls snapped a photo showing a tiny configuration of lights unlike anything he had ever seen.

Still, Mr. Hulls wasn’t leaping to conclusions. “Maybe it’s paper lanterns floating up,” Mr. Hulls said. “Maybe it’s some different phenomena. But people are seeing something, and I don’t know what it is. It’s just fun to let the imagination run wild.”

His wife had her own explanation. Perhaps, she told him, people just get weird when they move to West Marin.

Across Tomales Bay, Chuck Seligman, a school principal in Redding and former science teacher, took a more analytical approach to assessing the unusual object he noticed in a video he shot while visiting his mother’s Inverness home last winter. 

He became aware of the object by chance, thinking at first that it was dust on his iPhone screen. But when he enlarged the image, he saw that it was moving near the western shore of Tomales Bay—at a very high rate of speed. Another one followed.

He made a series of measurements and calculations, estimating the distance the object had traveled and how quickly it had moved. “Someone might say it was a drone, but the velocity was way too much. It’s just too darned fast,” Mr. Seligman said.

In recent years, the U.S. government has acknowledged receiving and investigating many hundreds of reports of UFOs, which it refers to as unidentified aerial phenomena, including various sightings by military aviators.

“Some of these uncharacterized U.A.P. appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities and require further analysis,” stated a report released last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In September, NASA released its Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Report, which recommended that the agency collect and analyze U.A.P. data via smartphone apps in addition to satellites and supercomputers.

Anyone can report sightings on one such app, Enigma, which has mapped 27 sightings in Marin County, including a dozen or so in West Marin. Several were seen last year, while others took place several decades ago. They came in the shape of spheres, fireballs, cylinders, ovals—even one shaped like a vertical Tic Tac breath mint. They zig and they zag, they hover and they zip.

The app can identify known objects in the sky, such as airplanes and satellites. It ranks each UFO sighting on a credibility scale ranging from 0 to 100. Objects spotted by two people receive higher rankings than those reported by one person or those that sound, well, a tad zany. (The Tic Tac sighting received a 37.)

Way back on March 31, 1963, someone in Nicasio reported: “Close encounter with an unidentified craft and its occupants.”

On Feb. 6, 2007, a mother and daughter saw a silvery oval rising into the pink sky through the skylight of their Point Reyes Station home. “My daughter is 14, has never seen or been interested in UFOs previous to this incident,” the mother wrote. “I am a 57-year-old nurse… Neither my daughter nor I have ever experienced hallucinations.”

In March 2021, a couple saw a glowing yellow orb zigzagging in the sky above Inverness, somewhere in the national seashore. “We played crop circle tones from the car speakers and meditated for 20 minutes, visualizing our consciousness expanding throughout the universe and asking for any beings to manifest in a safe, appropriate way,” they reported. The incident moved them to tears of joy. 

By contrast, back in 1994, a young man who reported seeing a lime green fireball hovering 10 feet off the ground in Dillon Beach was terrified. Suddenly, it moved toward him. “I ran away as fast as I could and I never looked back,” he wrote.

Mr. Seligman, Ms. Mickley and Mr. Hulls did not report what they saw in the skies on an app. And they absorbed their sightings with equanimity, open to earthly explanations for whatever they saw but willing to consider other possibilities.

“It would be an awful waste of space if we were the only ones in the universe,” Mr. Seligman said, paraphrasing Carl Sagan. “It would be a shame if it was just us.”

Being a middle school science teacher makes a person ask big questions, he said, posing one of the biggest: “Are we alone?” 

See these videos from Chuck Seligman below.