Were you ever identified, tested, or enrolled in a gifted program as a child?
Have you ever had a UFO/UAP sighting or experience — at any point in your life?
If the honest answer to both is yes — even loosely, even if you're not sure it “counts” — this page is for you. Keep reading.
“Gifted” Goes by a Lot of Names — All of Them Count
One of the reasons this comparison has never been run is that gifted identification in the United States has no single national name, test, or standard — each state, and often each individual school district, runs and brands its own. If you were tested or placed in any of the following — or something like them that isn't listed here — it counts. Don't rule yourself out because your program wasn't called “Gifted and Talented.”
State-Level Official Terms
District-Branded Program Names
National Talent-Search & Enrichment Programs
None of these on your own school's letterhead? That's fine — tell us what your own program was actually called. Every real name we collect makes the next version of this list, and the underlying research, more complete.
Confidentiality Always
If you don’t want your story shared, it stays between us. Full stop. No exceptions.
No Judgment, No Diagnosis
We are not asking whether you were “special.” We are collecting data. Your answers are treated the same whether they support this hypothesis or contradict it.
Your Story Isn't Stored
Unless you give us permission, your submission is never added to our systems. It lives only in the email you send — nowhere else.
Negative Answers Count Too
Gifted but never had a UFO experience? Had a UFO experience but were never tested as gifted? Tell us that too — a real comparison needs both.
What to Include in Your Email
Copy and paste the template below into your email. Fill in whatever you can. Leave blank whatever you can’t — a partial answer is still useful data, and this is not a test you can fail.
SUBJECT: Gifted & UFO Experiencer Report — [Your First Name or Anonymous] ABOUT YOU First Name (or “Anonymous”): General Location you grew up in (city, state, country): Year of Birth (or approximate decade):* QUESTION ONE — GIFTED IDENTIFICATION Were you ever tested, identified, or enrolled in a gifted/talented program? (yes, tested but not enrolled, enrolled, no) What was your program called? (GATE, TAG, G/T, AIG, Pathways, Horizons, QUEST, PACE, Odyssey, Highly Capable, a talent-search program like Duke TIP/Johns Hopkins CTY/Davidson, or your own program's actual name): School District & State/Country: Grade(s) or Age(s) when tested or enrolled: Years / How Long You Were In the Program:* (e.g., "3rd–8th grade" or "one year only") Did you know any siblings, cousins, or close family who were also gifted-identified?* QUESTION TWO — UFO/UAP EXPERIENCE Have you had a UFO/UAP sighting or experience? (yes/no) Date: (exact or approximate — e.g., "Summer 2018" is fine) Location: (nearest city, state, country) Number of Witnesses: (were you alone, or with others? Were any other witnesses also gifted-identified?)* Craft or Object Shape / Description: Your Account: Tell us what happened in your own words — as much or as little as you want: EVIDENCE Did you capture any photos, video, or audio?* (yes/no — if yes, please attach) Did you report this to anyone?* (NUFORC, police, military, etc.) SHARING PREFERENCES Would you like your story used (fully anonymized) in this site's ongoing research on this hypothesis? (yes / no) Would you like your story published as its own account on OverClassified? (yes / no / anonymous only) ANYTHING ELSE Anything you want to add:
Send Your Report
Send your completed template (or just answer the two questions in your own words) to the address below. There is no form, no account, no sign-up.
overclassified.main@gmail.com
We respond to every email. It may take a few days, but we will respond.
Prefer a general sighting report with no gifted-program angle? Use our Share Your Story page instead.
Responses So Far
This page went out on Reddit and by direct email starting in September 2026. Here is an honest accounting of what has come back — not a finding, and not proof of anything either way. Read the caveat below before the numbers, not after.
This is not a survey, and these numbers are not a statistic. Every respondent so far found this page because it was posted in UFO-interest communities on Reddit — a self-selected sample of people already inclined to have a UFO story, replying to a post that told them exactly what correlation it was looking for. That is close to the worst possible sampling method for testing whether a real correlation exists, and more than one commenter said so directly in the threads themselves. The tally below is a running, transparent count of what has actually been said — nothing more.
The count also isn't just people saying yes. Responses reporting no gifted history who did report a UFO experience are counted too, and matter more than the "yes" side does for anything resembling a real comparison — without them there is no non-gifted group to compare against at all.
UFO/UAP: Yes
UFO/UAP: No
UFO/UAP: Yes
Counted from public Reddit comments and direct email/report submissions received so far. Ambiguous or joke replies, and anyone who asked not to be counted at all, are excluded rather than guessed at.
On using Reddit comments
A comment posted publicly on Reddit is treated as fair to reference in the aggregate count above, the same way a public comment can be quoted anywhere else — but no Reddit username or exact quote appears anywhere on this site unless that person gave real, separate confirmation first. Several respondents explicitly asked not to be included at all ("I would prefer not to be on a list," "please leave me out of that") — those requests are honored in full, regardless of what a public comment technically permits. Public visibility is enough to count a data point; it is not enough to publish someone's name or story as their own account.
Full accounts, with permission
Two respondents so far completed the full report by email and explicitly consented to their story being used here, anonymized. Their accounts, unedited beyond removing identifying detail they didn't offer themselves:
Gifted history: Enrolled in an Australian primary-school gifted and talented program from Kindergarten (age 5) through 7 years. No gifted-identified siblings or close family.
UFO/UAP experience: March 2007, Sutherland, Sydney, NSW. Alone at home at night, drawn outside by the family dog reacting to something. Describes a spinning-top-shaped object, roughly 1.5m across and 1.2m tall, dark matte metallic, a red light slowly brightening and dimming at a vertex on top, and dozens of small colored lights on its underside, hovering about 2 metres from the doorway. Watched for a few seconds before retreating inside. No photo, video, or report filed. Also describes a sleep-paralysis experience some months later, which the respondent themselves frames as "well possible as imagined" rather than a second encounter — and notes minimal prior exposure to alien/UFO fiction before either experience.
Gifted history: Enrolled roughly 2nd–4th grade in Regional School District 12, Connecticut, in either the QUEST or AIG program (unsure which after this many years). No gifted-identified siblings.
UFO/UAP experience: Roughly summer 2007, Washington Depot, CT, with two other witnesses (mother and sister). A bright white light diffused through low fog roughly 100 yards down a side road while driving home, initially dismissed as the moon — until turning a corner and finding the actual moon clear and unobscured elsewhere in the sky. No photo, video, or report filed.
What's been checked so far
Per the standard this whole project runs on: a name, place, or program mentioned in a submission gets checked against a real source before it's treated as anything more than a claim.
"GATE/MGM," Orange County, California, respondent born 1969. California's gifted-education program really was called Mentally Gifted Minors (MGM), established by state law in 1961, before being replaced by the Gifted and Talented Education Act (GATE) in 1980. A respondent old enough to have started the program in the late 1970s and finished around 1980–81 would have lived through that exact rename — which is almost certainly why this respondent remembers it under both names. The timeline lines up precisely with real legislative history.
GATE program, J.P. Taravella High School, Coral Springs, Florida, 1985. The school is real, opened in 1981 in Broward County, and does run a Gifted & Talented program today. What can't be confirmed from public sources is whether the specific term "GATE" was already in use there in 1985 rather than a different name adopted later — plausible and consistent with everything checkable, not fully nailed down.
New program names surfaced through outreach: REACH and MGM were both independently reported by respondents who had no apparent knowledge of each other, and both also appear on a Reddit community's own list of program-name variants — a real name showing up twice from unrelated sources is a reasonable bar for adding it to the glossary above. Odyssey of the Mind was also reported, and is worth distinguishing from the generic "Odyssey" pull-out programs already listed — it's a real, specific international creative-problem-solving competition, not a school's own gifted-identification track.
This section will be updated as more responses come in. If you submitted a report and want to update your sharing preferences — including asking for something already listed here to be removed — email us any time.
Common Questions
Does my gifted program have to be called GATE or TAG to count?
No. There is no single standard term nationally or internationally. GATE, TAG, G/T, AIG, Highly Capable, Pathways, Horizons, QUEST, PACE, Odyssey, G.O.A.L., an Advanced Learning Plan, a talent-search program like Duke TIP or Johns Hopkins CTY, or simply being told you were “tested for gifted” all count. If you were formally identified or tested under any name, we want to hear from you.
What if I was tested for a gifted program but not enrolled?
That counts too, and it is scientifically just as useful as being enrolled — a comparison between tested-and-enrolled and tested-but-not-enrolled experiencers is one of the few ways this hypothesis can actually be evaluated. This site's own founder is exactly that case, discussed openly on the theory page itself.
Do I need both a gifted history and a UFO experience to submit?
To be useful to this specific research question, yes — we're looking for people who can speak to both halves of the comparison, including a firm “no” on either one. If you only have a UFO story and no gifted-testing history at all, our general Share Your Story page is the right place for it.
Is this trying to prove gifted kids get recruited into a secret program?
No. This site's own research on the subject found no credible evidence for an institutional-recruitment claim, and said so plainly. What this page is testing is a narrower, more mundane possibility: that the psychological traits gifted-identification measures overlap with the traits that independently predict who reports intense anomalous experiences. Answering that honestly requires real numbers, not another story on a podcast — which is what this page exists to start collecting.
🔓 Privacy Statement
OverClassified does maintain a data storage system for the site itself, but we do not add your personally shared information to it unless you explicitly give us permission to do so. Absent that permission, the only record of anything you share is the email you send — it lives in a private inbox accessible only to the site founder, and is never copied into any website server, database, or third-party service. If you request confidentiality, your account will never be published, referenced, or shared in any form, including in aggregate research. If you wish to remain anonymous, we will never retain or record any identifying information beyond what already exists in the email itself. If you request that your submission be removed from our records entirely, send an email and it will be deleted permanently.