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.
A handful of "not gifted, but yes UFO" Reddit replies isn't a real control group either — nine self-selected internet comments can't tell you what the non-gifted population actually looks like. For an honest comparison point, the third box below instead uses real, nationally representative polling on how common a UFO sighting is in the general population.
Tally reset on September 15, 2026. Earlier counts on this page were tracked informally across many separate conversations without a permanent, checkable source. Starting now, every number here comes only from a full Reddit thread or email actually saved to this project's private archive, with each individual response classified against a written set of counting rules — so the count can only grow as fast as new source material is actually archived, and every number is independently re-checkable against its source.
UFO/UAP: Yes
UFO/UAP: No
Has Ever Seen a UFO
Left two: 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. Right: Gallup, "Americans Still Skeptical That UFOs Are Aliens," 26 August 2026 (fieldwork July 1–19, 2026) — 17% of Americans say they have personally seen something they thought was a UFO, essentially unchanged from 16% in a 2019 Gallup poll and higher than the 9–14% Gallup recorded between 1973 and 1996. Source →
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
Five respondents so far completed the full report by email and explicitly consented to their story being used here, anonymized or under a name of their own choosing. 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.
Gifted history: Tested in first grade and enrolled in Juneau, Alaska's Extended Learning/GATE program from 1st through 12th grade. Cousins, a brother, and nephews are also gifted-identified.
UFO/UAP experience: Three sightings (2024–2026) near Rogue River, Oregon, witnessed jointly with a spouse who is also gifted-identified. In 2024, a floating, glowing red orb. On two later occasions, a pulsing, pear-shaped craft cycling through green, red, blue, and violet light, observed near the tree line for up to 30–45 minutes — through a spotting scope, described as moving in small, rapid patterns while covering distance slowly, before sinking below a ridgeline. Two of the three sightings followed the respondent's own attempt at CE5 (a human-initiated contact protocol) earlier the same evening; on both of those nights, the couple reported hearing an unidentified woman's voice inside their home afterward — whispering once, singing an indistinct tune once — which they describe as deeply unsettling and the reason they stopped attempting CE5. No photo, video, or official report was filed; the respondent said filming "felt wrong."
Gifted history: Tested in first grade and enrolled from second grade in Rankin County School District's Venture gifted program; also took part in Duke TIP. Describes her gifted-track schooling as running from 2nd through 11th grade. All four of her maternal cousins were also gifted-identified.
UFO/UAP experience: Multiple, beginning February 6, 2024, in Mississippi. While meditating outdoors around midday, she opened her eyes to a large, metallic-silver, teardrop-shaped object with a tail and no trail behind it, crossing the sky in under six seconds in what she calls a "swimming" motion. She describes the surface as molten and reflective, "like it was liquid mercury," estimates it at the size of a school bus or larger at roughly 5,000 feet, and heard a loud boom after it passed out of view. She reported it to police, the FAA, the Air National Guard, the American Meteor Society, and a national UAP reporting service. The American Meteor Society identified the object, which other witnesses in neighboring states also reported, as a daylight fireball. She does not accept that identification, citing its erratic movement and slower-than-meteor speed. No photo or video was captured; she later made the recreation below herself.
She reports further encounters since. Around February and March 2025, small, erratic orbs, which she filmed. On a separate occasion, with her mother, a shape-changing orb that held a fixed position over a crowded parking lot near an airport while jets passed around it. Around Christmas 2025, a blinding white orb about the size of a globe that hovered for roughly a second in a windowless corner of her living room, seen by both her and a friend; she says her eyes hurt for days afterward. On September 17, 2026, with other witnesses, formations of star-like lights "dancing and weaving around each other." She notes that many of these sightings followed prayer or meditation.
Gifted history: Identified as gifted from kindergarten, consistently testing in the 99th percentile on grade-level standardized tests. Offered the chance to skip third grade, which she refused so she wouldn't leave her friends. Placed in fourth grade in a gifted and talented program she knew as SOAR, which ran through sixth grade. No close relatives were placed in the program.
UFO/UAP experience: A shared episode of missing time around Christmas when she was about ten years old, in the mid-1990s. She, her mother, her aunt, and her sister left a mall in Greenwood, Indiana, around 9:30 PM and took back roads home to Westport. Along the way they came upon what looked like a forest on fire, a huge orange glow, followed by a blinding white light directly ahead of them in the road. Her next memory is of regaining awareness, which she distinguishes sharply from waking up, to find her mother and aunt in the front seats staring at each other and the car windows frosted over. When her mother started the car, the clock read 2:30 AM. They were in Greensburg, Indiana, at the very back of a grocery store parking lot, parked at a right angle to the marked spaces, still about fifteen minutes from home. Her father, who had been phoned as they left the mall, had already called the police; officers who knew the family drove the route looking for them, assuming the car had slid off the road.
She retains one fragment from the missing hours: looking down from roughly 100 to 200 feet above the interstate off-ramp into Greensburg. She is careful about what she claims: "I'm not completely convinced it was a 'UFO' as I do not recall an actual craft or beings." Years later, she and her mother saw what she now believes was a TR-3B-type triangular craft and reported that sighting to MUFON, mentioning the earlier missing-time episode as an aside. No physical evidence exists; she wonders whether a police report from that night might.
Broader experiencer accounts (not counted in the tally above)
The comparison above is specifically about UFO/UAP sightings. At least one respondent's account doesn't fit that question at all — a gifted history paired with no sighting, but a cluster of other anomalous experiences sometimes discussed in the same experiencer literature this hypothesis draws on. It's presented here for what it actually is, not folded into the sighting count above.
Gifted history: Tested in first grade at her Ocean Springs, Mississippi public school and placed in a pull-out program she remembers as "Enrichment" — a small, mixed-grade group of 8–10 students meeting once or twice weekly for logic puzzles, research projects, and occasional hearing tests. Remained in the program through eighth grade. One sibling was tested but not placed.
Experience: No traditional UFO/UAP sighting. Reports a lifelong cluster of other anomalous experiences instead: an out-of-body experience during a minor surgery at age five, chronic childhood sleepwalking that included waking up outdoors at night, an unexplained "scoop mark" scar on her thigh with no memory of an injury, and recurring "hyper-real" premonition dreams as both a teenager and an adult. The closest she has come to an NHI encounter is one such hyper-real dream in May 2024, written down immediately on waking: witnessing what she perceived as the Earth eclipsing the sun, then a shifting face resolving into a reptilian entity with large, cat-like eyes, communicating in a hissing language she couldn't understand but says she felt physically, "like blow darts." The only word she retained afterward sounded like "Mat-Tsu" — phonetically close to the Japanese matsu ("to wait"), which she notes herself without claiming the connection is meaningful. No physical evidence exists beyond her written account, recorded the same morning.
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.
"Extended Learning," Juneau School District, Alaska. Extended Learning is a real, current Juneau School District program name. One nuance worth naming: the district's current materials describe Extended Learning specifically as a grades 3–5 math-compaction track, with K-12 gifted identification formally sitting under a separately-named program (Talent Enrichment and Development). Plausible that the structure or naming differed for a respondent who moved through the district across the 1990s and 2000s — presented here as the name the respondent knew it by, not a claim about the exact program structure decades ago.
"Enrichment," Ocean Springs School District, Mississippi. The district's current official term is Gifted & Talented, not "Enrichment" — but its own program description is built entirely around that word, and this respondent attended in the 1980s, when naming plausibly differed from today's catalog term (the same pattern already confirmed above for MGM/GATE). Presented as the name remembered, not verified against a 1980s-era district document.
"Venture," Rankin County School District, Mississippi. Venture is the district's real, current name for its intellectually gifted program, and the district's own page says all 1st and 2nd graders are screened for it — consistent with a respondent tested in first grade and enrolled in second. One nuance: the district describes Venture as serving 2nd through 6th grade only. A respondent who describes gifted-track schooling through 11th grade is most likely combining Venture with what came after it (Duke TIP's talent search began in 7th grade), not claiming Venture itself ran that long. Source →
A widely reported daylight object over Mississippi, February 6, 2024. The American Meteor Society's fireball log does carry an event for that afternoon (event 754-2024): 11 witness reports from Louisiana and Mississippi at about 19:26 UT, early afternoon Central time. That corroborates the core of one respondent's account — that something bright crossed the daytime sky that day, that other people reported it independently, and that the AMS classed it as a fireball. Her own figures differ slightly from the log as it stands (she recalls 13 other reports across three states, around noon). What a log entry can't settle is the part she disputes: whether the object she watched moved the way a meteor does. Her reports to the FAA and other agencies are her own account and haven't been independently checked.
Greenwood to Westport, Indiana, by way of Greensburg; the "SOAR" program. The geography of one respondent's missing-time account holds together: Greensburg sits on a natural route between Greenwood and Westport, about fifteen minutes north of Westport, with an interstate exit, as she describes. She recalls coming to in the lot of a grocery she calls "Harvest Market"; Greensburg does have a Harvest Supermarket, part of a family-owned Indiana chain operating since 1976, so the store was plausibly there in the mid-1990s under a name she remembers slightly differently. Not confirmed: that her school district's gifted program was called SOAR. The name is real and used for gifted programs elsewhere, and the elementary school serving Westport does offer gifted services today, but no source found so far ties the SOAR name to that district in the 1990s. Also unchecked: whether any police record of that night's search survives.
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.