Unidentified flying object

A photograph of a frisbee UFO.

The woo is out there UFOlogy

Aliens did it...

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...and ran away

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“”None. I don't drink before I fly.

—General Chuck Yeager (the first pilot to break the sound barrier) when asked how many UFOs he'd ever seen[1]

An Unidentified Flying Object or UFO (alternatively Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, or UAP^[2]) is any observed anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Alleged UFO sightings are associated with related crank claims, i.e. of visitation by intelligent extraterrestrial life or of government-related conspiracy theories.

Culturally, "Unidentified Flying Object" has come to mean "alien spacecraft" by default though sometimes the term ETV (ExtraTerrestrial Vehicle) is used to separate an alien vehicle from an unknown earth vehicle. A typical paradox is the fact that identifying UFOs as flying saucers negates the "U" part of UFO, of course, since if an object is said to be of alien origin, it can no longer be called "unidentified"...unless one is referring to which alien the craft belongs to.^{[note 1]}

Alleged UFO sightings are more likely to occur at night, since many regular flying objects give off one or several peculiar lights, sometimes blinking, and sometimes seeming to disappear and re-appear due to clouds — which can be practically invisible at night.

The basic list of what needs to be eliminated before alien spacecraft is even worth considering includes known commercial and private air flights, to classified military flights, to experimental test flights of various planes and rockets (like those at Area 51), to rocket launches and corresponding spent-stage ejections, to weather balloons, to meteorites or space junk burning up in the atmosphere, to kites, to ball lightning, to atmospheric phenomena (like the Northern Lights,^[3] or strangely lit clouds), to bright stars or planets (Venus is often reported as a UFO), to Iridium flares, to drones of various types, to pranksters, to video hoaxters (who fake their own evidence) and so on.

How UFOs got turned into "flying saucers" and gathered media interest[edit]

A giant cigar The Zeppelin III in flight, 1907

UFO construction plan

First wave of interest[edit]

The first notable wave of interest in UFOs was actually in the 1890s. Interestingly, this helps put later waves of interest in UFOs in perspective: because popular culture had yet to define what a UFO was supposed to look like, the spacecraft described were rarely shaped like flying saucers (in one incident, the supposed craft was shaped "like a giant cigar") and the flashing lights later common to many stories were much rarer.^{[note 2]} The craft were also much slower (though they would've seemed fast at the time).

Foo fighters[edit]

"Foo fighter" was the term given by Allied pilots to unusual aerial phenomena and so-called UFOs they encountered during World War II. There were reports from both theatres of war, namely Europe and the Pacific. Various explanations have been put forward, including St. Elmo's Fire, Nazi secret weapons, ball lightning, the planet Venus, and even disoriented pilots suffering from vertigo.

Kenneth Arnold[edit]

On December 10, 1946, a U.S. Marine C-46 transport plane crashed on the southwest side of Mount Rainier in Washington State, and was not located until the next summer. ^[5] A private pilot named Kenneth Arnold volunteered to aid with the search. While he was circling the mountain he spotted a cluster of nine brightly glowing objects near the remote bulk of Mount Adams to the south.

They seemed to be flying in formation, so Arnold assumed they were aircraft of some sort, and he naturally interpreted their brightness to be the Sun glinting off of polished aluminum. The pieces were tumbling, and this made them hop up and down in the airstream. Arnold told reporters they flew "like a saucer skipping over water."

This was a highly publicised UFO sighting, and it sparked a national obsession with "flying saucers" that bordered on mass hysteria. Suddenly there were many more sightings. Some were ordinary mistakes but most were outright copycat hoaxes. An important point that is often missed is how Arnold's description of the actions of his nine meteors skipping like saucers somehow got garbled into the shape of the objects being like saucers, and once that got locked into the public's mind, all UFOs suddenly began to look like saucers.

Many frauds came forward to push this hysteria, including George Adamski who claimed to have ridden across the Solar System with Venusians (unlikely, as the planet Venus is over 450°C^[6]).

Project Mogul[edit]

Artist's impression of a "flying disc", circa mid-late 1950s.

Artist's impression of a UFO, circa 1978. Things haven't changed much since the 1950s, have they?

In the late 1940s, the USAF ran Project Mogul, a top secret attempt to detect sound waves from potential Soviet nuclear explosions using microphones flown by high-altitude balloons.^[7] On July 7, 1947 Mogul Flight #4 crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.^[8][9] A rancher found the debris field and brought some of the debris to the nearby air base. The public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field made a press release reporting that a crashed "flying disc" has been recovered. The press went nuts, cementing the meme of the "flying saucer" in the public's consciousness. After the sensation hit the headlines, the officer was reprimanded, and new information was announced: the wreckage was from a weather balloon. Years after the fact, the story got embellished and mutated into different versions, becoming the archetypal "crashed saucer" myth, complete with recovered alien corpses (or live aliens!) and a government cover-up.

The rise of the conspiracy[edit]

The "mother ship" from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, now housed at the Smithsonian

The first event was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, which sparked a poisonous conspiracy mindset that, before, had largely been found only within fringe groups. The second, the Tet Offensive in 1968, seemed to validate this mindset to many people, who realized with shock that the government had lied to them and victory in the Vietnam War was actually nowhere in sight. The third and final event was the cover-ups and incredible abuses of power of the Nixon Administration in the Watergate affair.

It was only after this vast attitude shift occurred that people looked back and read ominous things into the comedy of errors that took place at the beginning of the UFO era. Alien bases were imagined to exist in the southwestern United States. An entire alphabet soup of imaginary government agencies were cooked up, which supposedly controlled all information on the alien presence. Even the information that these agencies existed was, conveniently, also classified as top secret. There were imaginary projects to recover downed flying saucers and imaginary projects to overhaul and test-fly recovered flying saucers. And the very lack of evidence for any of these claims was put forth as proof that a conspiracy to hide the truth existed.

In the Fall of 1977 and again in the Spring of 1982, Steven Spielberg made a pair of movies (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) with "good" aliens and "bad" federal agencies, which tapped into the new mythology and made enormous amounts of money. In reality, no coordinated government plan to respond to alien contact, if there even is/was any, has ever been made public. A side effect of Close Encounters was to generate a new idea of UFO appearance, informing the shapes and designs of what appeared in blurry photographs from 1977 onwards.

Actual conspiracy[edit]

It has been alleged by at least one wingnut^[10] that the government created the alien conspiracy theories to provide a cover for other projects, such as the Lockheed Skunk Works. Gullible farmers would be shown so-called "alien crash sites", and told to keep quiet. This cunning plan did two things:

1. Caused them to tell everyone they knew.
2. Created the impression of a government cover-up.

Alternatively, it's entirely possible the government merely exploited rumors about crashed alien spacecraft as a distraction from such top-secret projects.

US government inquiries[edit]

The United States Air Force "identifies" all unidentified flying objects as "weather balloons".^[11] So there.

20th Century[edit]

The USAF did actually launch an investigation of UFOs — Project Blue Book — that lasted between 1952 and 1970. It didn't find anything interesting.^{[note 3]} They received technical assistance from imagery interpretation specialists at the Central Intelligence Agency.

CIA documents indicate that the agency monitored the UFO situation from 1952.^[12] In 1952, the CIA reacted to the new rash of sightings by forming a special study group within the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI). Edward Tauss reported for the group that most UFO sightings could be easily explained, but recommended that the Agency continue monitoring the problem, in coordination with the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC). He also urged that CIA conceal its interest from the media and the public, "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies".

Upon receiving the report, Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) Robert Amory, Jr. assigned responsibility for the UFO investigations to OSI's Physics and Electronics Division. Amory, who asked the group to focus on the national security implications of UFOs, was relaying concerns from the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith. Smith wanted to know whether or not the Air Force investigation of flying saucers was sufficiently objective and how much more money and manpower would be necessary to determine the cause of the small percentage of unexplained flying saucers. Smith believed "there was only one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon posed a threat to the security of the country, but even that chance could not be taken." According to Smith, it was the CIA's responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.

After the Project Blue Book report, in 1967, the Air Force issued a contract to the University of Colorado for the study of UFOs. The principal investigator from the University was Dr. E.U. Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards from 1946 to 1950. The project gained some support from the Central Intelligence Agency.^[13] The 'Condon Report' was published in 1969.^[14]

From the National Photo-Interpretation Center (NPIC), Condon's group was allowed access to classified material through the collateral^{[note 4]} SECRET level (a relatively low level of intelligence category). Information was provided under the rules:^[15]

Any work performed by NPIC to assist Dr. Condon in his investigation will not be identified as work accomplished by CIA. Dr. Condon was advised by Mr. Lundahl to make no reference to CIA in regard to this work effort. Dr. Condon stated that if he felt it necessary to obtain an official CIA comment he would make a separate distinct entry into CIA not related to contacts he has with NPIC.

NPIC will not prepare any written comments, will not analyze information with the intent of drawing a conclusion, nor prepare written reports. NPIC personnel will be available to assist Dr. Condon by performing work of photogrammetric nature, such as attempting to measure objects imaged on photographs that may be part of Dr. Condon's analysis. Work performed by NPIC will be strictly of a technical nature using services and equipment generally not available elsewhere.

In summary, "At about 1235 the group adjourned to lunch and following lunch they left NPIC for a meeting with Brig. Gen Gillers at the Pentagon.

Most all the discussion during the morning was of an unclassified nature dealing with primary fundamentals of photogrammetry, photographic analysis and problems related to the acquiring of enough information to conduct meaningful analyses.

Condon and the same group met again in May 1967 at NPIC to hear an analysis of UFO photographs taken at Zanesville, Ohio. The analysis debunked that sighting. The committee was again impressed with the technical work performed, and Condon remarked that for the first time a scientific analysis of a UFO would stand up to investigation.

Seriously, the list of crashed UFOs (complete with body counts!) reads like a history of general aviation fatalities. Yet we are told these are advanced beings with superior technology. If they are so advanced, why do they crash so readily? Conversely, if millions of visits to Earth have been made, their crash rate is a lot lower than, say, the United States' Interstate 25 highway.

As always, the evidence is "believed by some to be buried" or "reported recovered" or "the memo also states that it was believed" and even reports from foreign governments are somehow shut down by the US government. And every single scrap of wreckage is whisked away by the Air Force which is omnipotent in this area, but so incompetent they allowed B-52s to fly over the US, unaware they were carrying live nuclear weapons (for which the Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff of the Air Force were sacked).

21st Century[edit]

From 2007-2012 Senator Harry Reid gave his old friend and campaign donor Robert Bigelow (1944–) $22 million of taxpayers' money to hunt UFOs, ghosts, and werewolves on Skinwalker Ranch in Utah in a program euphemistically called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP).^[16][17][18] After funding to the program was cut due to doubtlessly unfounded fears it was producing nothing useful and was a potential embarrassment, it spent several years underground going by the name of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Following a reputation saving piece of hagiography by UFO propogandist Leslie Keen in the New York Times, it was reawakened by Senator Marco Rubio as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) which ran from 2020-2022.^[19][20][21] The 2021 9-page report it produced failed to identify all but one of 144 UFO reports (that one being, of course, a balloon). After two embarrassments the Pentagon made the surprising decision to put the adults back in charge, and thus in 2022 the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office was born,

Britain[edit]

In the UK, the Ministry of Defence had a department investigating UFOs that was founded in the late 1940s and scrapped in 2009 as a part of general funding cuts. It operated a hotline which received 11,000 calls over its five decades of operation.^[22] The official state body the National Archives has advice on how to research public records of UFO sightings.^[23] David Clarke, a journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, has for several years been conducting research into the reporting of UFOs and their presence in government archives.^[24]

Unidentified Submerged Objects[edit]

Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs) are the lesser-known marine counterpart to UFOs. Like UFO reports, most USO sightings are either mundane, or impossible to verify. They are usually of the form "something glowing in the water", though the term sometimes is also used for the cases when a more traditional "flying saucer" decides to take a dive or rises from beneath the waves. *dramatic drums* If you have watched The Abyss or played X-COM: Terror from the Deep, you know what we are talking about.

In UFO books (and nowadays, websites) USOs are usually discussed together with ghost ships like the Mary Celeste, the Bermuda Triangle and mysterious collisions and accidents with submarines to reinforce the spooky mood and make you dread leaving the shore behind the horizon.

Note that bioluminescence is common in the ocean and there are a lot of glow-in-the-dark critters that rise to shallower waters during the night to feed. Note also that during the Cold War, ramming or getting rammed by a Soviet submarine could have far-reaching political consequences, so both parties tended to whistle innocently and pretend that nothing had happened. That didn't always work.

There are several genuine underwater cities including Heracleion in the Mediterranean and Shi Cheng city now below Qiandao Lake in China. Sea level was 120 metres lower 20,000 years ago, after the evolution of modern humans.^[25] So finding things underwater isn't surprising. And there are enterprising artists like Jason deCaires Taylor who created an underwater sculpture park in the Caribbean.^[26]

Examples[edit]

• The Baltic Sea thing — circular dome, 60m diameter, discovered in 2011 by the Ocean X Group.
• The Malibu Dome — roughly elliptical, with what look like supporting pillars. UFOlogists are convinced that it's an underwater base for extraterrestrials. Geologists call it the Sycamore Knoll, and identify it as an unusual feature caused by slumping in an earthquake zone. See This HuffPo article.
• The Yonaguni Monument — A sophisticated alien base cleverly disguised as a pile of rocks.
• The Bloop — a thus far unidentified (well, not certainly identified) submerged sound.
• Sea serpents and the Loch Ness Monster (and Cryptozoology in general) — for the other type of "I swear I saw it!" fishing stories.

Evidence[edit]

How "unidentified" a phenomenon really is depends partly on the quality of the observation and the amount of effort invested in identifying it. Multiple observation locations and reasonably accurate bearings and azimuths can make identification much easier. Single observations of brief phenomena are more difficult to analyze.

There is a bit of a discrepancy between the evidence needed to show an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs and the evidence so far acquired and used by UFO enthusiasts. If they were real, it would — in principle — not be difficult to show their alien origin.

Furthermore, a claim of alien visitation would be pretty extraordinary, so following the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence what would we need?

Evidence we need to show our visitors were aliens[edit]

• Ideally we would like to both meet the aliens and, most importantly, obtain biological samples which could be tested by various independent labs.
• In addition to biological samples they could provide us with back-up evidence such as: images taken of their own home-world along with exotic materials, scientific theories and technologies presently unknown on Earth.
• All of the above obtained from a wrecked alien spacecraft.
• All of the above presented by some respectable research institute which had previously kept it hidden for "reasons"

Evidence we have[edit]

You can find altocumulus lenticularis worldwide, though they are most common near mountains and other hilly places as mountains aid in formation of these clouds. You can see more images of these particular cloud formations.

• Blurry pictures of hubcaps captured mid-toss.
• A hilarious series of photos that Billy Meier says are extraterrestrial spaceships but turn out to be the lid of a storage bin with Christmas decorations stuck on.
• Unsteady handheld video of some lights floating in the darkness which could well be the parking lot of a desert roadhouse a half-mile away and/or the planet Venus.
• Behavior of urine droplets when dumped from manned spacecraft, and then pushed around by hydrazine jets from the RCS thrusters, making them appear to execute weird aerobatics.
• A black dot seen in two frames.
• Anecdotes and stories — but never photographic evidence — of closer encounters with spacecraft.^[29]
• Pictures created by a "how to make your own UFO" guide.
• Project Blue Book, cataloguing every UFO story anyone bugged the USAF with for 18 years and listing why pretty much every one was conventionally explicable.
• Recreated cutaway diagram and eyewitness testimony of a "Flux Liner" flying saucer or Alien Reproduction Vehicle (A.R.V.)
• Pictures of lenticular clouds.^[30]

Conclusions on evidence[edit]

Now with the widespread availability of cheap mobile phone cameras, high-quality point & shoot cameras, as well as cheap, high-definition handheld recorders, an influx of much clearer and well-focused UFO recordings should be expected. Any time now. Aaaaaany time now… yet, the quality of UFO evidence has not increased with the technological ability to capture it.

While we're at it, astronomer Phil Plait made an astute observation—assuming UFO sightings are of extraterrestrial origin, the group that should report them more than any other (at least per capita) would be amateur astronomers, since they watch the sky much more than other people... yet they actually make very few UFO reports. Plait suggests that this is precisely because they watch the sky more than other people, and much better understand what they see up there: they know not to be suspicious of routine phenomena (Jupiter and Venus are often reported as UFOs), and are likely to be able to identify unusual atmospheric phenomena—that is, they know what not to look for as being suspicious.^[31]

UFO proponents usually defend the lack of evidence based on a form of special pleading for UFOs. Perhaps science shouldn't discount eyewitnesses, no matter how drunk, or should drop some of its intellectual rigor for the sake of UFOs — say, to forget about reproducing any experiments, as most of the time no two UFO reports ever cite the same details with true independence.

In 2024, the US Department of Defense issued a long-awaited report on historical UFO reports, concluded that there was no evidence of alien visits to Earth, secret storage of alien spacecraft, or credible evidence that "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs or UFOs) were alien spacecraft.^[32]

Reality of UFOs[edit]

Whilst the vast majority of UFO sightings can be explained via cognitive biases, mistakes, natural phenomena or, in the worst case, bullshit, Unidentified Flying Objects do exist in a sense that someone might be unable to identify an object that is flying. Just because an object is unidentified, it doesn't automatically mean it's of extraterrestrial origin. For example, one researcher has shown that a sighting was simply a dust devil.^[33] It's most likely that the people may have just misinterpreted what they saw and, due to cognitive biases, are remembering the phenomena incorrectly, (like other examples) however, it does prove that not every flying object that one sees can be automatically identified (remember: unidentified does not mean "aliens"). Furthermore, during Project Blue Book, the last serious USAF investigation into the UFO phenomenon, the committee found that 701 reported cases remain unidentified. Once again, this does not mean "alien", it means unidentified.

External links[edit]

• UFOs: Russian or Martian? BBC Radio 4, Today, 18 August 2012.
• UFO Sightings Daily. If siteowner Scott C. Waring is a Poe, he's an extremely good one.
• Images of supposed UFOs according to UFO researchers.
• Killjoy Qualified astronomer on the UFO phenomena.

Declassified documents[edit]

In 2016, President Barack Obama promised to release more declassified UFO information before leaving office.^[34]

• UFO Documents Index- NSA hosted, but documents are from several different agencies.
• UFOs in FBI's FOIA vault
• UFOs: Fact or Fiction?, a collection from CIA's FOIA site.
  • CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90, A Die-Hard Issue; Gerald K. Haines; Apr 14, 2007
  • The Investigation of UFO's, History and methodology of "flying saucer" intelligence; Hector Quintanilla, Jr.; 22 SEPT 93.
• USAF Declassification, Top Flight Documents, UFOs collection

See also[edit]

• Roswell — The mother of all UFO conspiracies.
• The Battle of Los Angeles
• Everything You Know Is Wrong! — Firesign Theatre
• Those flashing lights in the sky over there! Quick, look! Nevermind, you missed it. It was there though, I swear.
• Crop circles — revealed to be a hoax ages ago, but still used as "proof".
• Alien abduction — When UFOs get a little too close.
• Raëlism - When aliens are your creator.
• The Aetherius Society — when aliens contact humanity via a taxi driver's radio.
• SETI — projects to try to detect any alien communications.
• Rods

Notes[edit]

References[edit]