UFOs

UFO redirects here. For other uses, see UFO (disambiguation).

A UFO — fact or fiction?

A UFO or Unidentified Flying Object is simply defined as any object or optical phenomenon observed in the sky which cannot be identified, even after being thoroughly investigated by qualified people.

A fuller definition was given by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, late astronomer, U.S. Air Force consultant and UFO proponent, as "the reported perception of an object or light seen in the sky or upon the land the appearance, trajectory, and general dynamic and luminescent behaviour of which do not suggest a logical, conventional explanation and which is not only mystifying to the original percipients but remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making a common sense identification, if one is possible."

The U.S. Air Force adopted a similar official definition in 1954. A UFO was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object."[1]

Thus by the stricter definitions, something must remain unidentified and have anomalous characteristics to be classified as a UFO. Such characteristics, as noted by early Air Force studies dating back to 1947, might include unconventional shape, high speed and acceleration, high maneuverability, extreme rate of climb, absence of sound and trail, formation flying, and/or evasion upon pursuit.[2] Consequently there has been continued speculation that some UFOs might be spacecraft constructed by extraterrestrial intelligence (the ETH or Extraterrestrial Hypothesis), although a number of other theories also exist to explain UFOs. However, no incontrovertible physical evidence of the existence of such spacecraft has been presented, though many forms of disputed physical evidence do exist in the public domain.

It is the unproven contention of some that incontrovertible proof probably does exist but is being withheld from the public by world governments, perhaps out of fear of widespread panic and social disruption that might result from disclosure of such information. Such allegations have been made by Ufologists as well as notable high-ranking military officers, government officials, astronauts, scientists, and other notable ETH supporters.

However, similar groups of notables are equally skeptical, and often dismiss such statements as conspiracy theories, maintain that the evidence is unconvincing, and that the subject in general is pseudoscience.

History

Strange unidentified apparitions in the sky and on the ground have been reported throughout history. The army of Alexander the Great in 329 BC saw "two silver shields" in the sky. Ancient Roman records occasionally mention "shields" and even "armies" seen in the sky. In 1235 the army of Oritsume in Japan saw mysterious lights in the sky. An appropriate report was made for the emperor, and other appearances occurred in Japan in 1361. On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg were filled with a multitude of objects, including cylinders and spheres, seemingly engaged in an aerial battle. This event was witnessed by hundreds of people, as was a similar event in Basel in 1566, where numerous "flaming" and black globes appeared. In 1896-97, unidentified "Mystery airships" were reported in the United States, though some of these reports are now known to have been deliberate hoaxes.

Mystery airships were seen throughout Britain in 1909 and from 1912 to 1913. These were thought to be German Zeppelins spying out the land prior to invasion. The same fears generated a similar scare in New Zealand and Australia in 1909. Airships and mystery aircraft were also seen over the USA in 1909 and 1910 and were thought to be the creation of Wallace Tillinghast, though this seems very doubtful. During the First World War there were mystery aircraft scares in South Africa, Canada, Britain and the USA. Most of these scares can be attributed to the misperception of stars, the work of hoaxers and their promotion by the media. These phantom airship scares are detailed in The Scareship Mystery edited by Nigel Watson (DOMRA, 2000).

In his travelogue Altai-Himalaya, Russian artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich reported sighting "an oval form with a shiny surface" flying high above Amdo, eastern Tibet in 1926. However, Roerich did not express an opinion as to what he thought it might be, surrounding passages discuss the technology of ancient civilizations as recounted by Theosophical lore.

There were several reports of unidentified aircrafts in the Scandinavian countries in the 1930s. In Europe during World War II, "Foo-fighters" (luminous balls that followed airplanes) were reported by both Allied and Axis pilots. In 1946, there was a wave of "ghost rockets" seen over Scandinavia.

The post World War 1 phase in UFOs began with a claimed sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier, Washington. Arnold was helping to search for the wreckage of a downed U.S. Marine C-46 transport plane. He reported seeing nine bright objects, (possibly irregular, glowing components of a meteoric fireball in the process of breaking up) flying at "an incredible speed" at an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,000 m) towards nearby Mount Adams. The UFOs witnessed by Arnold were not, in the strictest sense of the term, saucer-shaped, he described only their movements as being similar to that of a saucer skipping over water, hence the origin of the term flying saucer. Arnold's claims subsequently received significant mainstream media and public attention.

Beginning in the 1950s, UFO-related spiritual sects began to appear. The Aetherius Society is an early example; more recent ones include Raël and the Ashtar Command. Generally speaking, the aliens who were purported to sponsor such groups, claim benevolent purposes such as warning humanity of the dangers of nuclear war or inviting Earth to join an interplanetary federation.

Others claimed that the main role of the supposed craft was to supervise. This was the case with the UFO encounter reported by police sergeant Lonnie Zamora just outside the town of Socorro in New Mexico, which is perhaps the best documented encounter.

NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper has claimed, (including in his book Leap of Faith), that a classic saucer-shaped aircraft landed at Edwards Air Force Base on May 3, 1957 when he was stationed there, and was photographed by a technical film crew. Cooper said he viewed prints of the object before the film was shipped back to Washington. Project Blue Book claimed it was a weather balloon distorted by desert. The incident was Dr. James E. McDonald’s Case 41 in his 1968 Congressional testimony discussing his list of the best UFO evidence. McDonald said the incident evidently happened; besides talking to Cooper, he had interviewed the two photographers involved, who corroborated Cooper’s basic story.[3] In 1985 Cooper addressed a United Nations Panel Discussion on UFOs and ETs chaired by then Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. Cooper stated, "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth. ...For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us." [4]

By the 1970s, popular sentiment had it that UFOs were alien spacecraft, and that the aliens involved were benevolent, reinforced reinforced through movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., and Karen Carpenter's popular song Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. This model was all but overturned during the 1980s mainly in the USA, with the publication of books by Whitley Strieber (beginning with Communion) and Jacques Vallee (Passport to Magonia). Strieber, a horror writer, felt that aliens were harassing him and were responsible for "missing time" during which he was subjected to strange experiments. The cover of the paperback edition of Communion introduced a standard "grey" alien-head appearance charactierized by a large lozenge-shaped head sharpening to a pointed chin, a small slit for the mouth and large pointed lozenge-shaped eyes canted downwards towards the nose (this was later satirized in Schwa). Both Strieber and Vallee were led to doubt that these beings were "extraterrestrials" as the term is ordinarily understood, and see more of a connection to elf and fairy lore. (Cf. Jung's comparison with angelic visions in his article Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.) This newer, darker model can be seen in the subsequent wave of "alien abduction" literature, and in the background mythos of TV's X-Files. Outside the U.S most people still think of extraterrestrials as benevolent.

Another important development in 1970s UFO lore came with the publication of Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods. Gods argued that aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, which explained UFO-like images from various archeological sources as well as unsolved mysteries (such as the Egyptian pyramids). This "ancient astronauts" theory inspired numerous imitators, sequels, and fictional adaptations, including one book (Barry Downing's The Bible and Flying Saucers) which interprets miraculous aerial phenomena in the Bible as records of alien contact. Many of these theories posit that aliens have been guiding human evolution, an idea taken up earlier by the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Another 1970s-era development was the association of UFOs with supernatural subjects such as occultism, cryptozoology, and parapsychology. Many participants in the New Age movement came to believe in alien contact, perhaps through channeling. A prominent spokesperson for this trend was Shirley MacLaine, especially in her book and miniseries, Out On a Limb.

Noting the variance of the above theories with Christian tradition, a number of conservative Protestant writers (e.g., Hal Lindsey) have suggested that UFOs and their occupants are demonic in origin, intent on seducing humanity into accepting non-Christian doctrines such as evolution. This is echoed in the character of the parson Nathaniel in Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.

Etymology

On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that John Martin, a local farmer, the previous day had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed," and also used the word "saucer" in describing it. [5] This may be the first known use of the word "saucer" to describe an unidentified flying object. Some seventy years later in 1947, the media used the term "flying saucers" to describe Kenneth Arnold's sighting.

Another UFO from Brazil.

The nine objects Kenneth Arnold reported were not strictly saucer-shaped. Arnold initially described and drew a picture of eight of the objects as being thin and flat, circular in the front but truncated in the back and coming to a point. (See Kenneth Arnold for drawing and verbal descriptions.) Another drawing was of a ninth, somewhat larger object with a boomerang or crescent shape, resembling a flying wing aircraft. However, several years later Arnold said he had described their movement as a kind of skipping, like a saucer skimming over water. He complained that the press misquoted him, picking up the "like a saucer" phrase, and reported it as a "flying saucer".

"Flying disks" was another term commonly used by the media to describe the objects in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

By mid-1950, a Gallup poll revealed that the term "flying saucer" had become so deeply ingrained in the American vernacular, and that 94% of those polled were familiar with it, making it the best-known term appearing in the news, easily beating out others like "universal military training" (75%), "bookie" (67%), or "cold war" (58%).

Hollywood science fiction movies in the 1950s, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), depicting flying saucer-like craft, further entrenched the term as a cultural icon. So did popular books on the subject such as Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers (1950), Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) and Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), and "contactee"-oriented books, such as George Adamski's Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953).

"Flying Saucer" was the preferred term for most unidentified aerial sightings from the late 1940s to the 1960s, even for those that were not actually saucer-shaped. The term "UFO" was more commonly used by the late 1960s. Use of "UFO" instead of "flying saucer" was first suggested in 1952 by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of the U. S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, who felt that "flying saucer" did not reflect the diversity of the sightings. His suggestion was quickly adopted by the Air Force, who also briefly used "UFOB" circa 1954. Ruppelt recounted his experiences with Project Blue Book in his memoir, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956) online.

An unforeseen difficulty with the term "UFO" is that it often leads to semantic debates between skeptics and advocates. Skeptics often argue that UFO simply means that the object was "unidentified" by those making the sighting and doesn't mean the object is unexplainable, much less extraterrestrial. In contrast, researchers like Hynek have argued that the term should be strictly limited to those sightings that have been intensively investigated and still defy conventional explanation, which was the actual definition adopted by the Air Force in official directives in the 1950s. For example, Air Force Regulation 200-2, issued in 1954, defined an Unidentified Flying Object (UFOB) as "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Furthermore, investigation of UFOBs was stated to be for the purposes of national security and to ascertain "technical aspects." Obviously these concerns would not apply to the usual explanations for most UFO sightings, such as natural phenomena or man-made conventional objects, except, perhaps, previously unknown foreign aircraft.

Thus the "U" in "UFO", instead of standing for "Unidentified", would more aptly stand for "Unexplained" or "Unconventional". Along these lines, Paul Hill, an early NACA/NASA aerospace engineer, titled his 1970s book on the subject, Unconventional Flying Objects.

Foreign versions of term

In Spanish, Portuguese, and French, the acronym for UFO is OVNI (in Spanish, Objeto Volador No Identificado, in Portuguese, Objeto Voador Não Identificado, in French, Objet Volant Non Identifié). In Russian, the term is NLO or "Neopoznanii Letaushii Obekt". In Italian and Japanese, UFO is an acronym instead of an initialism.

Pronunciation

Ruppelt suggested that "UFO" should be pronounced as a word — "you-foe". However it is generally pronounced by forming each letter: "U.F.O."

Physicist Edward Condon suggested the word should be pronounced "ooh-foe", but this seems to have largely been ignored.

UFOs and popular culture

Regardless of any ultimate explanation, UFOs constitute an international cultural phenomenon of the last half-century. Since the mid-1900s, UFOs have been the subject of a very large number of books, motion pictures, songs, documentaries and other media. UFO topics were amongst the most popular on early computer Bulletin board systems, and millions of people have some degree of interest in the subject. There have also been notable hoaxes involving UFO reports, some of which have received substantial press attention (see the list below).

UFOs have played a role in tourism, such as in Roswell, New Mexico, site of a supposed UFO crash in 1947 (see Roswell UFO incident).

A 1996 Gallup poll reported that 71% of the United States' population believed that the government was covering up information regarding UFOs. Another Gallup poll in 2001 found that 33% of respondents "believe that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth sometime in the past." [6] These two poll results may seem confusing or contradictory if one considers only the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) as an explanation for UFOs. The poll results may also simply suggest that a greater percentage of those polled believe that the U.S. government has been less than forthright in regard to UFOs than accept the ETH.

A 2002 Roper poll for the Sci Fi channel found similar results, but with more people believing UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. Again about 70% felt the government was not sharing everything it knew about UFOs or extraterrestrial life. But 56% thought UFOs were real craft and 48% that UFOs had visited the Earth. The younger the person was, the more likely the person were to hold such beliefs. [7]

Comprehensive review of opinion polls on UFOs since 1947

Typical reported characteristics of UFOs

• Saucer, toy-top, or disk-shaped "craft" without visible or audible propulsion. (day and night)
• Rapidly-moving lights or lights with apparent ability to rapidly change direction — the earliest mention of their motion was given as "saucers skipping on water." Disc-shaped craft are sometimes reported to move in an irregular or "wobbly" manner at low speeds.
• Large triangular "craft" or triangular light pattern
• Cigar-shaped "craft" with lighted windows (Meteor fireballs are sometimes reported this way).

The number of different shapes, sizes, and configurations of claimed UFOs has been large, with descriptions of chevrons, equilateral triangles, spheres, domes, diamonds, shapeless black masses, eggs, and cylinders. Skeptics argue this diversity of shapes, size and configurations points to a socio-psychological explanation. Other researchers argue that the large diversity of UFO shapes points to a possible paraphysical origin. Still others argue that there is a large diversity in the shapes and sizes of human flying craft, reflecting different origins, propulsion systems, and purposes, so such diversity in UFOs is not necessarily unexpected or inexplicable.

Another argument is that the true underlying shape may, in some cases, be concealed or distorted by the ionization of air around the objects, believed by some researchers, such as NASA engineers Paul Hill and James McCampbell or rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth, to be a characteristic of the propulsion system. Air ionization could also partly explain the diversity of colors reported, as different air molecules are excited at different energy levels, as well as the electric, neon-like glow around the objects often reported, similar to what happens with polar auroras. Another view is that the shape may be concealed or distorted by space-time distortions arising from an anti-gravity propulsion system. However, some feel that such speculation is overly premature because the very actuality of UFOs as alien craft is itself problematic.

Other advocates, arguing for the non-conventional interpretation, reply that the volume of impressive sightings reported by witnesses, from commercial airline pilots to United States presidents, and occasionally captured on film and radar, possesses strong consistency and cannot be explained away simply as mundane phenomena (weather balloons, aircraft, Venus, etc.).

One writer contends that UFO mass sightings — sometimes called "flaps" — are "a hard core of genuinely unusual sightings ... surrounded by a great deal more misidentification, wishful thinking and general flakiness." [8]

Other researchers, such as Jacques Vallee, argue that if UFO sightings are motivated by some mechanism through which the public can release hidden fears and satisfy a psychological need for fantasies, why did "UFO waves" not coincide with such science-fiction feats such as Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds in 1938, or the motion-picture versions of Flash Gordon (1936-37)? Vallee points out that the theory regarding how the general public generates and propagates UFO reports as a way of releasing psychological tensions, is denied by the absence of correlation between notable periods of interest in science fiction and major peaks of UFO activity. It should also be noted that no single, comprehensive "psychological" theory to explain the generation of all UFO reports has yet been proposed. A notable attempt on the basis of his theory of archetypes was made by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in his book Flying Saucers (1959). Jung, however, also felt that at least some UFOs were "nuts and bolts" craft, based on physical evidence such as simultaneous radar contact.

Scientific UFO field studies

Norway

One established non-military station, which has seriously monitored UFOs, including anomalous lights, is project Hessdalen AMS in Norway.

United States

Challenged to explain sightings of unidentified lights and luminous phenomena in the hills around Piedmont, Missouri, Dr. Harley Rutledge established Project Identification in 1973 to gather scientific data.

Official governmental studies

Canada

In the early 1950s, Project Magnet was created to investigate the possibility of discs powered by magnetic propulsion. The equipment was designed to detect gamma rays, magnetic fluctuations, radio noises and gravity or mass changes in the atmosphere. One of these monitoring stations was located at Shirley Bay, Canada.

United States

In response to the June-July 1947 wave of UFO sightings and resulting publicity, the U.S. government began a number of formal studies of UFOs:

• From July 9 to July 30, 1947, Army Air Force Intelligence studied the 16 best UFO sightings of the previous months, mostly those reported by military and civilian pilots, and concluded that the "flying saucer situation" was neither imaginary nor adequately explained as natural phenomena: "something is really flying around."

• In response to the earlier study, the engineering and intelligence divisions of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, under the direction of General Nathan Twining, further reviewed the data. Twining's memo of September 23, 1947, likewise concluded the craft were real, further defined their described characteristics, and urged that the subject should be treated seriously, including a formal investigation by multiple government agencies besides the Air Force. Both the Air Intelligence and Material Command studies concluding saucer reality were classified and not publicly acknowledged for many years.

• Twining's memo resulted in the United States Air Force founding Project Sign in late 1947, the first publicly acknowledged government UFO study. Sign produced an "Estimate of the Situation" in late summer, 1948, concluding that the flying saucers were not only real but likely interplanetary in origin. USAF Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenberg ordered the report destroyed citing lack of physical proof. In late 1948 Project Sign was renamed Project Grudge. Grudge was active until early 1952, when it too was renamed and upgraded in status by the Pentagon, becoming Project Blue Book. In 1956, the first director of Blue Book, Edward J. Ruppelt, referred to the previous era of Grudge as the "Dark Ages" of USAF UFO studies. According to Ruppelt, highly influential Pentagon generals were frustrated with the UFO debunking of Project Grudge, resulting in it being replaced by Blue Book. Since Project Blue Book was dissolved in 1969, the United States government claims that they have had no formal study of UFO reports.

• In December 1948, mysterious Green Fireballs were sighted over sensitive military and government research facilities in New Mexico, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, astronomer and noted meteor expert, investigated for the Air Force, with extensive help from military intelligence and the FBI. Based on observed object characteristics, LaPaz quickly concluded the fireballs weren't natural and thought they might be Russian spy devices. Upon urging of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, a year later the Air Force set up a small observation program called Project Twinkle. In 1951, over LaPaz's objections, Twinkle concluded the fireballs might be some natural phenomenon. But at the same time, scientists at Los Alamos told new Project Blue Book chief Edward J. Ruppelt they thought the fireballs were alien probes from spaceships orbiting Earth.

• The Robertson Panel was organized by the Central Intelligence Agency in late 1952, in response to a wave of UFO sightings, especially in the Washington DC area, which included highly-publicized radar contacts and jet intercepts. After brief study, the panel concluded that most UFOs were prosaic, and furthermore suggested a public relations campaign using celebrities, authority figures, and media giants like Walt Disney Corporation to reduce public interest. They also recommended spying on civilian UFO organizations because of their influence on the public. Immediately after the Robertson Panel, Project Blue Book was downgraded in status by the USAF, directed to withhold information on unexplained cases from the public, and also ordered to reduce the number of unexplained cases to a minimum. Thereafter, unexplained cases plummeted from over 20% down to 3%. The alleged intent of this government program, as indicated on many UFO-related websites and other UFO conspiracy sources, is to ridicule or discredit any who had seen UFOs or had alien encounters. This protocol is allegedly still in effect.

• Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 was a massive scientific statistical study of all Blue Book UFO reports to date conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute at behest of the Air Force from 1951 to 1954. Their statistics indicated that 22% of the reports remained unexplained even after stringent analysis and the highest quality reports were twice as likely to remain unexplained than the poorest quality (35% vs. 18%). Also six studied characteristics (speed, duration, color, etc.) were found to be different between knowns and unknowns at a high level of statistical significance.

• The Brookings Report was a study commisioned by NASA in 1960 from the Brookings Institution. The study was noteworthy for its conclusions regarding possible future contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, which they felt would likely be highly disruptive: "...societies sure of their own place in the universe have disintegrated when confronted by a superior society..." Among groups cited as likely having trouble adapting to the new reality were religious fundamentalists and many scientists. The report's conclusions have been offered as a possible motive for governments to cover up evidence of extraterrestrial life.

• The Condon Committee (1966 to 1969), commissioned by Project Blue Book while under pressure from a Congressional inquiry after a new wave of sightings in 1965 and 1966, was a landmark but still controversial study which supported the misidentification-delusion-hoax explanation for UFO reports, and furthermore argued that no available evidence warranted further scientific study. The conclusions were quickly endorsed by the National Academy of Science (NAS), but a more detailed review by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) criticized the NAS position and the Condon Report conclusions, which they noted did not match the actual data. About 30% of the cases examined by the Condon Committee itself were "well-documented but unexplainable" and formed the "hard core of the UFO controversy." They recommended a moderate level, ongoing scientific study of UFOs.

Ultimately, the official U.S. Air Force public position was that UFO reports were due almost entirely to misidentification of ordinary aerial phenomena, delusion, or hoaxes. Both contemporary and modern critics, however, argue that some of the listed studies harbored an unacceptable degree of bias, were involved in sloppy science of dubious validity, or even perpetrating a cover up. Furthermore, the official Air Force position was frequently at odds with internal, classified documents, many later released under the Freedom of Information Act, which proved that the subject was treated far more seriously by the Air Force and other government agencies, like the CIA and FBI, than the public had been led to believe. In addition, many documents still remain classified or are heavily censored even when released, such as those of the CIA. Sometimes lawsuits have had to be filed to get even the censored documents released to the public.

Civilian UFO investigation groups

There have been a number of civilian groups formed to study UFO’s and/or to promulgate their opinions on the subject. Some have achieved fair degrees of mainstream visibility while others remain obscure. The groups li