An unidentified flying object (UFO) is an object or phenomenon seen in the sky but not yet identified or explained. While unusual sightings in the sky have been reported since at least the 3rd century BC, UFOs became culturally prominent after World War II, escalating during the Space Age. After decades of promotion of such ideas by believers and in popular media, the kind of evidence required to solidly support such claims has not been forthcoming.
Scientists and skeptic organizations such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have provided prosaic explanations for UFOs, namely that they are caused by natural phenomena, human technology, delusions, and hoaxes. During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often called "flying saucers" or "flying discs" based on reporting of the Kenneth Arnold incident. "Unidentified flying object" (UFO) has been in-use since 1947. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt for the USAF. The term UFO became widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. "Unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP) first appeared in the late 1960s.
Studies show that after careful investigation, the majority of UFOs can be identified as ordinary objects or phenomena. An individual 1979 study by CUFOS researcher Allan Hendry found, as did other investigations, that fewer than one percent of cases he investigated were hoaxes and most sightings were actually honest misidentifications of prosaic phenomena. Hendry attributed most of these to inexperience or misperception. Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi rejected the hypothesis that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft and responded to the "onslaught of credulous coverage" in books, films and entertainment by teaching his students to apply critical thinking to such claims, advising them that "being a good scientist is not unlike being a good detective".
UFOs have been subject to investigations over the years. Here's a look into some of the sightings, reports and investigations that have been conducted:
Examples of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)
Historical Accounts of Unusual Sightings
Throughout history, there have been accounts of unusual sightings in the sky. Julius Obsequens was a Roman writer who is believed to have lived in the middle of the fourth century AD. An aspect of Obsequens' work that has inspired excitement in some UFO enthusiasts is that he makes reference to things moving through the sky. The descriptions provided bear resemblance to observations of meteor showers. Obsequens was also writing some 400 years after the events he described, thus the text is not an eyewitness account.
Shen Kuo (1031-1095), a Song Chinese government scholar-official and prolific polymath inventor, wrote a vivid passage in his Dream Pool Essays (1088) about an unidentified flying object. On January 25, 1878, the Denison Daily News printed an article in which John Martin, a local farmer, had reported seeing a large, dark, circular object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed". Martin, according to the newspaper account, said it appeared to be about the size of a saucer from his perspective, one of the first uses of the word "saucer" in association with a UFO. From November 1896 to April 1897, United States newspapers carried numerous reports of "mystery airships" that are reminiscent of modern UFO waves. Scores of people even reported talking to the pilots. Some people feared that Thomas Edison had created an artificial star that could fly around the country.
In the Pacific and European theatres during World War II, round, glowing fireballs known as "foo fighters" were reported by Allied and Axis pilots. Some explanations for these sightings included St. Elmo's fire, the planet Venus, hallucinations from oxygen deprivation, and German secret weapons (specifically rockets). In 1946, more than 2,000 reports were collected, primarily by the Swedish military, of unidentified aerial objects over the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece.
The Modern UFO Era
By most accounts, the popular UFO craze in the US began with a media frenzy surrounding the reports on June 24, 1947, of a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold who described seeing "a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds" near Mount Rainier that he said were "moving like a saucer would if skipped across water" which led to headlines about "flying saucers" and "flying discs". Only weeks after Arnold's story was reported in 1947, Gallup published a poll asking people in the United States what the "flying saucers" might be. Already, 90% had heard of the new term. Within weeks, reports of flying saucer sightings became a daily occurrence with one particularly famous example being the Roswell incident in 1947 where remnants of a downed observation balloon were recovered by a farmer and confiscated by military personnel.
UFO enthusiasts in the early 1950s started to organize local "saucer clubs" modeled after science fiction fan clubs of the 1930s and 1940s, with some growing to national and international prominence within a decade. In 1950, three influential books were published-Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucers Are Real, Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, and Gerald Heard's The Riddle of the Flying Saucers. Air Force began to record and investigated UFO reports with Project Sign looking into "more than 250 cases" from 1947 to 1949. Air Force cataloged 12,618 sightings of UFOs as part of what is now known as Project Blue Book".
In the late 1950s, public pressure mounted for a full declassification of all UFO records, but the CIA played a role in refusing to allow this. Air Force interest in UFO reports went on hiatus in 1969 after a study by the University of Colorado led by Edward U.
Project Blue Book: Unknown object over Phoenix, Arizona 1947
UFOs in Popular Culture
From the 1960s to 1990s, UFOs were part of American popular culture's obsession with the supernatural and paranormal. In 1961, the first alien abduction account was sensationalized when Barney and Betty Hill underwent hypnosis after seeing a UFO and reported recovered memories of their experience that became ever more elaborate as the years went by. In 1966, 5% of Americans reported to Gallup that "they had at some time seen something they thought was a 'flying saucer'", 96% said "they had heard or read about flying saucers", and 46% of these "thought they were 'something real' rather than just people's imagination".
Responding to UFO enthusiasm, there have always been consistent yet less popular efforts made at debunking many of the claims, and at times the media was enlisted including a 1966 TV special, "UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?", in which Walter Cronkite "patiently" explained to viewers that UFOs were fantasy. Cronkite enlisted Carl Sagan and J. Such attempts to disenchant the zeitgeist were not very successful at tamping down the mania. Keith Kloor notes that the "allure of flying saucers" remained popular with the public into the 1970s, spurring production of such sci-fi films, as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien, which "continued to stoke public fascination". Meanwhile, Leonard Nimoy narrated a popular occult and mystery TV series In Search of... Eghigian notes that, by this point, the UFO problem had become "far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve."
Interest was particularly fevered in the 1990s with the publicity surrounding the television broadcast of an Alien autopsy video marketed as "real footage" but later admitted to be a staged "re-enactment". Eghigian writes that "there had always been outlier abduction reports dating back to the '50s and '60s" but that in the '80s and '90s "the floodgates opened, and with them a new generation of UFO advocates". They all defended the "veracity of those claiming to have been kidnapped, examined, and experimented upon by beings from another world", writes Eghigian, as "new missionaries who simultaneously played the role of investigator, therapist, and advocate to their vulnerable charges.
When Mack began working with and publishing accounts of abductees-or "experiencers", as he called them-in the early 1990s, he brought a sense of legitimacy to "the study of extraterrestrial captivity". By the late 1990s, however, the Harvard Medical School initiated a review of his position which allowed him to retain tenure. However, after this review, as the review board chairman Arnold Relman later put it, Mack was "not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore". Claims of alien abduction have continued, but no other clinicians would continue to speak of them as real in any sense.
Nonetheless, these ideas persisted in popular opinion. In December 2017, a new round of media attention started when The New York Times broke the story of the secret Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program that was funded from 2007 to 2012 with $22 million spent on the program. Following this story, along with a series of sensationalized Pentagon UFO videos leaked by members of the program who became convinced that UFOs were genuine mysteries worth investigating, there was an increase in mainstream attention to UFO stories.
Recent Developments and Public Opinion
In July 2021, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb announced the creation of his Galileo Project which intended to use high-tech astronomical equipment to seek evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts in space and possibly within Earth's atmosphere. This was followed closely by the publication of Loeb's book Extraterrestrial, in which he argued that the first interstellar comet ever observed, ʻOumuamua, might be an artificial light sail made by an alien civilization.
MYSTERY SOLVED! Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) @aspwexperience
A Harris Poll in 2009 found that 32% of Americans "believe in UFOs". A National Geographic study in June 2012 found that 36% of Americans believe UFOs exist and that 10% thought that they had spotted one. In June 2021 a Pew research poll found that 51% in the United States thought that UFOs reported by people in the military were likely to be evidence of intelligent life from beyond the Earth. In August 2021, Gallup, with a question not specific to military reports, only found that 41% of adults believed some UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets. This Gallup poll showed 44% of men and 38% of women believed this. This average of 41% in 2021 was up from 33% in a 2019 Gallup poll with the same question.
Historian Greg Eghigian wrote in August 2021 that "over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects" and that "it often gets personal" with those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin dismissing those who consider UFOs to be worth studying as "narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel" while the skeptics brushed off "devotees" as "naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous".
Shape-Shifting UFOs
Reports of shape-shifting UFOs add another layer of complexity to this phenomenon. One such sighting occurred in Green Cove Springs. The object was floating above Green Cove Springs Electric, a few blocks west of the St. Johns River. The location is near the intersection of State Road 17 and south of Harbor Road, slowly heading southeast. It made no noise and was at least a few hundred feet off the ground.
Green Cove Springs is about 30 miles south of downtown Jacksonville, along the west bank of the St. Johns River in Clay County. At times the shape was like a spacecraft while it also looked like a turtle shell, a ball inside with white outline that almost looked like a mouth and teeth. Naval Air Station Jacksonville (NAS Jax) announced recently that it would be conducting training exercises beginning Saturday, March 22. The facility is about 15 miles north of where the object was floating above Green Cove Springs Electric, a few blocks west of the St. Johns River.
NAS Jax advised nearby residents that there would be an "increase in aircraft activity and noise." However, the object hovering above Green Cove made no noise that could be heard from the ground. Some on social media say the object was tarp and aluminum or a PVC frame, while others say it was a weather balloon or even a bounce house.
There have been other UFO sightings in recent weeks. From March 1 to March 19, there were 34 UFO sightings reported with some saying they were a rocket, drones or even a Chinese lantern.
An artist's depiction of a shape-shifting UFO
Early Reports of Shape-Shifting Phenomena
The men were Edward Hansford, a Virginia tavern keeper, and John L. Clarke, a Navy veteran and sea captain from Baltimore. They didn’t know Jefferson, but they wanted his opinion about an “extraordinary phenomenon” they had witnessed on the night of July 25, 1813 in Portsmouth, Virginia. What an oddly specific vision for two men to share. The fact that there were two witnesses suggests that these sights can’t be written off as a deluded hallucination, although I can’t rule out the possibility Hansford and Clarke were an early nineteenth century epistolary improv group… “Ooh, let’s make it turn into a turtle now!” “Yes, and then it transforms into a…bouncing human skeleton! If they weren’t playing a bizarre joke on Jefferson - if they were sincere about what they thought they saw - then I’m not sure how to explain it. Neither could Thomas Jefferson.