Unidentified flying object

UFO construction plan

UFOs are real. The Air Force doesn't exist. -- Discordian Koan.

An unidentified flying object is any observed atmospheric phenomenon for which there is no apparent explanation. These are more likely to occur at night, since many identifiable flying objects have funny flashing lights and little else to go by in the dark.

How "unidentified" a phenomenon 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.

The basic list of what needs to be eliminated for something to remain "unidentified" would proceed from known commercial and private airflights, to harder to verify military flights, to weather balloons, meteorites, kites, atmospheric phenomena (like the Northern Lights, or strangely lit clouds), pranksters, and, of course, alien spacecraft.

Barring omniscience, there will always be some things in the sky that humanity cannot identify. However, in popular meaning, "Unidentified Flying Object" has come to mean "Alien Spacecraft" by default. Identifying UFOs as flying saucers negates the "U" part of UFO, of course. So far, no verified alien machinery has been found on Earth. We have, however, left examples of alien machinery on the Moon and Mars, and quite possibly Venus. There are also two or three objects hurtling out of the solar system, on their way to starring roles in Star Trek movies.

How the whole thing got started

First wave of interest

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 spacecrafts 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. The craft were also much slower (though they would've passed for fast at the time).

Kenneth Arnold

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. 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 meteors rushing past his plane toward the massive, remote bulk of Mt. Adams to the south.

Since they were pieces of a meteoric fireball in the process of breaking up, they seemed to be flying in formation, so Arnold assumed they were aircraft, 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.

Mogul

On July 7, 1947 there was a top secret Air Force project, called "Mogul", that resembled a weather balloon and designed to fly high in the stratosphere and listen for possible Soviet atomic blasts. The idea was that a balloon traveled with the wind, so there would be no wind blowing across the microphone to mask any distant booms. Unfortunately, winds are unpredictable, and Mogul crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.

Quickly tasked to conceal the existence of Mogul, the Air Force made an official announcement that it had recovered the wreckage of a flying saucer, taking advantage of the current flying saucer craze.^{[citation needed]} The press went nuts, and the Air Force bureaucracy gradually realized it had made a huge mistake. On July 8 they went on the radio and retracted the flying saucer claim, and said it was really just a weather balloon they had picked up. Americans were less cynical in those days, so the military successfully covered up the cover-up. And that was the last anyone heard of it, until three things happened that took away America's innocence and put an end to the days when her leaders were looked up to and trusted implicitly.

The rise of the conspiracy

The first was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, which sparked a poisonous conspiracy mindset that only seemed to be validated by later events, like the Tet Offensive in 1968, when people realized with shock that the government had lied to them and victory in the Vietnam War was actually nowhere in sight, and the third 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 four corners area of the southwestern United States. An entire alphabet soup of imaginary government agencies were cooked up, that supposedly controlled all information on the alien presence. Even the information that these agencies existed was, conveniently, also classified 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 a famous filmmaker made a pair of movies (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) with "good" aliens and "bad" federal agencies that tapped into the new mythology and made enormous amounts of money. In reality no coordinated government plan to respond to alien contact has ever been made public if there are/were any.

The USAF line

A photograph of some UFOs.
^{Do You Believe That?}

The United States Air Force "identify" all unidentified flying objects as "weather balloons". So there.

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 always crash? (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) And 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 USA with armed nuclear warheads on board (for which the Secretary of the Air Force was sacked).

A random farmer's perspective

In "reality", thah hahd paht is ahdentifahying flahying objicks - ahspeshially aht naht. Durin' the dayh, we can seez them black gummint helicoptahs, them CIA gummint test planes, and the aly-an spacecrahfts lookin' for probe donors, but at naht, well, all baits is (or wuz) off. Who knows what them dung thangs is, flyin' ovah mah fahm at 3 AM when I gits up to pee? Prolly some gummint seekrit spah 'speriment thing — or thah aliens come to probe mah everlovin' butt. Dang aly-ans, they never cuddle afterwahds. Dang :(

Historical

In the not-so-distant past, virtually every object in the sky except birds and bats was "unidentified" - or incorrectly identified.

In the birding world

Birders are the world's top source for UFO sightings. As soon as a 60-year old retiree buys a pair of $1100 Leica binoculars and a $75 Tilley hat (which even comes with an owner's manual ), they are guaranteed to begin generating UFO reports.

Reports

Does my UFO sighting belong here, on the talk page, or in a padded cell deep within the bowels of the New Mexico Asylum for the Criminally and/or Stupidly Insane (NMACSI) ?

Evidence we need

• Images taken by the aliens of their own homeworld.
• A sample of alien DNA (or the equivalent).
• A piece of wreckage composed of an exotic material never yet produced on Earth.
• A mathematical proof which would be quite routine for the alien but which has not been solved by us on Earth at this time.

Evidence we got

• Blurry pictures of hubcaps captured mid-toss.
• 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.
• A black dot seen in two frames.

UFO proponents defend the lack of evidence by saying "Science should not ignore the testimony of credible witnesses. The usual rule of science requiring replicability of evidence obviously does not apply to a phenomenon involving intelligences more advanced than we."

The rule is not strictly "replicability of evidence" but simply the falsifiability of hypotheses generated from that evidence. It's not possible, for example, for other astronomers to replicate the observation of a certain brief gamma ray burst, because it was a one-shot. But if that astronomer makes the hypothesis that no gamma ray burst exceeds 60 seconds in duration, he has stated a falsifiable hypothesis. Subsequent observations of other gamma ray bursts can be made by other astronomers. If one of these bursts is five minutes long, then that astronomer can publish a paper that tears down the original hypothesis. But now he has generated a new falsifiable hypothesis that gamma ray bursts of five minutes in duration can exist, which spurs more observations. And so on. In this way, the scientific method slowly but inexorably discards false models and arrive at true and useful ones.

Now suppose that gamma ray bursts were really test detonations of US nuclear warheads in space, and the military was interested in keeping this fact secret. As soon as a scientist reported that 80% of gamma ray bursts occur on the earth's rotational plane, indicating a nearby event, imagine the military swooping down into his observatory and taking all his data. Now imagine foreign astronomers being shut down by their government after political pressure from America, even in places that are military rivals of the United States. That is what UFO advocates are asking us to believe. That the United States reserves a monopoly on alien artifacts, such that even if they fall on foreign soil our special forces get to haul them off to be reverse-engineered, and our military and economic rivals daren't say nothing about it.

See also

• Roswell - The mother of all UFO conspiracies.
• 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.