Unidentified flying object

Based on Wikipedia: Unidentified flying object

In 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted something strange near Mount Rainier. He described a formation of objects moving through the sky "like a saucer would if skipped across water." Newspapers ran with "flying saucers," and within weeks, ninety percent of Americans had heard the term. A phenomenon was born—though what that phenomenon actually was, and is, remains far more complicated than most people realize.

The term "unidentified flying object" exists precisely because those early reports described far too many shapes to call them all saucers. Captain Edward Ruppelt of the United States Air Force coined the acronym UFO to replace the misleading "flying saucer" label. As he put it: "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance."

Here's what makes this subject both fascinating and frustrating: most UFOs aren't unidentified for long. After careful investigation, the vast majority turn out to be entirely ordinary things—aircraft, weather balloons, satellites, planets, or unusual atmospheric phenomena. A 1979 study found that fewer than one percent of investigated cases were hoaxes. Most sightings were honest mistakes made by people who simply didn't recognize what they were looking at.

The Gap Between Seeing and Knowing

Think about how limited our perception really is. You're standing in a field at dusk. Something bright moves across the sky. Is it a plane? A satellite catching the last rays of sunlight? The planet Venus, which is bright enough to cast shadows? A Chinese lantern released from a backyard party? A military drone? All of these have been reported as UFOs.

The U.S. Air Force's 1952-1955 study categorized reports into groups that reveal how mundane most explanations actually are: balloons, astronomical objects, aircraft, light phenomena, birds, clouds, dust, psychological manifestations, and insufficient information. That last category matters enormously—sometimes there simply isn't enough data to identify what someone saw, which doesn't mean it was anything extraordinary.

Consider ball lightning. For centuries, people reported glowing spheres floating through the air, passing through walls, even entering houses. Scientists dismissed these accounts as hallucinations or folklore until the twentieth century, when researchers finally confirmed ball lightning exists. It's a real atmospheric phenomenon, just one we didn't understand yet. Many UFO sightings likely fall into similar categories—things that are real but poorly understood, or real but misidentified.

Ancient Lights in the Sky

Humans have always watched the heavens with wonder and occasional alarm.

Halley's Comet appears in Chinese astronomical records from 240 BCE, possibly even earlier. Ancient observers called it a "guest light"—something strange visiting their familiar sky. They had no way of knowing this guest returned every seventy-six years like clockwork. Each appearance seemed unique and ominous, a portent or sign from the heavens.

A Roman writer named Julius Obsequens compiled accounts of wonders and portents from Rome's history, including things moving through the sky. UFO enthusiasts have seized on these descriptions, but they likely describe meteor showers—and Obsequens was writing four hundred years after the events he recorded, hardly an eyewitness account.

In eleventh-century China, a scholar-official named Shen Kuo recorded eyewitness testimony of something remarkable in the regions of Anhui and Jiangsu. People described a flying object with opening doors that cast a blinding light, illuminating trees for ten miles around before departing at tremendous speed. What did they see? We cannot know. But Shen Kuo was a serious polymath—an inventor and government official—and he recorded what people told him without embellishment.

A famous woodcut from 1561 depicts strange objects over Nuremberg, Germany. It's been interpreted by some as evidence of ancient alien contact. Skeptics argue it's actually a vivid depiction of a sundog—an atmospheric optical phenomenon where ice crystals in the air create bright spots and arcs around the sun. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many pamphlets described "sky spectacles" and "miracles" that closely resemble natural phenomena we now understand through modern atmospheric science.

The Twentieth Century Changes Everything

Something shifted during and after World War II.

Allied and Axis pilots both reported strange glowing fireballs during combat missions—objects they nicknamed "foo fighters." Explanations ranged from Saint Elmo's fire (an electrical weather phenomenon that makes objects appear to glow) to oxygen deprivation hallucinations to secret enemy weapons. The term "foo fighter" itself came from a nonsense phrase in a popular comic strip of the era.

In 1946, Scandinavian countries collected over two thousand reports of unidentified aerial objects. People called them "Russian hail" and later "ghost rockets," assuming they were Soviet tests of captured German V1 or V2 rocket technology. Most were eventually identified as meteors.

Then came Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting, and the floodgates opened.

The timing matters enormously. The war had demonstrated that impossible-seeming technologies—jet aircraft, rockets, atomic weapons—were suddenly real. If humans could split the atom, why couldn't someone else be visiting from the stars? Science fiction had primed audiences with exactly these ideas for decades. When people saw something they couldn't explain, they now had a ready-made framework for interpretation.

Saucers, Clubs, and True Believers

Within weeks of Arnold's report, sightings became a daily occurrence. The most famous was at Roswell, New Mexico, where remnants of something that crashed were recovered by a farmer and confiscated by military personnel. The object was actually a high-altitude observation balloon from a classified program called Project Mogul, designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests. But the military's secretive handling of the incident—initially claiming it was a "flying disc" before quickly reversing course—planted seeds of suspicion that would grow for decades.

By the early 1950s, enthusiasts had organized "saucer clubs" modeled after science fiction fan clubs. Three influential books appeared in 1950: 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." All three argued that UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft, responding to humanity's detonation of atomic weapons. These books introduced a character type that would become central to UFO culture: the crusading whistleblower, dedicated to exposing government cover-ups of alien contact.

A 1957 survey found that more than twenty-five percent of Americans believed UFOs could be from outer space.

The cultural phenomenon caught the attention of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. His 1959 book "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky" didn't ask whether UFOs were real spacecraft. Instead, Jung asked what it meant that so many people were seeing them, interpreting them as alien visitors, and organizing their beliefs around them. He saw flying saucers as a modern mythology—a way of making sense of anxieties about the atomic age and humanity's place in the cosmos.

The Government Investigates

The U.S. Air Force took the reports seriously, if not always for the reasons believers hoped.

Project Sign began in 1947, examining over 250 cases. Project Grudge followed through 1951. Then came Project Blue Book, which from 1952 to 1969 catalogued 12,618 UFO sightings. The vast majority were explained. A small percentage remained "unknown"—not because they were extraterrestrial, but because there wasn't enough information to determine what witnesses had actually seen.

Intelligence officials worried, but not about aliens. A 1953 panel (called the Robertson Panel) feared that a flood of UFO reports could provide cover for genuine enemy incursions. If people were constantly reporting lights in the sky, how would anyone notice actual Soviet reconnaissance? The concern was strategic, not extraterrestrial.

In 1969, the Condon Report—a University of Colorado study commissioned by the Air Force—concluded that "nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge." Official investigation effectively ceased.

What We Actually Know

The evidence, after decades of investigation, points consistently in one direction: UFO reports reflect human perception, psychology, and culture far more than they reflect anything physically extraordinary.

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi, who taught critical thinking about UFO claims to his students, put it simply: "The more you investigate, the more likely you are to find that there is LESS to these stories than meets the eye."

This doesn't mean witnesses are lying. A 1979 study found that fewer than one percent of reports were hoaxes. Most sightings are honest misidentifications made by people who lack the experience or knowledge to recognize what they've seen. Someone unfamiliar with how satellites appear—steady points of light moving smoothly across the sky—might reasonably find the sight remarkable and unexplainable.

Psychology plays a significant role. Pareidolia—the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random stimuli—can make clouds or lens flares appear to be structured objects. Suggestibility and false memories can shape how people recall and describe events. When someone expects to see a UFO, they're more likely to interpret ambiguous stimuli as one.

The Terminology Keeps Changing

Notice something interesting: the language around this subject keeps shifting.

"Flying saucers" gave way to "UFOs" because the saucer image was too specific. Now "UFO" itself has accumulated so much cultural baggage—little green men, abductions, conspiracies—that official bodies have adopted "UAP," which stands for unidentified aerial phenomena or, more recently, unidentified anomalous phenomena.

The terminology change is deliberate. "UFO" conjures images from decades of science fiction films and tabloid headlines. "UAP" sounds clinical, serious, scientific. The U.S. government now has two entities dedicated to UAP data collection: NASA's UAP independent study team and the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

The rebranding hasn't changed the underlying reality. Most UAPs, like most UFOs before them, turn out to be identifiable once properly investigated. The genuinely unexplained cases remain unexplained not because they're extraterrestrial, but because there's insufficient data to determine what they actually were.

The Philosophical Problem

Here's where things get genuinely interesting from a philosophical standpoint.

Some phenomena may be temporarily unknowable—we don't know what they are yet, but better investigation could reveal the answer. Other phenomena might be permanently unknowable—the event is over, the data is insufficient, and we will never be able to determine what happened. This is a problem of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with what we can know and how we can know it.

A blurry photograph of something in the sky is not evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. It's evidence that someone photographed something blurry in the sky. The leap from "I don't know what this is" to "this must be alien spacecraft" skips over countless more mundane possibilities. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and decades of investigation have not produced evidence that meets that standard.

Why It Matters

So why do UFOs continue to captivate us?

Social scientists have identified UFO culture as a modern form of folklore and mythology. Like earlier supernatural beliefs, UFO stories provide frameworks for understanding the unknown, processing collective anxieties, and imagining our place in the universe. They've even inspired elements of new religious movements.

There's something deeply human in looking up at the night sky and wondering if we're alone. The universe is incomprehensibly vast. The idea that intelligent life might exist elsewhere isn't absurd—many scientists consider it probable. But the question of whether such life has visited Earth is entirely separate from the question of whether such life exists somewhere.

The UFO phenomenon tells us more about ourselves than about the cosmos. It reveals how we perceive, how we remember, how we interpret ambiguity, and how we construct meaning from uncertainty. In that sense, the phenomenon is real and worth studying—just not for the reasons true believers imagine.

When we see something we cannot immediately explain, we face a choice. We can acknowledge our uncertainty and seek prosaic explanations. Or we can leap to the extraordinary, filling the gap in our knowledge with whatever narrative most appeals to us. The history of UFO investigation suggests that patience and skepticism, while less exciting, consistently lead closer to the truth.

The next time you see something strange in the sky, take a moment before deciding what it is. Consider the satellites passing overhead, the planets bright enough to surprise you, the aircraft following routes you've never noticed, the atmospheric phenomena that can fool even careful observers. The universe is full of wonders. Most of them, it turns out, are wonders we can actually understand.