Unidentified flying object (commonly abbreviated UFO) is a popular term for any aerial phenomenon that is not readily identified. Research by military and civilian groups shows that after investigation UFOs are generally identified either directly or by applying Occam's Razor.Therefore some, such as the USAF, who originally coined the term in 1952, define UFOs as only those objects remaining unidentified after scrutiny by expert investigators, while other definitions call something a UFO from the time it is first reported as being unidentified.
In addition, in popular culture the term UFO is often used as a synonym for alien spacecraft, although alternatively an anomaly may be classified as a UFO independently of opinion as to its origins. Because of these different meanings that have become associated with UFO, some investigators now prefer to use the broader term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (or UAP).
Some studies have established that only a tiny percentage of reported UFOs are hoaxes.The majority of reports indicate something real, perhaps appearing anomalous, but most of these represent honest misidentifications of conventional objects such as aircraft, balloons, or astronomical objects such as meteors or bright planets. This leaves a small percentage, usually between around 5-15%, of genuinely unexplained sightings which form the core of the UFO mystery.
Modern reports and the first official investigations of UFOs began during World War II with sightings of so-called foo fighters by Allied airplane crews, and in 1946 with widespread sightings of European "ghost rockets". UFO reports became even more common after the first widely publicized United States UFO sighting, by private pilot Kenneth Arnold in mid 1947 (which gave rise to the popular terms "flying saucer" and "flying disc"). Since then, millions of people believe they have seen UFOs and tens of thousands of such reports have been cataloged.
History
On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg, Germany were reportedly filled with a multitude of objects. Woodcut from 1566 by Hans Glaser.
Unexplained aerial observations have been reported throughout history. Some were undoubtedly astronomical in nature: comets, bright meteors, one or more of the five planets which can be seen with the naked eye, planetary conjunctions, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia and lenticular clouds. An example is Halley's Comet, which was recorded first by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. and possibly as early as 467 B.C.
Other historical reports seem to defy prosaic explanation, but assessing such accounts is difficult. Whatever their actual cause, such sightings throughout history were often treated as supernatural portents, angels, or other religious omens. Journalist Daniela Giordano says many Medieval-era depictions of unusual aerial objects are difficult to interpret, but argues some that depict airborne saucers and domed-saucer shapes are often strikingly similar to UFO reports from later centuries.[6]Art historians, however, explain those objects as religious symbols, often represented in many other paintings of Middle-Age and Renaissance.[7]
Shen Kuo (1031–1095), a Song Chinese government scholar-official and prolific polymath inventor and scholar, wrote a vivid passage in his Dream Pool Essays (1088) about an unidentified flying object. He recorded the testimony of eyewitnesses in 11th century Anhui and Jiangsu (especially in the city of Yangzhou), who stated that a flying object with opening doors would shine a blinding light from its interior (from an object shaped like a pearl) that would cast shadows from trees for ten miles in radius, and was able to take off at tremendous speeds.[8]
[edit] Pre-modern reports
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Before the terms "flying saucer" were coined in 1947 and "UFO" in 1952, there were a number of reports of unidentified aerial phenomena. These reports date from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. They include:
- On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that local farmer John Martin had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed." Martin also said it appeared to be about the size of a saucer, the first known use of the word "saucer" in association with a UFO. [9]
Drawing of E. W. Maunder's November 17, 1882 "auroral beam" by astronomer Rand Capron, Guildown Observatory, Surrey, UK, who also observed it.
- On November 17, 1882, a UFO was observed by astronomer Edward Walter Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory and some other European astronomers. Maunder in The Observatory reported "a strange celestial visitor" that was "disc-shaped", "torpedo-shaped", "spindle-shaped", or "just like a Zeppelin" dirigible (as he described it in 1916). It moved rapidly from horizon to horizon. The sighting was during high auroral activity; therefore Maunder assumed it was some extraordinary auroral phenomenon never before seen and called it an "auroral beam".
- On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the USS Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Battle Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and "soared" above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after two to three minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns. [10]
- 1916 and 1926: the three oldest known pilot UFO sightings, of 1305 cataloged by NARCAP. On January 31, 1916, a UK pilot near Rochford reported a row of lights, like lighted windows on a railway carriage, that rose and disappeared. In January 1926, a pilot reported six "flying manhole covers" between Wichita, Kansas and Colorado Springs, Colorado. In late September 1926, an airmail pilot over Nevada was forced to land by a huge, wingless cylindrical object.
- On August 5, 1926, while traveling in the Humboldt Mountains of Tibet's Kokonor region, Nicholas Roerich reported that members of his expedition saw "something big and shiny reflecting sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed".
- In the Pacific and European theatres during World War II, "Foo-fighters" (metallic spheres, balls of light and other shapes that followed aircraft) were reported and on occasion photographed by Allied and Axis pilots but were dismissed by scientists as St. Elmo's Fire or illusions. [11][12]
- On February 25, 1942, the U.S. Army detected unidentified aircraft both visually and on radar over the Los Angeles, California region. No readily apparent explanation was offered. The incident later became known as the Battle of Los Angeles, or the West coast air raid.
- In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as "Russian hail", and later as "ghost rockets", because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. Over 200 were tracked on radar and deemed to be "real physical objects" by the Swedish military.
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The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a famous sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 while flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington. He reported seeing nine brilliantly bright objects flying across the face of Rainier towards nearby Mount Adams at "an incredible speed", which he "calculated" as at least 1200 miles per hour by timing their travel between Rainier and Adams.
Although there were other 1947 U.S. sightings of similar objects that preceded this, it was Arnold's sighting that first received significant media attention and captured the public's imagination. Arnold described what he saw as being "flat like a pie pan", "shaped like saucers and were so thin I could barely see them...", "half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. ...they looked like a big flat disk" (see Arnold's drawing at right), and flew "like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water". (one of the objects, however, he would describe later as being almost crescent-shaped, as shown in illustration at left.) Arnold’s descriptions were widely reported and within a few days gave rise to the terms flying saucer and flying disk.[13] Arnold’s sighting was followed in the next few weeks by hundreds of other reported sightings, mostly in the U.S., but in other countries as well.
After reports of the Arnold sighting hit the media, other cases began to be reported in increasing numbers. In one instance a United Airlines crew sighting of nine more disc-like objects over Idaho on the evening of July 4. At the time, this sighting was even more widely reported than Arnold’s and lent considerable credence to Arnold’s report.
American UFO researcher Ted Bloecher, in his comprehensive review of newspaper reports (including cases that preceded Arnold's), found a sudden surge upwards in sightings on July 4, peaking on July 6–8. Bloecher noted that for the next few days most American newspapers were filled with front-page stories of the new "flying saucers" or "flying discs". Reports began to rapidly tail off after July 8 [14], when officials began issuing press statements on the Roswell UFO incident, in which they explained the debris as being that of a weather balloon. [15]
Over several years in the 1960s, Bloecher (aided by physicist James E. McDonald) discovered 853 flying disc sightings that year from 140 newspapers from Canada, Washington D.C, and every U.S. state except Montana. [16]
[edit] UFO studies and result differences
It has been estimated from various studies (such as those cited below) that 50-90% of all reported UFO sightings are eventually identified, while 10-20% remain unidentified (the rest being "garbage cases" listed as having "insufficient information" to enable classification). Various studies (such as the U.S. air Force's Project Blue Book) have also shown that only a small percentage of UFO reports are deliberate hoaxes (typically less than 1%). Instead, the vast majority are honest misidentifications of natural or man-made phenomena.
The following are some major scientific studies undertaken during the past 50 years regarding UFOs:
- Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 (referred to further below as BBSR) was a massive statistical study the Battelle Memorial Institute did for the USAF of 3,200 UFO cases between 1952 and 1954. Of these, 22% remained unidentified (“true UFOs”), using the stringent criteria that all four scientific analysts had to agree that the case had no prosaic explanation, whereas agreement of only two analysts was needed to List the case as explained. Another 69% were deemed identified, and for the remainder, 9%, there was insufficient information to make a determination.
- The official French government UFO investigation (GEPAN/SEPRA), run within the French space agency CNES between 1977 and 2004, scientifically investigated about 6000 cases and found about 13% defied any rational explanation (UFOs), while about 46% were deemed readily identifiable. (The remainder, or 41%, lacked sufficient information.)
- When the AIAA in 1971 reviewed the results of the 1966-1969 USAF-sponsored Condon Committee study, 30% of the 117 cases remained unexplained.
- Of about 5,000 cases submitted to and studied by the civilian UFO organization NICAP, 16% were judged unknowns.
In contrast, much more conservative numbers for the percentage of UFOs were arrived at individually by astronomer Allan Hendry, who was the chief investigator for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). CUFOS was founded by astronomer Dr. Allen Hynek (who had been the scientific consultant in charge of the air Force’s Project Blue Book) to provide a serious scientific investigation into UFOs. Hendry spent 15 months personally investigating 1,307 UFO reports.
In 1979, Hendry published his conclusions in The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating, and Reporting UFO Sightings. Hendry admitted that he would like to find evidence for extraterrestrials but noted that the vast majority of cases had prosaic explanations. He deemed 89% IFOs and only 9% unidentified. If only “hardcore” cases -- well-documented events which defied any conceivable conventional explanation -- the figure for UFOs dropped to only 1.5%.
one possible reason for Hendry's more conservative results might be that he was operating from a very different set of data. Hendry examined almost exclusively civilian reports, mostly from inexperienced witnesses. In contrast, government studies, such as the U.S. Project Blue Book or the French GEPAN/SEPRA, or the civilian NICAP study, contained large numbers of civilian and military pilot sightings and other military sightings, usually considered to be higher evidentiary cases because of the greater experience of the witnesses and the presence of corroborating data such as radar.
As an example of the difference, military personnel made up only 1% of Hendry's witnesses, but 38% of the Battelle / air Force study. The military witnesses also contributed a much higher percentage of “excellent” or “good” cases (58% for the military vs. only 33% for the civilian cases), which were more likely to be judged unknowns in the Battelle study. Overall, 29% of military cases were judged as unknowns vs. 17% for civilian cases.
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