Unidentified flying object (UFO)

Technically, an unidentified flying object (UFO) is any moving object spotted in the sky that cannot be identified by the observer. However, the term’s meaning has shifted since it was first used in the 1950s. Today, many people equate the term UFO with the sighting of an alleged alien spacecraft. Indeed, the term has become so synonymous with the idea of extraterrestrial visitation that the US government reclassified unidentified sightings first as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and later as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), to avoid the association.

Scattered accounts of people witnessing strange objects in the sky date back centuries, but sightings of such phenomena truly exploded in the years following World War II (1939–45). Widespread media reports of so-called “flying saucers” fueled public interest in UFOs, but the objects were not usually considered to be extraterrestrial at first. However, by the 1950s, the association between UFOs and alien spacecraft had been cemented in the public consciousness. Since then, the US government has made several attempts to answer the mystery behind UFO sightings, with the vast number of cases found to have natural explanations.

The few that remained unexplained have continued to capture public imagination. Some UFO investigators believe the reports contain evidence that would confirm the existence of alien visitation. Skeptics doubt that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin and insist that the lack of an explanation means that more research is needed.

Early History

Ancient civilizations relied on a knowledge of the sky for their survival, as the movement of the sun, moon, and stars told them when to plant and harvest crops. Any celestial object that was out of the ordinary would surely have been noticed, although observers were far more likely to consider it a divine omen or harbinger of doom. Some accounts from ancient Egypt tell of “stars” falling to earth and defeating the pharaoh’s enemies, or of talking “flying disks,” but these are likely to be exaggerations from the time or possibly modern hoaxes. A fourth century CE Roman text called the Book of Prodigies features historical accounts of strange objects burning through the sky and the sighting of mysterious celestial figures. However, the book was written centuries after the sightings allegedly occurred and the author could easily be referring to meteors or other common astronomical events.

In 1561, residents of the German city of Nuremberg reported witnessing a sky full of strange flying cylinders and globes that seemed to them like a celestial battle. The event was recorded by a Nuremberg printer on a broadsheet illustration. Modern experts dismiss any extraterrestrial involvement, saying the sightings could have been an astronomical event known as a sun dog. This occurs when sunlight is reflected by ice crystals in the atmosphere, giving the appearance of multiple suns in the sky.

During the nineteenth century, reports of lights in the sky or strange flying objects increased across the globe (though this perceived increase is likely in part simply due to better documentation). For example, in 1878, a farmer near Dallas, Texas, reported seeing a circular object in the sky. He referred to the object’s shape as a “large saucer.” In 1896 and 1897, residents across the United States reported seeing mysterious airships in the skies. However, none of these reports were considered to be of alien origin. The Texas farmer likely saw a hot air balloon, while experts believed the airship sightings were just inventors testing out a new technology. It was only near the start of the twentieth century that the idea of extraterrestrials was attached to the phenomena of mysterious atmospheric sightings.

“Flying Saucer” Craze

During World War II, American pilots in both Europe and the Pacific reported seeing fast-moving balls of light following their planes. The pilots named these lights “foo fighters,” a name taken from the popular comic strip Smokey Stover. Some pilots assumed they were German or Japanese weapons, but the objects never threatened their planes. The US military investigated the sightings but did not reach a conclusion on the matter. Some experts theorize that because the objects never showed up on radar, they could have been a form of ball lightning or optical illusions caused by atmospheric conditions or pilot fatigue.

In 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane near Washington State’s Mount Rainier when he claimed to see a group of nine objects in the distance. Arnold reported the objects moved extraordinarily fast and swerved around the terrain as they flew. He described them as looking flat from the edge but crescent-shaped from the top. He also said they moved “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.” Arnold’s account is widely viewed as the first modern UFO sighting.

The media picked up on the story and soon reports of the mysterious objects had captured imaginations among the public. However, reporters misquoted Arnold’s words and called the objects “flying saucers.” Within weeks, hundreds of reports of flying saucers began to spring up across the United States. At the time, most people believed the witnesses had mistaken natural objects for the mysterious phenomena, or had seen some sort of top secret American or Soviet technology. Very few thought the objects were of alien origin. Modern researchers believe Arnold misjudged the speed and distance of the objects, and that they were likely birds flying in formation.

A few months after Arnold’s report, a farmer near Roswell, New Mexico, discovered rubber, paper, and tin foil-like metal wreckage in one of his fields. The farmer reported his find to the local authorities and the story soon made headlines nationwide. Officials from a nearby military base came to investigate and initially reported that they had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disk.” However, the next day, Army officials denied that story and said the debris was from a crashed weather balloon.

With the nation immersed in a flying saucer craze, the Army’s quick debunking of the initial story led to the conspiracy theory that the military was covering up the truth of the Roswell incident. Many versions of the conspiracy theory developed over the subsequent decades, generally focusing on the belief that an extraterrestrial craft had crash-landed and that alien lifeforms may have been found. In the 1990s, the US government admitted that it had obscured facts around the incident but denied extraterrestrial involvement, saying the object was not a weather balloon but a top-secret, high-altitude balloon developed to monitor Soviet nuclear weapons tests.

As the 1940s ended and the 1950s began, the public attitude toward flying saucers started to change, driven by heightened interest in outer space due to the escalating "space race" between the US and the Soviet Union. The subject became popular with writers who published several best-selling books speculating that the objects were of extraterrestrial origin. Hollywood added fuel to the fire by rolling out a series of alien invasion films with titles such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Flying saucer enthusiasts in the United Sates began to form groups to discover the truth—alien or otherwise—behind the sightings.

Sometime between 1953 and 1956, the term "unidentified flying object (UFO)" was first used by the US military in place of flying saucer. The term was considered to be more accurate and left out the implication that the “saucers” were controlled by some form of intelligence. Over the next decade, "UFO" became the standard term to refer to any unexplained object observed in the sky, regardless of potential origin. However, its widespread use in referring to flying saucers eventually made the two terms interchangeable in public usage. Today, most English dictionaries define UFO as an unidentified flying object that is assumed to be from another planet or of alien origin.

Initial Government Investigation of UFOs

After the sightings of the late 1940s, the US government began to consider the potential hazards unidentified flying objects could pose to aircraft or national security. The US military in particular subsequently conducted several investigations of the UFO phenomena, especially as the mounting Cold War brought concerns that the objects might be Soviet technology. In 1947 the Air Force launched Project Sign; a year later it was replaced with Project Grudge, which largely focused on refuting public concerns. However, the most comprehensive Air Force investigation was Project Blue Book, which examined more than 12,600 UFO sightings from 1952 to 1969. Of those sightings, investigators found 701 that could not be explained.

The project found most of the UFO reports were actually natural phenomena or misinterpreted sightings of clouds, stars, or bright planets such as Venus or Jupiter. For example, in 1951, residents of Lubbock, Texas, claimed to have seen a semi-circle of fast-moving lights in the night sky. The Project Blue Book investigators found the lights were low-flying birds reflected in the city’s new streetlights.

Project Blue Book’s findings also noted that of the 701 unexplained sightings, none were a threat to national security. The sightings were not considered evidence of superior technology and showed no signs of extraterrestrial origins. The investigators said they simply did not have enough evidence to make a determination in these cases.

Following Project Blue Book, UFOs increasingly became a divisive subject among both experts and the public. While some people remained convinced that the sightings represented extraterrestrial visitation, the mainstream view asserted that UFOs were not worthy of serious attention. These highly polarized positions left little room for actual scientific investigation of unexplained phenomena, as researchers often feared being stigmatized. A lack of government transparency also continued to factor into perceptions of UFOs, with only limited official efforts to address the issue. In 1998, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) claimed that many of the UFO reports from 1954 to 1974 were sightings of a top-secret, high-altitude spy plane. (Project Blue Book investigators did speak to the CIA in the process of their inquiry; however, the CIA did not always reveal the requested information at the time.)

Although Project Blue Book seemed to debunk most UFO sightings and ended the flying saucer craze, it did not fully answer the questions surrounding the phenomena, nor did it put a stop to UFO sightings in the US and elsewhere. For example, in 1980, two US Air Force members stationed at a British military base reported witnessing colored lights flying above a forest northeast of London. One of the men claimed to have seen what looked like a spacecraft; later investigation found damage to the trees and unusual radiation readings. In 1989 and 1990, more than 13,000 people in Belgium reported seeing a triangular-shaped flying object. The nation’s air force enlisted the help of the British to investigate, but found no credible explanation. However, they did determine the object was not a threat.

Topic Today

Interest in and investigation of UFOs has continued in the twenty-first century. In 2004, two veteran US Navy pilots off the California coast reported encountering an aircraft that seemed to accelerate impossibly fast. The incident prompted the US Congress to fund a secret US Defense Department program to investigate what were then being called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). The term was chosen to differentiate the sightings from the extraterrestrial association of the term UFO. The program, which began in 2007, was eventually defunded in 2012. Its existence was first revealed to the public through an article published in the New York Times in 2017, which helped set off a fresh wave of public attention to the ongoing issue of UFOs/UAPs.

Reports also emerged that between 2014 and 2015 several Navy pilots had reported encountering and, in some cases, almost colliding with unidentified aircraft that did not appear to have engines or exhaust trails. In some instances the pilots were able to record the object on their onboard cameras, and leaked footage eventually received widespread media coverage. In May 2019 the US Navy updated its policy on how to report such observations. By the following month, Navy officials had met with select members of Congress to deliver a classified briefing on the pilots' sightings and the work being done to understand them and avoid any possible security threats for aviators. Military officials were concerned the presence of unauthorized vehicles in US airspace could endanger the safety of pilots and jeopardize training exercises. That September, the Navy confirmed that the leaked video footage was real and could not be explained. In April 2020 the Pentagon further authorized the release of three short, declassified videos of observed UAPs as part of an effort to officially verify that the widely-circulated videos were authentic and that there was not anything more to them. Proponents of UFO research praised the release but argued that the issue needed to be taken up more seriously and more information needed to be shared with the public.

With increasing pressure from the public and lawmakers to address the issue of UAPs, in 2020 the US military announced a new project known as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). Its mission was to investigate and catalogue unidentified objects that could pose threats to national security. The UAPTF subsequently investigated reports from US government personnel from the years 2004 to 2021. In a preliminary report issued in June 2021, investigators said they looked at 144 UAP sightings during that time period. The report was able to positively identify only one of the 144 objects, although it did state that the original investigation lacked “sufficient specificity.” It went on to say that with further study, the majority of the incidents would likely fall into five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, US-based technology, foreign-based technology, or a catchall “other” source. Notably, this did not completely rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial origin.

The report did state that many of the UAP sightings interrupted planned military operations or training exercises. Eighty of the 144 objects were observed with multiple sensors, meaning they were likely physical objects and not light sources or optical illusions. Of the 143 unidentified sightings, 18 displayed "unusual flight characteristics" not considered possible with established systems, including known drone technology. The report pointed out that this did not mean they were necessarily of alien origin, and that those 18 reports would need further examination to rule out the possibility of sensor errors, hoaxes, cyberattack, or pilot misperception. The report recommended additional government funding to develop a better way to collect and analyze data. Although the report ultimately provided little new information, it was hailed as a breakthrough for showing that the military took the issue of UFOs seriously, potentially making sightings and investigations more respectable.

In July 2022 the US Department of Defense announced the formation of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to coordinate cross-agency UAP investigation. The organization's name reflected the fact that the term "UAP" was increasingly used to mean "unidentified anomalous phenomena," a category including not just airborne observations but also those in the ocean or appearing to move from water to air or air to space ("transmedium"). In October 2022 NASA launched an independent study, headed by a sixteen-member panel consisting of experts from a range of fields, of UAPs. Focusing on issues of data collection and analysis, it sought to establish a framework for future science-driven UAP investigations. An AARO report in January 2023 noted that the agency investigated hundreds of UAP cases in 2022; over half were ultimately explained (most often as balloons), but about 170 were flagged as needing further analysis.

Another surge in attention to UFOs or UAPs came in February 2023, after the detection of a Chinese spy balloon over the United States was followed by reports that the US military had shot down several unidentified objects. It was later suggested that the downed objects were likely research balloons from private companies or hobbyists rather than foreign spy equipment or extraterrestrial craft. The incident highlighted ongoing national security concerns over UAPs, and President Joe Biden announced that a new interagency team led by the national security adviser would take on a wide-ranging study of unidentified aerial objects and their implications. Meanwhile, some commentators noted that the wave of interest in UAPs amid rising tensions with China in some ways paralleled the connection between the flying saucer craze and tensions with the Soviet Union.

In May 2023, NASA's independent study panel presented their preliminary findings to the public during an organized briefing. Information shared at this meeting included a statement that no evidence had been found to date that directly supported extraterrestrial origins of UAPs. There were also calls for improved technological collection and reporting of quality data regarding UAPs as well as reduced stigmatization of such efforts. That July the US House of Representatives held a subcommittee hearing on the issue of UAPs, with official testimony from multiple former members of the US military or intelligence services. The hearing was particularly notable for one witness's sensational claims that the government operated a secret program that had recovered crashed UAPs and "nonhuman" biological material, although no evidence was provided. While the Department of Defense officially denied these claims, the hearing further increased congressional and public calls for greater transparency in UFO investigations. Some observers also questioned whether the controversial testimony might even itself be part of a government misinformation campaign.

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