Unidentified Flying Object (UFO)

The term UFO, for Unidentified Flying Object, was originally used by the Air Force to signify a flying object that the observer could not readily identify. After sightings of UFOs in the United States became widely publicized since 1947, the term became associated in the public mind with hypothetical extraterrestrial craft so that today the term “UFO” is used when referring to craft piloted by aliens from outer space as well as unidentified flying objects.

Since 1947, popular UFO lore has come to cover a wide spectrum, ranging from objects seen in the sky, encounters and contact with alien beings, retrievals of crashed alien craft, abductions allegedly carried out by “gray aliens,” secret government documents regarding UFOs, “UFO cults” that seek salvation from extraterrestrials, channeling and spiritual communication with extraterrestrials, and “astronaut god” theories that see the angels and gods depicted in ancient religious scriptures as extraterrestrials. UFOs are also associated with “crop circles,” which are often complex geometric formations that mysteriously appear in standing crops all over the world but mostly in England; and mutilations of cattle and other livestock, in which animals are found dead with surgically precise cuts and missing blood and tissue.

Skeptics and mainstream scientists maintain that UFOs have a terrestrial explanation. They have been attributed to misidentified planets, optical illusions, hallucinations, atmospheric and electrical phenomena like “temperature inversions” and ball lightning, meteors, missile tests, weather balloons, secret experimental aircraft, false memories induced under hypnosis, and hoaxes. Psychologist Carl Jung asserts that the UFO phenomenon is a modern version of archetypal religious yearnings in his 1959 book "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen In The Sky."

According to several polls, however, such as a 1997 CNN poll, 80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. (http://www4.cnn.com/US/9706/15/ufo.poll/).

UFO sightings have been reported since ancient times and throughout the world, but the modern “UFO era” is said to have begun on June 24, 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold, while piloting his private plane, reported seeing nine flying objects traveling at “incredible speed” over Mt. Rainer in Washington State that he described as resembling saucers skipping across water. The press dubbed them “flying saucers,” which became a household word.

Arnold’s sighting was followed in the next few weeks by several thousand other reported sightings, mostly in the U.S., but in other countries as well. For the next few days most American newspapers were filled with front-page stories of “flying saucers” or “flying discs.”

On July 8 the public information officer at Roswell Air Base in New Mexico issued a press release announcing that the military had recovered a “crashed disk,” which military authorities removed for further study, sparking a media frenzy all over the world. Within hours the commander of the 8th Air Force in Forth Worth, Texas, issued a second press release, later combined with a staged photograph, claiming that the debris was only pieces of a weather balloon and its radar reflector.

The Roswell story quickly faded from the media, but thirty years later physicist Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner published "Crash at Corona," the first of many books on the Roswell crash citing eyewitness testimony that an alien craft did indeed crash, that debris and alien bodies were recovered, and the government covered it up. Other books include "UFO Crash at Roswell" by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt and "The Roswell Incident" by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. In "The Day After Roswell," the late Col. (ret.) Philip J. Corso writes that as an army intelligence officer he handled artifacts from the Roswell crash and helped secretly route them to civilian contractors who used them as the basis for transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, fiber optics and other technologies that are now major components of the U.S. economy.

In response to public outcry, the Air Force began a number of public investigations including Project Sign at the end of 1947, Project Grudge at the end of 1948, and then Project Blue Book in 1952. Blue Book closed down in 1970, ending the public Air Force UFO investigations. Researchers, citing secret documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and allegedly released by whistleblowers, say these public efforts covered a much more massive secret investigation that included recovery of crashed saucers, not only at Roswell, but in several other places. About 300 testimonies from government officials asserting U.S. government interest in UFOs has been released by the Disclosure Project headed by Stephen Greer. In November 2003 the first annual conference dedicated to crash retrievals was held in Las Vegas.

The latest official explanation of Roswell, contained in a 1997 Air Force report entitled "The Roswell Report: Case Closed," states that witnesses confused sightings of a secret series of tests called “Project Mogul,” which used high-level balloons to detect Soviet nuclear tests, and misidentifications of crash-test dummies that were dropped in the desert to test safety equipment. The Roswell case remains the most celebrated UFO case in America, making the small town of Roswell a tourist attraction.

Today UFOs and aliens constitute a major aspect of U.S. culture. Since the 1950s, numerous science fiction movies involving aliens were produced, including "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), "It Came From Outer Space" (1953), "Forbidden Planet" (1956), and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977), which introduced the popular image of the large-headed gray-skinned aliens. Images of the “Grays” can now be found on everything from balloons, lollipops, t-shirts, Hallowe’en masks, costume jewelry and posters. The alien theme is carried over on television with popular series like Star Trek, Babylon 5, X-Files, Stephen Spielberg's miniseries Taken, and numerous documentaries on the Sci-Fi and History channels.

The 1961 Betty and Barney Hill case was the first widely publicized alien abduction account. The couple claimed that while driving along a deserted country road they saw a saucer-shaped UFO with humanoid occupants seen through the craft’s windows. Arriving home, they later experienced disturbing dreams and “missing time,” or a gap in their memories that they could not account for. Later under hypnosis, the Hills recounted a tale of being paralyzed by aliens, brought aboard a spaceship and undergoing medical examinations. While under hypnosis, Mrs. Hill also drew a “star map” from memory that she said one of the UFO occupants showed her that indicated their home planet and trade routes between stars.

In the 1980s, the abduction phenomenon gained further public exposure from artist Bud Hopkins in his books "Missing Time" and "Intruders." Horror novelist Whitley Strieber also wrote the best-selling "Communion," later made into a movie, in which he recounted his personal abduction experiences. Hopkins concludes that the Grays need human DNA to survive because their evolution reached a dead-end due to over-reliance on cloning and genetic engineering.

Skeptics maintain that the abduction phenomenon either comes from hallucinations formed when people are in a “hypnopompic” state between waking and sleeping, or are a result of false memories induced during hypnosis when subjects are in a highly suggestible state and that fictional depictions of aliens in the movies contribute to these illusions. Astronomer Carl Sagan in a Parade magazine article suggested that the large black eyes and pale skin of the aliens come from memories of the birth experience, in which white-clad doctors and nurses are seen under bright lights with dark shadows around their eyes.

Hopkins counters that most abduction cases do not involve people asleep or under hypnosis. In the Travis Walton case, for example, which was made into the movie Fire in the Sky, logger Walton was knocked unconscious by a beam from a glowing UFO witnessed by six co-workers. He disappeared for five days, and when he returned told of being taken aboard an alien craft and being examined by gray aliens as well as human-looking ones. Walton’s account involves about 15 minutes, but he never underwent hypnosis to recover suppressed memories of the rest of his alleged abduction because he says his unaided memories were terrifying enough. Skeptics maintain Walton made up the story, although Walton and most of the eyewitnesses passed lie detector tests.

Many thousands of ordinary people claim to have had encounters with unearthly craft and beings. Scientists like physicist Stanton Friedman, NASA scientist John Scheussler, aeronautical engineer Don Berliner and the late astronomer J. Allen Hynek have written numerous scholarly works on the UFO phenomena and head private research groups like Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). These groups maintain large databases of UFO sightings and train observers to be impeccably objective and scientific in investigating sightings. Despite these efforts, UFOs are still not accepted by mainstream scientists as a legitimate field of study.

Other researchers like Zechariah Sitchin and Will Hart find evidence of extraterrestrial visitors in the archeological record and ancient religious scriptures. Sitchin, one of the few scholars able to read ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing, asserts in his "Earth Chronicles" series of books that a race of extraterrestrials called the Annunaki from the planet Nibiru colonized the earth and began the Sumerian and Mayan civilizations. Sitchin, as well as Hart in his book "The Genesis Race," claim that extraterrestrials biologically engineered humans by combining their own genes with pre-human hominids, creating homo sapiens. In the 1970s Erich von Däniken’s book "Chariots of the Gods" popularized this theme. Mainstream scientists roundly reject this theme, attributing ancient accounts of gods and angels to metaphorical religious myths.

UFOs have always involved a significant spiritual and mystical component. Beginning in the 1950s, UFO-related spiritual sects began to appear, usually around a leader who claimed to have made personal contact with space-beings or claimed to channel telepathic messages from them. Some of the most prominent sects include the Aetherius Society founded in 1956, the Unarius Foundation in 1954, the Urantia Brotherhood in 1955, and the Ashtar Command. A standard theme of these groups is that benevolent outer-space beings are warning us about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and pollution and that their desire is to raise humanity into a new age of enlightenment.

Some UFO cults have a darker side, such as Heaven's Gate led by Marshall Applewhite, who in 1997 led 38 followers into mass suicide coinciding with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, believing that their souls would be taken aboard a spaceship hiding in the comet’s tail. The Raelian Movement, founded in 1973 by Frenchman Claude Vorhilon, professes belief in space beings called “Elohim” who created human beings in laboratories. The Raelians gained notoriety because of hedonistic sexual practices and the claim that they had cloned human children, which was never substantiated.

Since the 1970s alien contact has become a common belief in the New Age movement, both through mediumistic channeling and physical contact. A prominent spokesperson for this trend was actress Shirley MacLaine in her book and miniseries, "Out on a Limb."

A recent development in the UFO field is “exopolitics,” or the political implications of extraterrestrial contact. Operation Right to Know, founded by Ed Komarek, tried to change the government’s secrecy policy through political action, mounting a demonstration in front of the White House in June 1993 demanding an end to UFO secrecy. The use of the term “exopolitics” began with Alfred L. Webre in 2000 with his online ebook, "Exopolitics: Towards a Decade of Contact." Michael E. Salla, PhD, uses conventional political science methodologies in "Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence" (2004). Salla claims U.S. government officials signed a secret treaty with the Grays in 1954 giving them license to abduct our citizens to a limited extent, but that the Grays violated the agreement by conducting abductions on a massive scale. In April 2004, Steve Bassett organized the “X-Conference” in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the first conference on the theme of exopolitics.

The attitude of mainstream religions toward UFOs ranges from cautious to hostile. Some fundamentalist Christians regard UFOs as inherently demonic, part of Satan’s efforts to deceive mankind into following false gods. On the other hand, Catholic prelate Msgr. Corrado Balducci, a Vatican expert on exorcism and demonology, has gone on record stating that he believed in the presence of alien intelligences interacting with Earth. Protestant evangelist Billy Graham, in a statement quoted by the Associated Press, said there is no reason that God could not have created other intelligent life in the universe, but that Christ is still the Lord.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, was quoted in 1965 as saying that UFOs are a “spiritual phenomena and a sign of the end times.” In 1968, Sir Anthony Brooke, the former Raja Muda of Sarawak and then president of Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, stated that Rev. Moon was a “general in the Ashtar Command” and led a company of extraterrestrial spirits participating in the human awakening, a statement never confirmed by Rev. Moon. Rev. Moon’s newspaper The News World in 1981 briefly published a supplement entitled UFOs and Other Cosmic Phenomena, which was discontinued when the paper changed its format and name to The New York City Tribune in 1983.