Unidentified flying object

Ikwipedia

Unidentified flying object

This article is about the unidentified-aerial-phenomenon umbrella term. For the rock band, see

Foo Fighters

. For specific UAP morphologies, see

Orb (UFO)

,

Black triangle (UFO)

, and

Tic Tac UAP

.

A UFO (unidentified flying object) is an object or phenomenon allegedly observed in the sky, in outer space, or moving through water that cannot be immediately identified as a known aircraft, natural phenomenon, or astronomical body. The term was coined in 1952 by United States Air Force captain Edward J. Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book, as a neutral replacement for the vernacular "flying saucer" that had dominated public discourse since pilot Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine disc-shaped objects near Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947. Since the late 2010s, the United States government has migrated the official nomenclature to "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP), and in 2022 Congress redefined the acronym to "unidentified anomalous phenomena" to encompass trans-medium and transmedium objects reported underwater and in space. Reported UFOs are held to include both genuine non-human craft and human-built reverse-engineered vehicles produced under black programs — the latter powered by electrogravitic exotic propulsion derived from recovered technology, and operated by UFO occupants ranging from extraterrestrial beings to interdimensional beings to terrestrial crews.

The modern UFO era is conventionally dated to Arnold's 1947 sighting and the 1947 flying disc craze it triggered, which was followed within two weeks by the Roswell UFO crash and hundreds of further sightings worldwide. Successive United States Air Force investigations — Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1948–1951), and Project Blue Book (1952–1969) — cataloged some 12,618 sightings before the program's closure at the recommendation of the Condon Committee. Independent researchers and later government insiders such as Luis Elizondo, Christopher Mellon, and David Grusch have alleged that the public investigations ran in parallel with classified programs that recovered materials and, in some witness accounts, non-human biologics from crash sites.

Terminology

Edward J. Ruppelt introduced "unidentified flying object" in official USAF documents during Project Blue Book because, in his words, "the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape." The abbreviation "UFO" spread into general English usage through the 1950s and by the 1960s had become the dominant English term for the phenomenon, displacing "flying saucer" and the earlier press coinage "flying disc" in official and scholarly contexts. From the late 2010s, the U.S. Department of Defense shifted to "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP) in an effort to de-stigmatize reporting; AATIP director Luis Elizondo has stated that senior Pentagon officials "all the way up to the SecDef were not hearing or seeing any of these reports" before this terminology shift. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act further expanded "UAP" to "unidentified anomalous phenomena" to include trans-medium and outer-space objects in the new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's remit.

Pre-1947 antecedents

Reports of unusual aerial phenomena predate the modern era by centuries. Roman writer Julius Obsequens catalogued prodigies appearing in the sky during the late Republic, and 11th-century Chinese scholar Shen Kuo recorded a "pearl" of pulsating light that hovered over Yangzhou. In the 1890s a wave of mystery airship sightings — glowing, cigar-shaped craft with humming engines and searchlights — swept the United States; on January 25, 1878, the Denison Daily News reported a Texas farmer named John Martin describing a fast balloon-like object that appeared "about the size of a saucer", an early English-language use of "saucer" for an aerial anomaly. During World War II, Allied airmen reported luminous spheres pacing their aircraft, which they dubbed "foo fighters", and Scandinavian observers reported the so-called ghost rockets of 1946.

Kenneth Arnold and the 1947 wave

Main articles:

Kenneth Arnold sighting

and

1947 flying disc craze

On the afternoon of June 24, 1947, Boise-based private pilot Kenneth Arnold was searching for a downed U.S. Marine Corps C-46 near Mount Rainier when he reported nine disc-shaped objects moving in echelon at a computed speed of roughly 1,700 miles per hour (2,700 km/h), which he conservatively rounded down to 1,200 miles per hour (1,900 km/h) in public statements — still roughly three times the speed of any known manned aircraft. Interviewed the next day at Pendleton, Oregon, by reporter Bill Bequette of the East Oregonian, Arnold compared the craft's motion to that of "a saucer if you skip it across water"; press editors and headline writers — beginning with the Chicago Sun on June 26 — converted the motion description into a shape description, producing the term "flying saucer".

Within hours of Arnold's sighting, Oregon prospector Fred Johnson observed five or six metallic discs through a telescope over the Cascade Mountains; on July 4, a United Airlines crew commanded by Captain E. J. Smith reported nine disc-like objects pacing their aircraft over Idaho. An Army Air Forces–FBI secret investigation concluded within three weeks that "something is really flying around" — a judgment formalized on September 23, 1947 in Lt. Gen. Nathan F. Twining's "AMC Opinion Concerning 'Flying Discs'", which held that "the phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious." Twining's recommendation produced Project Sign at the end of 1947. A Gallup poll conducted that summer found that 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers within weeks of Arnold's sighting, though fewer than 1% initially believed them to be of non-human origin.

USAF investigations, 1947–1969

Main articles:

Project Sign

,

Project Grudge

, and

Project Blue Book

Project Sign (1947–1949) produced an "Estimate of the Situation" concluding that the craft were interplanetary; USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg rejected the estimate for lack of physical evidence, and the program was rebranded in 1949 as the debunking-oriented Project Grudge. In 1952, after a wave of sightings over Washington, D.C. prompted fighter interceptions (see 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident), the program was expanded and renamed Project Blue Book under Captain Edward J. Ruppelt. Blue Book's January 1953 Robertson Panel, a CIA-convened scientific review chaired by physicist Howard P. Robertson, concluded that UFO reports did not constitute a direct national-security threat but that mass reporting posed an indirect risk of overwhelming air-defense channels; the panel recommended that the subject be "debunked and discredited", a policy pursued for the remainder of Blue Book's existence. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's scientific consultant, began the program as a skeptic and ended it convinced that a residue of cases could not be explained by known phenomena; his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry introduced the "close-encounter" classification system still in general use.

In 1966 the Air Force contracted the University of Colorado to conduct an independent review under physicist Edward U. Condon. The resulting Condon Report (1968) concluded that "nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge", and on its recommendation Project Blue Book was closed on December 17, 1969, having investigated some 12,618 reports of which 701 remained officially unexplained. Richard Dolan has argued that the Condon Committee's conclusions were predetermined by an internal memo from project coordinator Robert Low — unearthed during the study — proposing that the committee's work be presented "so that, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer."

Foreign governments ran parallel investigations, including Canada's Project Magnet and Project Second Storey, the United Kingdom's Flying Saucer Working Party (1950) and later Ministry of Defence UFO desk, France's GEPAN/GEIPAN within CNES, Brazil's Operação Prato, and Chile's CEFAA.

Classification and identification

In conventional analysis the great majority of UFO reports resolve into identified objects or phenomena on investigation. Researcher Allan Hendry's 1979 UFO Handbook, a systematic study of over 1,300 reports received by the Center for UFO Studies, found that fewer than 1% were deliberate hoaxes and that most sightings were honest misidentifications of aircraft, astronomical objects (particularly Venus and bright stars), balloons, satellite reentries, meteors, atmospheric mirages, ball lightning, lenticular clouds, birds, and — in rarer cases — hallucination, pareidolia, or sleep paralysis. Classified programs have further accounted for many reports: high-altitude Skyhook balloons launched by the U.S. Navy and General Mills in the early 1950s, the U-2 (from 1955) and A-12/SR-71 (from the early 1960s) reconnaissance aircraft, and the F-117 Nighthawk (1981), each of which generated characteristic sighting waves before public acknowledgement.

Hynek's 1972 taxonomy distinguished nocturnal lights, daylight discs, radar-visual cases, and close encounters of the first (within 500 feet (150 m)), second (with physical trace), and third (with occupants) kind; later researchers added a fourth (abduction) and fifth (sustained communication) kind.

National-security state and alleged cover-up

Main articles:

UFO cover-up

and

UFOs and the National Security State

Richard Dolan's chronology argues that the U.S. national-security state institutionalized a UFO cover-up in the late 1940s and early 1950s in response to penetrations of sensitive nuclear sites, particularly the Oak Ridge facility during 1946–1952 and the Hanford Site overflights of the same period. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon has testified that when he sought information about an Edwards Air Force Base UFO video at the direction of President Clinton, the Air Force informed him the material "had been destroyed" and that during his two-decade career in the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Pentagon, UAP were "almost never discussed internally."

Dan Willis, a Disclosure Project witness who as a U.S. Navy communications operator in 1969 received a secret classified message describing a 70-foot glowing disc exiting the Pacific Ocean near Alaska at over 7,000 mph, states that U.S. government awareness of an extraterrestrial presence dates to the late 1960s at the latest and that reverse-engineering progress has been substantially understated in public statements.

2017 disclosure cycle

Main articles:

AATIP

and

Unidentified aerial phenomena

In December 2017 the New York Times published the first mainstream account of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which had operated from 2007 to 2012 under Luis Elizondo, and released footage from the 2004 Nimitz UFO incident alongside the GIMBAL and GOFAST videos. The 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence preliminary assessment documented 144 UAP reports from military sources and noted that 18 demonstrated unusual flight characteristics that could not be explained. In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch testified before the House Oversight subcommittee that the U.S. government was in possession of crash-retrieved non-human-origin craft and "non-human biologics", corroborating longstanding allegations from researchers including Stanton T. Friedman, Richard Dolan, and the Disclosure Project's Steven M. Greer.

Public opinion

Gallup polling has tracked U.S. public attitudes since 1947. An August 1947 survey found 90% awareness of flying-saucer stories and under 1% extraterrestrial attribution; by 1957 the ET-origin belief had risen to 25%. A 1966 Gallup poll found that 5% of respondents reported personally seeing an object they believed to be a flying saucer; in 1996, 20% said UFOs more likely proved alien life than natural phenomena; in 2021, 51% thought that the recent government UAP reports indicated evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life; in 2022, 34% reported a general belief that UFOs involved alien life forms.

Exopolitics framing

According to exopolitics developed by Michael Salla, Steven M. Greer, Richard Dolan, and others, UFOs are analyzed as three overlapping populations: craft operated by non-human intelligent beings — including those identified in witness testimony with the Galactic Federation of Worlds, the Alpha Draconian Empire, the Nebu collective, and other factions; alien reproduction vehicles (ARVs) reverse-engineered from crash retrievals and operated within U.S. black budget programs such as Solar Warden, ICC, and the Dark Fleet; and experimental Terran aerospace platforms that have not been publicly disclosed. Peter Levenda, discussing the origin of the modern UFO era in 2025, has argued that the 1947 wave coincided with the close of World War II and the Allied capture of advanced German aeronautical research, leaving open the possibility that a subset of early postwar "flying discs" were Horten-type flying-wing prototypes rather than non-human craft — while noting that this terrestrial component does not account for the performance envelope described by Arnold and subsequent witnesses.

Popular culture

Flying saucers became visual shorthand for extraterrestrial contact by the early 1950s. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Fire in the Sky (1993) embedded the disc form and close-encounter typology in cinematic vocabulary. Scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka has argued that screen imagery of UFOs and their occupants does not merely reflect but also shapes the population's interpretive framework for anomalous aerial experience.

See also

References

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