UFOs have fascinated and confused people for decades, yet the evidence seems to be elusive. Many people believe that extraterrestrials not only visit Earth, but that governments maintain a top-secret global conspiracy that obscures it. Here's a look at UFOs throughout their history.
Today, most people consider UFOs to be offshore ships with advanced intelligence and advanced technology, but this is a recent idea. This is not to say that in history people have not reported seeing unusual objects in the sky, as they may have been comets, meteors, eclipses and similar phenomena that have been reported (and sometimes recorded in writing) for millennia - in fact, some scientists believe that Bethlehem the star may have been an optical illusion created by the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that occurred immediately after Jesus' birth.

But only in the last century did anyone assume that unknown lights or objects in the sky were visitors from other planets. Several planets have been known for millennia, but they were not considered places where other living creatures could live (for example, ancient Greeks and Romans thought the planets were inhabited by gods).
Early science fiction writers such as Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe fueled public interest in travel to other worlds, and as technology evolved, some people began to wonder if such travel would really be possible for advanced civilizations. The first reports of objects that could be called UFOs appeared at the end of the 18th century, although at that time notions such as "UFOs" or "flying saucers" were still used, but were instead referred to as "airships".

The most dramatic early encounter with UFOs occurred in Texas in 1897 when EE Haydon, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, described an amazing encounter with a crashed spacecraft, confirmed by dozens of eyewitnesses, obtained by a Martian dead body and metal debris. (Fifty years later, almost the same story spread about a UFO crash in New Mexico.) The fantastic story got tangled when scientists found no eyewitnesses to support Haydon's story, and no dead aliens or "a few tons" of metal from the mysterious wreck spacecraft was never found. It turned out that Haydon invented the whole story, as an advertising cheat sheet that would attract tourists.

UFO sighting

Leaving aside the first journalist scams, countless UFO reports have been published over the decades, and several of them stand out as particularly important. The first report on "flying saucers" dates back to 1947, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported that he had seen nine boomerang-like objects in the sky. He described their movement as "a plate if he jumps on the surface", a sloppy reporter misunderstood when he said the objects themselves resembled "flying saucers", and this mistake triggered many reports of "flying saucers" in later decades. Investigators think that Arnold probably saw a flock of pelicans and misjudged their size, as their large wings formed the "V" shape he described.
The most famous UFO crash reportedly occurred when something went down: skeptics say it was a top secret spy balloon; believers say it was a spacecraft with aliens that crashed on a ranch in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and this debate is raging to this day.

The first UFO kidnapping case - and most famous to date - was the case of Barney and Betty Hill, a mixed couple who in 1961 claimed to have been persecuted and kidnapped into a UFO. However, since there were no other eyewitnesses to the incident and they had not reported their kidnapping at that time (they remembered it under hypnosis), many remain skeptical.
Another famous UFO sighting took place near Phoenix, Arizona in March 1997, when a number of bright lights were recorded in the night sky. Although it is known that during routine military exercises, the army emitted flares during low flights, UFO enthusiasts reject the government's explanation of lights and insist that there is more to the story.

Since then, a number of UFO observations have been reported. Here are a few that have received a lot of attention in recent years, with links to articles from that time:
January 7, 2007: Strange lights over Arkansas sparked much speculation on the Internet until the Air Force refuted the UFO claim, explaining that flares were released from the aircraft as part of routine training.
April 21, 2008: The lights in Phoenix have been reported again. It was a scam created by flares tied to helium balloons. The impostor admitted it, and eyewitnesses saw him do it.
January 5, 2009: A New Jersey UFO that seemed incomprehensible to be reported on the History Channel proved to be helium balloons, red flares, and fishing lines, all as part of a social experiment. The men who committed fraud, Joe Rudy and Chris Russo, were fined $ 250 for creating something that could pose a danger to nearby Morristown Airport.
October 13, 2010: UFO over Manhattan emerged as helium balloons that escaped from a party at Mount Vernon School.
January 28, 2011: A UFO video hovering over the Holy Land (Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) was discovered as a scam because of the effects of using video editing software.
July 2011: UFO sightings at the bottom of the ocean were attributed to one Swedish scientist, but this scientist - Peter Lindberg merely said that what he detected in blurry images was "completely round". His claim cannot be supported by the low resolution sonar images. The second "anomaly" made the case appear even more bizarre, but there was no evidence to indicate the foreign origin of the object.

April 2012: The UFO at the sun, visible in the NASA image, turned out to be a camera malfunction.
April 2012: A UFO video taken from an airplane over South Korea probably showed only a drop of water on an airplane window.
May 2012: The nephew of the Wayans Brothers' famous comedy team, Duayne "Shway ShWayans," filmed a UFO over City Studio, California. But like many other UFO sightings, this one turned out to be the planet Venus. In fact, even airline pilots considered Venus a UFO.

Official investigation

As UFO reports became more common (and in some cases received national and international attention), the US government began paying attention to them.
Given that UFOs are literally "unidentified flying objects," the Pentagon's interest in the subject is understandable and appropriate. After all, unknown objects in the American sky could be a threat - whether they originated in Russia, North Korea or the Andromeda galaxy. The Air Force investigated thousands of unexplained reports from pilots between 1947 and 1969 and eventually concluded that most "UFO" sightings included clouds, stars, optical illusions, conventional aircraft, or spy machines. A small percentage remained unexplained due to lack of information.
In December 2017, The New York Times published information about the existence of a secret US Department of Defense program called the "Aviation Advanced Threat Identification Program" (AATIP). It began in 2007 and ended in 2012 when, according to Pentagon spokesman Thomas Crosson, "it was decided that there were other higher-priority issues that deserved funding."
Much of this program and its conclusions have not been published and it is therefore unclear what if some useful information would come from this effort. AATIP has released a few short videos from military jets that have encountered something they could not identify. Some experts have suggested that distant aircraft may be the culprit, and in the past, crowd research has yielded answers to seemingly inexplicable phenomena in our sky. The "Mysterious Rocket" that appeared off the California coast in November 2010, for example, initially confused military experts, but was later designed as an ordinary commercial fighter, viewed from a strange angle.
The fact that the US government had a program to investigate unidentified vessels and objects has caused many UFO fans to triumphantly announce that they were right, and that this finally proves that the wall of silence and government cover will be torn down.

All of this is significantly less than it seems. The government routinely spends money on research (and sometimes promotes) topics that prove to be little or no evidence or have no scientific validity. There are hundreds of federal projects that have been funded even though they have never been proven to be valid or effective, including Star Wars Missile Defense Program, Sex Education Abstinence and DARE Drug Program. The idea that a project must have a certain validity, otherwise it would not be financed or renewed, is ridiculous.

From the XNUMXs until the mid-XNUMXs, the US government had a secret project called Stargate, which aimed to explore the possibility of psychic forces and whether the "Remote Viewers" could successfully watch Russia during the Cold War. Research has continued for about two decades, with little apparent success. Scientists who were asked to review the results eventually concluded that psychic information was neither valuable nor useful. Like AATIP, the Stargate project was soon shut down.
One possible guide to why the $ 22 million program could have continued despite the lack of clear evidence of aliens is a financial incentive to continue it. The New York Times noted that the "shadow program" was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, a Nevada Democratic senator who was chairman of the Senate majority at the time. … Most of the money went to an aeronautical research company run by billionaire businessman and longtime friend Reid, Robert Bigelow, who currently works at NASA to make spacecraft for use in space. "

UFO psychology

It is not difficult to understand why there are so many UFO sightings. After all, the only criterion for a UFO is that a "flying object" was "unidentified" by the one who looked at it at the time. Any object in the sky, especially at night, can be very difficult to identify because of a reduction in human perception. Knowing how far away is helps us determine its size and speed; that is why we know that moving cars are not really smaller from a distance or slow moving; it is simply an optical illusion. If the eyewitness does not know the distance, he cannot determine the size. Is such an object or light in the sky 20 feet long and 200 yards away, or is it 200 feet long and miles away? It is impossible to know, and therefore estimates of UFO size, distance and speed are very unreliable. Even the planet Venus - at least 25 million kilometers away - was mistaken for UFOs by pilots and other humans on many occasions.

When residents of Morris County, New York, saw bright lights in the night sky on January 5, many thought it was a UFO. But Joe Rudy and Chris Russo committed a fraud by hanging flares under helium balloons. Psychologists also know that our brains tend to "fill in" missing information, which can mislead us. For example, many observations of the three lights in the night sky indicate that they appear to be a triangular spaceship. The fact is that any three lights in the sky, whether connected or not, will form a triangle if you assume (without proof) that each of these lights is fixed at the three ends of the object. If a witness saw four lights, he would assume it to be a rectangular object in the night sky, our brains sometimes make connections where none exist.

All that is needed to create a UFO observation is just a person who may not recognize the light or object in the sky. But just because one person, or even several people, can't immediately identify or explain something they see doesn't mean someone else with better training or experience (or even the same person who sees the same object from a different angle) immediately recognize. Although it is possible that aliens exist in spacecraft and have visited Earth, UFO sightings do not yet provide any real evidence. The lesson, as always, is that "unknown lights in the sky" are not the same as "extraterrestrial spacecraft."

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