It was just a normal day's flying for Alex Dietrich – until it wasn't.

Streaking through the sky over the

tranquil expanse of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, the US Navy lieutenant commander was taking
her F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet on a training mission with a colleague in another plane. Then
came a voice through the crackle of the radio.

It was an operations officer aboard the warship USS Princeton, asking them to investigate a
suspicious object flitting around: on several occasions, it had been spotted 80,000ft (24.2km) high,
before suddenly dropping close to the sea and apparently vanishing.

When the two jets arrived at its last known location, close to the ocean's surface, the water seemed
almost to be boiling. Moments later Dietrich saw it: what seemed to be a whitish, oblong object
around 40ft (12m) long, hovering just above the water – like a
wingless capsule, which she described as resembling a Tic Tac. As
they edged in closer, it was gone, accelerating off into the sky at
what seemed an impossible speed, leaving a glassy expanse of
regular sea behind.

This was the infamous "Tic Tac" incident of 2004, which later went
viral when a video captured by advanced tracking equipment on
one of the planes was leaked to the New York Times. In the
footage, eventually confirmed to be authentic by the US
Department of Defense, the object can be seen as an oblong
shadow against a bright sky, before suddenly lurching off-camera
to the left at uncanny speed.

What was Alex Dietrich doing when she got the call?
What did she say the object looked like?
How did the public see the footage?

What do the following describe in the article?

1. Tranquil
2. Suspicious
3. Whitish
4. Wingless
5. Glassy
6. Viral
7. Authentic
8. Uncanny

Give other examples of things that can use the adjectives above.
It's just one of hundreds of peculiar incidents that have make it into the hands of serious officials in
recent years. Now Nasa is expect to release the results of its first-ever study into Unidentified
Anomalous Phenomena.

It all begin with an aviator and businessman from Idaho. Kenneth Arnold have been searched for a
downed military aircraft in his single-engine CallAir A-2 one June afternoon, when he see a bright
flash at 10,000ft (3,048m), over the Cascade Mountains in Washington. Nine objects, like giant
reflective "pie-pans", were weaves in and out of formation in the sky. Arnold watch them zip from
one peak to another and calculated that they must has being moving at an incredible speed – around
1,200mph (1,931km/h). This was the beginning of
America's fascination with the flying saucer.

Before that moment, there is zero mentions of flying

saucers in the Earth's atmosphere in any US newspaper.
But within a month of Arnold's report, there has been
tens of sightings across the country – and what had
initially be dismissed as a "tall story" by experts started
to caused a national panic.

This is the first challenge of analysing UAPs – the more

we look for them or even think about them, the more we seem to spot.

Take the recent Covid-19 pandemic. When scientists looked at the number of UAP sightings across
the US, they finding major spikes during local lockdowns, when people were confining to their
homes. Perhaps people were simply spending more time outside, gazed at the sky. But the
researchers also proposes another explanation – that the increases were the direct result of people
devote more of their attention to them. We're simply more likely to ponder these suspicious objects
when we're in need of distraction, or just plain bored.

Correct the verb form errors.

What explanation does the article give for

increases in UFO (UAP) sightings?
Have you ever had an experience with a UAP?
Do you believe that people have actually seen
alien spaceships?
What other explanations could there be?
Complete the notes.
However, very few UAPs turn out to be truly abnormal.

Total = 800 sightings - Nasa investigating

2-5% unexplained.

David Spergel, chair of Nasa's UAP study,  sorted into two categories.

1st = everyday objects / events -- identified as balloons, drones, atmospheric phenomenon, and
anomalies within the camera itself.

2nd = ordinary - transformed - intriguing - simple optical illusions, e.g. Venus – almost as big as
Earth but 70 million km away – into a flying space-object.

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"If we saw something, [like] an object that comes into the Solar System at half the speed of light, and
then slows down, that would be pretty impressive," says Spergel, pointing out that Earth's velocity is
only a 10,000th of the speed of light.

Spergel thinks about it in terms of timelines. Most of the stars around our own Solar System are
significantly older or younger than our Sun by at least a billion years. Assuming these would take
roughly as long as ours did to spawn apes capable of sending themselves into space, the life
elsewhere might either resemble complex microorganisms, such as those found in billion-year-old
rocks in the Australian outback, or civilisations that are so mind-bogglingly advanced, their
technologies would be far beyond our comprehension.

"It's good to think about what [even] 100 million years means. If you showed someone from 1923
conventional tech, planes and cars and things from today, they'd be impressed, but not shocked. If
you took someone from the year 1023, they [would] think we were all witches. A thousand years is a
big step in technology. And 100 million years is 100,000 steps like that," says Spergel.

What point does Spergel make about timelines?

Does his point of view make you believe more in the possibility of
Alien spaceships?
Why do you think so many people are fascinated with the idea of
aliens visiting Earth?