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Introduction

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unidentified flying object
Possible explanations for UFO  Print  Cite  Share  Feedback 
sightings and alien abductions
Also known as: UAP, UFO, flying saucer, unexplained aerial phenomenon, unidentified aerial phenomenon

Fast Facts Written by Seth Shostak

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
unidentified flying object Last Updated: Sep 9, 2023 • Article History
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unidentified flying object (UFO), also called
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More Articles On This Topic interest following the development of rocketry Related Topics: extraterrestrial life •
extraterrestrial intelligence • Fermi
Contributors after World War II and were thought by some paradox • abduction • extraterrestrial
Article History researchers to be intelligent extraterrestrial life hypothesis

visiting Earth.
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(Read Carl Sagan’s Britannica entry on
extraterrestrial life.)

History
Flying saucers and Project Blue Book
The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in
1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold
claimed to see a group of nine high-speed
objects near Mount Rainier in Washington
while flying his small plane. Arnold estimated
the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as
several thousand miles per hour and said they
moved “like saucers skipping on water.” In the 
newspaper report that followed, it was
mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-
shaped, hence the term flying saucer.

Sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena

increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force
began an investigation of these reports called
Project Sign. The initial opinion of those The Flying Saucer as I Saw It
involved with the project was that the UFOs
were most likely sophisticated Soviet aircraft,
although some researchers suggested that they might be spacecraft from other worlds,
the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Within a year, Project Sign was
succeeded by Project Grudge, which in 1952 was itself replaced by the longest-lived of
the official inquiries into UFOs, Project Blue Book, headquartered at Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. From 1952 to 1969 Project Blue Book compiled reports
of more than 12,000 sightings or events, each of which was ultimately classified as (1)
“identified” with a known astronomical, atmospheric, or artificial (human-caused)
phenomenon or (2) “unidentified.” The latter category, approximately 6 percent of the
total, included cases for which there was insufficient information to make an
identification with a known phenomenon.

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The Robertson Panel and the Condon Report

An American obsession with the UFO phenomenon was under way. In the hot summer
of 1952 a provocative series of radar and visual sightings occurred near National
Airport in Washington, D.C. Although these events were attributed to temperature
inversions in the air over the city, not everyone was convinced by this explanation.
Meanwhile, the number of UFO reports had climbed to a record high. This led the
Central Intelligence Agency to prompt the U.S. government to establish an expert
panel of scientists to investigate the phenomena. The panel was headed by H.P.
Robertson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California,
and included other physicists, an astronomer, and a rocket engineer. The Robertson
Panel met for three days in 1953 and interviewed military officers and the head of
Project Blue Book. They also reviewed films and photographs of UFOs. Their
conclusions were that (1) 90 percent of the sightings could be easily attributed to
astronomical and meteorologic phenomena (e.g., bright planets and stars, meteors,
auroras, ion clouds) or to such earthly objects as aircraft, balloons, birds, and
searchlights, (2) there was no obvious security threat, and (3) there was no evidence to
support the ETH. Parts of the panel’s report were kept classified until 1979, and this
long period of secrecy helped fuel suspicions of a government cover-up.

A second committee was set up in 1966 at the request of the Air Force to review the
most interesting material gathered by Project Blue Book. Two years later this
committee, which made a detailed study of 59 UFO sightings, released its results as
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects—also known as the Condon Report,
named for Edward U. Condon, the physicist who headed the investigation. The Condon
Report was reviewed by a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences. A
total of 37 scientists wrote chapters or parts of chapters for the report, which covered
investigations of the 59 UFO sightings in detail. Like the Robertson Panel, the
committee concluded that there was no evidence of anything other than commonplace
phenomena in the reports and that UFOs did not warrant further investigation. This,
together with a decline in sighting activity, led to the dismantling of Project Blue Book
in 1969.

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Other investigations of UFOs

Despite the failure of the ETH to make headway with the expert committees, a few
scientists and engineers, most notably J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois, who had been involved with projects Sign, Grudge,
and Blue Book, concluded that a small fraction of the most-reliable UFO reports gave
definite indications for the presence of extraterrestrial visitors. Hynek founded the
Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), which continues to investigate the phenomenon.
Another major U.S. study of UFO sightings was the Advanced Aviation Threat
Identification Program (AATIP), a secret project that ran from 2007 to 2012. When the
existence of the AATIP was made public in December 2017, the most newsworthy
aspect of it was a report that the U.S. government possessed alloys and compounds
purportedly attained from UFOs that were of unidentifiable nature, but many scientists
remained skeptical about this claim.

Aside from the American efforts, the only other official and fairly complete records of
UFO sightings were kept in Canada, where they were transferred in 1968 from the
Canadian Department of National Defense to the Canadian National Research Council.
The Canadian records comprised about 750 sightings. Less-complete records have
been maintained in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Greece. In
the United States, CUFOS and the Mutual UFO Network in Bellvue, Colorado, continue
to log sightings reported by the public.

In the Soviet Union, sightings of UFOs were often prompted by tests of secret military
rockets. In order to obscure the true nature of the tests, the government sometimes
encouraged the public’s belief that these rockets might be extraterrestrial craft but
eventually decided that the descriptions themselves might give away too much
information. UFO sightings in China have been similarly provoked by military activity
that is unknown to the public.

Possible explanations for UFO sightings

and alien abductions
UFO reports have varied widely in reliability,
as judged by the number of witnesses, whether
the witnesses were independent of each other,
the observing conditions (e.g., fog, haze, type

of illumination), and the direction of sighting.
Typically, witnesses who take the trouble to
report a sighting consider the object to be of
Is there proof of alien life?
extraterrestrial origin or possibly a military
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craft but certainly under intelligent control.
This inference is usually based on what is
perceived as formation flying by sets of
objects, unnatural—often sudden—motions, the lack of sound, changes in brightness or
colour, and strange shapes.

That the unaided eye plays tricks is well known. A bright light, such as the planet
Venus, often appears to move. Astronomical objects can also be disconcerting to
drivers, as they seem to “follow” the car. Visual impressions of distance and speed of
UFOs are also highly unreliable because they are based on an assumed size and are
often made against a blank sky with no background object (clouds, mountains, etc.) to
set a maximum distance. Reflections from windows and eyeglasses produce
superimposed views, and complex optical systems, such as camera lenses, can turn
point sources of light into apparently saucer-shaped phenomena. Such optical illusions
and the psychological desire to interpret images are known to account for many visual
UFO reports, and at least some sightings are known to be hoaxes. Radar sightings,
while in certain respects more reliable, fail to discriminate between artificial objects
and meteor trails, ionized gas, rain, or thermal discontinuities in the atmosphere.

“Contact events,” such as abductions, are often associated with UFOs because they are
ascribed to extraterrestrial visitors. However, the credibility of the ETH as an
explanation for abductions is disputed by most psychologists who have investigated
this phenomenon. They suggest that a common experience known as “sleep paralysis”
may be the culprit, as this causes sleepers to experience a temporary immobility and a
belief that they are being watched.

Seth Shostak

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