Theory What About UFOs?

A UFO seen in New Jersey in July 1952. picture site 'Amateur Astronomy'

There are reports dating back to WWII, about pilots having seen bright objects following US airplanes, or pilots having seen the first German V-1 and V-2 rockets before they became usual. What it's certain, is that the UFOs question really started in 1947. On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a search-and-rescue pilot spotted nine flying discs speeding over Washington State while searching for a downed airplane as the sight triggered a spat of UFO sights. The famed Roswell crash is part of those. This very year 1947, from May, 17th to July, 12th, 16 alleged UFOs sightings took place. In 1948, the U.S. Air Force launched a covert inquiry named "Project Saucer", or "Project Sign". A last report, in February 1949, stated that 20 percent of the UFO reports remained unexplained. This same report was advocating for a deeper investigation. A new, overt, public relations campaign project followed, "Project Grudge". Project Grudge had to 'persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary' as USAF officials went on TVs and radios to dismiss UFO reports, attributing the sight to planets, meteors, or even 'large hailstones' and that UFOs were none of anything nefarious or out of this world. Such efforts however did very little to appease the public. One eventually came to a reduction of the program as there were no hints that UFOs might be related to some foreign weapons. On another hand, the interest that the Air Force was showing about UFOs was only encouraging people to believe in them. UFO sightings continued however

Following UFOs sightings which occurred near Fort Monmouth in Sept 1951, the USAF ordered a new project in 1952, the "Project Blue Book". Fort Monmouth, on the other hand, was mostly known to be a communications center for the military, and the place where the Rosenberg had spied, during WWII, to the benefit of the Soviet Union. The military was beginning then to perceive UFOs like a possible security issue. "Project Blue Book" inquired more accurately into the UFO reports. Further, UFOs came to be seen in mass around Washington in July 1952. The CIA became concerned that the number of ensuing reports might have clogged communications levels, or that USSR might use the phenomenon. The US government thus came back to a more secretive and media-manipulating attitude. Any interest officials might have about UFOs was to be concealed. The public was not to find a confirmation of the UFOs' existence in such an interest. Project Blue Book became under-funded and under-staffed, and it was eventually closed in 1969. 12,648 cases had been collected since 1947. 701 were considered unexplained. A list of these unexplained 701 might be found once on the Internet. California, New Mexico and Texas are the locations of the greatest number of unexplained cases, as were San Antonio (Texas) and Albuquerque (New Mexico) as far as cities are concerned. An interesting detailed page about this idea that CIA might have participated into a conspiracy to hide UFOs data is at A Die-Hard Issue, CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90. Not revealing officials' and agencies' interest into UFOs to avoid public interest in them, or efforts made when to discard the sight of U-2 reconnaissance planes like UFOs', to maintain such a highly sensitive weapon secretive, all such things surely led to this idea that a kind of conspiracy was existing. UK seems to have become then the specific place too where reports of UFO bloomed, with numerous sightings during the 1980s and 1990s, and a spike in 1996 The famest of those is the 'Rendlesham Forest Incident', in December 1980. A triangular, metallic object was seen glowing white, in a forest outside RAF Woodbridge, a U.S. base in eastern England. The day after, depressions were found in the ground, with unusual radiation readings. No explanation was ever found, as no evidence either of any UK national security threat was, as nothing had appeared on radars. Some officials in Britain then however suggested that the UFOs to be taken seriously in terms on national security as, they said, either some flying objects may enter the UK airspace unnoticed or, dozens of U.S. soldiers may be subject, at the same time, to the same kind of unexplained sightings. A natural explanation of the sighting might have been a mix of a lighthouse, a fireball and bright stars. UK defense ministry has logged UFO sightings since the 1950s, as the 'Flying Saucer Working Party' had been established. Fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force (R.A.F.) are even stating they were officially ordered to shoot down an unidentified object, should they encounter one. The British military UFO hotline however was closed by late 2009 with 50 years of report not showing any security threat to the UK nor providing substantiated proof of the existence of extraterrestrials. Like in the USA, a small proportion of the objects seen in England could not be explained. Churchill and Eisenhower selves might have been involved in the UFO question as a Royal Air Force (RAF) reconnaissance plane returning from a mission in France or Germany toward the end of the war, over or near the English coast, was allegedly intercepted by a strange metallic object that matched the aircraft's course and speed for a time before accelerating away and disappearing. Churchill and Eisenhower discussed how to deal with the UFO encounter and decided to keep the incident classified for fear or a mass panic or a disbelief in religion

The famed Roswell case, which occurred in New Mexico in July 1947, took place during the first, 1947, UFOs' sightings wave. The Roswell crash occurred about two weeks after the sightings of UFOs reported by Kenneth Arnold. Authorities then were thought to have discovered a manned extra-terrestrial spacecraft. An official July 1994 Air Force report eventually concluded that the Roswell UFO was certainly a mere balloon, part of a secretive project called "Project Mogul". This project was to use balloons to spy USSR nuclear explosions. Recently released FBI data are revealing a memo sent in March 1950 by a agent about the case: 'An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots. According to Mr. [redacted] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers. No further evaluation was attempted by SA [redacted] concerning the above.' When the Roswell case occurred, in July of 1947, General Walter Bedell Smith, previously CIA director, was the ambassador to the Soviet Union. Quickly a teletype from the FBI Dallas field office advised that the 'flying saucer' had to be officially just a weather balloon. Another troubling fact is that German experiments during World War II led to a handful of children being used as pilots, whose distorted bodies resembled aliens. In the Nevada desert a the time, most classified researches went on, from testing nuclear reactions to building super-secret, supersonic jets. Although the newly formed U.S. Air Force was the primary investigator of such sightings, the FBI received many reports and worked for a time with the Air Force to investigate. As far as 'Area 51' is concerned, it is a area where the US government, in Nevada, is testing secret technologies and new military airplanes. Some thinks that the Groomlake airport seen there and featuring the largest, 5.1 mile-long runway worldwide, is the center piece of the Area and added with a enormous underground artificial cave as the OVNI craft of Roswell and his crew might have been probed there. The US government neither admit nor denegate the existence of Area 51, which is not chartered on any map, as the area, in any case, is heavily guarded. Most think that Area 51 served and still does for so-called 'Black Projects,' or highly classified researches about aerial vehicles, like the Lockheed U2 about 1955 and later the A-12. Such projects may be pursued on a length of time of up to 30 years! During the Cold War era Area 51 further seems to have been a location where Soviet Migs which had been passed to the West by defeator pilots, or bought in Egypt or Indonesia, were tested, analyzed and used in flight and formation to train the US Air Force pilots. Area 51 was confirmed a major site into developing stealth capability in aircraft by 2013 along with other activities. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in 1962 photographed Area 51 from space or high altitude to check what the Soviets could learn that way. Area 51 was also photographed inadvertently by the Skylab mission as NASA managed to have the picture placed in Skylab series of photos against advice of the intelligence community

Another famed case occurred on Dec. 9, 1965, when the residents of the small town of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, saw a ball of fire shooting through the darkening evening sky. The unidentified object then made a controlled landing in the neighbouring woods. The army might have taken the object away on a truck, and NASA played a role in the recovery and examination of space object debris. Most recent inquiries from NASA data are keeping the mystery intact, as the object might have been either a UFO or a secret U.S. device of some sort. what took place, whatever it was, still remains an unanswered question. A Belgian wave of UFOs also occurred by the late 1980's

So, what? Most official inquiries about UFOs sightings always discarded that UFOs might have ever been weapons presenting a threat to national security, or that they could have been extra-terrestrial objects using technology ahead of what existed at the time. On another hand, a clear link is established between the increase in number of UFOs reports and any new aerial vehicle in development. It was the case, for example, for a British or Canadian flying-saucerlike aircraft, for Russian researches, or for the above mentioned US U-2 reconnaissance planes. It should not be astonishing that a new increase should arise in relation to the new UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, that is the unpiloted drones), or to the explosion of cell phones, video cameras, or online media reports. Some varieties of Russian ballistic missiles, like the Topol ICBM might also be misinterpreted like UFOs due to a unique spiraling pattern, which may be either a unique decoy or structure hardness or a feature seen when the missile spins out of control. Another example of the trend is, for example, that British intelligence, by the end of the Cold War, lent their interest to hundreds of UFO sighting reports in the late 1980's and 1990's the order to check whether their U.S. allies were not developing any secret stealth-plane and not telling it. The CIA estimates that over half of the UFOs repors from the 1950s through the 1960s were mostly U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and it's about certain that the U.S. Air Force then misled the opinion about such secretive projects. Recent, large quadcopters, those hobbyist model helicopters with four small rotor supports arranged in a cross shape, which can have bright lights attached to them, are also the source for UFOs reports. TV series or movies related to aliens may too have an influence on the number of sightings Is that to mean that no extra-terrestrial vessel, or beings, ever, were interested in Earth and his inhabitants? Maybe not. Some statements let place for further questions. The 1949 Project Sign last report did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial objects. Or a 1966 committee was including Carl Sagan, the famed space scientist. It was Carl Sagan which had placed on the Pioneer and Voyager craft messages to any potential extra-terrestrial intelligence, as these craft were going to be the first manmade objects ever to leave the solar system. The general feeling at the CIA about UFOs was elitist, as inherited from the old-school, WW2 OSS brought up, technology-dubious director of the time, Allen Dulles. He even disliked the U-2 spy plane project, or assigned the UFO problems to another former OSS spy named Todos M. Odarenko who ran the CIA physics office, as the later was not pleased with that responsability and sought to be relieved of it. CIA came to assess that it had more important things to do than handle such a public hysteria as the U.S. Air Force was more appropriately suited with its bureaucrats. With the Cold War and nuclear arms race in full swing, Armageddon and the End of Times had become a worry at the time, with even Hollywood movies released about aliens as the famed psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote about UFOs like individual mirrors of a collective anxiety about nuclear annihilation. The CIA declassified much of the work done at Area 51 in 2008 and 2009 as the camp still keeps nowadays officially a military secret, unmentioned by name. By 1974, the CIA had ceded control of Area 51 to the U.S. Air Force, like the main actor. As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters. U-2s were flying by 70,000 ft as the first of them were silver as their wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere leading people all over California, Nevada, and Utah to report for UFOs. Of note is that a 1950's U.S. Air Force effort to build a flying saucer with vertical take-off and landing possibilities was extant. At a top speed of Mach 4 and a ceiling over 100,000 feet, the craft had been contracted to Canadian company, Avro Aircraft Limited in Ontario as propulsive jets were to be used as controls. That is well showing how the idea of flying saucers were not pure fantasy only. By 2011, the White House stated that there is no evidence of aliens seen Earth as no credible information exists to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye. A view may be also that NASA missions are aiming to investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial life like the Kepler telescope or rovers at Mars. The White House then also noted that while astronomers think that this is likely that another planet home to life exists in the Universe, the odds of making contact with those are extremely small given the distances involved. Another thinking goes that ETs might have settled unto asteroid or dead comets in the Kuiper Belt

A position by Stephen Hawking, a cosmologist proposing alternate views to the Big Bang is quite certain that aliens exist, even in the center of stars or even the interplanetary space. According to Hawking, most of those likely look like microbes or simple terrestrial, or marine animals. A few life forms however could have reached intelligence and pose a threat to earthlings. Instead of seeking aliens out, humanity should endeavour, at the contrary, to avoid any contact with those, which could be devastating. On the other hand, most recent disclosures are stating that UFOs sightings occurred at US nuclear weapon sites between 1948 and as recently as 2003 with a few cases when nuclear missiles suddenly and simultaneously got malfunctioning, a hint to that ET is interested into our nuke armament and still is currently observing it. As far as so-called 'crop circles' are concerned, those patterns cut into harvests, that became increasingly prevalent since the 1970s and often considered the work of UFOs. Pranksters publicly claimed responsability by 1991, some keep claiming a extraterrestrial origin and crop circles still ocassionally surface here or there. Of note is that the U.S. Pentagon itself worked out scenarios concerning a attack of Earth by a E.T. civilization. Those work upon the idea that a attack would aim to appropriate Earth's bio ressource like chlorophyll and game as a assymetrical warfare-type guerrilla might win over. NASA has announced a new partnership with SETI as of October 2019 to scan scores of the nearest exoplanets for alien life. A joint team in a breakthrough, will use NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellites (TESS) in order to track possible anomalies and 'technosignatures' in the stellar light curves, believed to be signs of advanced alien civilisations