For decades, the question of whether UFOs were "real" was considered the province of tinfoil-hat nutters and TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries. In recent years, we've seen the topic taken far more seriously, even at the highest levels of our government. So we're rounding up some evidence to examine whether UFOs are real and what it might mean if they are.
We'll start with an overview of how we investigate UFO reports, then touch on the significant formative events that shaped American thought on UFOs. We'll also consider reports that turned out not to be aliens or UFOs and look back at modern American war history for insight into why UFOs are so hard to identify. Finally, we'll discuss an unsolved modern UAP* mystery.
*Many professionals in the field have switched from calling them "UFOs" to "UAPs": Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. In this article, we'll use the more common term UFO.
How Do We Investigate UFOs?
To examine the evidence from UFO reports, we have a vast array of different techniques.
Throughout the 20th century, folks have used the newest technology available, trying to substantiate—or dismiss—reports of visitors from beyond. Scientists can use mass spectrometers and X-ray crystallography to explore exactly what a piece of debris is made of, right down to the isotope. High-powered microscopes can find and identify tool marks on things that have been tampered with. We can use multi-spectral imaging to take snapshots of electromagnetic fields and radiation, from the radio band to X-rays. Sophisticated imaging programs can find the faintest traces in terrain and even on solid stone, like the way we've discovered petroglyphs nearly undetectable to the naked eye. And with the growing global constellation of satellites, more and more of the Earth's surface is constantly under observation.
As our equipment improves, more UFO reports roll in—along with the data we'll need to understand what's happening.
In another sense, our government takes UFO reports seriously enough that Congress funds an office to investigate them. From 1947-1969, the US Air Force monitored UFO reports under its Project Blue Book. In 2022, the Pentagon established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to nail down explanations for the "weird shit," including UFOs or other strange phenomena reported by the military. Included under that aegis are objects in the sea and sky and "transmedium" objects and phenomena.
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the AARO, told NPR, "We are structuring our analysis to be very thorough and rigorous. We will go through it all. And as a physicist, I have to adhere to the scientific method, and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes."
Amazing Stories: A Brief History of UFO Reports
Americans report more UFOs than any other country, by orders of magnitude. This suggests that there's something unique to American culture, something that draws our attention to the idea of visitors from another world.
Sci-fi luminaries like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Hugo Gernsback, Robert Heinlein, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells cast a long and beautiful shadow across the American imagination. Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to publishing science fiction, in 1926 and coined the term "science fiction" itself in 1929. And once the Golden Age of science fiction had begun, tropes from the genre spread throughout our culture and took on a life of their own.
Since then, ideas from science fiction have become science facts. A real-life astronaut can play a Starfleet ensign on TV. The International Space Station has Wi-Fi. Wireless information transfer done via invisible light waves has been powering this brave new world all along.
'War of the Worlds' Radio Broadcast
When Orson Welles signed up to do a radio reprise of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, he wasn't expecting to set off a nationwide wave of media hysteria, much less to spark an entire UFO enthusiast counterculture. Welles' CBS radio show, Mercury Theatre on the Air, was on a shoestring budget, so much that the show mainly broadcast readings of literary classics. But for Halloween 1938, Welles and his producers intended to air a two-segment, two-hour reading of War of the Worlds, dramatized to give listeners a bit of a spook. As written, the first part was fake news bulletins from Mars, and the second was to be a monologue delivered by Welles himself, in the persona of a survivor of the Mars attacks.
“I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” Welles explained in a 1964 deposition, “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.”
To make up for their lack of funding, Welles' voice actors and sound effect artists injected a ton of emotion, trying to make their fear believable. The studio even cast Kenneth Delmar, who could do a perfect impression of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But by the end of October, deadlines and budget constraints had forced Welles to mostly abandon the monologue segment. Welles and the radio station were scrambling to get the program broadcasting correctly and on time, right up to the moment the ON AIR sign blinked on—and in their haste, they neglected to run the station's usual call-sign break on the half-hour. The show was an "unmitigated disaster," and Welles later commented, "If I'd planned to wreck my career, I couldn't have gone about it better." His studio called the show insufferably dull, saying it would put listeners to sleep. After the show, Welles just walked home and went to bed.
Instead of putting the audience to sleep, though, the radio show was believably spooky enough that police and emergency services began to receive calls from listeners who thought the invasion was real. Journalists caught wind of the calls, "boosted the signal," and by the next morning, Welles found his face and name splashed across the front page of newspapers from coast to coast. Eventually, he ended up having to explain himself in front of Congress.
Roswell and the 1947 Flying Disc Craze
In the summer of '47, less than ten years after the War of the Worlds debacle, debris from what appeared to be a "flying saucer" fell out of the sky onto the land of an unassuming rancher from New Mexico. As news of the incident spread, theories emerged about the debris's origin. It appeared to be of intelligent manufacture, but on a technological level far superior to anything we had at the time—giving rise to the idea that it was the wreckage of a starship piloted by intelligent extraterrestrials.
The US military eventually explained that the "bright wreckage, made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks" came from a crashed surveillance device meant to listen in on Soviet atomic tests—disguised as a weather balloon. Far from a visiting extraterrestrial, the Roswell incident exposed America's covert surveillance of the USSR during the Cold War. Little wonder military spokespeople and spin doctors were slow to respond and not forthcoming with details.
The Roswell report aired on June 24, 1947, and electrified the public imagination. In the following weeks, hundreds to thousands of "copycat" reports flooded newspaper offices and police stations, describing crashed spaceships, flying saucers, and alien abductions. An actual invasion would scarcely have produced more of a reaction. Naturally, tabloids like the Weekly World News had a field day. Eager to get in on the new gold rush, news outlets published ads for "relics" supposedly of aliens or crashed spaceships, and descriptions of alien abductions that the abductee could only remember during dodgy hypnosis treatments. The Roswell incident has been described as "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim."
Roswell being debunked, however, didn't stop generations of entrepreneurs from using UFO reports and imagery to make a buck. For example, the Alien Autopsy film was initially broadcast in a Fox special hosted by none other than Star Trek: The Next Generation's Jonathan Frakes. (He also hosted Ripley's Believe it or Not.) Star power and a layer of post-processing polish lent the film an air of credibility. The 17-minute fauxtopsy was supposedly recovered in the aftermath of the 1947 Roswell alien crash, but the film's owner, Ray Santilli, eventually acknowledged that the work was a fraud. Santilli claimed that he had personally seen the real footage in 1992 but that it had decayed due to heat and humidity by 1996, when he actually bought it. The footage aired by Fox was a "recreation" of what Santilli initially saw. The mystery cameraman who supposedly filmed the footage during the original autopsy was an unknown homeless person.
If you remember anything about the original broadcast, this will probably come as no surprise. Even at the time, the alien on the table looked less like a being from another world and more like a dollar-store version of the little gray men first popularized by the Barney and Betty Hill abduction reports of the early 1960s. This type of hoax has a long history; a "mermaid" skeleton that startled and awed many sailors in the 1800s was a clever construction of clay, leather, and the skeleton of what appears to be a small primate.
20th Century Stealth Tech
So why are UFOs so tough to identify or explain? One reason why UFOs might confound both the human eye and sophisticated radar imaging is that they're literally designed to baffle observers. Earlier this year, American pilots shot down several flying objects that turned out to be Chinese passive surveillance devices—disguised as weather balloons. After some uncomfortable coughing and shuffling from Washington, military brass admitted that American intelligence does the same type of surveillance via cleverly designed flying objects.
Even before Roswell, this type of surveillance obfuscation had precedent. During World War I, the UK and the US both adopted so-called "dazzle camouflage" to confuse German U-boats. The goal was not to hide—painting something with giant high-contrast stripes is generally a poor way of doing that—but to make it more difficult for the Germans to accurately gauge an Allied vessel's heading, range, and speed. Dazzle camouflage was also used in a limited fashion during WW2, though improvements in rangefinding and the advent of radar made it less effective than it may have been 25 years earlier.
So-called "stealth" technology has replaced dazzle paint schemes in the modern era, but the emphasis on making it difficult for an enemy to tell precisely what they're looking at has never gone away. The Navy's Zumwalt-class destroyers use a tumblehome hull and a deckhouse made from composite materials to reduce the vessel's radar return. According to the US Navy, the Zumwalt class is 50x harder to spot via radar return than an older Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, with a signature more akin to a fishing boat than a 15,000+-ton warship.
While most UFO reports rely on visual phenomena, there have been a handful of incidents in which radar returns corroborated the existence of something. Picking up an unknown signal on radar supports the idea of a "real" event, but it doesn't preclude a terrestrial origin. Stealth aircraft designs don't typically try to make an aircraft invisible to radar; instead, they try to drastically minimize what ground-based radar does detect. For example, the B-2 reportedly has the radar cross-section of a goose.
Humans can be remarkably ingenious when making one thing look like something else. One of the problems with trying to pin the tail on a particular alien donkey is that we can't be sure we aren't looking at a clever strategy from a known adversary. However, as in the case of HAARP and that infamous sky spiral, sometimes it turns out that we're unknowingly confusing ourselves.
HAARP, SpaceX, and Spirals in the Sky
Early in the morning of December 10, 2009, observers in Norway were astonished to see a brilliant, spreading spiral in the night sky. Eventually, the spiral began to disappear from the inside out.
After some back-and-forth, Russian space agency Roscosmos explained that the expanding spiral resulted from a failed Bulava ICBM test. A malfunctioning third-stage nozzle left the rocket body spinning out of control, spraying a fuel cloud into the sky as it went.
When seen head-on, the fuel cloud looks like a gigantic spiral, slowly expanding in the sky. The blue streak is caused by the damaged nozzle, which was pointing out to the side of the rocket body, and the viewer's perspective.
As we launch more and more rockets, this phenomenon of spirals in the sky has become much better understood. SpaceX launches, in particular, often result in a plume of fuel ejected in a spiraling pattern as the rocket moves through the air. But the company conducts so many launches that sightings of these aerial spirals are becoming commonplace.
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After that spiral appeared in the Norwegian sky in 2009, a frisson of commentary spread across the Web, blaming HAARP for the spiral and an enormous list of other problems—some much more plausible than others. HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a former US Air Force atmospheric research program in Alaska that catches a lot of conspiracy-theorist flak. Among other things, it has been suggested that HAARP can influence the weather, even at a distance—so when the 2009 spiral showed up above the Arctic circle, questions started to fly. It wasn't responsible for the spiral, but HAARP can use "spooky action at a distance" to create aurorae and other effects in the atmosphere, which can be visible to the naked eye. Here, the truth is easily as cool as the conspiracy theory.
HAARP uses a powerful radio antenna to bounce radio waves off the ionosphere. For comparison, the FCC requires a broadcasting license to use antennas greater than five watts. HAARP dumps a cool 3.6 megawatts off the end of its antenna. That much energy can drive a radio signal to the bottom of the sea, enough to enable communication with submarines at depth. It's also sufficient to light up the sky with "optical bullseye patterns," scintillating points of light, or the same otherworldly glow we see during a solar storm that causes the aurora borealis. And all of this comes from just one or two percent of the energy released by a flash of positive lightning.
USS Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt
The phenomena we've discussed here all unravel under scrutiny. And it's easy to dismiss a sighting as a "trick of the light," especially when it's just one camera, person, and observer. But in 2017, the New York Times published reports by American military personnel of UFOs in progress that defied explanation so far.
It started in 2004 when two pilots from the USS Nimitz investigated a "possible target" off the coast of southern California. One captured a video with the plane's infrared camera, termed "Tic Tac" or "FLIR."
Ten years later, fighter pilots from the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group recorded two more videos, later called "GIMBAL" and "GOFAST." In late 2014, a Super Hornet squadron from the Theodore Roosevelt filed an official incident report after a "near collision" with an object of some kind while flying in formation. Investigation revealed that Navy pilots from the carrier group had reported seeing strange flying objects almost every day for months while operating off the US East coast. Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, and Lt. Danny Acoin of the same squadron, told reporters that they and others of their squadron had seen strange flying objects on their instruments for months before picking them up on visual.
Graves and four other Navy pilots, including Lt. Accoin, spoke to the New York Times, and Graves testified before Congress. "These things would be out there all day," said Lt. Graves. "Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we'd expect."
Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher told the New York Times in 2019 that pilots now operate under new, classified guidance on reporting UFOs. A few months later, the Pentagon formally released the three videos. None of the pilots from the Theodore Roosevelt are willing to speculate about what they might have seen. Lt. Accoin commented, "We're here to do a job, with excellence, not make up myths."
In 2021, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a preliminary report on UFOs. Now, the ODNI releases a new UFO report each year. You can find a declassified version of the 2022 report here.
We've found rocks great and small of extraterrestrial, interplanetary, and even interstellar origins. Rocks from Mars found their way to Antarctica. And in 2017, the same year the New York Times first published the videos from the USS Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt, 'Oumuamua appeared in the sky at a speed and angle so far out of the ecliptic that it must have come from somewhere beyond our solar system. So it's clear Earth can receive visitors from beyond the tiny, quivering bubble of our unremarkable star's solar wind. Despite decades and decades of committed and invested research, there still exists no coherent or credible evidence available to mere mortals that any UFO sighting has documented a visit from actual little green men—or in the parlance of Roswell aficionados, a close encounter of any kind.
What we do have is an abundance of evidence for two things. First, the US government and military do engage in covert, classified research and surveillance while also being righteously shitty at cover-ups. Like, reprehensibly bad. Naturally, some folks don't buy the official explanations: once deceived, twice skeptical.
And then there's the fact that frauds, hoaxsters, and charlatans are scavenger predator species that flourish (only at others' expense) in most terrestrial and rhetorical environments. They rely on the innate sense of wonder and curiosity to ensnare their prey. No less than L. Ron Hubbard himself used the promise of redemption via sci-fi concepts like flying saucers and intelligent life on other planets to attract the credulous and enrich the few.
So, Are UFO Sightings Real, Or Not?
Where does this leave us, with respect to the Big Question of whether UFOs are real?
As of 2023, the ODNI UFO summary states that out of a total of 510 cases on its radar, it can confidently attribute 191—less than 40% of reported sightings. In 2021 alone, 366 new reports came in.
These reports are "real" in that they were observed; the people reporting them were telling the unvarnished truth; multiple lines of evidence, such as video from multiple angles, substantiate the reports. That seems to be the case for many such reports. The sighting is often unequivocally real, not a story or fabrication. But the sighting, in and of itself, isn't enough evidence to prove that a UFO is of extraterrestrial origin. That doesn't mean UFOs aren't real; it just means the jury's still out.
The universe is a very big place. In its incomprehensible vastness, the odds of our existence round to zero. And yet, we are here, which makes the probability of our existence 100%. It seems like the height of arrogance to imagine we're the only intelligent life in the universe.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—and as of this writing, despite tens of thousands of UFO reports, there simply is no conclusive evidence that Earth has ever received visitors from an intelligent extraterrestrial species. But if you accept the idea that all things have an explanation, even if we don't have it yet, the study of UFOs and UAPs starts to look more like a problem for better imaging and AI, and less like the province of fools. Throw more and more photons and pixels at the issue, and eventually, we can shove outward the perimeter of human understanding. It's only a matter of time.
