Early history before the 20th century People have always observed the sky and have sometimes seen what, to some, appeared to be unusual sights including phenomena as varied as
comets, bright
meteors, one or more of the
five planets that can be readily seen with the naked eye,
planetary conjunctions, and atmospheric
optical phenomena such as
parhelia and
lenticular clouds. One particularly famous example is
Halley's Comet: first recorded by Chinese astronomers in 240 BC and possibly as early as 467 BC as a strange and unknown "guest light" in the sky. As a bright comet that visits the inner solar system every 76 years, it was often identified as a unique isolated event in ancient historical documents whose authors were unaware that it was a repeating phenomenon. Such accounts in history often were treated as
supernatural portents,
angels, or other religious
omens. While UFO enthusiasts have sometimes commented on the narrative similarities between certain religious symbols in medieval paintings and UFO reports, the canonical and symbolic character of such images is documented by art historians placing more conventional religious interpretations on such images. Some examples of pre-contemporary reports about unusual aerial phenomena include: •
Julius Obsequens was a
Roman writer who is believed to have lived in the middle of the fourth century AD. The only work associated with his name is the
Liber de prodigiis (Book of Prodigies), completely extracted from an epitome, or abridgment, written by
Livy;
De prodigiis was constructed as an account of the wonders and portents that occurred in
Rome between 249 and 12 BCE. An aspect of Obsequens' work that has inspired excitement in some UFO enthusiasts is that he makes reference to things moving through the sky. The descriptions provided bear resemblance to observations of
meteor showers. Obsequens was also writing some 400 years after the events he described, thus the text is not an eyewitness account. No corroboration with those amazing sights of old with contemporary observations was mentioned in that work. •
Shen Kuo (1031–1095), a
Song Chinese government
scholar-official and prolific polymath inventor, wrote a vivid passage in his
Dream Pool Essays (1088) about an unidentified flying object. He recorded the testimony of eyewitnesses in 11th-century
Anhui and
Jiangsu (especially in the city of
Yangzhou), who stated that a flying object with opening doors would shine a blinding light from its interior (from an object shaped like a pearl) that would cast shadows from trees for ten
miles in radius, and was able to take off at tremendous speeds. • A woodcut by Hans Glaser that appeared in a broadsheet in 1561 has been featured in popular culture as the
"celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg" and connected to various
ancient astronaut claims. Skeptic and debunker
Jason Colavito argues that the woodcut is "a secondhand depiction of a particularly gaudy sundog", a known
atmospheric optical phenomenon. A similar report comes from
1566 over Basel and, indeed, in the 15th and 16th centuries, many leaflets wrote of "miracles" and "sky spectacles" which bear resemblance to natural phenomena which were only more fully characterized after the scientific revolution. • On January 25, 1878, the
Denison Daily News printed an article in which John Martin, a local farmer, had reported seeing a large, dark, circular object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed". Martin, according to the newspaper account, said it appeared to be about the size of a saucer from his perspective, one of the first uses of the word "saucer" in association with a UFO. At the time,
ballooning was becoming an increasingly popular and sophisticated endeavor, and the first controlled-flights of such devices were occurring around that time. • From November 1896 to April 1897, United States newspapers carried numerous reports of "
mystery airships" that are reminiscent of modern UFO waves. Scores of people even reported talking to the pilots. Some people feared that
Thomas Edison had created an artificial star that could fly around the country. On April 16, 1897, a letter was found that purported to be an enciphered communication between an airship operator and Edison. When asked his opinion of such reports, Edison said, "You can take it from me that it is a pure fake." The coverage of Edison's denial marked the end of major newspaper coverage of the airships in this period.
20th century In the Pacific and European theatres during
World War II, round, glowing fireballs known as "
foo fighters" were reported by Allied and Axis pilots. Some explanations for these sightings included
St. Elmo's fire, the planet
Venus,
hallucinations from oxygen deprivation, and German secret weapons (specifically
rockets). In 1946, more than 2,000 reports were collected, primarily by the Swedish military, of unidentified aerial objects over the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. The objects were referred to as "Russian hail" (and later as "
ghost rockets") because it was thought the mysterious objects were possibly Russian tests of captured German
V1 or
V2 rockets, but most were identified as natural phenomena as meteors. Many scholars, especially those arguing for the
psychosocial UFO hypothesis, have noted that UFO characteristics reported after the first widely publicized modern sighting by
Kenneth Arnold in 1947 resembled a host of science fiction tropes from earlier in the century. By most accounts, the
popular UFO craze in the US began with a media frenzy surrounding the reports on June 24, 1947, of a civilian pilot named
Kenneth Arnold who described seeing "a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds" near
Mount Rainier that he said were "moving like a saucer would if skipped across water" which led to headlines about "flying saucers" and "flying discs". Only weeks after Arnold's story was reported in 1947,
Gallup published a poll asking people in the United States what the "flying saucers" might be. Already, 90% had heard of the new term. However, as reported by historian Greg Eghanian, "a majority either had no idea what they could be or thought that witnesses were mistaken" while "visitors from space were not initially among the options that anyone had in mind, and Gallup didn't even mention if anyone surveyed brought up aliens. Within weeks, reports of flying saucer sightings became a daily occurrence with one particularly famous example being the
Roswell incident in 1947 where remnants of a downed
observation balloon were recovered by a farmer and confiscated by military personnel. UFO enthusiasts in the early 1950s started to organize local "saucer clubs" modeled after
science fiction fan clubs of the 1930s and 1940s, with some growing to national and international prominence within a decade. A Trendex survey in August 1957, ten years after the Arnold incident, reported that over 25% of the U.S. public "believed unidentified flying objects could be from outer space". Starting in 1947, the U.S. Air Force began to record and investigated UFO reports with
Project Sign looking into "more than 250 cases" from 1947 to 1949. It was replaced by
Project Grudge up through 1951. In the third U.S. Air Force program, from March 1952 to its termination in December 1969, "the U.S. Air Force cataloged 12,618 sightings of UFOs as part of what is now known as
Project Blue Book". In the late 1950s, public pressure mounted for a full declassification of all UFO records, but the CIA played a role in refusing to allow this. This sense was not universal in the CIA, however, as fellow
NICAP official
Donald E. Keyhoe wrote that Vice Admiral
Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA, "wanted public disclosure of UFO evidence". Official U.S. Air Force interest in UFO reports went on hiatus in 1969 after a study by the University of Colorado led by Edward U. Condon and known as the
Condon Report concluded "that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge" and that further time investigating UFO reports "cannot be justified". In 1966, 5% of Americans reported to Gallup that "they had at some time seen something they thought was a 'flying saucer'", 96% said "they had heard or read about flying saucers", and 46% of these "thought they were 'something real' rather than just people's imagination". Responding to UFO enthusiasm, there have always been consistent yet less popular efforts made at
debunking many of the claims, Such attempts to disenchant the zeitgeist were not very successful at tamping down the mania.
Keith Kloor notes that the "allure of flying saucers" remained popular with the public into the 1970s, spurring production of such sci-fi films, as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
Alien, which "continued to stoke public fascination". Meanwhile,
Leonard Nimoy narrated a popular occult and mystery TV series
In Search of... while daytime talk shows of
Mike Douglas,
Merv Griffin, and
Phil Donahue featured interviews with alien abductees and people who credulously reported stories about UFOs . while the 33 Volume
Time-Life series
Mysteries of the Unknown which featured UFO stories sold some 700,000 copies. Kloor writes that by the late 1990s, "other big UFO subthemes had been prominently introduced into pop culture, such as the abduction phenomenon and
government conspiracy narrative, via best-selling books and, of course,
The X-Files". Eghigian writes that "there had always been outlier abduction reports dating back to the '50s and '60s" but that in the 1980s and 1990s "the floodgates opened, and with them a new generation of UFO advocates". Leaders among them were the artist
Budd Hopkins, horror writer
Whitley Strieber, historian
David Jacobs, and
Harvard psychiatrist
John Mack. They all defended the "veracity of those claiming to have been kidnapped, examined, and experimented upon by beings from another world", writes Eghigian, as "new missionaries who simultaneously played the role of investigator, therapist, and advocate to their vulnerable charges".
21st century In December 2017, a new round of media attention started when the
New York Times broke the story of the secret
Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program that was funded from 2007 to 2012 with $22 million spent on the program. Following this story, along with a series of sensationalized
Pentagon UFO videos leaked by members of the program who became convinced that UFOs were genuine mysteries worth investigating, there was an increase in mainstream attention to UFO stories. In July 2021, Harvard astronomer
Avi Loeb announced the creation of his
Galileo Project which intended to use high-tech astronomical equipment to seek evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts in space and possibly within Earth's atmosphere. This was followed closely by the publication of Loeb's book
Extraterrestrial, in which he argued that the first interstellar comet ever observed,
ʻOumuamua, might be an artificial light sail made by an alien civilization. adopting the new moniker "unexplained aerial phenomenon" (UAP) to avoid associations with past
sensationalism. On 17 May 2022, members of the
United States House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation held
congressional hearings with top military officials to discuss military reports of UAPs. It was the first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in the US in over 50 years. Another Congressional hearing took place on July 26, 2023, featuring the
whistleblower claims of former U.S. Air Force (USAF) officer and intelligence official David Grusch. A Harris Poll in 2009 found that 32% of Americans "believe in UFOs". A
National Geographic study in June 2012 found that 36% of Americans believe UFOs exist and that 10% thought that they had spotted one. In June 2021 a
Pew research poll found that 51% in the United States thought that UFOs reported by people in the military were likely to be evidence of intelligent life from beyond the Earth. In August 2021,
Gallup, with a question not specific to military reports, only found that 41% of adults believed some UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets. This Gallup poll showed 44% of men and 38% of women believed this. This average of 41% in 2021 was up from 33% in a 2019 Gallup poll with the same question. Gallup further found that college graduates went in 2019 from being the least likely educational group to believe this to being on par in 2021 with adults who have no college education. An October 2022 poll by
YouGov only found that 34% of Americans believe that UFOs are likely to involve alien life forms. Historian Greg Eghigian wrote in August 2021 that "over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects" and that "it often gets personal" with those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin dismissing those who consider UFOs to be worth studying as "narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel" while the skeptics brushed off "devotees" as "naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous". Such "mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief", and science too has found itself engaged increasing amounts of "boundary work" (which is "asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas, between what may and what may not refer to itself as science") with regard to UFO questions. Eghigian points out our current "stark divide did not happen overnight, and its roots lie in the postwar decades, in a series of events that—with their news coverage, grainy images, celebrity crusaders, exasperated skeptics, unsatisfying military statements, and accusations of a government cover-up—foreshadow our present moment". Jeffrey Kripal, chair of the Department of Religion at
Rice University, has said that "both the material and the mental dimensions [of UFOs] are incredibly important to get a sense of the full picture". As Adrian Horton writes "from
The X-Files to
Men in Black,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind to
Star Wars to
Marvel,
Hollywood has for decades provided an engrossing feedback loop for interest in the extraterrestrial: a reflection of our fears and capaciousness, whose ubiquitous popularity has in turn fueled more interest in UFOs as perennially compelling entertainment tropes not to be taken seriously". Horton observes that these "alien movies have generally reflected shifting cultural anxieties, from the existential terror of nuclear war to foreign enslavement to loss of bodily control". American entertainment has explored both "hostile aliens" as well as the "benevolent, world-expanding encounters" seen in films such as
Steven Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. In her research on the relationship of media to UFO beliefs,
Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina, says that what is seen on a screen, "if it conforms to certain criteria, is interpreted as real, even if it is not real and even if one knows it is not real" and that "screen images embed themselves in one's brain and memories" in ways that "can determine how one views one's past and even determine one's future behaviors". ==Investigations of reports==