Why does ufos exist

New protocols encourage personnel to report sightings, and military leaders are taking these reports seriously. Dietrich retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander in May , having taught as an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy in Maryland for more than six years.

Just before retiring, she went on the record for the first time, identifying herself as a UAP witness. She wants to end the stigma of pilots reporting strange things in the sky, still disquieted by the fact that whatever she saw remains unexplained. Voorhis is seeking his own answers, planning on mounting sky-facing cameras on Catalina Island to search for the UAPs he encountered near there in All rights reserved. Science News. A video shows U. Share Tweet Email.

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The era of greyhound racing in the U. See how people have imagined life on Mars through history. See More. The following January, the C. Robertson, a mathematical physicist from Caltech. This was a real problem: if notices of genuine incursions over U. The Cold War made it crucial that the U. Not all members of the military were content with this stance. Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the C.

But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense. The government maintained one public repository for U. Blue Book was a meagrely funded division run by a series of low-ranking officers who would have preferred any other billet.

Allen Hynek, a U. Luminous orbs were attributable to Venus; silent triangles could be connected to classified military technology. Hynek, to his surprise, developed sympathy for the people who saw U. Still, he was expected to do his job. Beginning on March 14, , more than a hundred witnesses in and around Dexter, Michigan, reported seeing glowing lights and large football shapes at low altitudes.

In seventeen years, Blue Book had reviewed approximately twelve thousand cases; seven hundred and one of them remained unexplained. In late , Edward U. Condon, a physicist at the University of Colorado, was given three hundred thousand dollars to conduct such a study.

That was out of the question—their behavior was not commensurable with our understanding of universal laws. In other words, sightings should be understood as metaphors—for Cold War anxiety or ambivalence about technology. Of the ninety-one Blue Book cases selected for examination, thirty of them remained official mysteries.

Air Force base in England. Condon, who announced long before the study was complete that U. He seemed to have only a glancing familiarity with the other nine hundred pages of the report. Scientists should take their talents and their money elsewhere. Project Blue Book was shut down in January, The Condon Report, which focussed on disproving any conjecture about alien spaceships, was even worse.

What was instead required was an agnostic approach, one biased in favor neither of extraterrestrial craft nor of the weather or Venus. Once it was clear that U. Ufologists liked to dwell on certain historic encounters, like Roswell, where any solid evidence that might once have existed had become hopelessly entangled with mythology.

Air Force officers claimed to have observed a U. Bentwaters, in Rendlesham Forest. The deputy base commander made a contemporaneous audio recording. Another witness, Sergeant James Penniston, said that he got close enough to a silent triangular craft to feel its electric charge and to note the hieroglyphic-like designs etched into its surface. In , Major Parviz Jafari, a squadron commander in the Iranian Air Force, was dispatched in an F-4 jet to intercept a glowing diamond outside Tehran, near the Soviet border.

American intelligence sources in Iran described the incident in a classified, four-page memo to Washington. This case is a classic, which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon.

Edwin S. Kean selected an incident that occurred in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a rural hamlet southeast of Pittsburgh, on December 9, , in which an object the size of a Volkswagen Beetle allegedly hurtled from the sky. According to multiple witnesses, the acorn-shaped bulk had been removed from the woods on a flatbed truck as service members guarded the area with guns. Kean filed Freedom of Information Act requests for NASA files, including some that she believed contained information about debris that was retrieved from the scene.

NASA claimed that the relevant records had gone missing in Podesta agreed to publicly support the suit. The case dragged on for four years, until Kean won a settlement.

She received hundreds of largely irrelevant documents. They just refused to own up to what had actually happened. As Kean discovered, a legacy of Cold War paranoia and obstructionism continued to bedevil the U. On November 7, , at about 4 p. Initially, the Federal Aviation Administration denied that it had any information about the incident, but media pressure brought to light a taped phone conversation between a United Airlines supervisor and an air-traffic controller.

The F. According to meteorologists whom Kean interviewed, it was much too warm that day for hole-punch clouds to occur. Kean looked abroad for cases that were treated with greater open-mindedness, and did not have to wait long.

On Monday, April 23, , an eighteen-passenger plane operated by Aurigny Air Services departed from Southampton, England, for a routine flight to Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. The captain, Ray Bowyer, had been a professional pilot for eighteen years. In the previous decade, he had flown the forty-minute Channel crossing more than a thousand times.

That particular day, the plane took off as scheduled, and climbed through a layer of shallow haze before reaching cruising altitude.

Bowyer engaged the autopilot and turned his attention to some paperwork. At P. Bowyer reached for his binoculars. At a magnification of ten times, the yellow glow took on the contour of a corporeal object.

It had a long, thin, cigarlike shape, with sharp edges and pointed ends, like a wheel viewed in profile. The passenger seated behind Bowyer, whose name was not made public, reached forward to borrow the binoculars. A week after the sighting, the U. Nevertheless, three weeks later, the British ministry released the available documentation, a packet that included corroborating radar data from an air-traffic controller on the nearby island of Jersey and a statement from a second commercial pilot in the vicinity, who had seen the objects from a different direction.

Ten months later, David Clarke, a known U. None of the speakers made mention of Roswell, alien bodies, reverse-engineered craft, or government coverups. Over the next two years, Kean collected their accounts, and other reports, for her book.

In it, she argued that, for reasons of safety and security, and to encourage people who saw peculiar stuff in the sky to speak out, the government needed some sort of centralized U. Many other countries had followed the lead set by France, and had either declassified and published U.

The problem in the U. She met with her uncle Thomas Kean to discuss the U. In June of , Podesta invited Kean to make a confidential presentation at a think tank he founded, the Center for American Progress. So what do you know? She had scaled down her request, proposing that a single individual in the Office of Science and Technology Policy be assigned to handle the issue.

Nothing came of it. She was, however, a well-known figure on the international U. She had begun breaking stories from its case files with an atypical recklessness. For the most part, people who do not feel that U. The world is full of weird, unaccountable convictions: some people believe that leaving your neck exposed in winter makes you ill, and others believe in U. When Kean wrote about the CEFAA video, debunkers leaped at the chance to point out that the object in the case they had been dreading was in all probability a housefly or a beetle buzzing around the camera lens.

A tendency to discount or overlook inconvenient facts is a thing debunkers and believers have in common. But rather than benzo comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly deep, mystical experience of existential ignorance.

Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of consequentiality. These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as horror stories even as they may have expressed secret desires.

But the pop culture of the same era introduced another mode: the suburban encounter, often still private and personal but more ooey-gooey New Age than abductions and anal probes. Stephen Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort, not just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last acts was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire building a giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Americans used to regard the space race with not just national but something like collectivist pride — all those government engineers from the new middle class. Which does mark a change. Given the option, America will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post—Cold War s, the dominant alien-encounter template was still the swaggering military strut of Independence Day.

The closest thing we got to a counterpoint was the cover-up paranoia of The X-Files , which just expressed a darker faith in the same American power. By the time we got an alien epic for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it as a story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of course, in that story, the winner was always going to be the humans — that is, the Americans.

And then came the financial crisis, the recession, and Trump, and the new hope that E. But even our future Chinese overlords, projecting power for the first time into the ever-receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens; as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the evidence. They have their own memory of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that empire — to reckon with.

And, besides, the unknown is just scary. Things have to get pretty bleak before you take a chance on the arrival of a total blank slate, just for the sake of change. But the government seems to have been interested, too: In December, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November , the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena.

Then, suddenly, he saw a white, foot Tic Tac—shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. But Elizondo has claimed the project was alive and well when he resigned in October. The former Senate majority leader is definitely a truther. When he was a young man, he heard a story from his grandparents about driving down from Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas, where they saw a so-called flying saucer, for lack of a better description.

Bob became a very wealthy man. He would pay for these conferences about UFOs, and he would bring in scientists, academics, and a few nutcases. There were people trying to figure out what all this aerial phenomena was. Bob started sending me tons of stuff.

Mainly what interested me is that so many people had seen these strange things in the air. EB : So tell me how this program got started. Could I have a courier bring it to you? I also want to go to your ranch in Utah. Bigelow had bought a great big ranch. All this crazy stuff goes on up there — you know, things in the air.

Indians used to talk about it, part of their folklore. We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get something done. HR : Read the reports. We have hundreds of — Eric, two, three weeks ago, maybe a month now, up in Montana, they had another strange deal at a missile base up there.

It goes on all the time. HR : Yeah. The universe is really big, people. Just 30 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet outside our solar system. Now we know of more than 3, of them, and we know nearly every star in the night sky has at least one planet in its orbit. Our study of other planets and moons in the solar system shows us many worlds possess the ingredients necessary for life — an atmosphere, organic compounds, liquid water, and other necessities.

The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, for example, feature whole subsurface oceans. Some, like tardigrades, can even survive the bleak vacuum of space itself. It shows that biology is all over. New technology gives us a better chance to actually make contact with extraterrestrials.

Our radio telescopes can scan more of the night sky for an intelligent message than ever before. Our ability to parse volumes of data in mere seconds means we could conceivably survey much of the galaxy in just a few decades. Extraterrestrial researchers and enthusiasts are most excited about these seven:. Ross b: One of the best chances we have so far at finding life on another planet. In , the photographer Steven Hirsch asked UFO-convention attendees who claimed to have had personal contact with extraterrestrials to draw and describe their experiences.

A sampling below. For science-minded SETI freaks, the last decade has been a particularly exciting one. UFO enthusiasts point out that rods along with flying saucers are the two most common shapes cited by witnesses in UFO sightings, and the cigar shape would allow it to be slim enough to avoid collision with other objects as well as maximize aerodynamics for travel.

Both the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen initiative pointed their instruments toward the object but found no unusual signals emitting from it.

With the object on its way out of the solar system, we may never know. He theorized, instead, that the fluctuations may be the result of massive objects passing in front of the star, in a kind of orbit — a whole array of massive satellites or other kinds of structures, presumably produced by a civilization of advanced intelligence.

Last year, two planets were discovered orbiting a red dwarf At least one of these planets is in the Goldilocks zone, so METI International decided to beam some musical signals over to the planet.