UFOs: What Is the Government Not Saying?
Even with increased transparency, there are more questions than answers
In 1947, a California farmer reported to the US Air Force that he’d seen something strange floating above his home. “I was standing near my hog pen about 100 ft. east of my house, when I heard the pheasants raising a disturbance and the chickens all rushed into the chicken house,” he wrote in the statement he filed with the government. “I looked toward the house to see what was causing it and saw something hovering just above the house… It lowered over the north end of the house… [and] just wobbled around for an instant, fire belching out of it and sucking back in… Suddenly there was a lot of sparks showered from it… and it took off in a northwesterly direction, gaining altitude as it went.”
His previously classified report was just one small part of the collection released earlier this month by the Pentagon and the Department of Defense under a directive of President Trump, who called for disclosure of “government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”
The release, housed on a dedicated government site, includes 120 PDFs (some containing photos), 28 videos (primarily infrared, and mostly from military cameras), and 14 image files, detailing more than 400 incidents from all over the world. It also contains numerous written reports from civilians, as well as marginally more credible reports from commercial airline pilots, several US military pilots, and astronauts. The most recent eyewitness statements were taken last year, while others — such as the farmer’s — date back to the 1940s.
The Department of Defense concedes that the materials are completely unverified and that “the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena.” They give no indication that the US government has had any interaction with beings from other planets or that it has any reason to believe such beings have visited Earth.
Response to the documents has been mixed. Some of the sightings by more credible sources, and the more recent sightings, have excited interest. But Adam Frank, a self-described “astrophysicist whose day job includes searching the cosmos for intelligent life,” captured the sentiment of many when he wrote for The Atlantic that he’s “disappointed” because of the lack of “hard evidence” in the files. “Spaceships. That’s all I’m asking for. Just one actual stinking spaceship.”
American interest in UFOs
Humans have pondered whether we are alone in the universe for millennia, and sightings of flying objects go back centuries. Reported sky phenomena as far back as Greek and Roman classical antiquity include sightings of “chasms,” “sky fire,” and “night suns,” as well as types of “flying armaments” and “fiery globes” in the sky. Some of them can be interpreted and explained in hindsight, but not all.
In the US, the mid-1940s marked the beginnings of a new interest in “ufology” as the growing field of rocket science helped to create a fascination with strange flying objects. This interest was also fueled by reports of many Allied pilots flying at night over Germany who claimed to see balls of orange light following their aircraft, which they nicknamed “foo fighters.” It was variously speculated that these ghostly flyers, never satisfactorily explained, were extraterrestrial spacecraft, German secret weapons, optical illusions, or results of electrical phenomena. During the Cold War, the Pentagon feared that UFOs represented not aliens but secret Soviet spacecraft built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists.
Interest in UFOs and suspected government conspiracies hiding their alien origins gained a stronger hold on the American psyche with the Roswell incident. When a New Mexico rancher discovered some unusual debris on his land in 1947, he took the items to the local sheriff, who in turn handed them over to officials at the Roswell Army Air Field. The airfield sent out a press release stating that wreckage from a “flying disc” had been found on a local ranch, and then scrambled to correct itself with an announcement that the wreckage in fact came from a weather balloon.
It was too late. The Roswell Daily Record had already published a story with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” (Research in 1994 proved that the wreckage belonged to a US spy balloon, part of the Department of Defense’s top-secret Project Mogul, in which the Air Force lofted high altitude balloons carrying sensitive microphones to pick up sonic signatures of Soviet nuclear tests.)
During the same summer as the Roswell incident, in June 1947 civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported that he had observed nine UFOs flying at approximately 1,700 miles per hour in the skies over Washington State. Arnold described the objects as “appearing like saucers skipping on water.” News reports shortened the term to “flying saucers,” which was already becoming a popular term for UFOs.
Roswell and Arnold’s report led to a flood of UFO reports in the months following and caused the Air Force chief of staff to establish a highly classified project “to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information concerning sightings which could be construed as of concern to national security.”
Codenamed “Project Sign” and headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, it continued until 1949 and evaluated 243 reported UFO sightings with the primary aim of determining whether they were of extraterrestrial or Soviet origin, but the results were inconclusive. The follow-on Project Grudge evaluated an additional 244 reports. It was acknowledged publicly to quell public fears regarding UFOs and national security, but it lasted less than a year and all its findings remained classified.
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