Story of “UFO”
In popular culture, the term UFO–or unidentified flying object–refers to a suspected alien spacecraft, although its definition encompasses any unexplained aerial phenomena. UFO sightings have been reported throughout recorded history and in various parts of the world, raising questions about life on other planets and whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth. They became a major subject of interest–and the inspiration behind numerous films and books–following the development of rocketry after World War II.
Flying Saucers
The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane. Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water.” In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.
The Roswell UFO Incident
The same year that Arnold saw the flying objects, rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel came across a mysterious 200-yard long wreckage near an Army airfield in Roswell, New Mexico. Local papers reported it was the remains of a flying saucer. The U.S. military issued a statement saying that it was just a weather balloon, though the newspaper photograph suggested otherwise.
The flames of conspiracy were further fanned in the 1950s, when dummies with latex “skin” and aluminum “bones” that looked eerily like aliens fell from the sky across New Mexico and were hurriedly picked up by military vehicles. To those who believed in the earlier Roswell sightings, this seemed like a government cover-up. For the Air Force, these “dummy drops” were a way to test new ways for pilots to survive falls.
Fifty years later, the military issued a subsequent statement admitting that the Roswell wreckage was part of Project Mogul, a top-secret atomic espionage project.
Project Blue Book
Sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force began an investigation of these reports called Project Sign. Cold War tension was mounting, and the initial opinion of those involved with the project was that the UFOs were most likely sophisticated Soviet aircraft, although some researchers suggested that they might be spacecraft from other worlds, the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).
Within a year, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge, which in 1952 was itself replaced by the longest-lived of the official inquiries into UFOs, Project Blue Book, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. From 1952 to 1969 Project Blue Book compiled reports of more than 12,000 sightings or events, each of which was ultimately classified as (1) “identified” with a known astronomical, atmospheric or artificial (human-caused) phenomenon or (2) “unidentified.” The latter category, approximately 6 percent of the total, included cases for which there was insufficient information to make an identification with a known phenomenon.