Lots of unidentified flying objects turn out to be weather balloons,
clouds, or planes, but there are definitely sightings that can’t be
explained away so easily.
Most UFOs don’t stay unidentified
UFO sightings often turn out to have very simple explanations, such as
“aircraft, astronomical objects, rocket launches, balloons (escaped
party balloons at sunset are particularly effective!), birds, insects,
intensely bright squid lights used by Japanese fishermen, and so forth,”
says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and fellow at the SETI Institute,
which is dedicated to exploring the origins of life and intelligence in
the universe. In 1973, before he became president, Jimmy Carter
reported seeing a UFO, but it’s widely believed to have been the planet
Venus. The debris found at Roswell Army Airfield in New Mexico in 1947
turns out to have been from a top-secret experimental spy balloon
project that wasn’t declassified for almost half a century.
But not all can be explained away
In December 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged to The New York Times
that it had been running a program focused on investigating
unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. The Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program (AATIP) received about $22 million in funding
between 2007 and when it was shut down in 2012, according to the
Pentagon. Two infrared videos were released with the articles that
showed an encounter between Navy fighter jets and a UFO off the coast of
California in 2004. Commander David Fravor,
who was piloting one of the jets, told the paper that after a radio
operator asked him to check out a mysterious aircraft, he flew to the
specified location and saw the seawater churning below him. A whitish,
oval-shaped aircraft was hovering above the water. “It accelerated like
nothing I’ve ever seen,” Fravor told the Times, admitting that it made him feel “pretty weirded out.” Here are more science mysteries no one has figured out.
Unidentified, but not necessarily alien
Of course, just because there’s no explanation for an event does not
mean it was a visit from extraterrestrial intelligence. There are plenty
of phenomena that scientists don’t understand—they’re not even sure why
ice is slippery. Shostak says he doesn’t know exactly what the AATIP
videos show (though he has some ideas), but he’s not convinced that they
indicate cosmic visitors: “There’s no explanation for about one-third
of the murders in New York City,” he says. “Nonetheless, that doesn’t
mean that they weren’t committed by people!”
Still, humans have been spotting mysterious objects in the sky for centuries, with cases increasing dramatically in the
middle of the twentieth century,
when aviation and the Cold War presumably made people extra wary of
unexplained lights in the sky. Here are a few of the most notable
examples of encounters that haven’t been solved yet.
China, 11th century
Around the year 1088,
Shen Kuo, a well-respected poet and military tactician, wrote a book called
Dream Pool Essays
(named after his garden estate) that covered his scholarship in
astronomy, mathematics, geology, zoology, botany and more. In the book,
he describes what might be the first recorded UFO sighting; an object
nicknamed “the Pearl” regularly appeared in the sky over Yangzhou
province. Its door would open and very bright light would pour out. “The
spectacle was like the rising sun, lighting up the distant sky and
woods in red,” according to the text.
Mount Rainier, Washington, 1947
The flying-saucer era can be traced back to a sighting of a UFO that didn’t even look like a saucer. Amateur pilot
Kenneth Arnold
was flying over Washington on a clear June night when he spotted a
flash of bluish light near Mount Rainier. Then he saw more—nine flashes
in total. He said the lights moved around, like “the tail of a Chinese
kite,” according to a 1967 book about the incident by Ted Bloecher.
Arnold at first thought they were jets, then maybe geese, and then he
ruled both of those out and did not know what he was looking at. Later,
when he described the sight to reporters, he said something about how
the lights moved “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”
Mount Rainier, Washington, 1947
By the mid-1960s, UFOs were being investigated by the U.S. government
through Project Blue Book, and space alien plots were common in movies
and TV shows;
The Outer Limits series started in 1963. When Socorro, New Mexico, police officer
Lonnie Zamora
heard a loud roaring sound and saw a flame in the sky, he abandoned the
speeding car he’d been chasing to check it out. He found a round object
in a canyon and saw two figures in white near it, but as he got closer,
the object flew away. Investigators from
Project Blue Book
apparently believed Zamora wasn’t making up the story and weren’t able
to come up with a clear explanation (despite the event’s proximity to
the White Sands Missile Range). They classified the case as
“unidentified.” Find out all the
secrets about Area 51 the US government won’t tell you.
Finland, 1969
A group of fighter pilots on a navigation flight saw seven objects
shaped like disks or balloons hovering about 5,000 feet in the air over a
field. As the jets approached, the objects flew off at what the air
force pilots called astonishing speed, according to an article in the
Finnish Defense Forces’ magazine,
Ruotuväki. The incident is the only UFO encounter acknowledged by the country’s air force.
France, 1981
When the
French UFO investigation division
(called GEIPAN) released its records to the public in 2007, its website
crashed from too many users. One of its most famous unexplained cases
happened near the southern village of Trans-en-Provence, where a
resident said an 8-foot oval-shaped craft landed on his property and
then quickly took off again. It left behind marks, which GEIPAN
confirmed appeared to have been made by a heavy object.
New Jersey Turnpike, 2001
Several drivers actually
pulled off the highway to get a better look at what they described as a group of golden-orange lights moving quietly overhead near the
Arthur Kill Waterway.
One of the witnesses was a lieutenant from the nearby Carteret Police
Department. Air traffic controllers couldn’t come up with any
explanations, and the National Weather Service didn’t have any ideas
either. Here are more
everyday mysteries scientists can’t explain.
Chicago O’Hare International Airport, 2006
On a cold November afternoon, pilots, ramp workers, mechanics, and
United Airlines employees working at or near Concourse C at O’Hare saw
what looked like a very unusual aircraft hovering above the airport. All
described it as a shiny gray disc, according to the
Chicago Tribune,
and some thought it was spinning. After several minutes, it shot
silently upward and punched a hole in the cloud above. Unfortunately,
nobody got a photo or video, and the Federal Aviation Administration
said it hadn’t caught anything on its radar systems.
Krista Carothers
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