UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS. The UFO phenomenon consists of reports of unusual flying objects that remain unidentified after scientific inquiry. It first came to public attention in the United States in 1947, when a pilot reported seeing nine unusual objects flying in formation in the state of Washington. Since 1947, the U.S. federal government, private research institutions, and individual scientists have collected data about the phenomenon. Although UFOs are not a phenomenon unique to the United States, American organizations and private individuals have taken the lead in collecting, analyzing, and publishing sighting reports.
The most publicized collection agency was the U.S. Air Force through its Projects Sign (1948), Grudge (1948–1951), and Blue Book (1951–1969). The Air Force also sponsored research by the Battelle Memorial Institute in 1955 and the University of Colorado in the late 1960s. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. government agencies also looked into the phenomenon. Congressional hearings were held on the subject in 1966 and 1968. The goal of the U.S. government was to determine whether the UFO phenomenon was a threat to national security. Unable to find the threat, the government stopped collecting reports from the public in 1969.
Private research institutions, including the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO), the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the Mutual UFO Network, the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and the Fund for UFO Research, have collected and analyzed reports since 1952. Even the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) conducted a study in 1971.
Nearly all research efforts have determined that a small but significant number of sightings remain "unidentified" after scientific investigation. This is especially true with reports made by the most articulate witnesses and containing the most data. Although the primary objective of private UFO researchers was to collect and analyze reports, they also sought to convince the public and the scientific community of the legitimacy of the subject. Their task was made all the more difficult by ridicule, caused in part by the perceived unlikelihood of the phenomenon's extraterrestrial origin, and in part by publicity hungry charlatans and self-promoters ("contactees") who, beginning in the 1950s, made fictitious claims about meeting "space brothers" and traveling to distant planets, or hinted darkly about secret government conspiracies with aliens.
In addition to the problem of ridicule, serious researchers found it difficult, although not impossible, to gather "hard" evidence of the unconventional nature of the phenomenon. They amassed photos, films, videotapes, radar tracings, and great numbers of multiple witness reports of objects on or near the ground. They reported studies of UFO effects on electrical and mechanical devices, animals, and humans. They studied soil samples
purportedly altered by landed UFOs. In spite of all this, they were unable to present artifacts of a UFO—the hard evidence that most scientists demanded.
Since the late 1940s, the UFO phenomenon has entered U.S. popular culture, and it has become a staple of motion pictures, television shows, advertising copy, and media images. As early as 1950 it proved to be one of the most recognized phenomena in Gallup Poll history, and it has continued to play an important role in popular culture.
In the early 1960s, people began to claim that they were abducted into UFOs. Although UFO researchers at first considered these reports to be an "exotic"—and probably psychological—sidelight of the main sighting phenomenon, abduction accounts grew steadily in number. Evidence for abductions was mainly derived from human memory, usually retrieved through hypnosis. But the people who reported being abducted were not "contactees" or self-promoters and appeared to be genuinely concerned about what had happened to them. In the 1980s, the numbers of people who came forward with abduction accounts had begun to rise dramatically, and a 1998 Roper Poll of 5,995 adults suggested that as many as a million Americans believed they had been abducted. By the end of the twentieth century, the abduction phenomenon had come to dominate UFO research.
In spite of extensive efforts in the second half of the twentieth century, attitudes toward the legitimacy of the UFO phenomenon and the research into it changed little. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, researchers had failed to convince the scientific community of the phenomenon's legitimacy, they had not developed a standardized methodology to retrieve alleged abduction accounts, and no UFO organization had gained the academic backing to professionalize both UFO and abduction research. Yet after half a century of study, UFO proponents had advanced knowledge of the subject greatly, and some even claimed that a solution to the mystery of UFO origins and motivations seemed possible.
In the twenty-first century, the UFO phenomenon persisted, apparently unaffected by societal events. It continued to maintain a ubiquitous presence in popular culture, researchers continued to study it, and, although scientists and academics still scorned it, ordinary people continued to report both sightings and abduction accounts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia. 2ded. Detroit, Mich.: Visible Ink, 1998.
Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Hopkins, Budd. Intruders. New York: Random House, 1981.
Jacobs, David M. The UFO Controversy in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.
———. Secret Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
