What kind of evidence would we really need, before we could reasonably conclude alien contact had been made?
The worldwide fascination with UFOs started in the late 1940s after a few incidents made the news in the U.S.
David Zaitz/The Image Bank via Getty Images
The history of UFOs weaves together public fascination, government secrecy and cultural phenomena. Recent news and shifts in the government’s stance on UFOs are giving new life to the mystery.
Screenshot from a Depart of Defense video of an unidentified aerial phenomenon.
US Department of Defense/US Navy
A new nine-page report, requested by Congress, doesn’t say what the 144 UFO sightings from 2004 to 2021 are, but does say that the government wants to learn more.
Unidentified aerial phenomena remain a mystery.
US Department of Defense/US Navy
Scientists are not convinced by the current evidence of UFOs. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. But have Americans’ belief in UFOs gone from science to a new religion?
An apparently unidentified object detected on a Navy plane’s infrared camera.
U.S. Department of Defense/Navy Times
During a military mission, whether in peace or in war, the inability to identify an object within an area of operation represents a significant problem.
US F/A-18 footage of a UFO (circled in red).
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Parzival191919
Kevin Knuth, University at Albany, State University of New York
About 5 percent of all UFO sightings cannot be easily explained by weather or human technology. A physicist argues that there’s compelling evidence to justify serious scientific study and that the skeptics should step aside – for the sake of humanity.
An intricate crop circle spans a diameter of more than 45 metres in a barley field close to Barbury Castle near Wroughton, England, about 130 kilometres west of London, in 2008. The circle is noteworthy for its complexity, representing the first 10 digits of the mathematical constant pi, or 3.141592654.
Lucy Pringle
Crop circles are global phenomena gaining attention as paranormal culture becomes mainstream, along with a hybrid approach that emulates scientific investigation.
Gurneys to remove bodies from the Heaven’s Gate cult house in San Diego, California, March 27, 1997.
AP Photo
Twenty years ago, the paranoia that consumed cults like Heaven’s Gate existed on the margins of American society. Now it’s moved toward the center of the nation’s political life.
Churchill allowed science to flourish. Without a similar attitude in today’s politics, we may hit a bottleneck for life that leaves a Universe without a single human soul to enjoy it.
There’s got to be a perfectly logical explanation for this.
Shutterstock
Whether it’s Hillary Clinton’s courting the UFO vote or Donald Trump’s lending credibility to various conspiracy theories, the “triumph of reason” seems to have gone by the wayside.