elektronika: Investigation of UFO reports by the United States government

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Investigation of UFO reports by the United States government has taken place under multiple branches and agencies, past and current, since 1947. In spite of decades of interest, there remains no evidence that there are any UFOs with extraterrestrial origins and, indeed, those identified all have been shown to be natural phenomena, human technology, misapprehensions, delusions, or hoaxes. The first programs were established under the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and 1969 with Project Sign, Project Grudge, and finally Project Blue Book. The Condon Report in 1968 led the U.S. to stop spending resources on the effort to receive and analyze UFO reports because "nothing has come from the study of…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 88

UFO Reports. «Theoretically insightful and descriptively rich, UFO Reports is deeply thoughtful and thought provoking. Jenkins demonstrates how UFO advocates and sceptics alike exist within a shared universe of meaning that is utterly rationalist and yet profoundly occult. As such, chasing UFOs becomes a rival scientific vocation animated by the human imagination.» (Joe Webster, Professor of the Anthropology of Religion, University of Cambridge) «A terrific study of knowledge formation. Jenkins interprets the mid-twentieth-century flood of UFO preoccupations in the United States, tracing the streams of Theosophy, pulp fiction, military security, and science that fed it. A book of many surpr…

Evidence: 26 • authority: 88

Social factors and UFO reports: was the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic associated with an increase in UFO reporting?. The ongoing SARS-Cov-2 pandemic had many drastic effects upon society beyond the illness and death it caused. Pandemic mitigation measures disrupted and altered behaviors related to social mobility, significantly increasing the time spent at home compared to the pre-pandemic period. Further, it was well documented that social anxiety and stress increased at a population level. Early in the pandemic there was speculation in the popular media that reporting of paranormal phenomena (e.g., UFOs, ghosts, etc.) increased due to factors associated with the pandemic. Past research on UFO/UAP r…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Philip Julian Klass (November 8, 1919 – August 9, 2005) was an American aviation and aerospace journalist and UFO researcher, best known for his skepticism regarding UFOs. In the ufological and skeptical communities, Klass inspires polarized appraisals. He has been called the "Sherlock Holmes of UFOlogy". Klass demonstrated "the crusader's zeal for what seems 'right,' regardless of whether it brings popular acclaim," a trait he claimed his father instilled in him. "I've found," said Klass, "that roughly 97, 98 percent of the people who report seeing UFOs are fundamentally intelligent, honest people who have seen something—usually at night, in darkness—that is unfamiliar, that they cannot ex…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis or extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), synonymous with interplanetary aircraft and alien UFO technologies, proposes that some unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by intelligent extraterrestrial organisms (non-human aliens) from other planets, or probes designed by extraterrestrials. The scientific community has shown very little support for the ETH, and has largely accepted the explanation that reports of UFOs are the result of people misinterpreting common objects or phenomena, or are the work of hoaxers.

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Identifying unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is a difficult task due to the normally poor quality of the evidence provided by those who report sighting the unknown object. Observations and subsequent reporting are often made by those untrained in astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, aeronautics, physics, and perception. Nevertheless, most officially investigated UFO sightings, such as from the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, have been identified as being due to honest misidentifications of natural phenomena, aircraft, or other prosaic explanations. In early U.S. Air Force attempts to explain UFO sightings, unexplained sightings routinely numbered over one in five reports. However, in ear…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The United States UFO files, officially known as the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), also referred to as the UFO files or the UAP files, are a collection of declassified United States government records concerning UFOs, also called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), released by the administration of Donald Trump beginning on May 8, 2026. The files were published through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), a government website created to release reviewed UAP-related material to the public. The first release included reports, photographs, videos, witness accounts, military records, astronaut transcripts, a…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

David Grusch is a former United States Air Force (USAF) officer and intelligence official who has claimed that the U.S. federal government, in collaboration with private aerospace companies, has highly secretive special access programs involved in the recovery and reverse engineering of "non-human" spacecraft and their dead pilots, and that people have been threatened and killed in order to conceal these programs. Grusch further claims to have viewed documents reporting a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini's government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance. The National Aeronautics and Sp…