The UFO Phenomenon

"UFO Report - a statement by a person or persons judged responsible and psychologically normal by commonly accepted standards, describing a personal visual or instrumentally aided perception of an object or light in the sky or on the ground and / or its assumed physical effects, that does not specify any known physical event, object, or process or any psychological event or process [even after examination by qualified persons]..."

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Northwestern University, founder of the Center for UFO Studies

Of all of initially reported sightings, between 5% and 30% (depending on the sample) remain unidentifiable after expert examination. These are the real UFOs, and they are the subject of this article.

If you think that reports of UFOs remain unidentified because there is insufficient information to perform an identification, you will find it hard to explain how the Battelle Institute, under contract to the Air Force, in an analysis of nearly 4,000 reports (Blue Book Special Report 14), found that a "good" (detailed) report was twice as likely as a "poor" (sketchy) report to be classed as unidentified. This was confirmed by a later study on a completely separate set of cases performed by the French organization GEPAN (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Study Group of the French National Center for Space Studies). You will also find it hard to explain why the Battelle study found that the "knowns" share almost nothing in common with the "unknowns".

If you think that reports of UFOs remain unidentified because the witnesses are perpetrating hoaxes, you should know that no major study, including the Air Force Project Blue Book and the Condon Committee, has ever found more than a few percent of initial reports to be hoaxes.

If you think that only unreliable individuals are reporters of UFOs, then you are unaware of the tens of thousands of reports generated by responsible police officers, pilots, military personnel, and ordinary people who were going about their normal business in their normal environment when they were confronted with something they had never imagined or desired, and which, in a matter of minutes, left them confused, amazed, or terrified.

There are many reliable UFO reports.

• For example, at Exeter, NH on September 2-3 1965, two police officers observed a UFO estimated to be 90 feet in diameter at a distance of 300 feet, while the object hovered and moved erratically at an altitude of approximately 100 feet, bathing its surroundings in a lurid red light, before it departed over trees, heading toward the town of Hampton. The object had been previously reported by two independent witnesses, one a woman in a car who had been terrified by the close approach of the object, another a young man who observed the object over the field where it was later sighted by the police officers. The US Air Force was unable to identify the cause of this sighting, which was the subject of a book by Saturday Review columnist John Fuller.

• In a second example, on December, 12, 1952 UFOs were observed visually and on radar by an Air Force crew - "... cruising at 18,000 feet... radar operator Lt. Coleman... [saw] a fast moving target... on the scope, approaching from ahead... [it] moved 13 nm between sweeps of the radar... [Coleman] computed the speed at 5240 mph... 4 other blips came on the screen [from ahead] ... the unknowns appeared not only on Coleman's scope, but also on the captain's scope and the navigator's scope. As one of the four objects came by, Master Sgt. Bailey... [observed from] the right waist blister... a blue lit object [streaking by] far enough to the side that he could see the [angular] motion... "A second group of blips appeared on all three scopes... this group also traveled at about 5000 mph [but their courses missed the bomber by miles... "A third group appeared from ahead... computed speed... over 5000 mph.... the navigator... watched two of the [objects] streak by [from the waist blister]. "Capt. Harter... [observed] 40 miles behind, a group of five cut across his path, and turning, headed straight for the bomber. But they slowed and fell in behind, pacing the bomber for about 10 seconds... this group then turned aside and picked up speed again. All watched their scopes while the 5 targets approached a huge [target] that made a half inch spot on the scope... the five smaller blips merge[d] with the large one. The big [target] swiftly accelerated... making... over 9,000 mph."

• A third example of the "UFO pattern" is the Levelland, TX case, in November 1957. This case involved numerous sets of independent witnesses, each of whom contacted the police within the span of a few hours, concerning a multi-hundred foot luminous oval object which landed on the road in close proximity to the front of their vehicle, apparently disabling the operation of the engine and electrical systems of the car before it departed, after which the vehicle could be restarted and ran normally. Police also witnessed this object. Almost all of the observations were at close range, and a sequencing of the observations showed that the departure direction of the object could be correlated with the next observation in the sequence.

• The fourth example includes scientifically tested traces which remained after the sighting. On 8th January 1981, at about 5PM, Renato Nicolai, a builder in the town of Trans-en-Provence, France, was attracted by a whistling noise coming from above. As he looked up he noticed a strange object descending onto a nearby piece of land. The object was disc-shaped, small (only 7-8 feet in diameter and 5-6 feet in height), and gray in color. He approached, and when he was only 90 feet from the object, it suddenly started to make again a whistling noise, lifted above the trees, and shot away into the distance. A circular imprint was found at the location. The day after, the French police gathered soil samples, which were sent for examination to several laboratories, coordinated by the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Study Group (GEPAN) of the French National Center for Space Studies. Examination of the various samples found that the ground had been crushed from above by a heavy weight, and heated to a temperature of between 300 and 600 degrees Centigrade. Also found were unusual levels of zinc, iron and phosphates. The plants from within the trace that were examined were found to have 50-70% less chlorophyll and carotenes than those outside it.

• On March 12, 1965 at 1AM, while hunting, ranch owner James Flynn encountered a cone-shaped UFO hovering over some cypress trees. The object descended into the trees after several sweeping motions. He drove closer in his "swamp buggy" and saw that the object was a flattened cone with four tiers of yellow-lit windows, about 25 feet high and 70 feet across (estimated relative to the trees in the background). Flynn approached within a few hundred feet and noticed a humming sound like a large transformer. When within a few yards of the object, he felt a "wind" coming from underneath the object. He waved, and a white beam of light struck him between the eyes. He lost consciousness, and when he woke was nearly blind. Examination by a physician revealed traumatic hemorrhaging into the anterior chamber of the eye, and neurological abnormalities including absence of the deep tendon reflexes. A thickened area above his right eye was centered with a depressed spot, and there was a haematoma on the eyelid. The sight from that eye was the most impaired. At the location of the incident, a burned circle 72 feet in diameter was found.

• And lastly, a case which combines many of these features with the appearance of UFO "occupants". In Lakeland, FL, on an early evening in October, 1968, Miss Sharon Burgess and two school students saw while on a nearby hill a mysterious object heading towards the McMullen home . The disc-shaped UFO, approximately 13 feet in diameter and 8 feet high, hovered 7 feet above a palm tree, 150 feet distant form the house. Two occupants, dressed in tight white outfits with headgear, were seen through its transparent dome. Prior to the incident, and during the twenty minutes the object was present, Mr. & Mrs. McMullen noted audio and visual interference on their TV - they also complained of a smell, like ammonia, which caused a burning sensation in their nose and eye mucous membranes. During the excitement, the McMullen's dog knocked a hole in the screen porch in an effort to get away from the UFO. Lakeland police were called, but the object had left by the time the police cruiser arrived.

These reports are simply exemplars, and for each of them, a hundred or a thousand reliable reports could be found - and yet every researcher knows that only about 1 in 10 witnesses ever report their observations.

Government documents reveal that the objects have penetrated nuclear weapon storage facilities, have interfered with the operation of nuclear missile installations, and have prevented interceptor aircraft from carrying out their missions, as revealed in documents obtained using the US Freedom Of Information Act.

Clearly, this is serious business, reported by serious individuals from around the world, and from every walk of life, including police, military personnel, reputable (and even famous) scientists, technical personnel, housewives, workers, businesspeople, and ship captains.

UFO sightings have happened throughout history, with variations in volume and geography, as "waves" and smaller "flaps". Until the 1950s, such observations were not interpreted in the same way as they are now. In 1897, sightings following the same general pattern as those today were called the work of a secretive inventor. In 1946, the Swedish government assumed the observations were tests of captured German missiles by the Russians. In the immediate post-1947 era, the sightings were considered to be secret US government aircraft. And, as pointed out by Jacques Vallee, the period from 1914 through 1946 was relatively barren of sightings, despite the presence of many social factors which proponents of psychological theories of UFO sightings use when discounting current observations. For example, 1938, the year of the famous Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast, and the years prior to and following that broadcast, were not years of noticeable UFO activity.

UFOs have largely been investigated by dedicated amateurs, many with scientific or technical training. Reputable investigators work hard to identify a mundane source for a sighting, and they are frequently successful. Journals in the field and books by researchers often discuss the nature of the Identified Flying Object, and clearly separate these from cases where no valid explanation can be found.

On the other hand, one must be careful not to distort the facts of the case in an effort to arrive at an explanation. For instance, Dr. Donald Menzel once attempted to explain the famous Papua, New Guinea observations by Rev. Gill as being the result of Gill having astigmatism, mistaking the planet Venus for multiple disk shaped objects, and Gill convincing the other witnesses that something strange was being seen (which he claimed they accepted because they were uneducated natives). Unfortunately for this explanation, Rev. Gill was wearing properly corrected glasses, had separately noted Venus before and during the encounter, the object was seen at times below the clouds and in the rain, and the other witnesses were not uneducated or easily manipulated, but were, in fact, the staff and residents of the mission. Others have tried to explain UFOs as manifestations of poorly understood physical phenomena, such as ball lightning, or well-understood phenomena such as mirages, ignoring most of what was known about such phenomena, most of what was known about UFOs, and most of the evidence in the cases involved in order to force-fit explanations.

"Finally, in the matter of methodology a philosopher of science would find a serious operational and epistemological flaw: An hypothesis which covers everything covers nothing. Let us state this in the form of a UFO theorem: For any given reported UFO case, if taken by itself and without respect and regard to correlations with other truly puzzling reports in this and other countries, a possible natural, even though far-fetched, explanation can always be adduced. This is so if one operates solely on the hypothesis that all UFO reports, by the very nature of things as we know them, must result from well known and accepted causes. " - Dr. J. Allen Hynek, commenting on the report of the University of Colorado UFO Study, often referred to as "the Condon report".

In any event, misperception explanations only go so far. Close observations are unlikely to be explained in this way. In fact, "explainers" are often reduced to calling the witness a liar in order to dispute such cases, but a motivation can seldom be found for a witness of responsibility to risk their reputation with a falsified close encounter UFO report. And in the case of physical and medical effects, the plausibility of misperception, hallucination, and hoax explanations are seriously disputable.

What is known strongly indicates that the UFO is a physical object.

Measurements and estimates indicate that the landed UFO is an object between 15 and 100 feet in diameter (most commonly under 30 feet) which weighs between 30 and 60 tons; it emits visible light energy when airborne and landed, ranging from a few kW to hundreds of mW. It emits invisible electromagnetic energy at the high frequency end of the spectrum, including UV and soft x-rays - as shown by the many cases of skinburn and eye irritation, some reliable photographs, and a few cases of radiation detection. It occasionally emits harder radiation, which have led to symptoms of radiation sickness in witnesses who have closely approached the objects, and radiation traces at landing sites.

In flight, the UFO has no aerodynamic characteristics. It has no wings or visible propulsion systems, and, with few exceptions, makes no more than a soft humming or whining sound. In darkness, it is frequently observed to emit a colored luminosity which is both global and localized. It usually emits that luminosity in a shape which depends on its current maneuver. Though sometimes described as "flames", close observations have shown that this luminosity does not have a high temperature, and it probably represents an ionization of the local atmosphere similar to what occurs in a neon light. It is this lighting which allows estimation of energy output levels for UFOs.

Most UFOs are symmetrical objects with spherical, lenticular, elliptical, or cylindrical shapes. Some UFOs have a equatorial ring and are referred to as having a "Saturn" shape. There are also flat bottomed disks and disks with domes. Some UFOs are very small (inches to feet) and some are very large (hundreds of feet). All of these forms have common flight characteristics.

UFOs are capable of incredible speeds. Reliable radar observations (in some cases with multiple sets at multiple frequencies) have documented speeds of thousands of miles per hour. High speeds alone do not distinguish the UFO, since such objects as meteors can attain similar speeds. But profiles of speed and altitude, based on radar measurements and backed up by visual observations, indicate that UFOs can and do undergo radical changes in both speed and altitude simultaneously. Other observations indicate a disregard for normal orientations, where the UFO is seen to hover on edge, flip upside down, or spin while hovering. A particularly characteristic maneuver is the "falling leaf", where the object swings like a pendulum from side to side while descending. UFO behavior also indicates curiosity about human vehicles and facilities.

UFOs do have solid surfaces, as has been shown by reports where witnesses have struck the objects with hands, rocks, or bullets.

UFOs do land, and when they do so, they sometimes simply hover at a very low altitude, producing swirled grass, heat-damaged soil, subsoil burning of plant root systems, and unusual effects on the exposed plants (usually changes in the chlorophyll). In other cases, they extend landing gear of some sort, usually legs with footpads. It is these landing gear which have left marks amenable to pressure analysis, and from which we have been able to estimate the possible weight and density of the UFO. While no material of certifiable extraterrestrial origin has yet been recovered, unusual materials have been obtained from UFO sighting locations, and it should be realized that few resources are available for the analysis of physical traces, due to the unfunded nature of most UFO research.

In short, there is significant evidence that UFOs are a phenomenon which should be of interest to science. Once the distraction of minor and low reliability cases are set aside, there is a large unexplained residue which is not addressed by mundane explanation. Does it represent a manifestation of life from beyond the Earth? At this point, no one knows for sure. But it is worth finding out.

Some further reading can be found on the UFO books page.