Catching Up: A brief rundown of UAP history
Since the bombshell revelations on the 16th of December 2017 that the United States’ Department of Defence (DoD) ran a secret program to track and research the set of phenomena traditionally called Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), the subject has been significantly more present in our mainstream media, often using its contemporary name, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), and often without the same degree of ridicule that the subject has received over the past few decades. With the subject in this new light, I, previously a sceptic, used to believing that witnesses of such phenomena were either hallucinating, under the influence of drugs, outright making it up, or otherwise unreliable, decided to look back on the history of modern UAP sightings, the wealth and breadth of witnesses, and the various military, intelligence, and governmental programs set up to research these phenomena over the years and the conclusions that they reached. This journey has taken me through a list of seemingly unbelievable events, a series of mind-expanding thought experiments, and on the path of a paper trail belonging to a seemingly incompetent and uncontrollable military-industrial-entertainment-intelligence complex coverup. On the journey I also encountered a plethora of different and often contradictory theories that permeate UAP-lore, which in turn re-calibrated my understanding of reasonable doubt and has allowed me to reach several personal hypotheses, ones I would have once considered exotic, and which, due to the highly speculative nature of the field, may be considered quasi-conclusions in this realm. Below, through a timeline of events and a wide collection of evidence, I will hopefully show that there exist strange phenomena in the skies all over the world, that there exists a long history of credible witnesses to these phenomena, that these phenomena seem to follow a pattern of intelligent behaviour, and that due to the often described technological nature of the phenomena, no hypotheses should be considered entirely off the table. In this post-truth, fake news filled world, I want you to question everything that I’ve written as fact and investigate the specific cases I’ve outlined for yourselves to come to your own conclusions about the existence and nature of these aerial phenomena.
The first thing that a cursory glance at this topic shows is that the reporting of these phenomena is significantly older than one might think. Most people who haven’t looked deeply into the question might think that modern sightings started around the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico, however, modern sightings that fit the description of the phenomena started around June 1801 in Hull, the United Kingdom with witnesses claiming to see a fiery moon-like globe with a black bar across it bathing Hull and the Humber in a strange blue light. The globe then allegedly split into seven smaller fiery objects which proceeded to disappear. On top of that there exist much earlier supposed sightings, including the flying palaces called Vimanas from Sanskrit epics, descriptions of “phantom ships”, “silver wine jugs” and “flying shields” descending from the skies during Roman times, or indeed the April 1561 mass sighting of spheres, cylinders and other oddly shaped objects seemingly having an aerial battle in the skies above Nuremberg followed by the sighting of a large black triangular object, and a crash outside of the city “with immense smoke”, although due to the age of these events it is difficult to verify their veracity nowadays. June 1801, therefore, marks the beginning of ‘modern’ UAP sightings.
Following Hull, few sightings were reported throughout the early 19th Century, until the 1870s when reports of “a serpent in the clouds”, “stationary meteors”, and of “mysterious lights” started permeating American, French, and British publications. The Scientific American described comet-like objects with a searchlight instead of a tail as a “remarkable phenomenon”. Sightings of “mystery airships” peaked around 1896 over the Eastern United States, including one of the earliest reports of a “cigar-shaped” object and of a crash in 1897. These sightings were written about in serious publications and opinions about them were discussed candidly. People were divided in speculating that they were experimental machines, misinterpreted natural phenomena, or hoaxes, with only a few hazarding the guess that they could be extra-terrestrial visitors.
Due to the advent of dirigible technology, most early 20th Century European sightings can be dismissed as misidentifications as people became accustomed to the new technology. However, the October 1917 “Miracle of the Sun” event in Fatima, Portugal marks an exception where thousands of people allegedly witnessed the Sun moving in zigzag patterns, emitting beams of multicoloured lights, and descending close to the ground, all on a day that was allegedly prophesied. During World War Two, bomber crews all over the world reported seeing strange lights and metallic spheres in the skies, which became known as “foo fighters”. Witnesses on the ground reinforced these sightings, reporting the crash of an unidentified “unconventional” craft in Cape Girardeau in Missouri in 1941. 1942 saw the emergence of photos of flying saucers from China, and the “Battle of Los Angeles”, which saw the reporting of unidentified blinking lights over the city be followed by hours of anti-aircraft artillery fire. Officially, the event was caused by a meteorological balloon and war nerves setting off a chain of events. However, even contemporary newspapers doubted that claim and suspected some form of a coverup was at hand. After the war, the possibility that the lights belonged to Japanese warplanes was completely dismissed.
The summer of 1947 changed the conversation about UFOs forever. In late June, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine metallic delta-shaped objects ‘flying’ in the mountains in Washington state as if they were ‘saucers bouncing off water’. Just two weeks after the sighting, the first report of the legendary Roswell crash was published with the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) announcing the recovery of a crashed flying saucer. Within 48 hours, after examination of the debris by higher-ranking officers and its shipment away for further investigation, the RAAF held a press conference stating that it was a misidentified high-altitude weather balloon, that their high-ranking officials had been mistaken, and proceeded to offer debris consisting of sticks and aluminium foil for photographs. Several allegedly leaked and declassified documents, and a considerable amount of witness testimony pokes holes in this narrative, though. Witnesses have described the material as “super-strong” and “out of this world”, and others have given accounts of the real debris being replaced for the photographs and the media not being given an opportunity close inspection of it. Others yet allege the sighting and recovery of several humanoid bodies from the crash, one potentially alive. Although still denying any extra-terrestrial involvement, the official narrative about Roswell has since changed, with the Air Force now claiming it was a classified Project Mogul balloon capable of detecting Soviet nuclear tests that had crashed and that it had been carrying some crash test dummies.
Although the official explanation for Roswell effectively buried the case, in some regards, until the 1970s, the United States Air Force (USAF) seemed interested enough in the phenomena to set up an official study into UFOs called Project Sign. By 1949, Project Sign had concluded that some UFOs genuinely appeared to be aircraft, but more data was needed to determine their origins, with a significant proportion of the personnel taking the ‘extra-terrestrial hypothesis’ seriously. With higher-ranking officers rejecting that suggestion, Project Sign was reorganised into Project Grudge. Personnel were reassigned, and the de-facto position of the project was shifted from investigating the phenomena to debunking UFOs as being the result of hoaxes, crackpots, and misidentification. Sightings were to be discredited, not investigated. Through cooperation between Grudge and the mass media, the USAF wanted to demystify public opinion about UFOs. Naval aviator Donald Keyhoe didn’t aid that goal with the 1950 publication of his book “The Flying Saucers Are Real” which, based on anecdotal evidence collected over three years, contended that the Earth had been visited by extra-terrestrials for at least two centuries, with a significant increase in visitations after the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Keyhoe further, correctly, stated that the USAF was investigating these cases seriously and that they had possibly managed to adapt some of their technology and might begin the process of disclosure after 1949. With the rebirth of Sign as Grudge, that turned out to be an impossibility.
The increase in the number and intensity of the sightings through the 50’s led to countries around the world setting up their own investigations into the matter. Canada’s Project Magnet, perhaps due to its direction by Wilbert Smith, who in his later life believed that UFOs were real and were related to psychic phenomena, concluded that UFOs were likely extra-terrestrial and propelled by manipulating magnetism. This led to the creation of Project Second Storey, a committee to advise the Canadian government on such matters. The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) set up their own short-lived investigation called Flying Saucer Working Party (FSWP) which concluded that all sightings they had investigated were misidentifications, illusions, delusions, or hoaxes. Dissatisfied with the direction Grudge was taking, and as the result of the credible sighting of V-shaped lights over Lubbock, Texas, in 1951, some officers in the USAF re-organised Grudge into Project Blue Book (PBB), which under the direction of Captain Edward Ruppelt, who coined the term UFO, would attempt a serious investigation of the matter, with their personnel split on their belief in the extra-terrestrial hypothesis.
This wasn’t a moment too soon, it would seem, as following hundreds of reports worldwide, July 1952 would see one of the most famous radar and eyesight-verified mass UAP sightings in history. Hundreds of people reported seeing UFOs over Washington D.C. over the course of a two-week period. Three different airports had verifications on their radars, the sightings of which were confirmed by people in planes and on the ground. The USAF, seeking to calm public anxiety, stated that the radar targets and the visible objects were likely the result of temperature inversions coupled with misidentified natural phenomena. Witnesses, radar technicians and even USAF personnel disputed that explanation, with criticism ranging from witnesses seeing structured craft and not just lights, to the presence of temperature inversions nearly nightly over Washington D.C. that summer, to the event observed being wholly unlike other cases of temperature inversion on radar or the ground.
In response to a need for answers, the CIA established the Robertson Panel in 1953. Drawing on evidence from PBB and the CIA’s own investigations into the phenomena, four days of examination and dismissal concluded in the panel claiming that UFOs were not a national security threat and should be stripped of their “special” status through public debunking of misidentification cases and a non-publicization policy towards unidentifiable cases. Additionally, the panel recommended that civilian UFO groups be monitored. Although these conclusions were criticised as being set by the CIA prior to any investigation, they did largely set the tone for the rest of Blue Book.
Disregarding the panel’s conclusions, sightings continued worldwide with a seeming intensification as cattle mutilations and abductions entered UFO-lore. Quietly, in the background, the US government was studying the phenomena and keeping an eye on the people associated with them. During a 1958 live TV interview on CBS, Donald Keyhoe was muted when he began to deviate from the agreed-upon matter of discussion, with Air Force officials allegedly having given the order. Air Force and military witnesses of the phenomena have claimed to have been approached by higher-ups ordering them to maintain confidentiality. By 1969, Project Blue Book concluded with the often-criticised Condon Report, which stated that no national security threat was posed by the phenomena and that they didn’t exhibit behaviours associated with technology or extraterrestrial visitation. Evidence has however emerged that the report was purposefully rigged to look objective but came with assurances that the conclusions would be to show the phenomena as nonsense. Edward Condon himself publicly stated that that was his opinion “but I’m not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year.” That’s without even mentioning the fact that some cases in Project Blue Book were outright dismissed with ridiculous hypotheses, for example, a case where an airplane had to perform evasive maneuvers because an unidentified object came within 40 feet of it was dismissed as “possible celestial object.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember the last time a plane I was on had to swerve to miss hitting Venus.
As before, the phenomena took no notice of the Condon Report, indifferent to its conclusions, and sightings continued worldwide. Groups of credible, trained USAF personnel, including the deputy base commander of RAF Woodbridge witnessed strange lights above Rendlesham Forest in 1980, including some claiming to have witnessed a small landed craft that was covered in strange hieroglyphs. This event even resulted in one of the witnesses suing and winning the case against the US Veteran’s Association for heart tissue damage that he received from the high levels of radiation exerted by the craft. The hundreds of various sightings encompassed a full range of shapes and sizes to the phenomena, which sometimes came in waves. As the result of the 1997 Phoenix Lights incident, in which thousands of eyewitnesses claimed to see a gigantic triangular craft over Phoenix, the governor of New Mexico held a press conference mocking the witnesses by parading a man wearing handcuffs in an alien costume, however he later backtracked, stating that in reality, he, too, had seen an otherworldly massive triangular craft that night.
Investigations continued, confidentially or not, throughout the decades. The UK government’s Defence Intelligence Staff’s (DIS) report, Project Condign, concluded that the sightings were the result of plasma and optical illusions caused by weather conditions that caused strange refractions of light. France has had different projects ongoing since 1977. They ran GEPAN from 1977–1988, SERPA from 1988–2005, and GEIPAN ever since. By 2010, 23% of all the cases investigated still remained unidentified, and, if the words of Jean-Jacques Velasco, who headed SERPA, are to be believed, even more should be in that category, as he says that roughly 13.5% of the cases investigated by SERPA were dismissed without any rational explanation and that he himself now believes the extraterrestrial hypothesis. COMETA, a private think tank, mostly made up of individuals from the French MoD concluded in 1999 that UFOs were likely real technological flying machines and that the extraterrestrial hypothesis should be taken seriously.
On the 16th of December 2017, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) within the DoD was revealed. Regardless of public dismissal, research into the nature of UAPs was underway. Luis Elizondo, the program’s director publicly quit, citing the stagnation of the program’s progress due to people’s beliefs within the DoD. Since resigning, Elizondo, through his work with To The Stars Academy (TTSA) has secured the release of three previously classified DoD gun camera videos of UAPs and has continued to pursue several lines of inquiry into these phenomena whilst working with a team of professionals from the intelligence, defence, engineering, and scientific fields.
While the above may only act as an outline of a select few UAP sightings and a keen interest in these phenomena by governments worldwide, in the future I will provide an in-depth look at other examples and events and will explore more aspects of ufology. In truth, the purpose of this work was never to convince of one conclusion or another. It was only to highlight the strange nature of these potentially different phenomena and to present it as a field deserving of scientific interest and research. In a court of law, we’d be beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt about the existence of a set of phenomena in our skies, whatever they may be. What we need now is an objective and public investigation into it which isn’t opposed or ridiculed pre-emptively. In an age where Harvard astronomers, regardless of criticism, seriously hypothesise the possibility that the astronomical object Oumuamua may have been an ancient extraterrestrial solar sail or probe, while others hypothesise that we’ve detected Dyson spheres around faraway stars, perhaps it’s time for us, having been conditioned by decades of extraterrestrials in our mass media and entertainment, to be more open-minded and pursue serious scientific inquiry into our UAP reality.
