America’s fascination with UFOs

America’s fascination with UFOs

Subject : International Events

Context :  US government released an unclassified report that concerns the assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — known in popular culture as unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — and the progress that the Department of Defense (DoD) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.

Concept :

• The report, which is largely inconclusive, looks at instances of apparent UFO sightings noticed between November 2004 and March 2021. While there is no evidence that the sightings were UFOs, there is no other explanation either for what these sightings were.

What is a UFO ?

• A UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object that cannot immediately be identified or explained.
• The term is widely used for making claims about sighting an extraterrestrial spacecraft i.e. a spacecraft that does not belong to Earth and humans.

World UFO Day

• World UFO Day is an awareness day celebrated by UFO enthusiasts to educate people about the ‘undisputed evidence’ that UFOs are real and to get governments de-classify files about UFO sightings.
• Some celebrate the day on June 24 which is the date that aviator Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO sighting for the first time in the United States.
• Some others observe the day on July 2 which is the day when the supposed Roswell UFO crash took place in 1947.

Roswell UFO incident

• In July 1947, a crash took place near Roswell in New Mexico which led to the speculation that the object was a “flying disc”.
• The United States Army Air Forces, however, later said that it was just a weather balloon which crashed.
• The curiosity around the incident only bolstered and led to exhaustive investigations by enthusiasts who believed that the US military was trying to cover up the incident.
• In turn, the conspiracy theories around an ‘alien spacecraft’ crashing near Roswell met with an equally thorough counter of claims debunking speculations.

Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sightings

• Kenneth Arnold was an American aviator who claimed to have seen nine objects flying in a tandem which could not be identified, while he was flying his aircraft near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947.
• Arnold’s claim is widely regarded as the first to have sparked theories around alien objects on Earth.
• The US Air Force formally listed the Arnold case as a ‘mirage’. Arnold had described the shape of the object as “flat like a pie pan” or “saucer-like” which led media to coin the term “flying saucer” and “flying disc”. By 1977, Kenneth claimed that they “have 15 million witnesses…who have seen something.”