Ex-intelligence officer testifies in US Congress on UFOs: Sightings, name changes, and explanations over the years

In another similar instance this week, The New York Times reported how Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, and Amir Siraj, then an undergraduate student at the university, stumbled across a 2014 “fireball from space” that had gone through Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the sea near the coast of Papua New Guinea. Loeb then led an expedition to retrieve fragments of the fireball and claimed in June this year, even as many in the scientific community remained unconvinced, that he might have found evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Objects in the distant sky have attracted human fascination for long, drawing feverish speculation about their nature and origins. But how did the modern-day sightings of UFOs first come about, and what separates that from terms like UAPs?

What are UFOs?

According to the US Air Force Declassification Office, UFOs “is the popular term for any apparent aerial phenomenon whose cause cannot be easily or immediately identified by the observer.”

It credits the Air Force for coining it in 1952, saying it “initially defined UFOs as those objects that remain unidentified after scrutiny by expert investigators.” Although the term “UFO” originally referred to unidentified flying objects under investigation mostly, it is now used more casually to describe any type of unidentifiable object.

While the US is not the only country that reports such sightings, its government and society at large have often given the phenomenon an unusual amount of attention. Former US President Barack Obama said in a 2021 interview with CBS, “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory…They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is…”

An example of the government’s involvement in such activities is Project Blue Book. Time Magazine reported on it 40 years later, “From 1952 until 1969, more than 12,000 reports were compiled and either classified as “identified” — explained by astronomical, atmospheric or artificial phenomenon — or “unidentified,” which made up just 6% of the accounts. Because of such a meager percentage and an overall drop in sightings, officials axed the program and ended the research.”

Another recent US government report said in 2021 that the limited data available on such objects’ sightings is “largely inconclusive”, though some patterns are spotted, such as the fact that most of these sightings tended to be around US training and testing grounds.

But these objects need not point to outer space origins, they are simply unidentified and could range from being birds, balloons, drone-like objects, a result of natural atmospheric phenomena (ice crystals, moisture), or even foreign adversary systems, the report noted.

Notably, this heightened interest came right after World War 2, when the Cold War had set in. The ideological and material battle between the capitalist USA and the communist USSR, never manifesting into a direct ‘hot’ war between them, meant there was significant government focus on protection from Soviet ‘threats’. In this context, unidentified objects in the US airspace became a cause of concern.

Also, as rocketry and the technology to capture images and videos became more advanced, there developed a greater interest in the analysis of such sightings.

Why is the term ‘flying saucer’ used for UFOs sometimes?

It comes from the first known such sighting in modern times. In 1947, American businessman and aviation enthusiast Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects in a V-formation near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane, according to a History Channel article.

News stories of the time had Arnold saying the object was crescent-shaped objects and flying at a speed of several thousand miles per hour, moving unusually – “like saucers skipping on water.” “In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer,” the article adds.

This was followed by the famous Roswell incident in the same year, when a rancher saw some wreckage near an Army airfield in Roswell, in the state of New Mexico. Some local papers reported it was the remains of a flying saucer, while the US military issued a statement saying that it was just a weather balloon. Conspiracies got a fillip when dummies with latex “skin” and aluminium “bones” were retrieved from the wreckage by the military. The Air Force claimed them to be “dummy drops” to test the safety of pilots in aircraft.

The July 8, 1947, issue of the Roswell Daily Record, announced the “capture” of a “flying saucer”. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

“Fifty years later, the military issued a subsequent statement admitting that the Roswell wreckage was part of Project Mogul, a top-secret atomic espionage project,” the History Channel article adds. Incidentally, this project of the US government was related to developing technology for espionage purposes because of the Cold War.

And what are UAPs?

UAP or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon is seen as a newer, broader term that is used to avoid “the confusion and speculative associations that have become attached to UFO”, according to the US Air Force. The term unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is used by the Pentagon to refer to UFOs.

NASA also uses the term now. In June 2022, it said it would commission a study team to examine UAPs “from a scientific perspective”, focusing on identifying available data, how best to collect future data, and how “NASA can use that data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward.”

According to the journal Scientific American, a preliminary report of the study said in June this year, “Gaining any new clarity about surging reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, will take time, better data gathering and diagnostic tools and, perhaps most importantly, a hale and hearty dose of nit-picking scientific scrutiny.”

This was echoed in a recent official statement. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in a press briefing on July 26, “What we believe is that there are unexplained aerial phenomena that have been cited and reported by pilots — Navy and Air Force; that these phenomena have in some cases had an impact on our training ranges, on our pilots’ ability to fly, train, operate, and stay ready. That alone makes it a national security issue worth… We don’t have the answers about what these phenomena are.”