UFO is real by definition, and after reading a number of Wikipedia articles that cite various official reports by many governments, I started to believe that ev

UFO is real by definition, and after reading a number of Wikipedia articles that cite various official reports by many governments, I started to believe that evidences already showed that there are definitely some (1%?) UFOs which cannot be attributed to known natural phenomena or man-made technologies. Of course, I don't think they are alien spacecrafts, and alternative explanations, such as unidentified natural phenomena are more likely. However, there are two problems regarding to UFOs. The first problem is, it's not a single phenomenon, but a class of different phenomena, potentially hundreds of different things. The next problem is, their appearances are entirely unpredictable, you cannot just wait at a place and keep observing it with a rack of instrumentation. These two problems mean that UFO will continue to be an open question for many decades, if not forever, and most researches will not recognize them as an genuinely unknown physical phenomena. Consider Ball Lightning [0]. It's real, and there are 200 years of anecdotal reports from everywhere in the world. Yet, until recently, it was not recognized as a real phenomenon by many researchers in the scientific communities - for good reason, "I never saw one in my life, and why should I believe these random stories on ball lightning, if there's no irrefutable data recorded by a scientific instrument?" But because of its unpredictable nature, it's highly unlikely to carry a scientific observation to begin with. It was only scientifically observed in 2014, for a duration of only 1.6 seconds [1], by a coincidence. If arguing for the existence of ball lightning is that difficult, now imagine the case of UFO. I believe a lot of data can be potentially gathered on UFO - acoustic, optical, radar, or X-ray measurements are all possibilities. However, because of the not-a-single-phenomenon and unpredictable nature of UFOs, such scientific investigations will never be funded. And even if there are funded, such projects will be a wild-goose chase on unpredictable UFOs, and such UFOs will disappear before you are ready to do some observations on them. It's unlikely to find anything significant. And don't even mention that UFO's popular connotation of aliens alone is enough to discredit the potential scientific efforts of investigations. On the other hand, hypothetically, imagine that UFOs could always appear at a specific geographical locations in a predictable manner, only then the members of academia will start treating it seriously and real researches will be funded. But it's not going to happen. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-lightning-probed-for-the-first-time/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-li...