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130,000 pages of declassified US Air Force files related to UFO sightings
- maxerickson 12y agoThe interesting question is how much of it was serious investigation of space aliens and then how much of it was operational security for secret programs and concern over soviet spy craft. I looked at a couple of reports, one was explained as a meteor, another as a missile, another as aircraft lights, pretty mundane stuff to be spending time on. The investigators would know that the report came from near live ranges and such.
- pibefision 12y agoI want to believe
- furyg3 12y ago> he interesting question is how much of it was serious investigation of space aliens 0%
- maxerickson 12y agoThere had to be at least a few goofballs involved.
- jimhefferon 12y ago.. and how much was people calling their congressman saying, "You need to investigate these unidenitfied thingies." Because I think that's 100%.
- Swizec 12y agoAmazing! I've been working on a UFO sightings visualisation as an example for a d3.js video course. This will be perfect :D If anyone's interested: http://imgur.com/gallery/xTUxdi6 http://imgur.com/gallery/xTUxdi6 The whole visualisation is an animation going from 1945 to 2014. But it's not hosted anywhere yet (mostly because 14MB of data files make for a bad website). The green colors show sightings per capita in a state, darker is more. The blue crosses are US air/navy bases. The yellow dots are the sightings themselves. And the red circles are sightings clustered into 120 clusters, then normalised by population. The "result" is that most sightings happen near air/navy bases. And that there are strangely many sightings per capita in the north-west.
- Spooky23 12y agoLook at the corridors that had lots of sightings. In my area of upstate NY, there were a ton of sightings later revealed to be due to testing the terrain following radars in cruise missiles. I guess the topography looked like whatever area of the former Soviet Union the missiles would target.
- Avshalom 12y agoI'm sure Boeing has something to do with Washington's rate.
- wnevets 12y agoYou would think UFO sightings would increase now that everyone carries a HD video camera with them at all times.
- sroerick 12y agoI don't know if sightings have increased, per se. But there are a lot of sightings captured on cell phones these days. Many are obvious fakery. Some seem more interesting.
- nhzmju 12y agoWith higher resolution, blobs and smears suddenly become ordinary terrestrial objects.
- runeks 12y agoI've long suspected the reason that all videos of UFOs are smeary/unclear is because if they were clear, we would be able to see which kind of aircraft it is in the footage, and it wouldn't be a UFO (but an air balloon, commercial aircraft, glider, etc.). One thing that is certain is that if no alien air crafts have ever visited earth, then all UFO videos/pictures must necessarily be unclear, because otherwise we'd see that it's not a flying saucer.
- Flow 12y agoPerhaps it's because those pictures and videos are taken in the night, or in the day in a very bright sky? Also, they are often far away so zoom level is set on max.
- danohuiginn 12y agoobligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/
- senjutsuka 12y agoOne problem with the conclusion: Type UFO video 2014 and you'll see that there are still hundreds of hours of video taken about this every single year... So, I'd say the evidence keeps mounting for something its just more convenient (then ever) to ignore it.
- emcrazyone 12y agoI'm not a conspiracy theory type but I wonder how much was declassified vs. how much was not. Do you wonder if this is the mundane stuff the US Air Force releases to be able to give them an argument against UFO phenomenon? I loosely follow this subject. I get excited when guys like Stanton Friedman speak. I got real interested in this subject when the whole Rendlesham Forest thing exploded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident And even Niel Armstrong believes. Wasn't there an unencrypted radio communication that was recorded between NASA and one of the space shuttle missions where the astronautes describe a UFO being observed of some sort? All this just makes me wonder how much is not declassified or if it is declassified that it's probably down played as something other than a UFO???
- krapp 12y agoOn the other hand, everything that has ever been declassified regarding UFOs suggests the phenomenon is mundane. That the government has probably taken advantage of the popular culture of UFOs to cover up their own projects with false reports and sightings makes the waters purposely murky. Belief isn't evidence of anything but a convincing story. People believe in things which turn out to have been untrue, misconstrued or plain fraud all the time (see: the Cottingley fairies, Piltdown man, WMD in Iraq.) Yes, there always could be some super-super secret treasure trove of classified information showing that UFOs are really alien spacecraft but it also seems increasingly likely that none of them are.
- roberthahn 12y agoI checked out Friedman's website: http://www.stantonfriedman.com/index.php?ptp=ufo_challenge http://www.stantonfriedman.com/index.php?ptp=ufo_challenge Anyone know what these 5 major studies he references on that page are?
- crystaln 12y agoI'd be curious to know as well. Given his claim that the NSA and CIA are hiding UFO data, I have to wonder why none of that was released by Snowden.
- donald_trumpet 12y agoUFOs still exist. Most are explainable as something mundane, aircraft, weather, whatever. There are still a small percentage of strange experiences out there. But that does not mean they are "aliens" - they are just unexplained. They may be caused by anything - weather, ball-lightning, volcanic activity, marsh gas, psychological oddities. They are deserving of study.
- omegant 12y agoI´m airline pilot with 16 years of professional experience, I spent my first 3 to 4 years as a pilot looking outside to see if I could see a UFO. Of course I didn't see anything strange. But I am routinely fouled by Venus. I've observed Venus at dawn thousands of times, but now and then it seems that there is a light following us. I look at it thinking it's another airplane, then when I can't identify it as such, I remember that I´m looking at Venus. It's fun it happens after so many years knowing the phenomenon. When I was a kid I used to live in the country, not far from the airport (my father was a commercial pilot too). It was common to see airliners doing a visual landing traffic to land, passing just overhead. One afternoon, I was coming out to feed the dogs when I saw a very bright green light, just the same type of green that shines at the right wing of airplanes, but this light's trajectory was 90º to the normal traffic one, and was heading away from the airport. At first I thought It was a crashing airplane, but it was completely silent. It was very weird, I stared at it for a minute or so, till it disappeared to the East. I thought then that it was a hight (and heavy) meteorite composed of Cu. Next day the local newspaper talked about it, how everybody reported it to the police, and how it was in fact a meteorite that brushed the higher atmosphere and rebounded again to the space. If you are expecting or believing in alien UFOs, it´s easy to mistake something like this for a real UFO. I read some time ago this report http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-Institute/dp/090467438X http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-Inst... It's about a couple of guys that join a UFO sighting group, and start doing fake UFOs with helium balloons and a flash to see how they responded to it (spoiler: not very accurately or sceptical). Highly recommended.
- neuronic 12y agoDon't forget drones.
- senjutsuka 12y agoHow is this still so crazy when we have 100s of interviews by military and intelligence personnel talking about this stuff openly: https://www.youtube.com/user/csetiweb/videos?shelf_index=0&view=0&sort=dd https://www.youtube.com/user/csetiweb/videos?shelf_index=0&v... What exactly discredits all of them?
- joshontheweb 12y agoOne of the most compelling things to me is the astronauts testimonies. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, and Gordon Cooper all have reported either first hand experience or second hand knowledge. Also presidents of the USA. Reagan and Carter both have UFO stories they have talked about openly.
- neuronic 12y agoI seriously wonder if maybe it's just a running joke or something? Only people who work in the field or are exposed to it are somehow in on the joke?
- ics 12y agoIt might not be the worst idea for getting more funding for space projects...
- tedd4u 12y agoCosmic Ray Visual Phenomena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena
- joshontheweb 12y agoThis may account for some of them. Gordon Coopers experience didn't happen in space though. Not saying it's proof but it does cause me to raise an eyebrow.
- scott_s 12y ago
- thedangler 12y agoThis one really gets me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6WobAoTaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6WobAoTaI
- nl 12y agoI saw a really good paper showing how myths about UFOs almost exactly mirror the "old world" myths about "the little people" and the Faie. The form of the myths mirrored each other almost exactly - strange night visitations, kidnappings and often sexual violations. From memory the paper argued that they represented "the unknown" in the human psyche , and the rise of science had forced the myths to take a more scientific form. I wish I could find the paper. (I guess some will argue that this is actually evidence that UFOs have been visiting since prehistoric time. Enjoy, I guess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F )
- sroerick 12y agoCarl Jung's flying saucers is a good read. He discusses the idea that of technological society automatically assuming that visitors have a "far more advanced technology", and the idea of the saucer being a completion the incomplete mandala of the industrial age. Very interesting stuff.
- msh 12y agoCarl Sagan makes that comparison in his book "the demon haunted world".
- makmanalp 12y agoThis would be very interesting to read about. Slight tangent: I also remember seeing some stuff about how the brain is influenced by sociocultural things - like how people from christian-majority nations see heaven / hell / god imagery during psychosis but people from other, dissimilar cultures see different things. Or: how come people ingesting hallucinogens consistently report being one with god or being god? What's so special about the concept of god that triggers that kind of hallucination? Why isn't it as common to think that you're any other object, like a toaster?
- sogen 12y agoThere's an old 1900's illustration of UFOs, saw it in a Ripley's Magazine way back in the late 90's - early 2000's. They looked like stuff from that era: Cigars, Hats, Zeppelins, etc.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- larsmak 12y agoI worked in the air-force as ground-crew servicing F-16 for a year. Every now and then they would exercise gun target-practice by having one jet tow a red "sail" (I think it was called a "taxan"). The towing-line was several hundred feets long, and the towing jet would fly in a large circle. The practice always intrigued me, and seemed very low-tech compared to some of the other stuff in the domain. Don't know if that was what you saw but - they did not fire missiles at the target how ever, and certainly not over populated area. They always flew out over the North-sea.
- joshuaheard 12y agoIf you consider the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation), there are probably millions of alien civilizations in our galaxy alone that could send craft to our planet. If that is true, they would certainly observe and study us, much like we observe and study lesser animals. And to avoid harm to their subjects, the aliens would likely avoid detection. So, even though I think 90% of UFO evidence is terrestrial phenomena, the odds are in favor of alien race(s) visiting us, so it's possible some UFO evidence is of alien craft.
- outsidetheparty 12y agoOr if you choose different values for the variables in the Drake Equation for which we have only a single known data point -- i.e. most of them -- there is probably exactly one civilization in the galaxy.
- el_zorro 12y agoI think you fundamentally misunderstand the statistics and distances involved here. Millions of civilizations? Only if you take the most optimistic of all statistical stretches. I personally think that there are at most a dozen civilizations that are within our technological range +- 10,000 years (really generous given the enormity of time) and the speed of light conspires to keep them forever beyond our reach. Aliens do not walk among us.
- delecti 12y agoWhile the Drake Equation indicates that there are probably loads of other intelligent species in our galaxy, there's no reason to think that it's practical for them to visit.
- ArtDev 12y agoEspecially that a craft will have to travel for millions of years to get here! Heck, we only evolved very recently on this planet. If humans don't go extinct in the next 2-5 million years, then maybe its possible to get a visitor (but I wouldn't bet on it).
- logician76 12y ago130,000 pages released, yet every commenter here is talking about their own beliefs.. incredible since this is supposedly a science community.. I clicked to see if anyone had looked at any of the pages yet and dug up some stuff to save myself some time..
- nzealand 12y agoObservations are typically lights seen by pilots or from the ground. Conclusions range from meteors, astronomical bodies, other planes etc... Honestly the thing that surprises me is how each report was completed in detail. There is usually insufficient data for a definitive analysis, yet each report must have days to complete.
- api 12y agoI've always had a passing interest in UFOs and similar mysteries. The sense I get from reading a bit into the subject is that when you subtract the obvious cranks and cultural mythology there does exist a hard core of very hard to explain UFO cases with hard evidence associated with them. It's a minority of cases overall but they do exist. The evidence isn't strong enough to confirm any of the leading hypotheses (ETs, classified tech, etc.), so they still remain in the mystery category. A common misconception about a basically scientific worldview is that you can't have mysteries, that everything has to be settled. This is absolutely wrong. Of course there are mysteries. If there weren't, science would stop. I'm perfectly comfortable with mysteries and with answering "I don't know" to certain things.
- wahsd 12y agoWhat I find interesting is that these documents were classified at all if there was nothing to them. I'm sure some of the documents can be tied to secret test flights, but why classify and keep secret the rest of the documents. I wish someone would ask that question, what if any justification was there for classifying them in the first place. Edit: Looking at some of the documents, it seems that many of the reports of sightings are essentially people reporting celestial bodies, aircraft, or weather phenomenon. I am rather certain that there is really absolutely nothing in here to be found. This strikes me as the equivalent to clearing out filing cabinets of useless documents. It's probably a matter of finding the needle that may or may not have slipped through in a huge haystack. Mildly amusing statement from one of the more interesting reports I cam across (Last Report, last page): "...leads me to believe, or at least to suspicion, that the accusations of NEGLIGENCE heaped upon you (as individual officers in Bluebook and collectively by some independent investigators in recent years may not be entirely unfounded." http://projectbluebook.theblackvault.com/documents/1960s/1967-06-7365317-Austin-Texas/1967-06-7365317-Austin-Texas.pdf http://projectbluebook.theblackvault.com/documents/1960s/196...
- jdietrich 12y agoInformation is classified by default, and only ever declassified when there is a high degree of confidence that the information is no longer sensitive. The concern almost certainly has nothing to do with the possibility that someone might have seen an alien spacecraft, but the risk of revealing information about military aircraft movements.
- Thrymr 12y agoIt has been alleged that the US Air Force actively encouraged UFO conspiracy theories to draw attention away from secret weapons programs. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men
- rglover 12y agoI mean, come on...http://cl.ly/ZNIU/Image%202015-01-20%20at%201.13.21%20PM.png http://cl.ly/ZNIU/Image%202015-01-20%20at%201.13.21%20PM.png
- acd 12y agoDoing a word frequency analysis from the site of the reports 1940-1960. What happened in Dayton Ohio and in Ohio in general? City and state 20 Miami Florida 21 N W PACIFIC 21 Duluth Minnesota 21 LasVegas Nevada 22 KansasCity Missouri 22 Philadelphia Pennsylvania 23 Houston Texas 23 Seattle Washington 25 Fairborn Ohio 26 N E Pacific 26 LosAngeles California 26 Washington D C 27 Albuquerque NewMexico 27 Dallas Texas 27 Denver Colorado 28 ColoradoSprings Colorado 30 SanAntonio Texas 31 Baltimore Maryland 31 Cleveland Ohio 32 Brooklyn NewYork 32 Columbus Ohio 32 Kettering Ohio 36 Chicago Illinois 41 N W 41 Cincinnati Ohio 42 BLANK 69 N W Pacific 71 ILLEGIBLE 140 Dayton Ohio By state 57 Japan 59 Oklahoma 59 Tennessee 62 Nebraska 66 Alabama 67 NorthCarolina 72 Kansas 73 E 73 Mass 76 Louisiana 78 Nevada 81 Maine 90 Kentucky 92 Alaska 98 Arizona 111 Georgia 113 Minnesota 117 Iowa 117 Massachusetts 131 Calif 137 Virginia 139 Maryland 140 Missouri 141 Oregon 141 Wisconsin 149 NewJersey 155 Indiana 156 Washington 160 Colorado 165 NewMexico 191 Illinois 197 Michigan 199 Pennsylvania 216 N 237 Florida 244 W 427 Texas 461 NewYork 565 California 731 919 Ohio
- WillNotDownvote 12y agoProject Blue Book itself was based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is outside Dayton, Ohio.
- acd 12y agoThanks for pointing that out, possibly false positive then.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mratzloff 12y agoIf you are genuinely curious about officially documented reports about UFOs (not aliens), then I highly recommend reading "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record" by Leslie Kean. http://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Officials/dp/0307717089 http://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Offici... In a field where many of the books are written by either true believers or debunkers, this is a fresh take on the phenomena, carefully researched and conservatively written by an investigative journalist.