For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead.
In the United States, unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, came into the national spotlight in the late 1940s and early ’50s. A series of incidents, including a supposedly crashed alien spaceship near Roswell, N.M., generated something of an American obsession. The Roswell UFO turned out to be part of a classified program, the remnants of a balloon monitoring the atmosphere for signs of clandestine Russian nuclear tests. But it and other reported sightings prompted the U.S. government to launch various projects and panels to investigate such claims, as Science News reported in 1966 (SN: 10/22/66), as well as kicking off hobby groups and conspiracy theories.
In the decades since, UFOs have often come to be dismissed by scientists as the province of wackos and thus unworthy of study. The term UFO has a smirk factor to it, says Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the school’s Center for National Security Initiatives.
But government agencies and officials are trying to change that attitude. Among the biggest concerns is that the stigma associated with reporting a sighting has the side effect of stifling reports from pilots or citizens who might have valuable information about potential threats in U.S. air space — such as the Chinese spy balloon that traversed North America and made headlines last year.
“If there’s something interfering with flights, people or cargo, that’s a problem,” Boyd says.
To help reduce the stigma, many serious investigators now refer to UFOs as “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs, coined by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2022. “The term UAP brings science to the issue,” Boyd says. It also rightly broadens the view to include natural atmospheric phenomena as well as things outside the atmosphere, such as satellites and particularly bright planets such as Venus.
Hellbound and Down 