Unidentified Flying Objects

UFO's in general

UFO is short for "unidentified flying object", and not "extraterrestrial spacecraft", despite what many people seem to think. A better name might be "unidentified aerial phenomenon" (UAP), but "UFO" has stuck. I've also seen "unidentified aerial object" (UAO) and the U as "unconventional" or "unexplained". There is also an underwater version: USO, "unidentified submerged object".

Here is a UFO that I (lpetrich) once saw. I was traveling by airplane from Newark NJ to Ithaca NY in the winter, and I saw on the clouds a whitish spot that looked like a reflection off of a glass or clear-plastic pane. But there was no such pane in evidence, and my location was an unlikely one for such a pane. It would have to be huge. The spot sometimes flickered, but usually stayed constant in brightness. An extraterrestrial spacecraft following my plane? I decided that the clouds below my plane had an odd property: they had specular reflection in addition to diffuse reflection. I later found out that this was due to ice crystals in the clouds getting oriented as they fell. They have hexagonal symmetry, allowing them to have different optical properties in the horizontal and vertical directions. Others have seen this effect, and photographed it, and it is called a "subsun".

The term UFO was introduced by the United States Air Force as an alternative to "flying saucer", a rather goofy-sounding name. The USAF had investigated UFO's for two decades because of the possibility that some of them might be secret Russian airplanes or spy balloons.

The large majority of UFO's that have been investigated in detail have turned out to be known phenomena, though sometimes odd variations of them. Identified ones are sometimes called IFO's, Identified Flying Objects. Identification studies of UFOs - Wikipedia lists numerous identifications.

• Astronomical: the Moon, bright stars, planets, meteors, re-entering spacecraft, artificial satellites
• Aircraft: advertising airplanes, other airplanes, missile and rocket launches
• Balloons: fire balloons, weather balloons, high-altitude balloons, etc.
• Birds
• Clouds, dust
• Light phenomena: mirages, sundogs, subsuns, ground lights, searchlights, etc.
• Other: kites, flares, reflections, windblown debris, etc.

The planet Venus has been reported as a UFO numerous times, for instance. However, there are poorly-understood phenomena that some people have observed, like ball lightning. These may almost be called "real UFO's", but these are more likely odd natural phenomena than extraterrestrial spacecraft.

There are also nightmares, hallucinations, fantasies, and outright hoaxes. UFO skeptic Philip Klass once conceded that

I never encountered a single hoaxer during my entire 10 years with GE. And in my first 14 years at Av Week, up until the time I began investigating UFO reports, I encountered only one spinner of tall tales. So, believe it or not, when I first began looking at UFO reports, I naturally assumed that the witnesses were probably just honestly describing what they believed they had seen. But I quickly learned that I was too trusting.

UFO's have been classified in various ways. UFOlogist Dr. J. Allen Hynek has helpfully worked out a classification of UFO sightings, and various other authors have extended it (Close encounter - Wikipedia).

• Nocturnal Lights -- distant or small objects at night.
• Daylight Disks -- distant or small objects in daytime.
• Radar-Visual Sightings -- an object appears both on radar and visually.
• Close Encounter of the First Kind -- a UFO within 500 ft / 150 m, close enough to observe a lot of details.
• Close Encounter of the Second Kind -- the UFO also produces physical effects.
• Close Encounter of the Third Kind -- animated entities ("UFOnauts") with some connection to the UFO, like entering or exiting. This was Dr. Hynek's highest classification, and it became the title of a movie.
• Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind -- abduction. Experiencers are controlled agains their will by UFO's or UFOnauts, and those entities usually subject the experiencers to various examinations, various experiments, and/or implanting various objects.
• Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind -- voluntary two-way communication with ET's, UFO-contactee cases, close encounters of the friendly kind. This friendliness sometimes goes as far as the contactees' UFOnaut friends giving the contactees rides in the UFOnauts' spacecraft.

My UFO was a daylight disk that I decided was an IFO.

In recent years, we have been seeing what may be called the twilight of the UFO's: TWILIGHT OF THE GULLIBLE | More Intelligent Life. The proliferation of smartphones and digital cameras ought to mean an enormous amount of video of extraterrestrial spacecraft or whatever else "real UFO's" are supposed to be. Something like what we got for the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor: numerous video clips from several vantage points and numerous pictures and video clips of its aftereffects in several places. This was like the L'Aigle meteorite fall of 1803, but bigger and more spectacular. But the opposite is happening, not only a fall-off in UFO sightings, but also in interest in UFO-investigation groups. So we may be seeing an anti-L'Aigle.

Here might be a good logo for UFO contactees:

(SVG version, a vector-graphics version for Inkscape and various web browsers)

It must be noted that many believers in extraterrestrial-spacecraft UFO's look down on the contactees as the lunatic fringe of their movement. This even includes many believers in UFO abductions. I suspect that a good part of it is objection to something that seems too good to be true. Who wouldn't like some Star Trek United Federation of Planets? Complete with very likable emissaries. By comparison, abductees' UFOnauts often seem like clumsy wildlife biologists, and they are certainly not very likable.