Since the Cold War, thousands of sightings of flying saucers have been reported across different states in the United States. Since then, the American people have consistently lived with a sense of fear and curiosity regarding alien beings and unknown celestial entities.
Congressional inquiry after 50 years
Last month, the US Congress held its first public hearing in over 50 years to address the recorded sightings of flying saucers within the country. The discussion around this mysterious phenomenon ended with no plausible explanations. The last public hearings on the issue had taken place in 1966 when Gerald Ford, a Republican congressman and future president of the United States (August 1974 to January 1977), convened sessions to discuss the sighting of a flying saucer in Michigan by more than 40 individuals, including 12 police officers.
Now, five decades later, some members of Congress have once again brought this topic to a public congressional session and discussed 11 “near-misses” recorded by US military aircraft and other similar cases.
Several American lawmakers expressed concerns during this session and stressed that any inexplicable aerial phenomena could potentially pose a threat to national security. Rick Crawford, a Republican from Arkansas, stated that failure to identify potential threats was “tantamount to intelligence failure that we certainly want to avoid.” It is not about finding alien spacecraft; it is about the fact that the United States may not be aware of potential adversaries with such technologies.
Following the public session, Congress closed its doors for a classified session with legislators to delve deeper into the matter.
The origin of extraterrestrial entities and objects in America
The event of 1947 marked the initial publicized sighting of flying saucers when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to have observed a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington. He estimated the objects, moving like "saucers skipping on water," to be traveling at speeds exceeding a thousand miles per hour. In a subsequent newspaper report, these objects were mistakenly referred to as "flying saucers," leading to the popularization of the term.
Sometime later, the city of Roswell in New Mexico, the fifth-largest state in the US, reported another similar incident. Even today, the city is home to the UFO Museum and Research Center and continues to attract investigators searching for further evidence to back up their beliefs.
However, some American media outlets have raised this speculation, based on various pieces of evidence, that for a long time it was believed that the secretive place where the US government stores and conceals extraterrestrial beings and flying saucers is located in Nevada. For decades, this state has been a focal point of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories in America.
It should be noted that many of the most well-known claims and terminology regarding extraterrestrial entities stem from a publication titled “Project Blue Book.” The name is derived from a US government program aimed at investigating and researching reports of flying saucers from 1948 to 1969.
During that time, a specialized group within the US Air Force examined 12,618 reported sightings of flying saucers, determining that 701 cases remained “unidentified.” Ultimately, the project concluded, “No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security”.
UFOs and space aliens in the beliefs of American people
Some media reports suggest that 95% of the Americans have heard or read at least something about UFOs, and 57% believe they are real. This issue is so much usual for different parts of the American society that some US presidents like Carter and Reagan claimed they has observed a UFO. Some university majors have been allocated to studying the issue as terms like ufology and ufologist are connected to this matter.
CIA steps in
Based on reports, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has openly formed a special bureau to investigate the issue since late 1940s while it is also said that the bureau has been secretly active since years ago.
According to CIA reports, the US experienced the first wave of UFO sightings in the 1940s at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The first report of a UFO over the United States was published on June 24, 1947, and after the publication of this report, a large number of people from different social levels in the US discussed their experience of seeing similar objects.
After this incident, the US Air Force undertook the mission of investigating these reports. According to a report of this military agency at the time, these objects may be secret Soviet weapons and these UFOs are real, but they are easily explained and are not unusual objects.
The Air Force report emphasized that nearly all sightings were due to one or more of three causes: “mass hysteria and delusion, hoaxing, or misinterpretation of known objects." Nevertheless, the report recommends continued military intelligence control over the investigation of all sightings and does not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial phenomena.
The publication of mass reports of UFO sightings over the United States in 1952, especially in July, worried the then government of Harry Truman, and this process has involved all governments in this country since then.
A CIA research group also studied the Soviet press for UFO reports. The group also considered possible Soviet use of UFOs as a psychological warfare tool.
An important point was that most political and military leaders of the United States believed that the Soviet Union had become a dangerous adversary in the mid-1950s that had the power to launch a nuclear attack against the US.
In addition, they worried that if the US aerial warning system was deliberately overloaded by UFO sightings, the Soviets might gain a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack.
With the rising tensions of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the continued sightings of UFOs, Gen. Charles P. Cabell, Director of Intelligence of the US Air Force, ordered a new UFO project in 1952. The Blue Book Project became the Air Force's main effort to study the UFO phenomenon.
In fact, the US Air Force was trying to convince people that UFOs were not extraordinary. Actually, the three projects "SIGN, GRUDGE and BLUE BOOK" set the official policy and tone of the US government regarding UFOs for the next 30 years.
From 1952 to 1969, "Project Blue Book" compiled reports of more than 12,000 observations or events which were either classified in Group -1 which identified the sightings as known astronomical phenomena or Group -2 which were unidentified. The latter, approximately 6% of the total, includes cases where there was insufficient information to identify with a known phenomenon.
In late 1993, former CIA director James Woolsey ordered a re-examination of all unidentified flying object (UFO) cases due to pressures by ufologists (UFO researchers) to release classified information about UFOs by CIA.
Apart from US efforts, there are some other official records of UFOs sightings that are being kept in Canada, where they were transferred from the Ministry of National Defense to the National Research Council of Canada in 1968. Canadian records include about 750 observations.
Some other reports are registered in other countries, including the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Greece. In the past, in some countries of the Soviet Union and China, UFO sightings have been mostly recorded during missile tests or military air exercises.
Conclusion
Anonymous flying objects and aliens are an institutionalized topic in US public opinion. In the United States, both at the national and state level, the subject of unidentified flying objects and aliens has been around for more than 80 years, and from time to time fresh news in this field have influenced public opinion.
Although the issue of living creatures on other planets and the hypothesis of the possible alien invasion of the Earth have not yet been fully confirmed by scientists, this phenomenon in the United States has always been part of the political, cultural, military, and even economic pillars.
In fact, in the 1940s and 1950s, UFO sighting reports became an American cultural phenomenon. Observing strange objects in the sky led to various works being made in Hollywood to provide an objective view of potential threats.
The fear of alien enemies among the American people was heightened by fears of the Soviet Union and the Communists of the McCarthy era, and eventually, it was fueled by some published reports on the abduction hypothesis of humans, animals, and creatures on Earth, the hypothesis of alien invasion and the possibility of a space war and confronting them.
UFOs are now part of American popular culture. Ideas of aliens and UFOs have even entered the mythological part of America. Documentation of these kinds of experiences in the daily lives of the American people is abundant in the American media.
So far, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and a number of scientists and astronomers have considered this issue in various ways and many of whom have dismissed the idea of aliens coming to Earth as unsubstantiated, but that fear persists and the future will show how this hot topic will live on and how people will tend to view it.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/12/more-than-360-new-ufo-cases-have-been-reported-to-us-intelligence-agencies-since-march-2021.html
https://www.britannica.com/topic/unidentified-flying-object
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZHTlRFD۶E
https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61474201
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/20/us/ufo-sightings-history-scn-trnd/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13U47q6AuqM
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190390376/ufo-hearing-non-human-biologics-uaps
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190390376/ufo-hearing-non-human-biologics-uaps
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