Author Paul T Bell - August 1996
Unidentified Flying Objects are exactly that .. unidentified. They are aerial phenomena variously reported as all manner of exotic objects, including all kinds of unknown flying machines, usually termed flying saucers.
The vast majority of UFO cases turn out to be natural phenomena which have been genuinely misinterpreted. By far the most cited of all cases turns out to be none other than the planet Venus which is the brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and Moon. However not many know how bright Venus is or that it is so conspicuous, even when the sky is too bright to see other astronomical objects.
Other often cited UFO candidates have been unusual cloud formations, such as noctilucent or rectilinear clouds and most UFO sightings turn out to be identified flying objects.
The small percentage of sightings which remain unidentified does not necessarily make them flying saucers, many reports are straightforward frauds and some of the more exotic claims come from unreliable individuals or those found to be seeking attention and / or publicity.
Sorting through the masses of sightings, talking to witnesses, attempting to integrate possible natural or human generated explanations an immense undertaking, often involving dealing with people of abnormal psychology and , not surprisingly, few scientists have given over time or effort to research what they tend to see as the provenance of sociologist or psychologists.
People have been seeing unexplained things in the sky for millenia but the modern UFO sightings stem from just after WW2. In 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, reported seeing flying disks over Washington State, USA, the press called these Flying Saucers and brought the term into public use.
It is no coincidence that the modern UFO pheneomonon starts shortly after WW2, radar, television, jet aircraft, atomic bombs and rockets had all appeared in less than a decade, so why not interstellar space craft. Furthermore the troubled state of the world may have inclined many people, then as now, to hope that a superior race would intervene to help solve the world's problems.
UFO frauds and hoaxes often follow other highly publicised reports, joining in the bandwagon of publicity. Those found to be frauds and hoaxes rarely receive as much publicity as the original media event reports. Devotees of UFO's have been known to reject the "confessions" of hoaxers, this deliberate rejection of the truth showing what kind of individuals objective researchers often are up against. This reminds me of the refusal of some crop circle "believers" to accept the confessions of the artistically talented hoaxers who showed exactly how the circles were produced.
False echoes on radar have always been a problem for operators. These can turn out to be flocks of birds, insect swarms, aircraft illegally in the airspace amongst other things. The anomolous propagation of radio waves, caused by large fluctuations in air density may also show up on radar.
A senior investigator into alien abduction cases finally concluded that the answer to these cases is "intercranial rather than interstellar", a concise explanation putting these cases into perspective.
The reception of anomolous radio signals in Norway and The Netherlands in the '20's and '30's is still not explained. However these are now thought to be "whistlers" which are radio waves which could be mistaken for intelligent signals but are now known to be the radio emission from electrical storms in the Earth's atmosphere. These emissions can propagate for thousands of miles 'echoing' around the atmosphere. This article does not, of course, prove that all UFO sightings have a mundane, natural explanation but human error, whether deliberate fraud or genuine misidentification, must always be the preeminent explanation.
What evidence do we have for extraterrestrial visits to Earth? None..no objects, no artifacts, no machines...nothing. If extraterrestrials could traverse interstellar space and visit Earth we would soon know. What point would there be to crossing light years of interstellar space and not making yourself known? A non-intervention policy perhaps? Why then show yourself to large numbers of people either intentionally or otherwise? The weight of evidence I believe gives us a human rather than alien explanation for UFO's.