The Truth about Unidentified Flying Objects

There have been many UFO sightings over the years but did you know...

The first well-known UFO sighting was in 1947. A business man by the name of Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington when he was flying his small plane. Arnold estimated the speeds of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour. Arnold said they moved "like saucers skipping on water." In the report that followed it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped hence the name flying saucers.

The Roswell UFO incident-

In 1947 Kenneth Arnold was not the only person to see a UFO. Another man by the name of W.W "Mac" Brazel came across a mysterious 200- year old wreckage. The wreckage was near an Army airfield in Roswell, New Mexico. The conspiracy fanned in the 1950's when dummies with latex "skin" and aluminum "bones" that looked identical to aliens as if they fell from the sky across Roswell, New Mexico and the military rushed to pick them up in military vehicles. Fast forward to fifty years later and the military made a statement admitting that the Roswell wreckage was part of Project Mogul. Project Mogul was a top secret espionage project.

Project Blue Book-

Sightings of UFO's increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force started an investigation of these reports called Project Sign. Cold War tension was mounting and the initial opinion was that the UFO's were most likely sophisticated Soviet aircraft. Some researchers think that they might be out of this world spacecrafts, the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).

Within a year, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge. In 1952 it itself was replaced by the official inquiries of UFO's, Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. From 1952 to 1969 Project Blue Book compiled reports of roughly 12,000 sightings or events. Each of the cases were classified as (1) "identified" with a known astronomical artificial (human-caused) phenomenon or (2) "unidentified."

The Robertson Panel and Condon Report-

The obsession with the UFO phenomenon was under way. In the summer of 1952 a series of radar and visual sightings occurred near the National Airport in Washington, D.C. The events that happened were attributed to temperature inversions in the air. Not everyone was convinced with this explanation. Meanwhile, the reports were at an all time high.

This led to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to command the U.S. government to create an expert panel to investigate the phenomena. The panel was led by H.P. Robertson. Robertson was a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. The panel also consisted of other physicists, an astronomer, and a rocket engineer. The Robertson panel met for three days in 1953 to interview military officers and the head of Project Blue Book. The Panel also reviewed films and photographs of UFOs.

Their conclusions were that (1) 90 percent of the sightings could be easily attributed to astronomical and meteorological phenomena; (2) there was no security threat; and (3) there was no evidence to support the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). In 1966 a second committee was set up at the request of the Air force to review the most interesting material gathered by Project Blue Book. Two years later this committee, which made a detailed study of 59 UFO sightings, released its results as Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects also known as Condon report. This report was named after Edward U. Condon, the physicist who led the investigation.