Unidentified flying objects: fact or fiction?
Pilot Clarence Chiles and co-pilot John Whitted were flying a commercial plane from Houston to Atlanta when they suddenly saw a dazzling light coming directly toward them, a light faster than any other plane could be, at least by 1948 standards. The shape of the craft resembled the fuselage of an airplane without wings, and it was blue in color. It glows from beneath her body. After it passed at a lightning speed, the object released what looked like flames before quickly heading toward the clouds to disappear. Subsequently, the US Air Force opened an investigation into this strange event within the framework of Project SINE, which was its first research program on unidentified flying objects.
This was one of many stories about flying saucers included in the book “Unidentified Flying Object… The Story of the American Government’s Search for Alien Life Here and There,” as told by American writer and journalist Garrett M. Graf. In this book, Graf examines, in three chronological sections, decades of scientific research, both federal and private, on UFOs and their relationship to the hypothetical life of extraterrestrial aliens.
Although there is nothing concrete linking UFOs to extraterrestrials, the two are firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. “The question people really ask when they ask whether UFOs are real is: Are we alone?” Graf writes. This is the central question that the book seeks to answer.
Graff, who previously authored the books “A New History of the Watergate Scandal” and “The Only Plane in the Sky,” devoted himself to studying the past eighty years of the history of UFOs, providing great details about the main players, programs, materials, and primary sources. The modern story of UFOs often begins, as here, with the convergence of two events in 1947: a pilot named Kenneth Arnold, while flying near Mount Rainier, saw nine bright objects flying faster than anything he had ever seen before. . Around the time of Arnold’s sighting, something crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. The US Army initially announced that it was a flying saucer, but later changed that and said that the crashed object was a meteorological balloon.
These sightings precipitated a flood of reports of seeing unidentified flying objects. Although officials were skeptical, these reports raised concerns about American national security. “Was the United States the target of surveillance and reconnaissance by a secret Soviet space weapon?” Graf writes about the concerns that existed at the time. American officials feared that the Soviets would monitor what was happening on the ground, similar to US Air Force officer Chuck Yeager’s efforts to break the sound barrier. “Certain world-changing projects, such as Yeager, have been a major reason for the military’s great concern about waves of UFO sightings,” Graff writes.
These concerns eventually prompted the Ministry of Defense to launch a series of studies on unidentified flying objects, such as the “Sine” and “Gradge” projects, and “Blue Book,” which focused on investigating UFO stories for more than 20 years. But the general result of those government studies remained consistent. Air Force Colonel Robert Landry summed up this view early on, referring to the reports he provided to President Harry Truman every three months: “The intelligence community never got anything of substance that was credible or threatening to the country.” A committee set up to review the Blue Book project also reported that of the more than 10,000 observations recorded in its database, “there appears to be no confirmed and completely satisfactory evidence of a situation that clearly falls outside the framework of currently known science and technology.” For this reason, Graff writes, “they proposed removing the focus on the UFO issue from the realm of national security.”
But such conclusions may raise some doubts, in part because the government has not always dealt with the subject of UFOs transparently. For example, the object that crashed in Roswell was not a weather balloon, but rather part of “Project Mogul,” a system for detecting nuclear explosions, a fact that was only revealed in the 1990s after pressure from public opinion, which shows that the military distorted the truth.
At the beginning of the book, Graf writes that “the government’s cover-up of UFOs was primarily a cover-up driven not by knowledge but by ignorance. But this does not mean that the government knows something that it does not want to tell us, but rather that the government is not comfortable telling us that it does not know anything at all.” However, what the book does not fully acknowledge is that there may not, in fact, be much to know.
But today the US Army is once again trying to find out everything there is to know. After a journey through the past, Graff’s book reaches the present, where officials prefer to call unidentified flying objects “unidentified aerial phenomena.” This sober-sounding term is meant to reflect the topic’s renewed appeal, a shift that Graff attributes beginning to events in 2017 when news stories revealed an effort called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program, which lasted for about five years and ended in 2017. 2012. According to Graf’s description, the program studied unidentified atmospheric phenomena.
However, the existence of the program, its description in news coverage, and the UFO videos that accompanied it all changed the rules of the game. “It has actually led to something new: a real, and so far apparently permanent, change in public perception of UFOs,” Graff writes. Since then, the US Department of Defense has established an office to deal with “unidentified aerial phenomena,” the military has established guidelines for reporting strange sightings, and NASA has launched a scientific study on the subject.
Muhammad Waqif
Book: Unidentified Flying Object…the story of the American government’s search for alien life here and there
Author: Garrett Graf
Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
Publication date: November 2023
#Unidentified #flying #objects #fact #fiction