I have had no personal experience of
extraterrestrials. Never seen a UFO. Never been abducted by an alien or had an
episode of “lost time.” I just write about such things in my Interstellar Rescue SFR series novels.
But I have done my research on the subject
of alien visitation to our little planet—the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book
investigations (1952-1969), the military’s later Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program (AATIP) from 2008 to 2011, Groom Lake, Roswell, reverse
engineering, abductions and so on.
One thing that has always puzzled me is the
rise and fall in the numbers of UFO sightings. The post-World War II era was a
Golden Age of UFO encounters and alien abduction claims (thus Project Blue
Book, and, not coincidentally, a surge in the popularity of science fiction,
both in written form and on the movie screen). Sightings rose again during the Sixties
decade of the Space Race but fell off after we reached the moon and the more
mundane space shuttle program took over NASA.
The Mutual
UFO Network (MUFON)still received some 7000 reports of sightings every day
to its website in 2018 but reported last year that reports had peaked in 2012
and dropped some 30-40 percent between 2012 and 2017. Cheryl Costa of the
National UFO Reporting Center confirmed the observation, stating that after a
rise in reports from 2001 through 2012, reported sightings have been on the
decline.
How this can be in an age of ubiquitous phone
cameras, selfies and videos is a little hard to explain. MUFON statistician
David Korts reviews the photos and videos his organization receives and attempts
to filter out the hoaxes, mistakes and otherwise explainable phenomena and ends
up with about 50 percent of the total as genuinely “unidentified.” He still
doesn’t understand the drop-off in reports.
““At this point, it’s unclear. It’s
perplexing,” he said in a
2018 interview with Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown. “I don’t know why it
is. I think it’s an interesting question. That’s the kind of thing you discover
by doing this kind of work.”
But perhaps the pendulum is swinging the
other way. The U.S.
Navy just this week issued new guidelines to its personnel for reporting UFO
sightings. This was reportedly in response to a spate of recent encounters
with what WWII pilots used to call “foo fighters” in the skies by Navy flyers
and sailors.
 |
| A screengrab from the NYTIMES shows what the Navy is on about. |
Clearly, the brass did not intend to give
these instances immediate credence by updating the procedure for filing the reports.
But, given military parlance, that was about all that was clear. This was their
statement, according to an article in Politico:
“There have
been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering
various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,”
the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. “For
safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these
reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.
“As part of this effort,” it added, “the Navy is
updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected
incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet
that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft.”
Got that? Great, carry on.
In the meantime, the procedure for us
civilians is the same as it has always been. See a UFO, whip out your phone,
take a video and send it to MUFON. Or run like hell in the opposite direction.
Personally, I’ll choose Option #2 and live to write another day.
Cheers, Donna
*Information for this post drawn from “Our Skies
Are More Watched than Ever, So Why Are Reported UFO Sightings on the Decline,
by Jennings Brown,” Gizmodo.com, 7/02/18, https://gizmodo.com/our-skies-are-more-watched-than-ever-so-why-are-report-1827284430
“The U.S. Navy is Working on ‘New Guidelines’
on How to Report UFOs,” by Tom McKay, Gizmodo.com, 4/24/19, https://gizmodo.com/our-skies-are-more-watched-than-ever-so-why-are-report-1827284430
Cool! I've never seen an UFO, but did have a weird experience one night when we drove to mountains on vacation. We were in the Central Valley and the entire night sky lit up blue. (Mind you, that's a lot of sky!) Later, a co-worker talked about seeing the blue light in the Valley that night too. Neither of us ever learned what caused it, therefore, we're going with the aliens theory.
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