FEWER UFOS? MAYBE NOT, NAVY SAYS

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

Close Encounters On My Doorstep: The #Rendlesham Forest #UFO Trail

I often talk about how much I love the place where I live and how close I am to settings that have inspired so much of my writing. But over my seven week break, I finally visited a site of huge importance in the history of UFO sightings--in the UK at least--and on my very own doorstep. It's even known as Britain's Roswell.

Taken from the Rendlesham Forest UFO Trail leaflet published by the Forestry Commission:

Link to further info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

Rendlesham Forest is located in the county of Suffolk, about 8 miles east of Ipswich and about a half hour drive from my home town of Colchester. The forest is mostly coniferous with some broadleaved belts, heathland and wetland, covering approximately 5.8 square miles or 15 square km, and owned by the Forestry Commission. The UFO trail is 3 miles long around the eastern end of of the forest, and navigates the key areas reportedly involved in the UFO Incident of 1980. Both civilian and military personnel witnessed and reported the strange sightings, which The Ministry of Defence (MoD) stated 'posed no threat to national security', and so were never was investigated. The sightings have been blamed on a fireball, the Orford Ness lighthouse and even bright stars.

I'm going to straight up admit I'm not a believer in alien visitors, or a fan of such stories (whether truth or fiction), nor am I convinced by conspiracy theories. Maybe that's a bit odd for a SF author. My husband is the fan of such things though, of the unexplained and the odd. So he was the one who suggested visiting the forest. Me, I love woodland, even more than the beach. The annual holiday in Wales with my parents and sister was the highlight of my year up until my teens. I'd wander along the river under the trees at the campsite all day, or we'd be taken to one of the many walking trails through mostly pine forests that dot the area. The scent of pine needles and damp earth, the dappled sunlight, the distant sounds of flowing water and the wind in the treetops...bliss. So regardless of the UFO sighting, I was up for it.

I have to admit that walking through the quiet of the forest occasionally broken by the eerie sound of the wind through the trees - an almost mechanical/aircraft like whine that blots out the birdsong - I can imagine that, combined with strange lights in the sky, it would be easy to convince myself of something unearthly occurring. There is a theory that perhaps the alien visitors were drawn by the deadly stockpile of US nuclear weapons and they came to neutralize them and so prevent us destroying ourselves, or simply to check them out. It sounds plausible (though I would ask "why would they care?").

But it was a pleasant walk, well marked with sign posts and information to make it more interesting, and the UFO sculpture at the halfway point was fun (though sadly graffitied).

And together me, hubs, and the monsters came up with our own story. Of alien visitors who came to cut their own Christmas tree from a pine forest on a remote blue-green planet because the best ones only grown on Earth. The next day with all the new toys played with, Little Alien asked its parents to take it back to build dens, since their planet no longer has trees. They used highly trained space beavers to cut the logs (because lasers are sooooo last millennium), and were spotted because Little Alien begged for five more minutes like any child in the universe, then demanded to be allowed to fly the spacecraft until they reached the outer atmosphere. Of course, one of the highly trained space beavers got left behind and Little Alien wouldn't sleep without it so they had to come back again to rescue the beaver...

The truth is out there. Maybe. :P