Always intrigued by UFOs, while not believing for a moment that they represent anything extra-terrestrial. As noted here before, they appear to be more psychological than anything else, perhaps with some infrequent natural phenomena thrown into the mix. This year is the seventy fifth anniversary of the first sightings of the near modern era.
In June 1947, a commercial pilot, Kenneth Arnold, claimed to have seen nine "flying discs" zipping across Washington state in the US at 1,200 mph. The editor of the East Oregonian newspaper sent this utterly unverifiable story to the Associated Press news service, and on 26 June, Hearst International put out a press release that contained the fateful term "flying saucers". The story spread around the globe considerably faster than 1,200 mph. Soon there were hundreds of other reported sightings – including one of crashed flying-saucer debris in Roswell, New Mexico. Some of these reports were clearly hoaxes: it wasn't hard to fake a saucer photograph if you had a hubcap, frisbee or pizza to hand. Some sightings, says Shail, were of "weather balloons, Zeppelins, cloud formations and experimental aircraft being developed by the US Air Force as part of the Cold War". And, just to be open-minded about it, perhaps some of the sightings were of Martians who were hovering over sparsely populated parts of the Earth for the fun of it. But one thing was certain: saucer-mania had begun.
And so it has continued.
Here's a report on a very interesting French organisation that seeks to find rational explanations for UFOs - that is the Study and Information Group on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (GEIPAN), which has been in existence for 45 years now. It is now intended that GEIPAN will work closely with NASA in this area.
Closer to home from the PSNI a report on UFO sightings in Northern Ireland in 2022.
Request 1
How many UFO sightings did the PSNI receive in relation in 2022, from January 1 to current date?
Could the data be broken down by date and location of reported sighting, detail of sighting and whether any investigation was carried out?
Rather disappointingly:
Answer
Between 1st January 2022 and 3rd November 2022 there was 1 incident of UFO sightings reported to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The incident reported occurred in the Stewartstown area of Dungannon on the 30th of October 2022. The caller reported seeing a UFO flying from the Belfast direction to Dungannon every evening. No further Police action was required on this occasion.
Hmmm...
Meanwhile in the US there's this:
The U.S. government's brand new UFO-tracking office has been open for half a year but business is already booming. https://www.livescience.com/hundreds-of-ufo-reports
Over the last six months, the office — named the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — has received "several hundreds" of new UFO reports from U.S. military personnel, office director Sean Kirkpatrick told the Associated Press. This adds to more than 140 UFO sightings reported by the military between 2004 and 2021, which were previously described in a much-anticipated report from the Pentagon in June 2021.
The new reports, which were filed this year by personnel in the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, describe unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP — the government's preferred name for UFOs — sighted in the air, under water and in space.
But...
None of the reports, old or new, show any hint of alien activity, Kirkpatrick noted.
And as the Guardian reported:
This May, Congress held its first hearing in more than half a century on the topic, with members expressing concern that – whether or not the objects are alien or potentially new technology being flown by China, Russia or another potential adversary – the unknown creates a security risk.
So far, "we have not seen anything, and we're still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin", said Ronald Moultrie, under secretary of defense for intelligence and security. "Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety."
The office is also working on ways to improve its ability to identify unknown objects, such as by recalibrating sensors that may be focused just on known adversary aircraft or drone signatures, Moultrie said.
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