Seventy years after the sighting that started it all, what are unidentified flying objects and where do they come from?

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Today is World UFO Day, when UFO enthusiasts around the world celebrate that strange phenomenon and remind the public that many mysteries remain unsolved. A whole 71 years after the sighting that kicked off the worldwide UFO craze, we are still no closer to determining what exactly causes hundreds of thousands of people to believe they have been witnesses to flying saucers.

Getty ImagesUFO eyewitness Kenneth Arnold, center, examines an alleged photo of a UFO with two other pilots.

The History of “Flying Saucers”

On June 24th 1947, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying his private airplane over the Pacific Northwest when he suddenly realized he was not alone in the skies. Near Mt. Rainier, Washington Arnold spotted “nine objects, glowing bright bluish-white” flying nearby. Eight of the objects were roughly disc-shaped, while the ninth larger object resembled a crescent. The nine objects were flying in a v-shaped formation.

Arnold estimated the craft were flying somewhere around 1,200 miles an hour and that he was witnessing a military exercise. He also compared their motion to a “saucer if you skipped it across water.” The objects obviously did not resemble any known aircraft and at the time there were no aircraft capable of flying in formation at Mach 1.5—Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier only two months later.

The press misconstrued the “saucer” comment, applying it to their physical description, and the term flying saucer was born. Obviously, since the objects were beyond the ability of humans, newly minted UFO experts declared the objects had to be from space and evidence of life on other planets. Though in strict terms, a UFO is merely a mysterious flying craft and so is not inherently tied to the idea of visiting aliens.

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“Could other stars harbor other forms of life, and could they be more advanced than ours?” If there are aliens, UFO thinkers speculated, it would stand to reason that at least some of them are millennia more advanced than we are, leaping across the universe in the blink of an eye.

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Arnold’s sighting over the Pacific Northwest triggered a flying saucer mania, with flying saucers reported worldwide. This coincided with fast paced technological development which saw the U.S. go from subsonic propeller-driven fighters to supersonic jet-powered fighters. The U.S. was also set to push into space with the establishment of NASA and the eventual goal of reaching the moon. Anything seemed possible, so why not aliens?

In the 1970s, as environmental problems mounted, trust in government decreased and the threat of nuclear war loomed, the emphasis shifted to reports of face-to-face contact with alien species, many of which were apparently unhappy with how humans were ruining the planet.

In the 1990s this narrative of direct interaction grew to its most extreme, with thousands reporting that they had been “abducted” by aliens, who then performed medical experiments.

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Is the Government Hiding Something?
If you take these experiences to be even remotely true, the logic leads you to an inevitable conclusion: The U.S. government knows far more than it lets on about flying saucers. One conviction among UFOlogists is that the U.S. government not only knows more about aliens than it lets on, but that actively cooperates with them. According to some conspiracy theories, the federal government, particularly the national security apparatus, allows aliens to maintain underground bases, such as the one allegedly underneath Dulce, New Mexico, or in the mountain next to the famous Area 51 in Nevada.