Ufos Fact Or Fiction Essays - Unidentified Flying Objects, Ufology

Ufos: Fact Or Fiction? Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, are one of the most controversial mysteries known to mankind. From ancient to present times, unidentified objects have been seen in the sky by millions of people. The question is, of course, what is it that we are seeing in our skies? Are they foreign spacecrafts from distant planets, merely Air Force experiments, or only our imagination? Many people believe that extraterrestrial life is existent and far more advanced then us. Conversely, many believe that aliens are just figments of our optimistic imaginations. What about our governments? Are they hiding vital information from us, the citizens of the world, in belief that we are better off not knowing the truth? Countless government employees have continually denied allegations of UFOs being in contact with our planet. Then again, many of these officials have also allegedly taken part in UFO cover-ups and seen flying saucers for themselves. Is there some huge conspiracy, or are there only attention-hungry people who wish to be in the spotlight? Arguments are incredibly strong for both sides. There is an excessive amount of information which could lead one to assume that UFOs are fiction, yet there is also an abundant amount of evidence which suggests that UFOs are in fact out there. What, and who, are we to believe? I. On September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a renowned astronomer of his time, saw two luminous bodies that he said were not meteors flying through the air (Lore 53). Nine years later at Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, many astronomers witnessed a luminous object that moved quickly across the sky, stopped, changed course to the west, then to the south, where it hovered for four minutes. Then it headed toward the north. (Lore 53) UFOs. What are they, and where do they come from? Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, are one of the worlds oldest and most intriguing mysteries. UFOs are commonly called flying saucers, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as any of various unidentified flying objects typically reported and described as luminous discs (272). Esteemed Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold coined the phrase flying saucer when in June of 1947 he saw saucer-shaped discs flying over the Cascade Mountains. It was in this year that these unidentified flying object sightings began to escalate. About one month after Arnold saw these objects in the sky the incident at Roswell occurred. July of 1947, Roswell, New Mexico. The spaceships of extraterrestrials flew over the site of a 1945 atomic bomb test site. During flight, one of these spacecrafts malfunctioned and crashed to the earth. Its entire crew was killed. As Charles Moore stated: various portions of this sequence of events were observed on Army Air Force radars and by eyewitnesses. Thus, alerted, the military acted swiftly; a cordon of troops was placed around the impact site; the wreckage and the small, humaniod alien bodies were removed; and all traces of the crash were expunged. (3) On the 8th of July, the public relations officer at Roswell Army Air Force issued a press release which stated that they had recovered a flying disk that had been sent on to higher headquarters for examination (Moore 3). Within hours though, this announcement was repudiated. The general in command of the regional Army Air Force declared that the wreckage was merely the remains of a weather balloon. This latter story was obviously invented to conceal the recovery of an alien spacecraft. Government officials continued this cover-up by threatening eyewitnesses and local reporters with severe reprisals if they continued to reveal information about the flying disk (Moore 3). This was just the beginning of a massive cover-up, which attempts to keep the worlds citizens in the dark. It wasnt until 1979 when a former military intelligence officer from the Roswell Army Air Force defied the security regulations and spoke out. He told reporters and UFO investigators that the wreckage collected near Roswell in 1947 was not that of a weather balloon and that the fragments he had seen and handled exhibited unusual properties, in terms of hardness and strength, that were not possessed by terrestrial materials (Moore 4). In following years researchers interviewed many people who had firsthand or secondhand knowledge about the