Unit 53
UFO Mystery
The first mass sightings of UFOs in the United States came in 1896, when a number of people from California to the Midwest reported seeing mysterious aircraft. According to reports, these flying machines were cigar-shaped with intense colored lights. Another wave of UFO sightings were reported in 1909 and 1910, and, during World War Two. A poll taken in 1947, though, indicated that few Americans associated flying disks with extraterrestrial spaceships; most people thought of the reported sightings as optical illusions, unknown natural phenomena, or top-secret military vehicles not known to the public.
A series of sightings between 1947 and 1949 changed public views of UFOs. And the UFO as an alien vehicle became the public interpretation of these phenomena. The government quickly established committees to investigate the sightings. The Air Force's project, Sign, which began its work in 1948, concluded that UFOs were real, but not extraordinary. UFOs, the committee concluded, were not extraterrestrial spaceships, but rather astronomical objects and weather balloons. A second project, Grudge, Published similar findings, but got little public belief.
Government officials thus started a series of programs to educate the public on matters related to UFO. This policy has remained largely unchanged for the past forty years. But in the eyes of many UFO fans, government officials were trying to hide information on extraterrestrial UFOs for fear of mass panic.
The UFO craze continued throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. Numbers of sightings increased steadily, and, as of the late 1990s, almost half of Americans believed that UFOs were in fact extraterrestrial spaceships. The form of the UFO myth changed shape somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, as individuals began to claim that, not only had they seen UFOs, but that they had actually been on board the spacecraft, as aliens had abducted them and performed experiments on them before returning them to Earth. One "abducted" eighteen-year-old claimed to have had sex with an E.T.
Scholars believe that the UFO myth contains religious-like elements that do much to explain its massive appeal, In believing the existence of superhuman being, by expecting travel to a better planet, and by creating a fellow community, the UFO myth embodies much of popular religious belief. Meanwhile, the UFO myth, with its government conspiracy speculations, indicates public's distrust of the government. Periods of high numbers of UFO sightings, have corresponded to a number of crises in government faith, among them the Vietnam War and Watergate.
But, as scholar Curtis Peebles has noted, "We watch the skies seeking meaning. In the end, what we find is ourselves." |