US explains what most UFO sightings actually are
The Pentagon has studied sightings of unidentified phenomena going far back and a new report addresses some theories.
UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, have long been one of the most fascinating rabbit holes you can fall down as you start to look into conspiracy theories.
There are vast communities out there who remain convinced that we have had contact with alien life in the form of these flying vessels, but that this has been consistently covered up by world governments.
This thinking has fuelled decades of speculation about places like Area 51, but most governments are actually quite keen to be more communicative about the whole question.
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Take the US Department of Defense, which has reportedly released a lengthy report about its work to explain UFO sightings over the years.
The report comes out of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, and concerns itself with a wide range of historical instances where the Government might have looked into UFO sightings.
In fact, it doesn't call them UFOs anymore - that term has fallen out of use and has been replaced officially by Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (or UAP). Whether this is just because of the history of theories around the term UFO is anyone's guess.
Regardless, the report has sections on a whole heap of old cases where the US looked into UAP sightings and reports. As it explains in its introduction: "Since 1945, the USG has funded and supported UAP investigations with the goal of determining whether UAP represented a flight safety risk, technological leaps by competitor nations, or evidence of off-world technology under intelligent control".
Those are three pretty obvious reasons for the government to be interested in sightings, and the report is also quite clear-eyed about people's interest in the topic.
It also acknowledges "a particularly persistent narrative that the USG - or a secretive organization within it - recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains" and that it kept this secret from the public for decades.
The key conclusions of the report are not a huge surprise, either, including the top-line summary that: "AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."
Still, the report seems to forensically and quite respectfully argue that most theories about these UAPs are founded on biases that individuals have - beliefs that make it hard for them to discredit apparent sightings, or to believe official explanations for them.
So, while the vast majority of these sightings are explained by test flights, drone outings, early secretive missile projects and environmental factors, the theories persist.
The full report is a fascinating read, unsurprisingly, featuring many snippets from interviews and cataloguing some episodes and arguments that might be new to you, so check it out if you've got a bit of a UFO or UAP fascination of your own.