UFOs are seen tens of thousands of times every year. Most of these cases can be easily explained by scientists. Does this mean that it is time to write down ufology forever in pseudoscience, or is it worth first clarifying several incidents that have remained unsolved? As soon as the prominent British publication The Guardian announced a sharp decline in UFO sightings, mysterious blue lights were noticed over one of the districts of Moscow. Coincidentally or not, but almost simultaneously a strange light in the night clouds was recorded on the other side of the world - in the American resort town of Myrtle Beach.
Eyewitnesses filmed both cases and posted them on social media. Scientists were quick to answer. Both in our country and in the United States, experts explain celestial lights by optical effects. They say that bright city illumination is reflected from low clouds, so light spots are jumping across the sky. It sounds logical, but not everyone is convinced. Although research shows that 80% of observations of unidentified objects in the air can really be attributed to the projection of light in the clouds, distant headlights, flames of rocket nozzles, balloons and other earthly phenomena, there are still 20% of cases that do not lend themselves to simple explanations.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2019 will mark 70 years since the first use of the term "ufology". Despite the best efforts of the skeptics, enthusiasts who believe in the presence of aliens among us persistently continue to collect evidence of alien expansion. Is there even a grain of truth in their work, or is it optical effects?
Chasing a shadow
At the end of last year, it became known that the Pentagon had invested tens of millions of dollars in a classified UFO study program. The military department, it turns out, considers "anomalous aerospace" phenomena as a threat to US national security. Thanks to the former head of the program, Luis Elizondo, it became known about the huge database of evidence for the existence of UFOs. Dissatisfied with the lack of management attention, Elizondo went into the private sector and became a consultant to the company "To the Stars", but before that he achieved the removal of the secrecy label from two unique videos.
Both footage was captured from the cockpits of US Air Force fighters. Before publication, some moments were cut out, but it is also so obvious that the military pilots had to face more than just light illumination. Luminous objects move across the sky with great speed and plummet downward, hovering above the sea surface. The journalists managed to contact the pilot of one of the aircraft chasing the UFO. David Freyvor not only confirmed contact with a strange oval-shaped object, but also described how it flew over the Pacific Ocean and made the water boil like boiling water. According to Freyvor, it is doubtful that such an object could have been created by earthlings.
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Invisible invasion
Since 2014, the number of UFO sightings has fallen and has almost halved, reports The Guardian, citing two major ufological sites. There are other data, according to which only last year, celestial anomalies were observed over 84 thousand times, which is 12% more than the number of similar cases in 2016. With the naked eye, the decline in interest in "flying saucers" and finds, which are attributed to alien origin, is also not visible. This week alone, several such cases were reported to the press. In addition to blue lights over Moscow and flashes of light in Myrtle Beach, it became known about a mysterious object washed ashore near the American Charleston.
According to the Daily Mail, a cylinder of soft material may be a piece of underwater pipes, part of a sea buoy or space debris, but some eyewitnesses are sure that this is an object that came to Earth from other worlds. You can touch the cylinder and find out its real nature, but the real deposits of ufological treasures are located in hard-to-reach places - we know about their existence only thanks to enthusiasts. Under a magnifying glass, ufologists study every millimeter of the earth's surface on satellite images, accessible through Google maps and similar services.
In September, they found fragments of "alien disks" in the ice of Antarctica, which supposedly lie next to some ancient landing site or other type of alien infrastructure created in time immemorial to prepare an invasion of Earth. Such finds are similar to the fruit of an excessively violent fantasy - you never know what flaw of the earth's surface or an object created by people can be mistaken for a spaceship from an alien galaxy. For example, some projects of modern architects have roofs that exactly copy the images of flying saucers from science fiction movies.
But skeptics do not manage to convincingly explain every UFO incident. Among them are both recent cases and stories that happened many years ago. For example, during the Korean War, dozens of American military personnel reported strange light flashes in the sky. In one case, an entire unit suffered painful effects when attacked by pulsating light. This story has not yet received an unambiguous explanation.
Of course, ufology can hardly be called a serious scientific discipline. For the most part, this is a movement of enthusiasts, often ready to believe in any fiction or to pass off the lights of distant headlights for lasers of Martian starships. But one cannot discount all UFO-related phenomena until they are fully explained. Judging by the amount of previously classified information that began to appear in the public domain, and by the fact that professionals like the previously mentioned company "To the Stars" got down to business, in the near future we will either observe a complete exposure of the "UFO effect", or learn something by -really amazing and shocking about the universe around us. Perhaps this can become the main gift of ufology on its 70th anniversary.
Alexey Yesod