Before starting a conversation about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), you should define the terminology. Scientists call a UFO any flying body whose existence cannot be explained by the available scientific means. This definition is too broad - it covers many objects that are not of interest to the general public. In everyday life, the abbreviation UFO has long been applied to mysterious, mysterious controlled objects that have arrived from somewhere from a distant universe or even from other worlds. So let's agree to call a UFO something that even remotely resembles an alien ship.
The second caveat concerns the word “facts”. When applied to UFOs, the word "facts" should be used with extreme caution. There is no material evidence of the existence of a UFO, there are only more or less reliable words of eyewitnesses, as well as photographs, films and videos. Unfortunately, unscrupulous businessmen from ufology have almost completely undermined the credibility of such UFO fixations with their fakes. And recently, with the proliferation of computer technologies for image processing, any schoolchild can tolerably fake a photo or video. Therefore, nevertheless, there is something of religion in ufology - it is mainly based on faith.
1. Numerous reports of observation, pursuit, attacks and even air battles with the participation of UFOs came to the headquarters of the Air Force (and some went further, up to the highest leaders of states) during the Second World War. Moreover, at about the same time, British and American pilots saw glowing balls up to 2 meters in diameter, and German air defense soldiers observed huge one-hundred-meter cigar-shaped vehicles. These were not just idle soldiers' tales, but official reports. Of course, it is always necessary to stress the nervous tension of the pilots and anti-aircraft gunners and the fact that atheists do not exist not only in the trenches, but also at the controls of fighters and bombers - anything can be seen. Without accusing the pilots of cowardice, it should be mentioned that the pilots were unnerved by the endless chatter of Nazi bosses about the "wunderwaffe". Well, what if they still invented a kind of superplane and right now they will test it on me? Here balls gleam in the eyes ... True, the balls were seen and even spent fifteen hundred anti-aircraft shells on them in the calm sky over the USA, in California. If it was a hallucination, then it was very massive - the balls flying from the sea in a dense group separated and performed complex maneuvers, not paying attention to the spotlights and anti-aircraft fire.
2. In 1947, two rural idiots from the town of Tacoma, Washington State (this is on the opposite edge of the US capital) decided to either become famous, or get insurance for a battered boat. In general, some Fred Crisman and Harold E. Dahl (pay attention to this “E” - do you know a lot in the history of the US Harold Dalov, so that this should be distinguished by an initial?) Reported that they saw a UFO. Not only that, the alien ship collapsed and the debris killed Dal's dog and damaged the boat. A journalist from a local newspaper, a pilot with an interest in UFOs and two military intelligence officers arrived at the scene. An impromptu commission made sure the couple were lying and went home. Unfortunately, on the way back, the plane with the scouts crashed. Although Dahl and Krizman soon confessed to the hoax, the conspiracy theory received a good blow with spurs - not only do the aliens fly around the United States without hindrance, they also kill scouts.
3. Quackery and fraud from ufology could have been pinned down in the bud, had the first FBI director John Edgar Hoover, who is considered almost a hero in the United States, at least something other than excessive ambition in his head. When reports of UFOs rained down in dozens, Lieutenant General Stratemeyer, the deputy chief of intelligence of the US Air Force on the West Coast, came up with an excellent algorithm: the military will take care of the technical side of the case, and the FBI agents - on the ground, that is, they will arrange all UFO “witnesses” to have a fun life with the prospect of spending years 20 in federal prison for perjury. Obviously, such work by the FBI would reduce the number of false UFO witnesses significantly. But Hoover flared with righteous anger: some general dared to command his employees! The agents were recalled. The FBI sheep still write reports about aliens only in secret and only to the top management. Ufologists believe that since they are hiding, it means that there is something there.
Symbol of Comprehensive Competence John Hoover
4. The name “flying saucer” (English “flying saucer”, “flying saucer”) stuck to the supposedly alien ships not because of their shape. American Kenneth Arnold, in 1947, saw either the glare of the sun thrown by clouds or snow clouds, or really some kind of flying machines. Arnold was a former military pilot and made a big splash. In the US, a flurry of UFO sightings began, and Arnold became a national star. Unfortunately, he was both tongue-tied and verbose. According to him, the chain of aircraft looked like either the traces left on the water by a flat “pancake” stone thrown horizontally, or a few pebbles thrown into the water from a saucer. A newspaper reporter picked up the floor, and since then the vast majority of UFOs have been called “flying saucers,” even if only some lights are visible.
Kenneth Arnold
5. The first book on the UFO problem was published in 1950 in the United States. Donald Keiho made his bestseller Flying Saucers Really Exist from rumors, gossip and outright inventions. The main postulate of the book was the accusation of the military command of hiding the results of investigations into reports of UFOs. Keiho wrote that the military was afraid of panic among the civilian population, and therefore classified all information about the UFO. He also said that the aliens appeared on Earth after the tests of nuclear weapons - they know what its use leads to. In the atmosphere of those years - the fear of the USSR and nuclear weapons, the beginning of the Korean War, McCarthyism and the search for communists under every bed - many considered the book to be almost a revelation from above.
6. Unprecedented UFO activity over Washington and in its vicinity in 1952 is among the cases that have not yet been explained. For obvious reasons, the sky over the American capital should be very tightly blocked by air defense forces - then the Communists in the States were looking for under every bed. In particular, three radars control the airspace at once. The radars worked flawlessly - all three recorded flights of unknown aircraft in the dark. UFOs even flew over the White House and the Capitol. The alarm revealed a deplorable situation in the air defense aviation. The reaction time of aviation instead of the minutes prescribed by the instruction was calculated in hours. The dispatchers also tried to write their name in history forever. On July 19, seeing that aviation, as always, was late, they turned in the direction of the UFO passenger DC-9 - the largest airliner at that time. Hypothetical aliens, if they arrived with hostile goals, would not even need a superweapon - they would simply have to drop the liner on the sleeping American capital with a sharp maneuver. Fortunately, the lights only dodged the plane flying towards them. When, one of the nights, military aircraft managed to arrive in the area where the UFOs were located, they evaded them and left at high speed.
8. The Soviet Union had its own analogue "UFO", which was born in a completely terrestrial design bureau. The story is similar: a secret aerial vehicle (in this case the ekranoplan is half an airplane, half a hovercraft), tests by casual observers, rumors about aliens from the stars. Due to the peculiarities of Soviet society and the press, however, these rumors excited a limited number of people and only conversations with eyewitnesses in the district office of the KGB.
9. UFO Day is celebrated on July 2 on the anniversary of the Roswell incident. On this day in 1947, a UFO allegedly crashed northwest of the American city of Roswell (New Mexico). He and the remains of several aliens were discovered by archaeological students. In those years, American counterintelligence still regularly caught mice, and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning were not even in the project. The incident was promptly classified, the wreckage and bodies were allegedly taken to the airbase, the local media were silenced. Moreover, when the military arrived at the local radio station, the announcer was just talking about the incident on the air. The arguments of the people in uniform turned out to be stronger than the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, and the announcer interrupted the broadcast in mid-sentence. Subsequently, the history of the incident was cleaned up and here - supposedly not by the military, but by the secretary of the Federal Communications Commission, and did not demand, but asked to interrupt the transmission. The tough measures of the authorities worked - the hype quickly faded away.
10. A new boom around the Roswell incident began in 1977. Major Marcell, who personally collected the wreckage, said they were not part of the probe that the authorities attributed to the incident. Children appeared, whose fathers personally drove, guarded, loaded the wreckage or bodies. A rather sensible document from 1947 was concocted in the name of President Truman. Writers and book publishers, souvenir producers and television men joined in, a museum of the incident opened. Images of a flying saucer and alien bodies have become textbooks for ufology. In 1995, CNN broadcast a video of the autopsy of the Roswell aliens, which was given to her by Briton Ray Santilli. Subsequently, it turned out to be a fake. And the explanation for the incident was simple: to test a new secret acoustic radar, it was lifted into the air on bundles of probes. Moreover, the launches took place back in June. Found all but one set of equipment. He was brought to New Mexico. All the plates and bodies of the aliens are fiction.
Ray Santilli is a shrewd man. He never claimed that the autopsy record was genuine.
11. One of the cornerstones of ufology is the explicit intervention of government agencies or even aliens who take on the guise of a human. The general outline is as follows: a person observes a UFO or even discovers some material traces, informs others about it, followed by a visit of two (less often three) people in strict black suits. These people arrive in an imposing black car (usually a Cadillac), which is why the whole phenomenon is called the “people in black”. These people behave emphatically without emotion, but their speech may be incorrect, include words from other languages, or even an indistinct jumble of sounds. After the visit of the “people in black”, the person loses the desire to share their impressions of the UFO. The subtext is obvious: the authorities or aliens are afraid of us and want to intimidate us, but we courageously continue our investigations.
12. The so-called "Sheldon's List" - the list of scientists who committed suicide under not fully clarified circumstances in the late 1980s - is truly impressive. However, it is unlikely that this series of deaths of scientists, who worked mainly in the field of high technologies and the military-industrial complex, is associated with UFOs - only some of the victims were interested in ufology. But Russian ufologists in the early 2000s suffered precisely because of their addiction to UFO research. The 70-year-old professor Alexei Zolotov was stabbed to death, attempts were made on Vladimir Azhazha and TV presenter Lyudmila Makarova. The premises of ufologists' clubs in Yekaterinburg and Penza were damaged. Only those guilty of the assassination attempts on Azhazha were found; they turned out to be mentally ill religious sectarians.
13. People not only observed alien ships, but also communicated with aliens, and even traveled on "flying saucers". At least, quite a few people from different countries said so. Most of this evidence was due to too rich imagination, if not greedy "contactees". However, there were those who could not be caught on inaccuracies, or otherwise caught in slyness.
14. American George Adamski said that in near-earth space the ship was surrounded by myriads of greenish lights that were not stars. It happened in 1952. Ten years later, astronaut John Glenn also saw these fireflies. They turned out to be the smallest specks of dust illuminated by the Sun. On the other hand, Adamski saw forests and rivers on the far side of the moon. Outwardly, the most famous contactee looked quite adequate, intelligent and confident person. He made good money from publishing his books and public speaking.
George Adamski
15. The rest of the known contactees also did not live in poverty, but did not look so convincing. There were no particularly loud revelations, but with the development of astronautics, an indirect, but very weighty proof of the contactees' lies appeared. They all described the planets to which they were taken, at the level of the then ideas about them: canals on Mars, hospitable Venus, etc. The most far-sighted of all was the Swiss Billy Mayer, who, according to him, was taken to another dimension. Mayer will be difficult to verify.
Prudent Billy Meier's accounts of travel to another dimension took dozens of pages
16. A separate subtype of contactees is formed by “involuntary contactees”. These are the people who were abducted by UFO crews. Brazilian Antonio Vilas-Boas was kidnapped in 1957, underwent a medical examination and forced to have sexual intercourse with an alien. Englishwoman Cynthia Appleton even gave birth to a child from an alien, without having (as she claimed) sexual contact with him. In addition, the aliens gave her a lot of scientific information. Appleton was a typical housewife, raising two children at the age of 27, with a corresponding outlook. After meeting with the aliens, she talked about the structure of the atom and the dynamics of the development of the laser beam. Both Vilas-Boas and Cynthia Appleton were ordinary people, as they say, from the plow (Brazilian so in the literal sense of the word). Their adventures, actual or fictional, were noticed, but did not have much resonance.
17. The average percentage of UFO reports, which cannot be explained from the point of view of modern knowledge, varies in different sources from 5 to 23. This does not mean that every fourth or 20th UFO report is true. This, most likely, testifies to the integrity of the investigators, who are in no hurry to declare nonsense even knowingly false or far-fetched messages. For example, when contactee Billy Meyer provided experts with samples of metals allegedly transferred to him by aliens from another dimension, the experts only concluded that such metals can be obtained on Earth without accusing Meyer of deception.
18. The 1961 abduction of the Hill couple in the United States provoked hundreds of allegations of alien attacks on respectable Americans. Barney (black) and Bette (white) Hill were attacked by aliens while driving their own car. When they arrived home, they found that more than two hours had dropped out of their lives. Under hypnosis, they said that the aliens lured them into their ship, separated them (perhaps the key point - the Hills cannot be caught in contradictions) and examined. They went to a psychoanalyst because of panic attacks and poor sleep. Let us recall that it was the beginning of the 1960s. Interracial marriage in the then USA was not daring - it was a provocation. To take such a step, both Barney and Betsy had to be not just brave, but extremely exalted people.Such people in a state of hypnotic trance can be instilled with a lot, the rest of their inflamed brain will think out by itself. The Hills became real press stars, and were very jealous of reports of alien abduction of other people. The Hill story is a good illustration of the problem of free speech in the United States. In those days, journalists freely joked about the conclusions that the aliens should have made, examining Barn and Betsy. The human race, according to alien guests, consists of black males and white-skinned females. At the same time, for some reason, males have atrophied teeth on the lower jaw, and they wear artificial ones (Barney Hill had a false denture). Now, even in the Russian version of Wikipedia, Betsy Hill is called Euro-American.
19. The loudest incident with possible UFO participation in the Soviet Union took place on September 20, 1977 in Petrozavodsk. A star flashed over the city, for several minutes, as if feeling Petrozavodsk with thin tentacle rays. After some time, the star, giving the impression of a controlled object, retired to the south. Officially, the phenomenon was explained by the launch of a rocket from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome, but the public remained unconvinced: the authorities are hiding.
They claim that this is an authentic photo of the Petrozavodsk phenomenon.
20. At the suggestion of science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev, many were convinced that the Tunguska catastrophe of 1908 was caused by the explosion of an alien spacecraft. Numerous expeditions to the disaster area were mainly engaged in the search for traces and remains of an alien ship. When it turned out that such traces did not exist, interest in the Tunguska catastrophe faded away.
