The U.S. government has finally admitted that UFOs are real..sort of.

This past week, the U.S. Navy confirmed that several videos—two of which were first released by The New York Times in 2017 depicting so-called “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" (UAP)—are authentic. The three videos, (another was later published by The Washington Post), each depicting quick-moving oblong-shaped objects, were shot by Navy pilots during training exercises in 2004 and 2015. The Navy has yet to identify the objects in the video, and along with the Department of Defense, said the videos should have never been made public.


While a “UAP” may be an unfamiliar term, that’s sort of the point. UAPs are essentially the new UFO—but with a lot less historical baggage. A Navy spokesman told The Washington Post that the acronym “UFO” carries so much stigma that it discourages someone from reporting a sighting.

“That term is so loaded at this point, that you are never going to change people’s understanding of what it means,” journalist Leslie Kean, who co-wrote the 2017 New York Times investigation into the Pentagon’s UFO (or UAP) program, tells Popular Mechanics. “All you can do is adopt a new one.”

But humans didn’t just start seeing UFOs darting around above our heads in just the past few weeks...or in 2015, 2004, 1947, or even 1639. Humans have seen and encountered unidentified flying objects for millennia.

Biblical Beginnings

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Gustave Doré, 1885.
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Unidentified flying objects have been recorded throughout human history. The only thing that’s changed is how people—stretched across thousands of years—have interpreted these unexplainable events.

“Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all the major religions actually have pictures and anecdotes of ariel phenomenon,” Diana Walsh Pasulka, author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and a professor of philosophy and religion at UNC Wilmington tells Popular Mechanics.

Some of them were comets, asteroids, meteors, and other atmospheric optical phenomena that were scientifically unknown to our ancient ancestors, but others still defy modern explanations.

Pasulka explains in nearly every religion, there are “contact events” where an important figure makes contact with a heavenly figure. Moses and the burning bush, Mohammad and the angel Gabriel, and the Virgin Mary’s own angelic visitation.

When religion is a lens to explain the universe, unexplainable phenomena can become religion.

“These are human’s first contact with something they interpret to not be human or of this planet. And, if they are [not of this planet], they are de facto extraterrestrial.”

Pasulka says the Torah’s tale of Jacob’s fight with an angel is a good example of an encounter with aerial phenomenon that was turned into a religious narrative. “When you go back to the original source and read it in its original language... it wouldn’t look like what the artists’ rendition of it are in Western history,” says Pasulka, “It would look like he's fighting some kind of being from outer space.”

Pasulka isn’t saying that a biblical figure fought an alien and it turned into a religious text, but that vision of a figure descending from the sky could have come from a shared, human experience or observation. When religion is a lens to explain the universe, unexplainable phenomena can become religion.

The Era of Airships

Zeppelin Lz 1
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In his 2010 book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, French engineer and astronomer Jacques Vallee analyzes 500 historical reports of aerial phenomenon sightings.

The book’s earliest sighting, dating back nearly 3,500 years in modern-day Sudan, is from a stela (granite slab) of Gebel Barkal that tells the tale of how a falling star “the like had not happened before” struck down the Nubians in defeat. For the Egyptian victors, it was looked upon as a miracle and spiritual intervention.

Art, Monochrome, Black-and-white, Facial hair, Illustration, Drawing, Line art, Monochrome photography, Beard, Artwork,
Mystery airship illustrated in the San Francisco Call in 1896.
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These mysterious sightings dot human history through out Vallee’s book, culminating in a phenomena in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1879. It’s a “large, unexplained airship” that was visible for an hour across the city before it “disappeared on the horizon.”

Pasulka says by the late 19th century humans began to shift their interpretation of the unknown from a religious framework to a technological one. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, what was happening on Earth was seeping into how we interpret what we saw in the sky. In 1896 and 1897, mysterious “airships” were again supposedly seen all over the U.S, with many witnesses even signing affidavits.

Even Thomas Edison weighed in by saying “you can take it from me that it is a pure fake...I have no doubt that airships will be successfully constructed in the near future is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret.”

By the late 19th century, hydrogen-filled airships were in development, and a few years later, in 1900, the first Zeppelin would make its maiden voyage. Whatever aerial phenomenon people in 1897 were seeing, it looked enough like a modern technological marvel of the day so that is what it became.

The Dawn of the UFO

Flying Saucer Flying over Farm
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In November 1944, late into World War II, American fighter pilots started observing orange, glowing lights. A few weeks later, one pilot saw a red-ish, wingless cigar-shape object. The pilots named these “foo fighters” after a nonsense phrase used in a popular cartoon about firefighters (and, yes, the band is named after this incident). The media got ahold of the story, and theories weren’t far behind.

Could they be optical illusions? Or a hallucination from battle fatigue? Or could these aerial phenomena be super-secret Nazi weapons? The last theory was what captured the public’s attention. After all, the pilots were flying in Axis territory and plenty of rumors surrounded the German’s taste for outlandish science projects, like a Nazi lunar base for example. In the end, it was never established exactly what these foo fighters were (and a 1953 panel would eventually conclude that it was likely an electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena).

Pilots Looking at Photo of UFO
Kenneth Arnold, middle, and two other pilots examine a UFO photo.
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But June 24, 1947, would change everything.

While searching for a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane, experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold diverted from his original flight path to help search the southwest slope of Mount Rainier. During the search, Arnold observed nine “peculiar-looking” and possibly “completely round” objects flying in a formation that reminded him of geese. It was later estimated they were flying in excess of 1,000 miles per hour. When he reported it (and assuming they were a new type of jet or experimental military aircraft), the Army Air Corps dismissed it as a mirage or hallucination.

Within days, others came out in support of Arnold saying they saw a similar aerial phenomenon. Arnold, perturbed that the military dismissed his account, did interviews with local press. When he described to reporter Bill Bequette from the East Oregonian newspaper what he saw looked “saucer-like,” Bequette termed them “flying saucers,” the first time the term was ever used.

A few years later, the term “U.F.O” was coined by the Air Force. Prominently used in the 1953 Robertson Panel report, the same panel that dismissed “foo fighters,” the acronym proved purposeful in its lack of clarity.

“It was unimaginable that the Russians could have something like this.”

“It was supposed to mean something unidentified. Period. Full stop,” says Kean. “And it’s a pretty reasonable term to use. It could mean anything.”

The first assumption of what Arnold and others had seen from both the U.S. military and the public was that it was the Soviets. The Cold War was quickly warming up in 1953 and atomic bomb testings, secret military exercises, and build-up of arms were all possibilities.

“There was a whole question about if they were Russian, but they wrote that off pretty early on because of the extreme sophistication of the technology,” says Kean, who along with reporting for the New York Times is the author of the book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record. “It was unimaginable that the Russians could have something like this.”

An Extraterrestrial Threat?

View of "Lubbock Lights"
The Lubbock Lights were an aerial phenomenon above Lubbock, Texas. One episode of the UFO mania that gripped the U.S. in the early 50s.
BettmannGetty Images

In response to these late 1940s sightings, the Air Force set up a secret project with the code name “Sign” to investigate these incidents. But the more the Air Force researched, the more stumped they became. “There are so many documents that show at the highest levels [the U.S. military] didn’t know what they were,” says Kean.

According to her book, there was a divide between those who thought there was a more conventional answer—like a mirage, natural phenomena, inaccuracy, or secret military technology—to those who believed these aerial phenomena were not from this planet.

A host of sightings in July 1952, including over Washington D.C., led to the broadest admission that the U.S. government and military would make that there was indeed some sort of aerial phenomena soaring over U.S. airspace. With the project now being called “Blue Book,” the FBI was briefed by Major General John Samford’s office, the director of intelligence for the Air Force.

“Some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of planetary ships.”

As Kean’s book depicts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was told by a branch of the U.S. military that “it was not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars.” Other FBI memos stated that “some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of planetary ships.”

The real worry—no matter if they were Russians or extraterrestrials—was if it was a threat to national security. On July 29, 1952, Major General Samford held a press conference where he said that they looked into nearly two thousand reports and have been able to adequately account for most of them. But they were still looking into the few “relatively incredible things” that they could not explain.

However, they’ve been able to reach one conclusion about these sightings and that was “it does not contain any pattern of purpose or of consistency that we can relate to any conceivable threat to the United States.”

“I don’t think they ever believed it wasn’t a national security threat. They just didn’t know what else to do at that point,” says Kean. “What are they going to tell people? They’re just not going to say ‘Well, there’s things flying around in our sky that demonstrate technology that we can’t explain.’ That’s not something you want to announce to the public.”

The Mystery Remains

A group of protestors march in front of the Genera

When Robertson Panel filed its report in early 1953, it came to two conclusions about how to best deal with these sightings as it related to the public: training them to properly identify natural phenomenon (meteors, mirages, noctilucent clouds) and human-made objects (weather balloons, reflective aircraft) and debunking.

And that’s exactly what federal authorities did for more than six decades. Through every sighting, incident, report, unexplained occurrence—from Roswell to Area 51 to 2006’s O’Hare sighting—the U.S. government and military has debunked or, just as often, remained silent, but recent events suggest a new strategy in the works.

What made the December 16th, 2017, New York Times article so shocking wasn’t that it had on record several very credible sources saying that the government had looked into UFOs recently. That much could probably be assumed based on the military’s 1940s and 1950s history with them. It’s what they’ve potentially discovered and found since that time.

The $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program officially ran for about five years, from 2007 to 2012. This much was acknowledged by the Pentagon, but Luis Elizondo, who headed the program until his 2017 resignation, told the Times that it continued to run beyond 2012.

In that time, Elizondo said that the program had investigated a number of UAPs, including the ones that the U.S. Navy confirmed were authentic. The program also studied physical effects from encounters with the objects, the technology that could in theory do what those said they observed, and the possible threat it posed to national security.


But the most jaw-dropping detail is one that’s a bit buried: the program recovered materials from these UAPs.

Kean says she believes there’s a lot going on behind-the-scenes. She thinks research is being done on these recovered materials to understand what they are. Alluding to the fact that the U.S. may not be the only country in possession of these materials—that there is a secretive global race associated with them.

“From what I’ve been told, it’s a competitive thing. Whoever understands the technology first has a real advantage,” says Kean. “My sense of it is that there’s an undercurrent of competition among Russia, China, and the U.S.”

Sources have also told her that the physics of how these objects move has already, theoretically, been cracked.

“What they’ve figured out is very futuristic. It would be a very difficult thing to [replicate], but they can understand how it’s done.” Scientists and medical experts are also attempting to understand the biological effects on those humans who’ve come close to these phenomenons.

Kean thinks the government is changing on how they deal with these reports of aerial phenomena. In this era of Youtube and cell phone cameras, it’s becoming more common to see these types of videos. After all, more than two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than they are telling the public.

Kean is convinced that there are unexplained aerial phenomena, but not convinced its extraterrestrials. “It’s a valid hypothesis, but I don’t think for a moment that we know what it is [yet].”

Other hypotheses and speculations out there include interdimensions, time travelers, or a super-secret weapons or aircraft developed by another nation on this planet. Even after decades of research, it’s still an unknown. What was once a mystery in ancient times, remains a mystery today.

In the end, Kean can only be certain of one thing: “You are just stuck with something that you can’t explain.”