The unidentified and the other4/24/2018 What are UFOs? Well in reality they can be anything which is unidentifiable or misidentified and flying...sometimes natural phenomena can appear to be a UFO or conventional aircraft or any number of other things. The problem with the term 'Unidentified Flying Object' is that it is so ambiguous that it literally can mean anything. If anyone ever asks you if you believe in UFOs, you can tell them with absolute certainty that you believe. Throughout our collective existence, there has always been objects in the skies that defy our attempts at identification, sometimes they have been misinterpreted as angels, sometimes as aliens, and yet other times as other supernatural phenomena. What we see and what era we see it in are interlinked as our cultural perception shifts our identifications of the unidentified. Most UFOs are eventually attributed to something explainable though the term has widely become associated with the prospect of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The term UFO or "UFOB" was created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to describe any number of phenomena; "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Though UFOs have been of interest to the American military, the scientific community has been generally uninterested in the matter because there is just not enough evidence to make a scientific argument for the existence of alien spacecraft visiting us from time to time. If you believe in alien visitation, then you have to prove it in order to be taken seriously. Numerous shaky videos and blurry photos do not equal proof. The first sighting of a UFO in the contemporary sense happened in 1947 by Kenneth Arnold when he was flying his plane. He claimed to have seen nine crescent-shaped objects flying at thousands of Kilometers/miles per hour (much faster than the speed of sound). He said that the craft moved “like saucers skipping on water”, which was misinterpreted and made "flying saucers" E.T.'s primary mode of transportation in our collective imagination. As tensions of the 'Cold War' heightened, American and Russian governments were testing more and more top-secret military projects and cultural paranoia was widespread, giving rise to the cultural surge of interest in alien-related-phenomena and therefor more and more UFO sightings between 1950 and the mid-1990s. Through our fantasy, we manifested an artificial reality of alien visitation. After the mid 1990s, the hype surrounding UFOs slowed until the 2010s when interest was revived "for unexplained reasons", according to the UFO Wikipedia page. It is uncorroborated but I believe there is an explanation for the first and second phases of mass-interest in UFOs in America. The first phase is a direct result and follows the timeline of the 'Cold War', while the second follows an increased distrust in the American government (and others) as well as the rise of conspiracy theories, nationalism and xenophobia. As globalism is being rejected by many communities across the world, a simultaneous rise in UFO sightings has been happening. It seems as though this mass hysteria, produced by various causes, is materializing in the form of alien related sightings. Our fear of "the other" is taking shape in a fear of extraterrestrial beings. Perhaps if we divorced ourselves from the idea that aliens with their foreign ways were about to invade, then we would also stop imagining flying saucers. Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/... https://www.history.com/... https://www.popsci.com/... https://science.howstuffworks.com/... https://megaphone.link/... https://www.space.com/... https://futurism.com/... https://www.theatlantic.com/... https://www.indy100.com/... https://www.livescience.com/... https://vizthis.wordpress.com/...
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Leave a Reply.M.P.BronsteinA scientist who exists outside of the time-space continuum, looking for the truth, but unsure if it still exists or if it has become extinct. ArchivesCategories
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