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Does life outside earth exist? Are UFO's really from outer space? Many people in the world today do believe in UFO's. "About half of the adult population do believe that UFOs are out there in space" (Ritchie 22). There are basically two sides to the matter.
The first is that UFOs are hoaxes and don't exist at all, and the other is that they do exist and come from somewhere in outer space. Government cover-ups have been used to keep the secrets of UFOs under wraps throughout history, but despite all the unexplained sightings and stories evidence continues to indicate that these mysterious vehicles do, in fact, exist. What are UFOs? A UFO is an unidentified light or object in the air that has no obvious explanation.
The expression unidentified flying object .".. is thought to have originated with Air Forse Caption Edward Ruppelt... " (Rich 220). This was introduced to replace the term flying saucer. UFO sightings first started in the late 1800 s, but there weren't that many until the 1940 s.
In the 1940 s UFO sightings were being told all over the world. Since the 1940 s UFOs are seen every day by people all over the world. Ufologists have come up with a system to divide UFO incidents into three major types of close encounters. First, close encounter of the first kind (CEI) are classified as UFO sightings. Second, close encounters of the second kind (CE 2) are sightings and permanent evidence, such as marks in the ground or burns on grass. Third, close encounters of the third kind (CE 3) are actual contact with alien beings from a UFO. (Oberg 240) There are many different theories about how UFOs travel and where they come from. "Some scientists believe that they come from the larger planets like Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter or Saturn" (Yenne 103).
Most people think that UFOs come from Mars, mostly because of movies they see. Psychic Jan Dixon suggested that UFOs come from a '"planet on the other side of the sun and can never be seen"' (Brookesmith). Its is also believed that UFOs are constructed right here on earth. Some people even go as far as saying that UFOs are secret weapons that Nazi's have created. The moon is another popular belief. People still think that this is a possibility even with all the lunar expeditions of NASA to the moon.
Another is that they come from the stars. Most scientists think its impossible that they come from the stars since it would take 40 years at light speed to get the nearest star. On the other hand if such vehicles exist, no one knows of their technological capabilities. They may be far more advanced compared to technology on earth. Other questions that remain unanswered as how they travel and what their made out of. It is a great mystery to how UFOs travel and what they are made out of.
Some people believe that they travel through black holes from point A to point B and that its like a tunnel. This theory is said to be impossible since a black hole would stretch out a space ship if its made of a solid material. This brings up another theory, what if UFOs aren't nuts and bolts, but are actually ghost like and can appear and disappear. This theory insists that UFOs are nonmaterial vehicles. "If UFOs are solid vehicles from outer space, I can't see why they don't register on our space tracking network" (Clark 78). Some scientists strongly believe that UFOs have the ability to make themselves invisible to the human eye. If this could be proved it could explain a lot about UFOs and how they travel through space.
This may explain why all these UFOs that people see don't show up on radar Throughout the previous fifty years there have been thousands of UFO sightings from all around the world. Some may be real and others are made up by people for various reasons. Some who see them keep it a secret in fear that other people will think that they are insane or crazy. Since many non-believers were ridiculed.".. only a small minority of witnesses would ever report their sightings, and many who did soon lived to regret it. " (Clarke 24). People use a variety of names to describe UFOS, but the most common is the flying saucer. "Some UFOs are called "flying saucers", this term was coined by the press in 1947 to describe a sighting by Kenneth Arnold" (Britannica).
This was the first major sighting that brought about all the investigations of UFOs. About fifty years after this first sighting around forty sightings are reported daily. "In 1996, Americans reported to the Air Force 1, 060 objects in the sky that they could not identify" (Yenne 86). In some areas of world is a larger number of UFO sightings than in others. For example in the Broadhaven triangle an area in mid-whales, fifty UFOs were reported in a single year. This is a very large sum for such a small area of the world.
Also in certain years the number of reports have increased immensely. From January to September 1978 there was a 40 % increase in the number of sightings around the world. Scientists have not been able to figure out why there are more sightings in these situations. The incident in 1978 in New Zealand has provided the best evidence to date.
New Zealand has a radar-visual photo encounter. Radar visual are very uncommon as are good pictures of UFOs. In one case a sighting matched the exact description of another sighting. It was a cigar shaped UFO that a jazz band witnessed in Glasgow Scotland, in 1955, it fit the exact description of one that visited Manchester, England in 1982. Another unexplained UFO sighting is when one hovered over a science lab for ten minutes on December, 10, 1975. Four pictures of the space craft were taken and have never been able to be explained to this day.
One famous UFO sighting abduction is the incident with Barney and Betty Hill. They claim to have been abducted by aliens in a space craft at their home. Barney Hill believed that he saw alien faces peering at him through a row of windows. Betty Hill reportedly had reoccurring dreams of their "lost hours" aboard the space ship. Betty Hill also believes that the aliens erased her entire memory of the experience she had with them. It is possible to report the star the Hills saw as the moon light.
The whole NAZI idea comes in again when Barney Hill described the leader as "nazi like." The Hills also mentioned how the aliens ran tests on them and then left them and sped away in their craft. Many times UFOs are mistaken for a variety of other things besides unknown space crafts. Around 95 % of alleged UFOs are misinterpretations of known objects. Investigators can explain all but a this 5 % portion of UFO sightings. Most sightings are due to unknown phenomenon, limitations to human perception, bright planets, stars, birds, meteors, aircraft's, missiles, satellites, boats, insect swarms, and weather balloons. "Some UFOs are mistaken for a rare form of lightening called "kugelblitz"' (Spencer 65). Air crafts are commonly confused for UFOs because of how their lights appear in bad weather.
Japanese Squid fishing fleets can be mistaken for UFOs because of the immense amount of light that they give off. Some sightings that were unexplained at the time have now been announced to be highly classified aircraft's. "Top secret research aircraft's often outrage normal ideas of how an airplane should look and perform. Could these bizarre man-made aircraft's be responsible for a large proportion of UFO sightings" (Soule 117)? The sighting of a triangular-shaped craft by a Commercial air line near Manchester, England was recently revealed to be the TR 3 Mantra, a highly classified stealth craft.
Over the years there have been many government research organizations along with others that have investigated UFO sightings all over the world. One of the non-government organizations that did investigations is called Project Starlight International in Texas. This UFO researching organization is the largest ever. The Unites States Air Force has been investigating UFOs since 1947. In 1952 the Unites States Air Force started a program called Project Blue Book. They investigated about 12, 000 UFO reports to determine whether these UFO sightings were a threat to the national security.
They researched all UFO reports from 1948 to 1949. Then 1969 The USAF decided to close Project Blue Book. The USAF has constantly been pressed to devote more time and man power in the investigation of UFOs. There are many factors that lead to how the government has tried to hold back information on what they know about UFOs. "Secret Government agencies like the CIA deny the existence of UFOs" (Brookesmith 37). United States government has long denied any interest in UFOs yet keeps thousands of files on the secret list. When UFO researchers unmasked this secrecy, they revolved a bizarre CIA plot to mislead the public.
In late 1952 the National Security Committee levied upon the CIA the request to determine if the existence of UFO would create a national security. "It is a widespread belief that the government knows far more about UFOs than it is willing to reveal" (Sheaffer r 25). National archives had shown that many reports were missing from files. Dozens of letters to the other agencies and even to the white house simply elicited the same official response-essentially, that UFOs did not exist. Why then all the missing files? On december 15, 1978 these documents were released after months of battling in the courts.
There were near one thousand pages of documents released. An important memo was found these papers... Deputy Director for the CIA, dated November 1952 says bluntly: sightings of unexplained objects at great altitude and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major United States defense, are such a nature that they are not attribute to natural phenomena or known types of Arial vehicles (Brookesmith 35) The debunking companies are the only one that have been successful because of well-known military or government figures have weighed against UFOs. This is because the public has an automatic respect for public figures. "Documents obtained by Ground Saucer Watch from the Unites States government under the Freedom of Information Act now confirm that there has indeed been a cover-up from the start... " (Brookesmith 33). In conclusion even though many UFO sightings can be explained, the small percentage that cannot be explained indicate that UFO do exist.
Since there have been so many sightings since the late 1940 's there have been many researchers of UFOs. The government being one of the major contributors to researching UFOs has held back information from the public. Also if the government simply says that UFOs don't exist, then why all the research on them and the missing files? For fifty years the unexplained air craft wreckage found outside Roswell, New Mexico, has been in the center of on-going speculation about alien life forms and US Government and Military cover-ups.
It is my personal belief that extraterrestrial bodies are present in this Universe and have landed on earth. There is more evidence pointing to the fact that there are aliens present in the universe as proved in this essay. Retired military officials will admit to there being extraterrestrials being present on earth. An excellent example of this is what happened in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. When the US Government and Military first found the wreckage of an unidentified aircraft they issued a press release stating that they had come into possession of an Unidentified Flying Object.
The present US Government have passed the Roswell incident off as a closed case their investigations declared the incident to be nothing more than a crashed weather balloon from the top secret Project Mogul and the alien bodies merely to be crash test dummies. This essay will argue the point that there is other life in the Universe and that the crash landing at Roswell in 1947, was an alien space craft and not a weather balloon. Leading up to the 'Roswell Incident' UFOs were spotted all over New Mexico and the mid-western coast line. On July 1 of 1947, an Unidentified Flying Object appeared on the radar screens of surrounding airforce bases.
People also saw these objects in the skies that night and the next. On July 4 - Independence Day - radar screens showed an object pulsate then explode. Some archaeologists in the area were watching the sky and saw the aerial display as did a large number of the people living in the town. The archaeologists set out the next morning to look for the wreckage they saw fall to ground after the explosion.
They reached the crash site about 10 am and found wreckage scattered over a site three quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet wide. The archaeology team alerted authorities then peered into the rubble to find the bodies of five aliens (the number of aliens is debatable), four of them already dead but one still alive with a severe wound to the thigh. The witnesses are sure they saw aliens in the space ship, not crash dummies, and the wreckage was too advanced to be human technology. A number of witnesses who saw the crash site before the US Government intervened were interviewed and all gave comprehensive descriptions of the aliens and their flying craft. All descriptions were very similar and if a number of people can give the same detailed evidence, something must have occurred.
Many army retirees have come forward to tell their stories concerning the truth of what happened at Roswell. The US Government will probably continue changing their stories of what they say happened (the crashed weather balloon). Only when new witnesses come forward and share their information will the truth eventually be exposed. For months after the incident, thousands of hopeful alien enthusiasts flocked to the alleged crash site to view the most famous alien crash site to date. So much attention was placed on the site that the few residents of Roswell, New Mexico, claimed that they feared the aliens would return and invade. Witnesses claim to have received death threats from the military; they were also told to deny all knowledge of what they had seen.
The pieces of the alien space craft were taken to Groom Lake Airforce Base also known as Area 51. Area 51 is a top secret military installation designed to house many of the government's secret details concerning alien aircraft. Substantial amounts of money was spent to protect the citizens of the world from receiving the truth about Are 51 and the alien present among us. Recent developments have occurred when three-thousand nine hundred more acres have been purchased by the US government that adjoins the Groom Lake Airforce Base to house what could be up to four hundred newly found pieces from alien aircraft (as shown in documents retrieved from the internet). Now over fifty years since the uncovering of perhaps the strongest single piece of evidence to support the theory that aliens are present in the Universe, the American Government will still not admit involvement in covering-up the event, that took place on July 8, 1947, in Roswell, New Mexico. Nearly every piece of information points towards the probability that aliens did crash at Roswell and more importantly that aliens do exist.
The only argument that does not support the fact that aliens are present is the American Government and Military denying it at numerous press conferences. The American Government's and military's argument are refuted by the numbers of retired military and government personnel's testimony. The American Government should not be able to refute the evidence that there is intelligent life on other planets in the Universe because we have a right to know. This paper will focus on psychological interpretations of UFO phenomena not because of any prejudice on my part but because I believe psychology can serve as a very useful tool in attempting an explanation of UFO's. All of the existing theories expounded by the Air Force and various physical scientists which have sought to explain UFO sightings have operated on the assumption that the empirical approach of the physical sciences, being less "subjective", was therefore the "superior" approach. I cannot concur with that assumption, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I believe that as Michael Polanyi (Oxford philosopher) pointed out in a recent article in the magazine of the American Psychological Association, that, all science is both intuitive methodologically and essentially "subjective." Secondly, the physical. science explanations of natural phenomena (meteors, cloud formations, planets, stars, ball-lightning-plasma, birds, "temperature-inversions", marsh gases) or artificial phenomena (Various aircraft, weather balloons, satellites, etc. ) fail to explain too large a number (though a minority) of the reported sightings. Because of this marginal group of unexplained sightings, the physical sciences have yet to prove successful in providing an alternative to the ET (extra-terrestrial) theory of intelligently guided vehicles. I have always been skeptical of the ET theory. I am now still more skeptical. This skepticism is based on a faith in both science and man.
It seems to me that we can never find a fully satisfactory explanation for all events connected with the UFO phenomenon -- scientists can never, for instance, explain all radar "blips" to everyone's satisfaction. But by exploring the one feature of every UFO sighting -- MAN -- we may perhaps account for that marginal minority of high-credibility reports. My approach will incorporate psychoanalytic, artistic, religious, political, and economic interpretations out of both necessity and desire -- a desire to examine the total nature of the man who is trying to explain events he himself experiences. In the past history of the evolving human mind, mankind has made a series of adjustments concerning his view of the universe. The first adjustment was to cease believing in a world that was anthropocentric, centered on man himself. After the higher civilizations of the Near and Middle East became conscious of the daily revolving sun, stars and wandering planets, they formulated a geocentric concept of the universe, often labeled the Ptolemaic theory.
This was interrelated with mankind's religious and psychological development. It took until the l 6 th century A. D. and the Copernican revolution for man to change his concept of the order in the universe. The scientists who were exponents of the (then) new heliocentric theory of the universe (with our sun at the center) faced opposition simply because heliocentrism ran contrary to Church doctrine, the primitive theories of St.
Augustine and Dante, and the early speculations of Greek scientists. Eventually mankind adjusted to the heliocentric theory of the universe and accepted the sun as the center, not only of the local family of planets, but also of the total sidereal assemblage. This necessitated further revisions in religion but man's psychological makeup changes little; as he had clung previously to other official dogmas which proved to be incorrect, he adopted heliocentrism as a dogma. This was fairly easy to rationalize with quasi-scientific rationalizations and observations. For instance, the Milky Way lies along a great circle: it is a band of starry light that divides the sky into two practically equal parts, with about the same brightness in all its parts. By implication, therefore, the sun and earth are centrally located.
Further evidence was that the numbers of stars seemed to the early census takers to fall off with distance from the sun in all directions as though the sun were central, and this position among the stellar billions provided man a dignity of location in the cosmos that was not at all disagreeable. As late as 1917 the astronomical leaders held that the sun was central, or very near the center of the sidereal universe. But new evidence (such as the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars used as a sounding tool, and the determination of the distances and distribution of the globular star clusters) indicated that heliocentrism was also fallacious. Other "galaxies" were officially recognized, and the earth and mankind forever lost its position or great significance in the universe. While the introduction of heliocentrism had little philosophic impact in the sixteenth century, the death of that theory had much more significant repercussions on the concept of the universe and mankind's uniqueness in a world that was no longer his, however flattering such advances of human knowledge were to the human mind. The "galactocentric" hypothesis put man on the outer fringe of one galaxy, more than twenty-five thousand light years distant from the center, in a universe of millions of galaxies.
Another psychological) adjustment had to be made, not only with the location of our earth in the time and space of the physical world, but with our location in the world of biological phenomena. Scientists and laymen alike have now had to accept the fact that man is not alone in the universe. The work of such scientists as Harlow Shapley and Su-Shu Huang suggests that not only if there life in the universe but that it may be fairly "close" to our earth. Huang suggested that Tau City, a star 10. 8 light years away, may have life-supporting planets.
The adjustment of mankind necessitated by this would be, in Shapley's phrase, our Fourth Adjustment. He states that, "The mystery of life is vanishing. Objective science is replacing the subjective miraculous. " He further suggests that the fifth adjustment may lie almost wholly in the "psychological realm." Of course the Fourth Adjustment is also psychological in nature. Psychology has shown us a great deal about mankind's myth-making abilities (even needs) and one need not have a Ph. D. in psychology to be aware of this characteristic.
If science is responsible for removing the "subjective miraculous", it is also likely that quasi-science, fantasy, mythology and mass-media-culture would create replacements to fill the needs of a not-so-rational human psychological makeup. I feel that there are many causative factors involved in man's turning once again to his mind's inner world, attempting to dispel the fears and insecurities manifested in UFO phenomena. One theory of UFO phenomena was advocated by the eminent pioneer in psychology, Carl Jung, who sees UFO sightings as cases or psychological projection, with a psychic cause. One of the explanations Jung offers is as follows: ."..
There are cases where the same collective cause produces identical or similar effects (i. e, , the same visionary images and interpretations) in the very people who are least prepared for such phenomena and least inclined to believe them. "This fact gives the eyewitness accounts an air of particular credibility: it is usually emphasized that the witness is above suspicion because he was never distinguished for his lively imagination or credulousness but, on the contrary, for his cool judgment and critical reason. In just these cases the unconscious has to resort to particularly drastic measures in order to make its contents perceived. It does this most vividly by projection, by extrapolating it contents into an object which then mirrors what had previously lain hidden in the unconscious... " Jung offers further an interesting interpretation of flying "saucers", as characterized by their roundness: "If we apply the principles of dream interpretation to the round object -- whether it is a disk or a sphere -- we at once get an analogy with the symbol of totality, well-known to all students of depth psychology, namely the mandala (Sanskrit for circle). This is not by any means a new invention, for it can be found in all epochs and in all places, always with the same meaning, and reappears time and again, independently of tradition, in modern individuals as the 'protective' or apotropaic circle...
a modern symbol of order, which organizes and encloses the psychic totality... " .".. Circular symbols have played an important role in every age in our own sphere of culture, for instance, they were not only soul symbols but 'God-images'. God in his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence is a totality symbol par excellence, something round, complete, and perfect. " One can substitute the "ability to fantasize" for the word "projection"; Ray Bradbury [ 3 ] himself has said that "the ability to 'fantasize' is the ability to survive. " Man's imagination has al...
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