Article/Document:

Is There a Case for UFOs?

Don Berliner, The Fund for UFO Research, Inc.; 2002

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Summary: About the only point that can be made concerning UFOs without the risk of starting an unpleasant controversy is that they are supremely controversial. Any discussion of their nature, their origins, their significance and, indeed, their very existence, has led to long-term arguments that have yet to reach any generally agreed-upon conclusion.

About the only point that can be made concerning UFOs without the risk of starting an unpleasant controversy is that they are supremely controversial. Any discussion of their nature, their origins, their significance and, indeed, their very existence, has led to long-term arguments that have yet to reach any generally agreed-upon conclusion.

On the pivotal questions of their being real and of a novel nature, the reasons employed by the negative side focus on the lack of scientifically acceptable proof of the presence of a single UFO. Expert testimony, photographs and radar trackings are discounted as insufficiently scientific. And since UFOs are so often equated with extraterrestrial spacecraft, the negative side points to the alleged impossibility of, and the lack of motivation for, traveling astronomical distances for undetermined purposes.

Those on the positive side point to the same evidence and suggest that comparable material and equally qualified witnesses are accepted by the legal systems of most countries. As for the possibility that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft (a leap that is not necessarily justified), pro-UFO activists say that any discussion of the likelihood of travel from other possible worlds depends on unavailable knowledge of the technology of those operating UFOs, their normal life spans and their motivations (or lack of same) for traveling extreme distances.

The Evidence

Evidence of a UFO sighting may be anecdotal (the description of a personal experience) and/or recorded (photographic, radar, physical). The reliability of any anecdote depends on the amount and precision of the data, and the personal character and technical background of the witness(es). The usefulness of reliable data depends on its nature: Does it point to a conventional explanation or toward something unconventional?

If every UFO report could be convincingly credited to some conventional astronomical or atmospheric phenomenon, there would be no UFO mystery. It is precisely because so many UFO reports cannot logically be blamed on stars, planets, satellites, airplanes, balloons, etc., that a UFO mystery has existed since at least the mid-1940s.

The most convincing UFO reports were produced in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s by airline pilots, military pilots and ex-military pilots. These men had the training and the experience to be able to distinguish between normal sky sights and highly abnormal sights. They knew what airplanes looked like, and what meteors looked like, having seen them many times. Their visual observations were frequently supported by radar data which showed essentially the same thing. They were therefore able, on many occasions, to methodically eliminate conventional phenomena from consideration when trying to identify UFOs.

In those same decades, most UFO sightings were made in the daytime and frequently at close range, when shapes and surface features could be distinguished, thus making positive identification of normal sights easier and the descriptions of unusual sights more detailed. When all normal explanations had been eliminated, the witnesses could concentrate on those aspects of the experience which were most abnormal.

These abnormal aspects included the shapes of UFOs and their behavior. Most of the UFOs seen in the daytime were said to have had simple geometric shapes--discs, ovals, spheres, cylinders--and surfaces that looked like metal. Such shapes are not only nonexistent among known aircraft, but contrary to all known theories of flight, in most cases offering control and performance disadvantages rather than advantages.

Even more unusual were the specifics of their flight performance: silent hovering, silent high-speed flight, extreme acceleration, supersonic flight at low altitude without sonic booms, and violent, very high-g maneuvers. The actions of many UFOs have suggested that they fly independently of the air and even of the force of gravity. The accomplishment of these maneuvers has been among the major goals of the world's aerospace industry for decades.

On the basis of their appearance, behavior and frequent well-kept, tight formation flights, we must face the possibility that some UFOs may be manufactured, high-tech vehicles. If this is the case, they must be either ours or someone else's. Any "UFOs" that are ours should be well known to the U.S. military, which would have been eager to so label them and remove them from the embarrassing "unidentified" category.

Secret American Aircraft

While there are always some military aircraft that are being kept secret for perfectly good reasons, the classified status of their appearance, at least, is generally changed as soon as they become operational or are declared unsuccessful and thus obsolete. It is possible that currently secret American aircraft may display one or more characteristics generally attributed to UFOs, but those listed as secret in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s can reasonably be assumed to be familiar to aviation experts, if not to every member of the general public. They have either gone into production or have been consigned to the scrap heap or to museums.

If we acknowledge the extremely unlikely chance that highly advanced American military weapons have been kept secret for three or more decades--something not known to have happened at any time in history--we must face the very serious implications. We must have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on known and highly inferior aircraft to be used in a cover-up of such deeply classified activities. These inferior aircraft must have been used and continue to be used while far superior aircraft have been kept in hiding instead of being employed to prevent or win wars which have cost many lives and endangered many more.

Such actions would be unprecedented and indefensible. If a country possesses superior aircraft, it does not equip several generations of its air force with second-rate equipment. It does not throw such inferior aircraft into combat when it has quantities of superior aircraft that would stand a far better chance of winning battles quickly and more certainly. It therefore seems extremely unlikely that most of the unidentifiable UFOs seen 30 or more years ago could be American military aircraft. They must, therefore, be foreign.

Secret Friendly Foreign Aircraft

The presence in American skies of aircraft from friendly foreign nations such as Canada, Great Britain, France and Israel would be known to American military authorities and would almost certainly be known to the civilian (FAA) air traffic control system. If there have been considerable numbers of superior foreign aircraft flying over the USA since World War II, they must have been here for good reasons known to the American military. But these countries have also experienced large numbers of puzzling UFO reports, and therefore are in the same uncomfortable position as the USA.

If, by any chance, one or more friendly nations had created such greatly superior aircraft, the U.S. military would almost certainly have purchased them or had them produced here under license, as has been done with the English Electric Canberra jet bomber and the British Aerospace Corp. Harrier VTOL fighter. As with American-built superior aircraft, these would not be kept secret for decades, and would not have been held in reserve when they were needed for defense or combat.

Secret Unfriendly Foreign Aircraft

The likelihood of highly advanced aircraft from less-than-friendly nations flying for decades over the USA without permission or notification is even smaller than the likelihood of friendly foreign aircraft doing so. In this case, there would be the additional great risk of accidental war upon their discovery and identification, and the only slightly lesser risk of the loss of priceless advanced technology in case of a crash or forced landing.

The only unfriendly nation that could have developed and then produced even slightly advanced aircraft would have been the USSR. Other unfriendly nations, such as Communist China, Libya, Iran, Iraq and Cuba, were even more lacking than was the USSR in the intellectual and industrial capability needed to achieve massive technological breakthroughs. Any of these nations--or other nations--would, of course, have repeatedly made use of such superior weapons to achieve political and economic ends which their conventional weapons never enabled them to gain.

So if the theories of domestic or foreign aircraft cannot explain the large numbers of almost certainly manufactured UFOs seen for more than a half-century in almost every part of the world, is it possible that these UFOs could be neither domestic nor what is usually considered to be foreign?

Alien UFOs

At first glance, the idea that some UFOs may be vehicles from outside the Earth seems utterly preposterous, the baseless result of wishful thinking by highly unscientific minds. If alien craft ever reach our planet, wouldn't they first be detected and identified by scientists, rather than by casual observers? Their nature and origins should be determined by appropriately trained individuals, and the news revealed by high-ranking journalists, not by self-appointed experts with no formal preparation for such a momentous assignment.

As improbable as the presence of non-terrestrial craft in the Earth's vicinity may be, the likelihood of such a presence seems to be increasing by the week, thanks to developments in the new and well-accepted science of astrobiology. Astrobiology is the search for evidence of living things in outer space: complex pre-biotic molecules, large quantities of water, meteorite-borne fossils and Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars.

When authoritative reports of radical-design craft having spectacular performance are viewed in the light of a stream of astrobiological discoveries, the possibility that some UFOs are alien does not seem quite so farfetched. Serious-minded scientists in astronomy and other disciplines estimate there could be billions of planets in the universe, and millions that could harbor life. If even a few of those planets were occupied by technological civilizations, their ability (if not desire) to explore other worlds, such as ours, must be a possibility.

The eventual discovery of, or contact by, one or more alien civilizations is assumed. A search of nearby space for unmanned probes sent by alien civilizations is now being seriously considered, since we have been sending unmanned probes to planets in our solar system for many years. The similarity between these probes and UFOs is hard to ignore.

Summary

Hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings have been made by persons in all walks of life, in all parts of the world. Tens of thousands of UFO reports have been made to governmental and private agencies in the past 55+ years. Thousands of these reports have withstood careful scrutiny and appear to represent real objects having a novel nature.

Patterns of these UFOs' appearance and behavior suggest a limited range of sizes and shapes of unidentified craft, despite the often-desperate efforts on the part of the American and other governments to discount them as nothing more substantial than mistakes made by naïve individuals. Their performance, observed repeatedly by expert witnesses, remains as far off the scale today as it was in the 1940s.

If even one of these unidentified UFOs turns out to be an alien craft, the impact on all aspects of our nation's culture--economic, political, personal--will be limited only by what is learned from an open, serious, objective study of the subject.

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