One of my most cherished guilty pleasures has always been UFOs. Since childhood, unexplained objects in the sky have fascinated me to no end. Watching episodes of Unsolved Mysteries way too young and being freaked out by the stories of UFO sightings and abduction cases only led to me checking out books at my school and local libraries on flying saucers. This created a lifelong love for the mysteries surrounding the mysterious objects in the sky.
While there has been continued interest, however niche, in the field of Ufology, it has really been only the past decade that they have reentered the public zeitgeist as news has broken of secret Department of Defense programs reporting and studying the phenomenon, Congressional hearings on the topic, global reporting on “drone” flaps, and much more.
In this glorious digital age, we find ourselves in, there is no shortage of resources available to study UFOs or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). From the past to the present, a wide variety of online collections, primary sources, reports, and records are now available to research and study UFO/UAPs from every angle.
In this edition of FTA, I am going to give a brief rundown of the different time periods, topics, and people related to UFO history and how to find resources to research to help you explore the topic.
A Very Brief History of the Phenomena (Pre-1947)
The history of unknown objects, lights, etc. in the sky dates to prehistoric times, and spans across cultures, continents, and centuries. Tracking down information on a specific sighting would require knowledge of that sighting in the first place. A good general history of such sightings is Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck’s Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, which provides their sources in the text that you can then go track down on your own.
The end of the 19th century would produce one of the first known “flaps” (and a personal favorite of mine), a flap is a sudden surge in sightings that lead to widespread new coverage and awareness, known as the “Airship Mystery” of 1897. Sightings of blimp-like objects were reported across the United States beginning in 1896 and on into 1897. Now the validity of these “sightings” is dependent upon newspaper accounts. And newspapers of the day being what they were, these might need to be taken with a grain of salt, but nevertheless you can view the original reporting being done through a resource like Chronicling America to view some of the fun accounts.
World War II would also see its fair share of reports mostly in the form of “foo fighter” sightings reported by pilots throughout the war. You can find contemporary newspaper and periodical coverage of these reports, records obtained from the National Archives, and oral histories. As well as the ghost rocket sightings reported in Scandinavia and across Europe immediately following the war.
This all paved the way for the birth of flying saucers and modern UFOs as we know it with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of saucer like objects near Mt. Rainer, Washington in 1947. You can find the original article and others reprinted here. From the Arnold sighting, we get the term flying saucer and this kicked off a slew of UFO reports across the country in 1947 with the infamous Roswell Crash in New Mexico being one of them.
Government and Military Involvement
Since 1947, the United States government usually through the military, has kept an eye on/investigated UFOs in an on-again, off-gain fashion. Beginning in 1948, the United States Air Force began investigating reports of flying saucers, this started with Project SIGN, being replaced the following year by Project GRUDGE (additional records), which led to the creation of Project BLUE BOOK (additional GRUDGE and BLUE BOOK records) in 1952 and would last until 1969.
Project BLUE BOOK was shuttered thanks in large part to the findings released by a scientific committee chaired by University of Colorado professor, Dr. Edward Condon. The report of the committee would come to be known as the Condon Report and would categorically deny the existence of UFOs, which consequently would become the government position on up to the present.
The Condon Report also had the impact of closing any official investigations into UFOs for the next 50 years. It would not be until a New York Times article appeared in 2017, “On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program”, that the world would find out about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a boutique investigatory body nestled deep within the Department of Defense that had been studying UFOs for a number of years.
The publicizing of the existence of AATIP kicked off the most recent era of official (or at least publicly acknowledged) government interest in UFOs, now rebranded as UAPs. From this revelation, came Congressional Hearings (Congressional documentation) and the creation of a UAP Task Force that is now mandated to report regularly to Congress.
Private Investigatory Groups
While government interest in UFOs has waxed and waned over the decades, there has been consistent involvement from those dedicated to studying and understanding the UFO phenomenon.
A flurry of organizations have been formed that have taken it upon themselves to investigate sightings, collect data, come to conclusions, and carry on the interest in UFOs. The records of these groups contain invaluable information and make for excellent research materials. Early examples of these UFO groups are the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), who produced a regular newsletter, the APRO Bulletin, and the National Investigations Committee on Aeiral Phenomena (NICAP).
Over the decades there have been many such groups that have come and gone with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) being the largest and most controversial, and whose archive is available to members.
Other groups, archives, and/or repositories include:
Ufologists
Further filling in the gaps in UFO research over the years have been scores and scores of individuals who have independently researched UFOs. These knights of the unidentified are known as ufologists.
Through their work, it is how we know about some of the most well-known UFO incidents and cases from Stanton Friedman’s work on the Roswell Crash and the Majestic 12 documents to John Keel’s investigation into the Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, WV, which included a significant amount of UFO activity, Rendlesham Forest Incident, cattle mutilations, the Paul Bennewitz case, and more.
Some of these individuals have donated their papers to archives where you can explore further. The Archives of the Impossible houses several ufologists archives, as does the Expanding Frontiers Archive, and you can search around to find others that might be locally kept like the Gray Barker UFO Collection at the Clarks Harrison Public Library in Clarksburg, WV.
So much of history is providing context to whatever it is you’re studying, and UFOs are no different. The history of UFOs really can be viewed as a history of the latter half of the 20th century America. That’s not to say that UFOs aren’t a global phenomenon, because they are. But more so than any other country, they have remained an itch that America has yet to satisfyingly scratch for the past 75+ years. With the slow, continuous stream of whistleblowers alerting us to new government programs and the countless videos posted online showing new lights in the sky, this fascination with UFOs does not show signs of going away anytime soon.
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