Fall Asleep Learning About UFOs

In this episode of the I Can’t Sleep Podcast, drift off to sleep while learning about UFOs. Are they real? Are they watching us? Too spooky for bedtime? Don’t worry—I’m not here to convince you to believe in little green men. Maybe UFOs aren’t your thing, and you’re thinking, “Why not an episode about giraffes? Giraffes are harmless and tall, right?”

Well, I’m not sure I have a good answer for that. Sometimes, I just pick a topic because it feels right, and tonight, it’s UFOs. But rest assured, this episode is as boring as ever, guaranteed to lull you into dreamland. Happy sleeping!

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast,

Where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

I'm your host,

Benjamin Boster,

And today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Unidentified Flying Object.

An Unidentified Flying Object,

Or UFO,

Or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon,

UAP,

Is any perceived airborne,

Submerged,

Or transmedium phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained.

Upon investigation,

Most UFOs are identified as known objects or atmospheric phenomena,

While a small number remain unexplained.

While unusual sightings have been reported in the sky throughout history,

UFOs became culturally prominent after World War II,

Escalating during the Space Age.

Studies and investigations into UFO reports conducted by governments such as Project Blue Book in the United States and Project Condon in the United Kingdom,

As well as by organizations and individuals,

Have occurred over the years without confirmation of the fantastical claims of the small but vocal groups of ufologists who favor unconventional or pseudoscientific hypotheses,

Often claiming that UFOs are evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence,

Technologically advanced cryptids,

Demons,

Interdimensional contact,

Or future time travelers.

After decades of promotion of such ideas by believers and in popular media,

The kind of evidence required to solidly support such claims has not been forthcoming.

Scientists and skeptic organizations such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have provided prosaic explanations for UFOs,

Namely that they are caused by natural phenomena,

Human technology,

Delusions,

And hoaxes.

Beliefs surrounding UFOs have inspired parts of new religions,

Even as social scientists have identified the ongoing interest in storytelling surrounding UFOs as a modern example of folklore and mythology,

Understandable with psychosocial explanations.

The U.

S.

Government currently has two entities dedicated to UFO data collection and analysis,

NASA's UAP Independent Study Team and the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

During the late 1940s and through the 1950s,

UFOs were often called flying saucers or flying disks,

Based on reporting of the Kenneth Arnold incident.

An identified flying object has been in use since 1947.

The acronym UFO was coined by Captain Edward J.

Ruppelt for the USAF.

He wrote,

Obviously,

The term flying saucer is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance.

For this reason,

The military prefers the more general,

If less colorful name,

Unidentified Flying Objects,

UFO.

The term UFO became widespread during the 1950s,

At first in technical literature but later in popular use.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,

UAP,

First appeared in the late 1960s.

UAP has seen increasing usage in the 21st century due to negative cultural associations with UFO.

UAP has sometimes expanded as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon.

While technically a UFO refers to any unidentified flying object,

In modern popular culture the term UFO has generally become synonymous with alien spacecraft.

The term Extraterrestrial Vehicle,

ETV,

Is sometimes used to separate this explanation of UFOs from totally earthbound explanations.

Studies show that after careful investigation,

The majority of UFOs can be identified as ordinary objects or phenomena.

The 1952-1955 study for the USAF used the following categories.

Balloon,

Astronomical,

Aircraft,

Light Phenomenon,

Birds,

Clouds,

Dust,

Etc.

Insufficient Information,

Psychological Manifestations,

Unknown,

And Other.

The most commonly found identified sources of UFO reports are Balloons,

Surveillance Balloons,

Toy Balloons,

Weather Balloons,

Large Research Balloons,

And Sky Lanterns.

Astronomical Objects,

Bright Stars,

Bolides,

Bright Planets,

And the Moon.

Aircraft,

Including military,

Civilian,

And experimental aircraft,

As well as such peculiarities as aerial advertising,

Missile and other rocket launches,

Artificial satellites,

The International Space Station,

Re-entering spacecraft including space debris,

Kites,

And various unmanned aerial vehicles,

Often popularly termed drones.

Light Phenomena,

Mirages,

Fata Morgana,

Sundogs,

Ball Lightning,

Moondogs,

Satellite Flares,

Lens Flares,

Searchlights,

And other Ground Lights,

Etc.

Other Atmospheric Objects and Phenomena,

Birds,

Unusual Clouds,

Flares,

Plasma.

Psychological Effects,

Pareidolia,

Suggestibility and False Memories,

Mass Psychogenic Disorders,

Optical Illusions and Hallucinations,

Hoaxes.

An individual 1979 study by CUFOAS researcher Alan Hendry found,

As did other investigations,

That fewer than 1% of cases he investigated were hoaxes,

And most sightings were actually honest misidentifications of prosaic phenomena.

Hendry attributed most of these to inexperience or misperception.

Astronomer Andrew Fracknoy rejected the hypothesis that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft and responded to the onslaught of credulous coverage in books,

Films,

And entertainment by teaching his students to apply critical thinking to such claims,

Advising them that being a good scientist is not unlike being a good detective.

According to Fracknoy,

UFO reports might at first seem mysterious,

But the more you investigate,

The more likely you are to find that there is less to those stories than meets the eye.

People have always observed the sky and have sometimes seen what to some appeared to be unusual sights,

Including phenomena as varied as comets,

Bright meteors,

One or more of the five planets that can be readily seen with the naked eye,

Planetary conjunctions,

And atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhalia and lenticular clouds.

One particularly famous example is Halley's Comet,

First recorded by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.

C.

And possibly as early as 467 B.

C.

As a strange and unknown guest light in the sky.

As a bright comet that visits the inner solar system every 76 years,

It was often identified as a unique,

Isolated event in ancient historical documents,

Whose authors were unaware that it was a repeating phenomenon.

Such accounts in history often were treated as supernatural portents,

Angels,

Or other religious omens.

While UFO enthusiasts have sometimes commented on the narrative similarities between certain religious symbols in medieval paintings and UFO reports,

The canonical and symbolic character of such images is documented by art historians,

Placing more conventional religious interpretations on such images.

Some examples of pre-contemporary reports about unusual aerial phenomena include Julius Opsikens was a Roman writer who is believed to have lived in the middle of the 4th century A.

D.

The only work associated with his name is the Liber de Prodigis,

Book of Prodigies,

Completely extracted from an epitome,

Or abridgment,

Written by Livy.

De Prodigis was constructed as an account of the wonders and portents that occurred in Rome between 249 and 12 B.

C.

An aspect of Opsikens' work that has inspired excitement in some UFO enthusiasts is that he makes reference to things moving through the sky.

The descriptions provided bear resemblance to observations of meteor showers.

Opsikens was also writing some 400 years after the events he described,

Thus the text is not an eyewitness account.

No cooperation with those amazing sites of old with contemporary observations was mentioned in that work.

Shen Kuo,

1031-1095,

A Song Chinese government scholar-official and prolific polymath inventor,

Wrote a vivid passage in his Dream Pool Essays,

1088,

About an unidentified flying object.

He recorded the testimony of eyewitnesses in 11th century Anhui and Jiangsu,

Especially in the city of Yangzhou,

Who stated that a flying object with opening doors would shine a blinding light from its interior,

From an object shaped like a pearl,

That would cast shadows from trees for ten miles in radius,

And was able to take off at tremendous speeds.

A woodcut by Hans Glaser that appeared in a broadsheet in 1561 has been featured in popular cultures as the celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg,

And connected to various ancient astronaut claims.

Skeptic and debunker Jason Colavito argues that the woodcut is a second-hand depiction of a particularly gaudy sundog,

A known atmospheric optical phenomenon.

A similar report comes from 1566 over Basel,

And indeed,

In the 15th and 16th centuries,

Many leaflets wrote of miracles and sky spectacles,

Which bear resemblance to natural phenomena which were only more fully characterized after the scientific revolution.

On January 25,

1878,

The Denison Daily News printed an article in which John Martin,

A local farmer,

Had reported seeing a large dark circle object resembling a balloon,

Flying at wonderful speed.

Martin,

According to the newspaper account,

Said it appeared to be about the size of a saucer from his perspective,

One of the first uses of the word saucer in association with a UFO.

At the time,

Ballooning was becoming an increasingly popular and sophisticated endeavor,

And the first controlled flights of such devices were occurring around that time.

From November 1896 to April 1897,

United States newspapers carried numerous reports of mystery airships that are reminiscent of modern UFO waves.

Scores of people even reported talking to the pilots.

Some people feared that Thomas Edison had created an artificial star that could fly around the country.

On April 16,

1897,

A letter was found that purported to be an unciphered communication between an airship operator and Edison.

When asked his opinion of such reports,

Edison said,

You can take it from me,

That is a pure fake.

The coverage of Edison's denial marked the end of major newspaper coverage of the airships in this period.

In the Pacific and European theaters during World War II,

Round glowing fireballs,

Known as Foo Fighters,

Were reported by Allied and Axis pilots.

Some explanations for these sightings included St.

Elmo's fire,

The planet Venus,

Hallucinations from oxygen deprivation,

And German secret weapons,

Specifically rockets.

In 1946,

More than 2,

000 reports were collected,

Primarily by the Swedish military,

Of unidentified aerial objects over the Scandinavian nations,

Along with isolated reports from France,

Portugal,

Spain,

Italy,

And Greece.

The objects were referred to as Russian Hail,

And later as Ghost Rockets,

Because it was thought the mysterious objects were possibly Russian tests of captured German V-1 or V-2 rockets,

But most were identified as natural phenomena as meteors.

Many scholars,

Especially those arguing for the psychosocial UFO hypothesis,

Have noted that UFO characteristics reported after the first widely publicized modern sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 resembled a host of science fiction tropes from earlier in the century.

By most accounts,

The popular UFO craze in the U.

S.

Began with a media frenzy surrounding the report.

There were reports on June 24,

1947,

Of a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold who described seeing a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds near Mount Rainier that he said were moving like a saucer would if skipped across water,

Which led to headlines about flying saucers and flying disks.

Only weeks after Arnold's story was reported in 1947,

Gallup published a poll asking people in the United States what the flying saucers might be.

Already,

90% had heard of the new term.

However,

As reported by historian Greg Eganian,

A majority either had no idea what they could be or thought that witnesses were mistaken,

While visitors from space were not initially among the options that anyone had in mind,

And Gallup didn't even mention if anyone surveyed brought up aliens.

Within weeks,

Reports of flying saucer sightings became a daily occurrence with one particularly famous example being the Roswell incident in 1947,

Where remnants of a downed observation balloon were recovered by a farmer and confiscated by military personnel.

UFO enthusiasts in the early 1950s started to organize local saucer clubs modeled after science fiction fan clubs of the 1930s and 40s,

With some growing to national and international prominence within a decade.

In 1950,

Three influential books were published,

Donald Kehoe's The Flying Saucers Are Real,

Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers,

And Gerald Hurd's The Riddle of the Flying Saucers.

Each guilelessly proposed that the extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis was the correct explanation,

And that the visits were in response to detonations of atomic weapons.

These books also introduced Americans to,

As Eganian puts it,

The crusading whistleblower dedicated to breaking the silence over the alien origins of unidentified flying objects.

Media accounts and speculation ran rampant in the U.

S.

Especially in connection to the 1952 UFO scare in Washington,

D.

C.

,

So that by 1953,

The intelligence officials,

Roberts and Panel,

Worried that genuine incursions by enemy aircraft over U.

S.

Territory could be lost in a maelstrom of kooky hallucination of UFO reports.

A Trendex survey in August 1957,

Ten years after the Arnold incident,

Reported that over 25% of the U.

S.

Public believed unidentified flying objects could be from outer space.

The cultural phenomenon showed up within some intellectual works,

Such as the 1959 publication of Flying Saucers,

A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky,

By Carl Jung,

A Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology.

Starting in 1947,

The U.

S.

Air Force began to record and investigate UFO reports with Project Sign looking into more than 250 cases from 1947 to 1949.

It was replaced by Project Grudge up through 1951.

In the third U.

S.

Air Force program,

From March 1952 to its termination in December 1969,

The U.

S.

Air Force cataloged 12,

618 sightings of UFOs as part of what is now known as Project Blue Book.

In the late 1950s,

Public pressure mounted for a full declassification of all UFO records,

But the CIA played a role in refusing to allow this.

This sense was not universal in the CIA.

However,

As fellow NICAP official Donald E.

Kehoe wrote that Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkircher,

The first director of the CIA,

Wanted public disclosure of UFO evidence.

Official U.

S.

Air Force interest in UFO reports went on hiatus in 1969 after a study by the University of Colorado led by Edward U.

Condon and known as the Condon Report concluded that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge and that further time investigating UFO reports cannot be justified.

From the 1960s to 1990s,

UFOs were part of American popular culture's obsession with the supernatural and paranormal.

In 1961,

The first alien abduction account was sensationalized when Barney and Betty Hill underwent hypnosis after seeing a UFO and reported recovered memories of their experience that became ever more elaborate as the years went by.

In 1966,

5% of Americans reported to Gallup that they had at some time seen something they thought was a flying saucer.

96% said they had heard or read about flying saucers and 46% of these thought they were something real rather than just people's imagination.

Responding to UFO enthusiasm,

There have always been consistent yet less popular efforts made at debunking many of the claims.

And at times,

The media was enlisted,

Including a 1966 TV special,

UFO,

Friend,

Foe,

Or Fantasy,

In which Walter Cronkite patiently explained to viewers that UFOs were fantasy.

Cronkite enlisted Carl Sagan and J.

Allen Hinnick who told Cronkite,

To this time there is no valid scientific proof that we have been visited by spaceships.

Such attempts to disenchant the zeitgeist were not very successful at tamping down the mania.

Keith Klor notes that the allure of flying saucers remained popular with the public into the 1970s,

Spurring production of such sci-fi films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien,

Which continued to stoke public fascination.

Meanwhile,

Leonard Nimoy narrated a popular occult and mystery TV series,

In Search Of,

While daytime talk shows of Mike Douglas,

Merv Griffin,

And Phil Donahue featured interviews with alien abductees and people who credulously reported stories about UFOs.

In the 1980s and 1990s,

UFO stories featured in such pulp true crime serials as Unsolved Mysteries,

While the 33-volume Time Live series,

Mysteries of the Unknown,

Which featured UFO stories,

Sold some 700,

000 copies.

Klor writes that by the late 1990s,

Other big UFO sub-themes had been prominently introduced into pop culture,

Such as the abduction phenomenon and government conspiracy narrative via best-selling books and,

Of course,

The X-Files.

Hagigian notes that by this point,

The UFO problem had become far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve.

Interest was particularly fevered in the 1990s,

With the publicity surrounding the television broadcast of an alien autopsy video marketed as real footage,

But later admitted to be a staged reenactment.

Hagigian writes that there had always been outlier abduction reports dating back to the 50s and 60s,

But that in the 80s and 90s,

The floodgates opened,

And with them a new generation of UFO advocates.

Leaders among them were the artist Bud Hopkins,

Horror writer Whitley Streber,

Historian David Jacobs,

And Harvard psychiatrist John Mack.

They all defended the veracity of those claiming to have been kidnapped,

Examined,

And experimented upon by beings from another world,

Writes Hagigian,

As new missionaries who simultaneously played the role of investigator,

Therapist,

And advocate to their vulnerable charges.

Hagigian says that Mack signaled both the culmination and end of the headiest days of alien abduction.

When Mack began working with and publishing accounts of abductees,

Or experiencers as he called them,

In the early 1990s,

He brought a sense of legitimacy to the study of extraterrestrial captivity.

By the late 1990s,

However,

The Harvard Medical School initiated a review of his position,

Which allowed him to retain tenure.

However,

After this review,

As the review board chairman Arnold Relman later put it,

Mack was not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore.

Claims of alien abduction have continued,

But no other clinicians would continue to speak of them as real in any sense.

Nonetheless,

These ideas persisted in popular opinion.

According to a 1996 poll by Newsweek,

20% of Americans believed that UFOs were more likely to be proof of alien life than to have a natural scientific explanation.

In December 2017,

A new round of media attention started when the New York Times broke the story of the secret Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program that was funded from 2007 to 2012,

With $22 million spent on the program.

Following this story,

Along with a series of sensationalized Pentagon UFO videos,

Leaked by members of the program who became convinced that UFOs were genuine mysteries worth investigating,

There was an increase in mainstream attention to UFO stories.

In July 2021,

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb announced the creation of his Galileo project,

Which intended to use high-tech astronomical equipment to seek evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts in space and possibly within Earth's atmosphere.

This was followed closely by the publication of Loeb's book Extraterrestrial,

In which he argued that the first interstellar comet ever observed,

Omauma,

Might be an artificial light sail made by an alien civilization.

Two government-sponsored programs,

NASA's UAP Independent Study Team and the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office,

Were charged in part by congressional fiat to investigate UFO claims more fully,

Adopting the new moniker Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon UAP to avoid associations with past sensationalism.

On May 17,

2022,

Members of the United States House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism,

Counterintelligence,

And Counterproliferation held congressional hearings with top military officials to discuss military reports of UAPs.

It was the first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in the U.

S.

In over 50 years.

Another congressional hearing took place on July 26,

2023,

Featuring the whistleblower claims of former U.

S.

Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grush.

A Harris poll in 2009 found that 32% of Americans believe in UFOs.

A National Geographic study in June 2012 found that 36% of Americans believe UFOs exist,

And that 10% thought they had spotted one.

In June 2021,

A Pew Research poll found that 51% in the United States thought that UFOs reported by people in the military were likely to be evidence of intelligent life from beyond the Earth.

In August 2021,

Gallup,

With a question not specific to military reports,

Only found that 41% of adults believed some UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets.

This Gallup poll showed 44% of men and 38% of women believe this.

This average of 41% in 2021 was up from 33% in a 2019 Gallup poll with the same question.

Gallup further found that college graduates went in 2019 from being the least likely educational group to believe this to being on par in 2021 with adults who have no college education.

An October 2022 poll by YouGov only found that 34% of Americans believe that UFOs are likely to involve alien life forms.

Historian Greg Egidjian wrote in August 2021 that over the last 50 years the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects,

And that it often gets personal with those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin,

Dismissing those who consider UFOs to be worth studying as narrow-minded,

Biased,

Obstinate,

And cruel,

While the skeptics brushed off devotees as naive,

Ignorant,

Gullible,

And downright dangerous.

Such mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion,

A domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief,

And science,

Too,

Has found itself engaged in increasing amounts of boundary work,

Which is asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas,

Between what may and what may not refer to itself as science,

With regard to UFO questions.

Egidjian points out our current stark divide did not happen overnight,

And its roots lie in the post-war decades and a series of events that,

With their news coverage,

Grainy images,

Celebrity crusaders,

Exasperated skeptics,

Unsatisfying military statements,

And accusations of a government cover-up,

Foreshadow our present moment.

UFOs have been taken up by religious studies scholars and various scholarly books.

Jeffrey Kripal,

Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University,

Has said that both the material and the mental dimensions of UFOs are incredibly important to get a sense of the full picture.

As Adrian Horton writes,

From The X-Files to Men in Black,

Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Star Wars to Marvel,

Hollywood has,

For decades,

Provided an engrossing feedback loop for interest in the extraterrestrial,

A reflection of our fears and capaciousness,

Whose ubiquitous popularity has,

In turn,

Fueled more interest in UFOs as perennially comparing entertainment tropes not to be taken seriously.

Horton observes that these alien movies have generally reflected shifting cultural anxieties,

From existential terror of nuclear war to foreign enslavement to loss of bodily control.

American entertainment has explored both hostile aliens as well as the benevolent world-expanding encounters,

Seen in films such as Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.

T.

The Extraterrestrial.

In her research on the relationship of media to UFO beliefs,

Diana Walsh Pasulka,

A professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina,

Says that what is seen on a screen,

If it conforms to certain criteria,

Is interpreted as real,

Even if it is not real,

And even if one knows it is not real,

And that screen images embed themselves in one's brain and memories in ways that can determine how one views one's past and even determine one's future behaviors.

Reviews

This was interesting Benjamin! Alas your reading of it with your soothing voice sent me to snooze land before I could hear the ending. Well played my friend, well played. 🤣🤣

From what I heard, I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t give any credence to UFOs being extraterrestrial spaceships. I’ve always loved the thought of ET coming to visit us. But it did the trick and put me to sleep, dreaming of 🛸👽🚀…