UFO Sightings Are Reported around the World Every Year

Horatio upon seeing the ghost of his father: “O day and night, but this is wonderous strange.” Hamlet: “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

(Shakespeare in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

15 July 2021 (Wall Street International)* — If someone wanted to ruin his career, taking UFOs seriously has been a good way to do it.  In polite circles, the idea that nonhuman species are visiting Earth from distant civilizations has ranked high on the kook scale. Now that might be changing.

Speculation about extraterrestrial presences has been around a very long time, from theories about crop circles to speculations that advanced civilizations have intervened in human affairs occasionally to help us avert crises or boost our intelligence.

What’s new is that straight-laced military officials in the United States have just added a hint of credibility to encounters with UFOs.

At the request of the United States Congress, the Pentagon¹ has issued the results of an investigation into UFO encounters with military aircraft. It turns out that military leaders have started taking these encounters seriously because highly trained and disciplined fighter pilots are not known for flights of fancy.

Thousands of UFO sightings are reported around the world every year. They became more frequent in the United States in the 1940s after it detonated the first atomic bomb.

The U.S. military began investigating in 1947, but suspended the program in 1969 after looking into more than 12,600 sightings. Its investigators left about 700 incidents they could not explain.

Then, in December 2017, the venerable New York Times published a front-page story that the Pentagon was still conducting a secret program to investigate its pilots’ encounters with airborne objects that displayed unearthly speed and maneuverability.

The popular television news program 60 Minutes recently interviewed two of the pilots and showed their videos. That reignited persistent rumors that the U.S. government knows much more about alien spacecraft than it admits.

The Pentagon was to give Congress the results of its investigations on June 28. According to pre-release leaks to the media, it concluded that neither the military nor the U.S. government was responsible for most of the 120 UFOs pilots observed.

Investigators found no proof that these were alien spacecraft, but they did not rule it out. Parts of the report to Congress were to remain classified.