UFOs and aliens in space write an essay
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UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, and extraterrestrials are perennial favorites in science fiction, but to date there have been no confirmed encounters on Earth. Still, strange sights in the night sky have been attributed to UFOs or aliens over the decades, most famously in Roswell, New Mexico, where many believers claim an alien craft crashed on a farm in 1947. In 2017, the existence of a secret U.S. government program that tracked "UFO" sightings by military pilots, which shut down in 2012, was brought to light in a New York Times report.
UFOs have fascinated and puzzled people for decades, yet hard evidence seems ever elusive. Many people are convinced that not only are extraterrestrials visiting Earth, but that governments have perpetuated a top-secret global conspiracy to cover it up. Here's a look at UFOs throughout history.
Today, most people equate UFOs with extraterrestrial intelligence and advanced technologies, but this is a very recent idea. That's not to say that historically people did not report seeing unusual things in the skies, for they surely did: comets, meteors, eclipses and the like had been reported (and sometimes recorded) for millennia — in fact some researchers believe that the Star of Bethlehem may have been an illusion created by a merging of Jupiter and Saturn, which occurred right around Jesus' birth).
But it's only been in the past century or so that anybody assumed that unknown lights or objects in the sky were visitors from other planets. Several of the planets had been noticed for millennia, but were not thought of as places where other living creatures might reside (for example ancient Greeks and Romans thought the planets were gods).
Early science fiction writers like Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe fueled the public's interest in voyages to other worlds, and as technology developed some people began to wonder if that might not indeed be possible for advanced civilizations. The first reports of what could be called UFOs emerged in the late 1800s, though in those days they didn't use terms like "UFO" or "flying saucer," but instead "airships."
The most dramatic early UFO encounter occurred in 1897 Texas, when E.E. Haydon, a newspaper reporter for the Dallas Morning News, described an amazing encounter complete with a crashed spacecraft, dozens of eyewitnesses, a recovered dead Martian body, and metallic wreckage (50 years later a nearly identical story would circulate about a crash in the neighboring state of New Mexico). The fantastic tale unraveled when researchers could find no eyewitnesses to support Haydon's story, and nothing of the alien or the "several tons" of mysterious spacecraft wreckage was ever found. It turned out that Haydon had made the whole story up as a publicity stunt to attract tourists
It's not hard to understand why there are so many UFO sightings. After all, the only criterion for a UFO is that some "flying object" be "unidentified" by whoever is looking at it at the time. Any object seen in the sky, especially at night, can be very difficult to identify because of the limitations of human perception. Knowing how far away something is helps us determine its size and speed; that's why we know that moving cars seen at a distance aren't really smaller, nor are they moving slowly; it's simply an optical illusion. If the eyewitness doesn't know the distance, then he or she cannot determine the size. Is that thing or light in the sky 20 feet long and 200 yards away, or is it 200 feet long and a mile away? It's impossible to know, and this makes estimates of size, distance and speed of UFOs very unreliable. Even the planet Venus — at least 25 million miles away — has been mistaken for a UFO by pilots and others on many occasions.