Close encounters

Oddly enough, in opposition to that fundamental disenchantment, a non-negligible part of the worldwide population today believes that the search for extraterrestrial life should not only focus on planetary bodies of our solar system or to the listening of electronic signals (SETI) from thousands of light-years away, but also to our immediate environment: the Earth itself. Survey polls s1Gallup poll (1987) CNN/Time magazine (1997) Life magazine (2000) Quark monthly science magazine (2002) SCI FI Channel/ Roper poll. regularly indicate not only a widespread belief in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life in the universe, but also and more intriguing that some of it is already visiting us, in the form of what is popularly called UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). Indeed an important number of people believe that the SETI searches have already been successful. The SETI institute’s senior astronomer Shostak underlined this close relationship in 2005: The good news is that polls continue to show that between one and two-thirds of the public thinks that extra-terrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction thinks that some of it is visiting Earth s2S. Shostak, The great UFO debate, SETI institute, 2005..

A national media poll on Americans’ beliefs and personal Experiences related to UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life was commissioned in August 2002 by the SCI FI channel and conducted by RoperASW via OmniTel, a weekly national telephone omnibus service, on a sample of 1021 adults. The results revealed two interesting details in particular: Firstly that more than half (56%) of the American public thought that UFOs were something real and not just in people’s imagination.

Nearly as many (48%) believed that UFOs had visited earth in some form (Fig. 2). Secondly that one in seven Americans said they or someone they knew had an experience involving a UFO s4 The 2002 Roper poll, Coalition for Freedom of Information.

Undeniably in parallel with the space exploration and particularly since the beginning of the 1950s, the last century has seen the emergence of a phenomenon that has generated intense interest and invaded the modern consciousness on a worldwide scale. In Europe many thousands of people, from all walks of life and including numerous civilian, governmental and military credible witnesses, have reported UFO sightings. Although embedded in everyone’s psychology and having gained the status of a modern myth, it is still necessary to give a definition of what the term, generally speaking, refers to: A UFO is the reported sighting of an object or light seen in the sky or on land, whose appearance, trajectory, actions, motions, lights, and colours do not have a logical, conventional, or natural explanation, and which cannot be explained, not only by the original witness, but by scientists or technical experts who try to make a common sense identification after examining the evidence s5 H. J. Allen, The UFO experience, Marlowe, 1972..

The majority of sightings can be explained in conventional terms, e.g. meteors, planets, rockets, space debris, satellites or weather balloons and there remains a continuing lack of any scientifically acceptable evidence. However despite this, the continuance of UFO reports for half a century, the apparent existence of a small residue of cases remaining unexplained after analysis, and the direct association with extraterrestrial probes generate intense interest and give the subject a strong aura of mystery, fascination, controversy and popularity. At each opportunity the debate over and fascination for the extraterrestrial hypothesis for explaining such UFO reports regularly resurfaces. Undoubtedly this situation is here to remain.

This persistent belief probably reflects our desire to find the answers to our age-old question of whether or not we are alone in the universe, projected right here on our planet. Regardless of the scientific results of space exploration, the human consciousness will seek new excitement and fascination for alternate perceptions of its natural frontier, the outer space, at much closer range: its immediate vicinity, be it the atmosphere or the earth’s orbit. Moreover, the detection of numerous extra-solar planets initiated since the mid-1990s has increased the public’s assumption that, with the existence in the universe of billions of stars and galaxies, other earth-sized twins of our planet should exist and even be commonplace. Compared to the beginning of the Space Age, it then became increasingly imaginable firstly that other extra-terrestrial intelligence existed, potentially million of years older than humankind, and secondly that these would also be involved in space exploration, through faster space travel technology means then humankind has today.

The belief that UFOs could represent such an event has by now invaded our mentality and stretched our imagination. This does not appear as impossible as it did decades ago. Perhaps this consideration should not be systematically rejected, based on bias or ridicule attached to the UFO subject, or on the wrong assumption that there is no data at all worth examining.

On the contrary, there is a vast amount of information to examine, the release of which was publicized recently in two widely circulated media announcements. Both announcements represented world wide news headlines and attracted the attention of millions of European citizens. Firstly, in March 2007 France became the first country to officially open its UFOs files to the public when its Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) unveiled a specific website s6CNES/GEIPAN website. documenting 100 000 pages of testimonies, photographs and statistics s7P. Ailleris, Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena in France: Seeking a renewed fascination for space exploration: paper associated to a Poster presentation for the conference ‘‘Imagining outer space’’, 6–9 February 2008, Bielefeld, Germany..

Unexpectedly, within 2 h of allowing access to the site, the CNES web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers around the world attempting to access the information. The objective of this release was to provide total transparency on the current status on the topic, after 30 years of information collection (Figs. 3 and 4). More importantly and in view of an overall 23% ratio of cases remaining unexplained, this unprecedented governmental action was an attempt to stimulate the interest of the scientific community.

Secondly, starting from May 2008 the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) initiated the declassification and release of thousands of documents related to allegedUFOsightings,throughtheNationalArchives’web site (total project estimated to more then 50,000 pages). Although this decision was guaranteed to generate intense international interest, no one had foreseen the actual record internet traffic. In the first four days there were 1.3 million downloads of information from the site. The chart of the number of reported events s8Mod Report, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Regions9, 2000. logged in the MoD database reflects an impressive number of yearly sightings in the United Kingdom (Fig. 5). Unexplained radar images from air traffic control, accounts of strange lights and objects in the sky being spotted by the public, police officers, airplane pilots and armed forces prove intriguing and sometimes alarming (e.g., a near miss by a civil airplane, a US air force fighter pilot scrambling to shoot down a UFO s10National Archivess11, 2008).

Finally a psycholinguistic comment: both the CNES and the MoD have decided to use a different acronym than UFO (respectively, PAN: "Phé́nomènes Aé́rospatiaux Non Identifiés": Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena and UAP: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). These agencies have realised that the old term was critically hindering a serious approach of the topic and had been long since discredited due to its strong connotation with extra-terrestrial vehicles and science fiction. For 60 years the term UFO has been embedded with the unfortunate connotation that if a phenomenon was unidentified it must be somehow extra-terrestrial. Moreover the utilisation of the word "object" within the term was misleading due to the fact that in the vast majority of the sightings there was no certainty about the presence of a material object, as almost exclusively luminous phenomenon are described. The term UAP will therefore be consistently used in the rest of this document.