The weird history and future of UFO’s
Lesson summary
Hi there, I’m Jeff and you are listening to Plain English lesson number 476. JR is the producer and he has uploaded today’s full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/476.
Coming up today: The U.S. military is keeping a list of mysterious objects that pilots have seen in the sky or that have been caught on camera. Nobody knows what they are. Until recently, the list has been shrouded in secrecy; nobody wanted to talk about them publicly. One reason is the wacky history of UFO’s in American culture. In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you what it means to “raise the stakes.” And we have a quote of the week. Let’s get started.
Hearings investigate unidentified objects and try to remove their stigma
Here’s a tip in English: If you want to get an English speaker, especially an American of a certain age, to laugh, you just need to use three little letters: UFO.
UFO stands for “ unidentified flying object ” and UFO’s hold a special place in America’s national lore . It all started in the 1940s, when a civilian pilot said he saw nine objects all flying in formation . These objects, he said, were round and flat, the shape of a frisbee or a saucer . (A saucer is the small dish that goes underneath a coffee cup.) The pilot, Kevin Arnold, said these discs were flying at almost 2,000 kilometers per hour. The strong implication was that this was an alien life form that had come to visit the earth. This report set off a nationwide media frenzy .
Soon, people who saw something—or thought they saw something—strange in the sky would report it to the government and the news media, claiming to have seen a UFO. People all across America wanted to get in on the action , and they sent letters and made phone calls reporting UFO’s, unidentified flying objects. Convinced they had seen evidence of aliens, people contacted their elected representatives , they contacted the military , they contacted scientists, they contacted new pseudo-experts in UFO’s, and they contacted the media. It was a national frenzy.
Then, in the early 1960s, a married couple from the rural state of New Hampshire raised the stakes . Barney and Betty Hill claimed that they had been driving in a rural part of their state and saw a UFO. They kept driving and tracking it across the sky , until finally it lowered itself over their car: it was a spaceship , they said. They said they could see the aliens in the spaceship and that they—Barney and Betty Hill of Portsmouth, New Hampshire— were abducted by those aliens, knocked unconscious , and dropped off 35 miles from their car. After seeing the publicity around their story, other people started claiming that they, too, had been abducted by aliens.
The term UFO, then , became synonymous with hallucinations , conspiracy theories , and people who believed aliens were invading the earth. Even so, it’s a topic that got serious attention . The U.S. military looked into it and Congress held public hearings investigating UFO’s.
The UFO craze eventually died down ; the last Congressional hearing on the topic was in 1969. By the 1990s, UFO’s had become the joke they are today— loony people from long ago who looked up in the sky and thought aliens were coming to Earth, ha ha ha. Movies like Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, and E.T., depicted UFO’s as dystopia , comedy, or an endearing fantasy of children.
UFO, as a term, is associated with the wacky conspiracy theories about aliens. But there are still things flying through the sky that cannot be identified with any scientific certainty. Today , the polite term for those is called “ unidentified aerial phenomena .”
And the U.S. Congress recently held its first hearing in over half a century on UFO’s, or, as we now call them, unidentified aerial phenomena. The objective was to bring more transparency to something that is, really, a serious issue .
The Navy has a database of over 400 incidents that cannot be explained . Many of them were reported by military pilots who saw something in the sky that they could not identify as something else. Often, a pilot adds an item to the list and the military investigates and discovers the cause. For example, the hearings featured a video in which a spherical shape appeared in a video clip for just a few seconds and disappeared . In another, a series of green triangles appeared in the sky.
An investigation found the green triangles were just a drone —it was the camera’s lens that caused them to appear green in the image. After a lengthy investigation , the military also determined another mysterious object was a balloon . But not every observation can be explained.
This type of inquiry is important because aircraft are getting smaller and quieter. It’s legitimate for a country’s military to investigate whether private individuals or another country’s government are using small aerial aircraft, like drones, for espionage or other purposes. That, alas , is what this list is for. The military wants to know if another person or country is using a small flying vehicle or drone to spy, conduct cyber warfare , or otherwise threaten the country.
But for years, the history of UFO’s has impeded this type of inquiry. Military pilots didn’t report anything strange they saw in the sky, afraid that they’d be laughed at. As for the reports that did exist…the military kept them under wraps , out of fear that they would invite public ridicule or ignite a new UFO craze.
The new report, and the Congressional hearings, were intended to bring transparency to the issue of modern espionage, defense, and warfare .
Still, the U.S. Navy knows its history—or at least its cinema. At the Congressional hearing, Navy officers were at pains to emphasize that none of the objects were “non-terrestrial in origin” (meaning from another planet) and that none had attempted to communicate with military pilots.
UFO click bait
The UFO craze lives on today, and here’s why. The headline that made it out of these hearings was, “Congress investigates UFOs.” And the media knows exactly what they’re doing when they write headlines like that— it’s click bait . What you think, as a reader, is that Congress is holding hearings on aliens landing on Earth.
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