Recently, U.S. fighter jets shot down three mysterious objects in or near American airspace, sparking curiosity and concern about these unidentified crafts.
This all began after a Chinese balloon suspected of spying on the U.S. was taken down on February 4, 2023. American military planes later encountered and brought down three more strange objects.
When asked about these events, Air Force General Glen VanHerck, who oversees U.S. airspace, didn’t rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement. Although other military officials later downplayed this idea, it highlighted how little the U.S. government knows about these objects.
As someone who studies space policy, I often get questions about UFOs and aliens. But as these recent incidents show, a UFO is more likely to be something human-made, not from outer space. But what exactly does UFO mean?
UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, a term used for aircraft that are hard to identify or explain. The interest in UFOs in the U.S. started in the late 1940s and 1950s when new technologies like rockets and missiles were being developed.
Today, the U.S. government uses a different term: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAPs. They do this partly to move away from the idea of aliens in science fiction and to encourage more scientific study. It also recognizes that many of these “objects” turn out to be strange things in the sky or camera tricks.
Now, let’s dig deeper. Thousands of people report UAP sightings every year, but until recently, there wasn’t an official way for the U.S. to keep track of them. This changed in 2020 when the Pentagon released three videos taken from fighter jet cockpits showing weird objects doing strange things.
In 2021, Congress told the government to investigate UAPs. The report found 144 accounts of UAP encounters by military pilots and sensors between 2004 and 2021.
The Pentagon’s report suggests different explanations for UAPs. Some could be birds, balloons, or drones – basically, “clutter” in the sky. Others might be natural things like ice crystals or changes in temperature. And then there are secret technologies that the U.S. or other countries are developing. This last category has drawn attention because the U.S. military has been shooting down some of these balloons and objects recently. China and Russia can get a lot of information from spy satellites, but balloons (or other unknown technologies) are another way to gather secret data. If the U.S. can’t identify a new technology, it’s easy to call it a UAP.
In 2022 alone, the Pentagon got 247 new reports of UAPs, and about half of them turned out to be balloons or balloon-like things.
But here’s the thing: if people don’t know what to look for, it’s easy to miss UAPs. This was the case with the spy balloons that China sent around the world. Whether future UAPs are balloons, secret tech, or something else, there’s going to be more focus on studying them, and we’ll get better at spotting them. So, expect more reports and more interceptions by U.S. aircraft in the future.