Every year since the late ‘80s, Eureka Springs has been home to the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference at the Best Western Inn of the Ozarks. Due to COVID-19 the last conference was held in 2019. The next one is scheduled for April 2022. Meanwhile, people remain interested in UFOs, and there has been interest in the recently released report by the U.S. Department of Defense concerning their information about the subject.
History is full of references to alien beings and spacecraft. There are references to battles in the skies from the Middle Ages, accounts by military pilots since the beginning of air travel, and volumes of news reports, books, and previous government investigations on the subject.
One early book on the subject is Chariots of the Gods by Erich Von Daniken, who attributes much early human technology to alien beings or to humans schooled by them. Mysterious statues like those at Easter Island, the pyramids, and the Nazca Lines in Peru are attributed to alien technology, and various paintings and biblical verses are said to reference ancient astronauts. Although most of these findings have been otherwise explained, some remain unconvinced.
The first reference to “flying saucers” comes from a report by an amateur pilot in 1947. Kenneth Arnold saw bright lights in the sky near Mount Rainier, and later described them as unidentified flying objects. When asked to describe their motion he said they were flying, “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.” Readers of his account took this to mean that the objects were shaped like saucers although that’s not what was said.
The famous Roswell, N.M., incident occurred that same year. When a rancher reported a strange 200-yd.-long wreckage near an army base there, the military attributed it to weather balloons although the newspaper photo of the scene didn’t match that description. The military, 50 years later, admitted that the wreckage was part of a top-secret atomic espionage project. Not everyone believes that account, either.
Hundreds of U.S. pilots have reported seeing UFOs. On July 24, 1948, pilots of an Eastern Airlines DC-3 saw something inexplicable in the skies over southwest Alabama. Pilot Clarence Chiles reported, “It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power, shooting flame from the rear some 50 feet. There were two rows of windows, which indicated an upper and lower deck, [and] from inside these windows a very bright light was glowing. Underneath the ship there was a blue glow of light.”
Both pilots drew what they’d seen. The incident report was destroyed by the U.S. Air Force without explanation. There is widespread consensus that this event may have been the catalyst for the U.S. government taking serious notice of UFOs.
Investigation of such encounters led to Project Grudge (1947), Project Sign (1948), and Project Blue Book (1952), the earliest inquiries into UFOs by the U.S. government. Blue Book was the most structured of the three, as well as the longest, and is described by the FBI simply as “the Air Force name for a project that investigated UFO reports between 1947 and 1969.”
That project was defined by unwillingness of higher ups to ascribe UFOs to anything other than misinterpreted weather balloons, actual aircraft, swamp gas, floodlights, or experimental Soviet aircraft. During the Cold War era. the secret Soviet aircraft hypothesis was more popular with military commanders than the extra-terrestrial hypothesis.
In December 2020, Congress ordered the Department of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to provide an unclassified report on all information about UFOs to Congress within six months. In June 2021 the report was released. And while it doesn’t confirm the existence of alien spacecraft, it doesn’t rule them out, either.
The nine-page report was based on 144 Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP, the new name for UFOs) reported by military pilots between 2004 and 2021. Excluded was a great “range of information on UAP described in U.S. military and IC (Intelligence Community) reporting,” because it, “lacked sufficient specificity.”
Of 144 reports, only one was explained. As a weather balloon. Eighteen sightings “reported unusual UAP patterns or flight characteristics.” Those unusual behaviors included objects which “appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion.”
Also, “in a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio-frequency energy associated with UAP sightings.” Eleven events resulted in “near misses” between the UAP and military aircraft.
Despite the above observations, official explanations are scarce, vague, and contradictory. The report states that the absence of “high quality reporting… hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.”
It goes on to state that the reporting is “largely inconclusive.” It then makes several conclusions.
It is concluded that the there is no evidence of the UAP being the result of secret weapons programs by the U.S. or adversaries, and the large cluster of sightings near military bases are probably the result of data collection bias. It concludes most UAP were likely physical objects and there are likely several types. The apparent advanced technological abilities demonstrated could possibly “be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misinterpretation.”
However, it’s also stated that UAP pose a clear risk to flight safety, may pose a threat to national security if developed by a foreign adversary (which it previously said there was no evidence for) and that the situation requires diligent investigation going forward.
Regarding aliens, the report makes no conclusion. The words “aliens” and “extraterrestrial” aren’t even present in the report. Among several possible explanations offered for UAP, including classified secret weapons, weather balloons, airborne clutter, birds, spotlights and such, the category “other” is included. A category many people might take to mean “alien spacecraft.”
It seems not much has changed with the U.S. government’s take on UFOs since Project Blue Book. It remains “inconclusive.”