The gradual removal of prejudices is the common goal of all science. Quote adapted from Niels Bohr. Have you ever seen anything strange in the sky?
Perhaps a point of light moving strangely on a dark night? Or maybe you saw a metallic-looking disk floating around in the daytime? Or maybe you saw something close up that looked like a spaceship, with details and everything?
You're not the only one. You may have seen a UFO, an unidentified flying object. Recently the term UFO has fallen out of use.
It has even been replaced by NASA with a more traditional term, UAP, which stands for Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon. In some sources you can even see the A standing for Anomalous instead of Aerial, and this is because the terminology has not yet been 100% determined. But in this video I'm going to use the term UFO.
At the beginning of the 1940s, American Air Force pilots began to report something very strange. An airplane that was much faster than all known airplanes, and here comes the crazy part, the pilots swore that this plane was being flown by a gorilla. Yes, that's right, a gorilla.
The pilots were obviously ridiculed by the US Air Force, but the reports didn't stop. Until years later the truth was revealed. What the pilots saw was the testing of the first jet airplanes by the rather joking pilot Jack Williams, who carried out these tests wearing a gorilla costume.
This isn't so much about UFOs, but I had to tell someone this story because it's so good. UFOs are a very charged topic. Everyone has opinions about them.
Some people believe that they are all of alien origin, others believe that there is a more terrestrial explanation. And what I want to do with this video is invite everyone to take a step back and take a serious, unbiased look at the history of strange observations in the sky. Believe me, it goes a long way back in human history.
How did these sightings come to be associated with aliens? And how did the subject become so controversial and divisive? Just before I go into detail, I have a question for you.
If you were in charge of Earth, what message would you send to aliens? The answer with the most likes in a week's time gets the t-shirt I'm wearing in this video. The t-shirts I'm wearing in the videos are already available in my store, L.
O. S. E.
And every print has a meaning. And you can choose which part of the universe you want to wear with me. The meaning of this one is a map of the galaxy so we know where we are.
And if it's your first purchase, use the coupon L. O. S.
E 10 to get 10% off. And now, back to our original discussion, let's do a general summary of what we know about UFOs. All the groups that have investigated UFOs in a public way, from the recent NASA Independent Committee to the classic Project Blue Book of the 50s and 60s, have come to some common conclusions.
Firstly, most UFO reports have a natural explanation. And that's a fact. Even people who believe that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin and have spent their lives studying them agree with this.
Secondly, there is a small but not insignificant proportion, of the reports that actually defy any known explanation. And these are the real UFOs. Incredible observations made by credible observers.
And thirdly, this is a difficult topic to study rigorously both because of the stigma surrounding it and the lack of quality data. And it's precisely from this third point that today's video will begin. Nowadays it's very difficult to talk about unidentified flying objects in a neutral way.
And I want to understand why. And to make it super clear, this video research is based on a critical eye on official US government documents on UFOs. And I need to make it clear that UFOs are a global phenomenon and several countries around the world, including Brazil, have UFO stories and a troubled government relationship, military forces and reports of strange things in the sky.
Why I'm talking about the United States specifically is because they have the largest volume of accessible documents and reports on these phenomena, not least because they have been the largest military presence on the planet for almost 70 years. That out of the way, we can now talk about the Foo Fighters. Foo Fighters No, not that Foo Fighters.
The name of the band led by Dave Grohl comes from a strange aerial phenomenon observed by pilots during the Second World War. From 1942 onwards, several American Air Force pilots began to report strange lights following the planes at some distance. And those lights were called the Foo Fighters, which is kind of a slang term for fighter jets, in the sense of fighter jets.
If I'm not mistaken, Foo even comes from French. I may have been wrong about that. The Foo Fighters were seen on all fronts around the world, from Europe to Japan, but the behavior and colors of the lights seemed to vary between locations.
The observation of this aerial phenomenon has become so common that the reports have even taken on a casual tone. Ah, we saw more Foo Fighters this Thursday. There he is again.
The first hypothesis for the lights was that the Foo Fighters were some kind of equipment unknown to the Allies. But in the aftermath of the war it became clear that the Allies' enemies were also watching the Foo Fighters and had no idea what they were. And even with investigations conducted into the phenomenon, the mystery continued.
Reports of strange things in the sky continued after the war. And the reports in Sweden, Norway and Finland were of special interest to the American government. These countries were close to the Soviet Union, and the end of the Second World War was just the warm-up for the Cold War.
At that time, the United States feared that UFOs were communist aliens. Just kidding. The alien hypothesis for UFOs would only be raised a few years later.
The fear of the United States at that time was that the reports of UFOs in the three countries were some secret Soviet Union technology being tested. Which in this scenario was quite possible. But nobody ever got solid evidence to prove it.
The point is that the fear of the Soviet Union's secret aerial technologies made the American military and intelligence departments take UFOs seriously. The United States has decided to look to the skies with its military and civilian intelligence. And here's a note to avoid anachronism.
The main American intelligence services of the time, such as the CIA, were still new and very uncoordinated. They were nothing like what they are today. There's even a phrase from the time that military intelligence was actually a contradiction.
And that's something to keep in mind while we're looking back at that time. There was a lot of duplication of effort, a lot of miscommunication and a lot of mutual distrust. between the efforts of the Air Force, the CIA and the Pentagon on UFOs, as well as internal disagreements within each service.
In 1947 there was no official opinion on UFOs within the military and intelligence agencies agencies and no public communication guidelines on the topic. The subject was new and they didn't yet have the modern preconceptions and expectations about the topic. 1947 was an iconic year for reporting strange things.
The first observation describing a UFO as a flying saucer was in that year. And that was also the year of the Roswell case, one of the most famous and controversial UFO cases in history. That said, the focus here is that the US Air Force repeated it publicly, with all the calm in the world, that everything was under control and they were investigating the mystery.
But internally there was a division of opinion as to what exactly the UFOs were. Perhaps unknown atmospheric phenomena, or perhaps Soviet technology, or super-secret projects of the American government itself. Some military personnel have also suggested that UFOs were some kind of collective hallucination.
That the Air Force was quite willing to dismiss civilian reports of UFOs as mere hallucinations. But to be suspicious of reports that came from pilots that the Air Force itself had trained, would be a betrayal of them. So, in general, only reports from the military were taken seriously.
In 1947, the Air Force only agreed that the matter needed to be investigated further. And in 1948, a centralized UFO investigation project was set up, the SINE project. Part of the motivation to take the issue seriously came from the first death due to a UFO.
An American pilot had an accident trying to chase a UFO in early 1948. And to make matters worse, this UFO was most likely just a balloon that the American government was developing in secret. The Skyhook balloon.
If there had been coordination between American intelligence, this accident would not have happened. And another example of how uncoordinated intelligence was at the time, is that another super-secret balloon project to spy on the Soviets was leaked in a popular magazine, as an explanation for UFOs. Reporters learned about these balloons before the SINE project that investigated UFOs.
And even with difficulties in coordinating information from different groups in the American state, the SINE project made progress and began to reach the first official conclusions about UFOs. And according to the SINE project itself, parts of the UFOs were real, represented a genuine phenomenon that could not be easily explained, and was not hallucination or confusion on the part of the observers. Towards the end of 1948, a new hypothesis was raised by the SINE project.
The hypothesis that UFOs are ships coming from outside the earth. UFOs are aliens. The hypothesis of the alien origin of UFOs begins here.
The reaction to the hypothesis was quite dramatic. The idea would enter the popular imagination permanently. The Pentagon responded to this proposal with a letter emphasizing that the origin of UFOs was unknown, saying between the lines that the alien hypothesis had no merit.
So much so that the Air Force Intelligence Final Report of 1948 only includes two possibilities for the origin of UFOs. New, secret vehicle projects, perhaps of American origin or perhaps of Soviet origin. But internally, the SINE project refused to rule out any hypothesis that they considered possible, including the alien hypothesis.
And perhaps because of the insistence on the issue, the SINE project was discontinued and replaced by a new project, the GRUDGE project. Furthermore, the final SINE report at the beginning of 1949, which was secret at the time, did not include the alien hypothesis. The GRUDGE project, successor to the SINE project, was extremely unsympathetic to any new hypothesis about UFOs, especially the alien hypothesis.
He seemed to follow a directive to find natural explanations for any and all UFO reports, and this attitude reached its extreme in 1950, when the production of public reports on UFOs was simply frozen. Reporting was eventually resumed by the BLUE BOOK project, but this project maintained the attitude of finding natural explanations for each and every report, avoiding as much as possible concluding that an observation was a real UFO. Looking from the outside, it seemed that the UFO issue had been resolved, at least for the military, and nobody cared that much about UFOs.
But the truth is that the divergence of opinions has reached its peak. The UFO situation was so controversial that there were no two divergent opinions, but five different opinions defended by different groups within the Air Force, the Navy and the Pentagon. The first opinion is that all UFOs, unidentified factor objects, could be identified with sufficient information.
That was the opinion of part of the Air Force high command, and because of that the public efforts to investigate UFOs, such as the GRUD project and BLUE BOOK, replicated that opinion. There was no mystery, everything could be unraveled. And here it's worth noting that even with this attitude, it was impossible to explain all the strange reports and observations that these projects received.
Another opinion is that the UFOs really represented some new and unknown phenomenon, but that this phenomenon did not represent a threat to the United States. So the issue shouldn't bother the American army and defense forces. If it wasn't a national danger, then it should be left to the scientists to solve.
And here it's worth noting that loyalty and obedience are much more valued in the Armed Forces than curiosity, which may explain the military's tendency not to take the issue seriously. That said, there were a number of members of the army who had experienced UFOs themselves, and who were much less willing to ignore the issue. In addition, the Pentagon and other civilian arms of American intelligence They also seemed more curious about the issue of UFOs than the Air Force.
The other three opinions about UFOs accepted that they were important and that a serious effort was needed to investigate, but they disagreed on the most likely origin. The two most popular versions of this idea were the Soviet origin and the secret origin of the United States itself, with the alien hypothesis being the least popular opinion, at least publicly. And this dissonance between opinions was also reflected in the division of efforts.
On one hand, the Blue Book and Groot projects publicly dismissed the seriousness of the issue. But internally, several less public study groups were set up to investigate the issue. For example, Stephen Poston led an investigation into the possible Soviet origin of UFOs in Europe in the late 1940s.
And when he returned to the United States in the 1950s, he returned convinced that not all UFOs were of Soviet origin, and he began to lead a special study group on the issue, which was disconnected from the Air Force's public efforts. The lack of organization and cohesion of American intelligence on UFOs was put to the test in 1952, which was a year with an extremely high number of UFO reports. This wave of new reports culminated in a case that prompted then President Truman to personally request the CIA to investigate UFOs from a national security perspective.
This was the 1952 Washington UFO incident. For two consecutive weeks, several objects with strange behavior were detected by radars around the capital of the United States, with episodes of visual confirmation of bright lights and strange fireballs in the sky coinciding with radar detection. And this event called into question the Air Force's public denial of the importance of the issue.
The US government needed to give some kind of public response regarding UFOs. The population was scared and news of UFOs circulated throughout the country. And behind the scenes, a new possibility for the origin of UFOs was scaring American intelligence.
The idea that UFOs were the beginning of a psychological war directed by the Soviets, with the aim of undermining American confidence in their own army and government. The main evidence for this at the time is that while newspapers around the world were reporting UFOs in 1952, nothing about UFOs appeared in the Soviet press, which indicated censorship by the Soviet government. The idea then was that the Soviet Union was creating these observations somehow to cause fear in the population and reduce the military's confidence in its defense system, while censoring the report about it internally to shield itself from these effects.
And just to be clear, in the following years this hypothesis gradually lost strength and became less and less likely. UFOs were a global phenomenon and were also observed in the Soviet Union with no apparent explanation. But in 1952 the hypothesis of psychological warfare was serious enough to make the leadership of the American army decide to act on it.
So after the 1952 Washington UFO case, the army's attitude towards UFOs became primarily focused on minimizing fear in the population and shielding them from some kind of psychological attack by the Soviets. Finding the truth or explaining the nature of UFOs has become a secondary issue for the Air Force. The immediate priority was to stifle fear and curiosity about UFOs.
So much so that at the press conferences on the events in Washington, General Samford not only dismissed the seriousness of UFOs, but he actively mocked reporters who took the issue seriously. The strategy of mixing silence and mockery worked. A stigma began to emerge around the UFO issue.
At the end of the 1950s, taking UFOs seriously was frowned upon. But that was the public side of the story. Internally, the president himself asked the CIA to take the matter seriously.
And the result of this request makes clear the dissonance between how American intelligence presented UFOs to the public and how they dealt with the issue internally. Two research groups were created by the CIA. One more public, led by Ray Gordon, who relied on information collected by the Air Force and ended up replicating the current discourse that UFOs were nothing special.
And another more discreet one, led by an assistant director of the CIA, Marshall Shadwell. There is evidence and reports that the most interesting cases went directly to Shadwell's group and not to the more public efforts to investigate UFOs. But the exact efforts of the group led by Shadwell are not transparent.
Shadwell sent his first report on UFOs in September 1952, shortly after the Washington case. And in this document, he states that he considers the Air Force's opinion of dismissing UFOs as a serious phenomenon as something honest on the part of the Air Force. But their honesty is based on poorly done work.
For Shadwell, the Air Force had already reached its conclusions before even studying the issue properly. And the denial of UFOs as something serious came from the limitations of military intelligence. He also indicated that the phenomenon seemed to be a global fact, with a portion of cases being truly unexplainable even by the most skeptical.
The field was full of stigma and prejudices, and the report concludes by stating that UFOs deserve a serious investigation by competent parties and without prior stigma. That being said, as far as we know, the more serious investigation suggestions were largely discarded. Any serious effort would cost money, and during the Cold War, every dollar spent on UFOs was a dollar not spent preparing for a possible nuclear war with the Soviets.
And that is a good summary of the early history of UFOs in general, a controversial issue that divided American intelligence internally. The most crucial point is precisely the dissonance between how UFOs were presented to the public in a way to create stigma and minimize the issue versus how UFOs were internally regarded as a matter worthy of investigation. And to be honest, looking at it this way, it makes you feel like conspiring a little bit.
to dream that perhaps some secret project that is still secret has discovered much more than has been made public. So let's look a little at the idea of a conspiracy that actually holds some secrets about UFOs, whether they're a top secret military project, or really from off the earth, or something else. Basically nothing in the UFO status quo has changed since 1953.
The subject is still full of stigma. Sometimes private groups investigate a little, or else the issue returns to the public interest, but the issue dies down after a few generic statements by the government and the military. Public interest in the issue is generally ridiculed or ignored.
So it's no wonder that the idea that there is a secret being actively hidden in this story has arisen. The most mundane hypothesis is that UFOs are one or more natural phenomena as yet unknown, that manage to fool radars and humans. But if that's all, then why have UFOs become taboo?
Because in the 1950s, US army communications made UFOs taboo, for fear that they were a Soviet psychological attack. And since then no one has had the good will to look at the issue seriously and honestly. This I would say is the least conspiracist version possible of UFOs and the government's relationship with UFOs.
That said, there are indications that at least some groups within American intelligence have investigated UFOs more seriously on their own, such as the groups led by Poisson and Shadwell. In addition, the American military probably maintained contact with some private groups that were studying UFOs during the 50s and 60s. And if any of these study groups came up with any results, it was never made public.
So here I'm going to endorse the conspiracies a little. Because if we want to look at the UFO phenomenon from a social point of view, conspiracies are a big aspect of it. If there is some kind of conspiracy around UFOs, if there is some secret being kept, it's being kept very well.
No direct evidence of the secret has come to light, all that exists are reports, and reports that are often inconsistent with each other, or that point to things that cannot be proven, or even reports that include proven lies, like those American aliens from some time ago. So if we really have a secret here, it is very well guarded. And for a secret to be well guarded, it needs to be guarded by just a few people.
For example, during World War II, Bletchley Park was a secret war effort in England, involving two thousand people. And there they deciphered the communication code of the Enigma machine, and sort of won the war in the process. Historically, this was one of the best-kept secrets in history, and Germany never found out that their encryption was broken.
But British reporters and Soviet spies discovered what was happening there. Two thousand people were simply too many people to keep a complex secret. So if there is a really serious secret about UFOs, it is probably guarded by dozens, or at most a few hundred people.
The secret couldn't involve any major organization like NASA, and probably wouldn't include any high-profile positions. In fact, as the Manhattan Project made clear, scientists are terrible at keeping secrets. If you want to keep a well-guarded secret, you want to minimize the number of scientists involved.
An important detail is that the United States has mechanisms for creating ultra-secret projects with an extremely limited number of people involved. These are called Special Access Programs. Some of these programs are not even reported to the American president.
And in fact, the American government has had several debates about secret projects consuming large amounts of money with basically zero public oversight. And just to be clear, I am not asserting that the American government knows that UFOs are aliens and is hiding it from everyone. But there are mechanisms in the American government to keep a very serious secret.
In fact, Richard Doe claims to have spread rumors of aliens and UFOs to cover up tests of secret government aircraft, which is basically the opposite of the usual conspiracy. His account is not particularly reliable, but that's the point. No conclusions can be drawn about what exactly the US government knows or doesn't know, based solely on people's reports.
The same goes for the relationship that other governments have with UFOs. Perhaps the main argument for the existence of something more behind UFOs is the interest of public figures who have nothing to gain by insisting on the issue. And probably the most obvious example of this is political consultant John Podesta, who has worked for several US presidents and was White House Chief of Staff during the Obama presidency.
John Podesta claims that his biggest failure as Chief of Staff was not being able to bring the UFO issue more into the spotlight. And he often points to his personal interest in clarifying what the US government knows about UFOs. And to make it clear again, John Podesta is someone who elects US presidents as a profession.
He has nothing to gain from associating himself with possible conspiracies. In fact, his interest probably hinders more than helps his career. And John Podesta is not alone.
The official and declared interest in UFOs seems to have resurfaced in recent years. Even the US Navy, which traditionally is very reserved on this matter, has made it easier to report UFO sightings in recent years. It cannot be guaranteed that the United States is keeping a secret that will change the world.
But it also cannot be guaranteed that it isn't. And that's the problem pointed out by figures like Podesta. There is a lack of transparency and coordination on the issue.
And this problem is so glaring that even someone who has assumed the position of White House Chief of Staff is unable to uncover the truth. Or if there even is a truth to be discovered. And this brings us to NASA's Independent UAP Studies Committee of 2023.
To be direct, the committee concluded that there is a very real portion of UFOs that are genuine UFOs. Something like 2%. But what this really means is that they cannot be explained by known phenomena.
This is not a confirmation that they have an alien origin. The NASA committee aimed to assess what can be known about UFOs from information sources that are no longer classified. And recommend measures to learn more about the issue.
Basically determining what are the problems that limit public knowledge about UFOs and how we can solve these limitations. And the limitations that the NASA committee pointed out are of a social, bureaucratic, and technical nature. From a social perspective, the existence of the stigma that UFOs are nonsense makes it difficult to both receive reports and collect data, be it through experiments or people with smartphones.
And it also makes it difficult to find scientists willing to study the issue seriously. In the 1960s, one of the astronomers consulting for Blue Book conducted a survey on UFOs among astronomers who had no interest in investigating the issue, but did not admit it in public for fear of being ridiculed. Scientists afraid of investigating the unknown out of shame.
This is a major flaw in the logic of science. And it is no wonder that this is one of the main points in the NASA report. It is necessary to change the social stigma about UFOs and strange phenomena in order to study them.
And on the bureaucratic side, there is a problem with data being kept secret. Most of the data on UFOs is obtained from military sources and classified as secret. And this is not necessarily due to the fact that the collected data is super incredible or super important.
The main reason for almost everything that the military produces to be secret is that most of the data is obtained through sensors with secret technology. In other words, if a camera on an American fighter jet takes a photo of a rat entering a sewer, that photo will be classified, not because of the rat, but because the camera is classified. This makes it difficult for other nations to uncover American technological capabilities and find weaknesses in them.
And having said that, even the available data tends not to be of great quality, since it is often collected accidentally, with equipment not calibrated to study UFOs. And here comes NASA's big proposal, which, if realized, will be the first change in the status quo on UFOs in 70 years. NASA has proposed methods to study UFOs as a real science.
This means thinking about detection systems dedicated to studying UFOs, with calibration designed for UFOs and of civilian origin. Which means that the data generated by these detectors would be open to everyone. And this would basically remove the exclusivity of the study of UFOs from the military and intelligence services, and basically start a new era of UFO study, a study carried out with the methods, seriousness and rigor of science.
For example, part of the idea is to study with radars, cameras and passive detectors what is the usual face of traffic and aerial phenomena to create a database of non-extraordinary events, which would be UFOs, which are identified flying objects. With this base established, the idea is to use simple, passive sensors to detect extraordinary events, events that are outside the UFO base, which would be the real UFOs. The simple and cheap sensors would then connect more specific and precise sensors, which would be able to collect intentional information about UFOs.
In addition, the data collected intentionally could be compared with climate data, data from sources such as civil aviation, or even reports from people who have filmed strange things in the sky. In other words, an honest attempt to study UFOs as something scientific. In fact, very similar methods are used to detect particles or rare events in physics experiments.
If the committee's proposal is actually followed, UFOs will become a real and serious research topic for NASA, which is the agency best equipped to deal with the issue on American soil. And this is the first sign that the public view of UFOs could change in 70 years. If one day we have confirmation that UFOs really are of extraterrestrial origin, This would be incredible news and a fantastic day to be alive.
But we cannot let our natural desires and inclinations for incredible matters we have with humanity get in the way of truth. We know that most cases have mundane explanations. But we need to take the matter seriously with scientific rigor if we really want to verify if the cases for which we have no mundane answers are indeed of extraterrestrial origin.
I am excited to know that after almost 70 years we are starting to take the matter more seriously. Not because I personally think the explanation for these phenomena lies outside of Earth, but because I want to know the truth, even if it is disappointing. And I think that is the main characteristic that we should all keep in mind.
Collecting data in a serious and scientific manner, in an open and transparent way, and only then drawing conclusions based on what humanity does best, which is discovering the unknown. But what about you? Which side of the discussion are you currently on?
I would love to hear what you think in the comments. Thank you very much and until next time!
