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Near Fine. Reports of unusual aerial phenomena date back to...
Near Fine. Reports of unusual aerial phenomena date back to ancient times, but reports of UFO sightings started becoming more common after the first widely publicized United States sighting in 1947. Many tens of thousands of UFO reports have since been made worldwide. Many sightings may remain unreported due to fear of public ridicule because of the social stigma surrounding the subject of UFOs and because most nations lack any officially sanctioned authority to receive and evaluate UFO reports. Unusual aerial phenomena have been reported throughout prehistory (flying saucers in cave paintings in Hunan, 47, 000 B.C., southern France, 20, 000 B.C., etc. ) and history. Some of these phenomena were undoubtedly astronomical in nature: comets, bright meteors, one or more of the five planets which can be seen with the naked eye, planetary conjunctions, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia and lenticular clouds. An example is the Comet Halley, which has been recorded the first time historically by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. and possibly as early as 467 B.C. Other historical reports seem to defy prosaic explanation, but assessing such accounts is difficult at best, since the information in a historical document may be insufficient, inaccurate, or embellished enough to make an informed evaluation difficult. On September 24, 1235, General Kujo Yoritsune and his army observed unidentified globes of light flying in erratic patterns in the night sky near Kyoto, Japan. The general's advisers told him not to worry — it was merely the wind causing the stars to sway. On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg, Germany were reportedly filled with a multitude of objects seemingly engaged in an aerial battle. Small spheres and discs were said to emerge from large cylinders. Whatever their actual cause, such sightings were usually treated as supernatural portents, angels, and other religious omens. Some contemporary investigators believe them to be the ancient equivalent of modern UFO reports. Art historian Daniela Giordano[6] cites many Medieval-era paintings, frescoes, tapestries and other items that depict unusual aerial objects; she admits many of these paintings are difficult to interpret, but cites some that depict airborne saucer and domed-saucer shapes that are often strikingly similar to UFO reports from later centuries. Before the terms "flying saucer" and "UFO" were coined in the late 1940s, there were a number of reports of strange, unidentified aerial phenomena. These reports date from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. They include: In July, 1868, The investigators of this phenomenon define the first modern documented sighting as having happened in Copiapo city, Chile. On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that local farmer John Martin had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying at wonderful speed. He compared its size when overhead to that of a "large saucer". Reports of "mystery airships" appeared in American newspapers in 1887 and 1896-7, and another wave of sightings occurred in 1909-12 in New England, Europe, and New Zealand. On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the USS Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Battle Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and soared above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after 2 to 3 minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns. An unusual phenomenon on November 17, 1882 was observed by astronomer Edward Walter Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory and some other European astronomers. Numerous sighting reports were written up in Nature and other scientific journals. Maunder in The Observatory reported a strange celestial...
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