by Terrence Aym

Created on: August 31, 2009

[Author's note: Numerous hypertext links are scattered throughout this article; for maximum enjoyment I suggest you click them as you see them.]

Some Background: Terminology and Definitions

The acronym "UFO" is very misleading. "Unidentified Flying Object" is too general a term for identification purposes. This fact has been the subject of debates within the UFOlogy field for many years.

The dilemma is that a UFO can be any object seen by any observer no matter their expertise, education, knowledge base or experience. A presumed sighting can range from common meteor streaks or orbiting satellites seen in the night sky, a stone thrown by a neighbor's child over a fence that whizzes past so quickly that the observer cannot determine exactly what it was that zipped by his nose, or an otherworldly vessel the size of a battleship piloted by beings from the planet Zantu dropping in unannounced for a quick picnic.

Even a lowly insect that zooms past a camera might be a UFO. In fact, such may be the case with those 'mini-UFOs' discovered by researcher Jos Escamilla, the first person to film them on March 19, 1994. He calls them 'rods.'

A UFO generally falls into one of three main categories:

1. a rare natural phenomena or,

2. a misinterpreted astronomical object or,

3. an unidentified object remaining stationary in, or traversing about, the sky.

For the purposes of this article we shall confine the data to these three categories.

Now that we have gotten past the basics we can get on to the "good stuff."

When Did Flying Saucers and UFOs First Appear?

It is generally believed by the public and much of the major media that UFOs - or flying saucers - did not make an appearance until that famous day in 1947 when Mr. Kenneth Arnold decided to take a business flight in his private, single-engine aircraft. What he saw on that flight captured the imagination of the country and created a feeding frenzy in the nationwide press. He described the observation of strange, scimitar-shaped aircraft flying in formation and traveling faster than five thousand miles an hour over Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24, 1947. An enthusiastic reporter dubbed the craft "flying saucers" and the name stuck even though Arnold saw craft that were not saucer-shaped.

Talk with average people (about 95% of Americans have heard of UFOs) and most of them believe that UFOs didn't make an appearance until Kenneth Arnold spotted them. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The existence of strange objects

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