Company type | Nonprofit corporation |
---|---|
Founded | 1974 |
Headquarters | Davenport, Washington, U.S. |
Key people | Peter B. Davenport, Director, Christian Stepien, CTO |
Website | nuforc |
The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) is a non-governmental, non-profit corporation registered in Washington State, the United States [1] that documents UFO / UAP sightings and/or alleged alien contacts.
NUFORC was founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble. [2] It has catalogued almost 170,000 reported UFO sightings over its history, most of which were in the United States. [3] In addition to record keeping, the center has provided statistics, graphs and maps to assist others looking for information. Slate Magazine published an interactive graph published by the current director, Peter Davenport, which showed the density of sightings relative to an area. [4]
Davenport has not claimed that any two phenomena are identical, but has catalogued flying saucers, colored lights, and triangles, throughout the years. [5] Davenport describes himself as a UFO believer, but skeptic, and has been praised by James Oberg as providing a valuable service in the field. [6] The work has been described as 'secretarial' rather than 'fun', as the years have progressed. [6]
Since its establishment in 1974, the Center has provided a 24-hour hotline phone number for people to report UFO / UAP activity that is currently going on in their area. [7] It also has an online form to submit written reports.
Peter Davenport, a businessman holding degrees from Stanford University and the University of Washington at Seattle, who became involved soon after hearing about the Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter, [5] has served as director of the organization since 1994. [7] Christian Stepien, a tech entrepreneur, has served as CTO over the same period.
The organization has been used by the Stamford police department in prior years, though events have always had a perfectly reasonable explanation. [8]
Police officers from Lebanon, Missouri, as well as various Arizona law enforcement officials, frequently refer UFO sightings to the organization, with no explanations forthcoming for some instances. [9] [10] Arizona relied on the organization specifically, in response to the Phoenix Lights incident, which was one of the sightings Davenport has been on record as proclaiming to be genuine. [11]
Except for donations, the organization has been almost entirely funded by Davenport and Stepien themselves, which was estimated to cost $500–5,000 a month. [5] [6] [12]
Until 2006, the Center was based in Seattle, Washington, but that year it relocated to a bunker in a former nuclear missile site about 50 miles west of Spokane, Washington. [6] [13]
MUFON, the most prominent UFO data collectors in the US, have worked with the National UFO Reporting Center, to publicise trends in public sightings reporting. [14]
The National UFO Reporting Center has been discussed on the radio show Coast To Coast AM [15] and on Jeff Rense's radio show.[ citation needed ]
An unidentified flying object (UFO), or unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP), is any perceived airborne, submerged or transmedium phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. Upon investigation, most UFOs are identified as known objects or atmospheric phenomena, while a small number remain unexplained.
Ufology, sometimes written UFOlogy, is the investigation of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by people who believe that they may be of extraordinary origins. While there are instances of government, private, and fringe science investigations of UFOs, ufology is generally regarded by skeptics and science educators as an example of pseudoscience.
The Kecksburg UFO incident occurred on December 9, 1965, at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, United States, when a fireball was reported by citizens of six U.S. states and Canada over Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Astronomers said it was likely to have been a meteor bolide burning up in the atmosphere and descending at a steep angle. NASA released a statement in 2005 reporting that experts had examined fragments from the area and determined they were from a Soviet satellite, but that records of their findings were lost in 1987. NASA responded to court orders and Freedom of Information Act requests to search for the records. The incident gained wide notoriety in popular culture and ufology, with speculation ranging from extraterrestrial craft to debris from the Soviet space probe Kosmos 96, and is often called "Pennsylvania's Roswell".
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) proposes that some unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by extraterrestrial intelligence or non-human aliens, or non-occupied alien probes from other planets visiting Earth.
The Maury Island incident refers to claims made by Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl of falling debris and threats by men in black following sightings of unidentified flying objects in the sky over Maury Island, Washington, United States. The pair claimed that the events had occurred on June 21, 1947. The incident is widely regarded as a hoax, even by believers of flying saucers and UFOs.
Black triangles are UFOs reported as having a triangular shape and dark color, typically observed at night, described as large, silent, hovering, moving slowly, and displaying pulsating, colored lights which they can turn off.
The Rendlesham Forest incident was a series of reported sightings of unexplained lights near Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, England, in December 1980, which became linked with UFO landings. The events occurred just outside RAF Woodbridge, which was used at the time by the United States Air Force (USAF). USAF personnel, including deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, claimed to see things they described as a UFO.
The Lonnie Zamora incident was an alleged UFO sighting that occurred on April 24, 1964 near Socorro, New Mexico when Socorro police officer Lonnie Zamora claimed he saw two people beside a shiny object that later rose into the air accompanied by a roaring blue and orange flame. Zamora's claims were subject to attention from news media, UFO investigators and UFO organizations, and the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book listed the case as "unknown". Conventional explanations of Zamora's claims include a lunar lander test by White Sands Missile Range and a hoax by New Mexico Tech students.
Identifying unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is a difficult task due to the normally poor quality of the evidence provided by those who report sighting the unknown object. Observations and subsequent reporting are often made by those untrained in astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, aeronautics, physics, and perception. Nevertheless, most officially investigated UFO sightings, such as from the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, have been identified as being due to honest misidentifications of natural phenomena, aircraft, or other prosaic explanations. In early U.S. Air Force attempts to explain UFO sightings, unexplained sightings routinely numbered over one in five reports. However, in early 1953, right after the CIA's Robertson Panel, percentages of unexplained sightings dropped precipitously, usually being only a few percent in any given year. When Project Blue Book closed down in 1970, only 6% of all cases were classified as being truly unidentified.
The giant Palouse earthworm or Washington giant earthworm is a species of earthworm belonging to the genus Driloleirus inhabiting the Palouse region of Eastern Washington and North Idaho, in the United States. The worm was discovered in 1897 by Frank Smith near Pullman, Washington. It can burrow to a depth of 15 feet (4.6 m).
This article is a list of UFO sightings that were reported in Norway.
Below is a partial list of alleged sightings of unidentified flying objects or UFOs in Canada.
GEIPAN, is a unit of the French Space Agency CNES whose brief is to investigate unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAP), and make its findings available to the public. The group, formerly known as GEPAN from 1977 to 1988 and SEPRA from 1988 to 2004, has been named GEIPAN since September 2005.
The 2009 Morristown UFO hoax was a series of aerial events involving mysterious floating red lights in the sky, that first occurred near Morristown, New Jersey, on Monday, January 5, 2009, between 8:15 pm and 9:00 pm. The red lights were later observed on four other nights: January 26, January 29, February 7, and February 17, 2009. The events were later revealed to be a hoax, perpetrated by Joe Rudy and Chris Russo. Rudy and Russo have described the hoax as a social experiment, with the ambition of exposing "ufology" as a pseudoscience and raising consciousness around unreliability of eyewitness claims.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was an unclassified but unpublicized investigatory effort funded by the United States Government to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP). The program was first made public on December 16, 2017. The program began in 2007, with funding of $22 million over the five years until the available appropriations were ended in 2012. The program began in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Pentagon UFO videos are selected visual recordings of Forward-looking infrared (FLIR) targeting from United States Navy fighter jets based aboard aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004, 2014 and 2015, with additional footage taken by other Navy personnel in 2019. The four grainy, monochromic videos, widely characterized as officially documenting UFOs, have received extensive coverage in the media since 2017. The Pentagon later addressed and officially released the first three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in 2020, and confirmed the provenance of the leaked 2019 videos in two statements made in 2021. Footage of UAPs was also released in 2023, sourced from MQ-9 military drones.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is an office within the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense that investigates unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and other phenomena in the air, sea, and/or space and/or on land: sometimes referred to as "unidentified aerial phenomena" or "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP). Its first director was physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, and its current director is Jon T. Kosloski who reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, also known as the UAP Report and colloquially named the Pentagon UFO Report, is a United States federally mandated assessment, prepared and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on June 25, 2021, summarizing information regarding unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) which include unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Substantial public attention had been given to the mandated June 25 report, fueled by statements by former high level officials in the U.S. government, including former president Barack Obama, who stated in June 2021 "...there's footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don't know exactly what they are."
Investigation and analysis of reported UFO incidents under the federal government of the United States has taken place under multiple branches and agencies, past and current, since 1947. In spite of decades of interest, there remains no evidence that there are any purported UFOs with extraordinary provenance and, indeed, those identified all have been shown to be natural phenomena, human technology, misapprehensions, delusions, or hoaxes.
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