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American sailors saw UFOs ‘every day’

Should we take UFOs more seriously? Today the world is abuzz as US military figures reveal that UFO sightings are happening on a daily basis. But should we be more worried about them? On a dark night in 2019, American sailors stationed on a stealth ship off the coast of California were tracking something strange. Footage of the incident shows a small, round blob, jerking erratically back and forth in the sky, as the sailors try to keep up with it. Pictures and videos of UFOs have been released before. What was unusual about this footage, leaked on Monday, was that the US Navy quickly confirmed that it was real. The evidence is mounting that these UFO sightings are not as rare as we might think. In an interview yesterday, US navy pilot Ryan Graves recounted seeing a UFO every day for two years while on duty. And it turns out the US military has been taking a close interest in them for years. Now, some want this information to be made public. Under a law passed by Congress in January, the US military has to produce a report on UFO sightings by July. Almost all UFOs turn out to be human in origin: balloons, satellites, drones or aeroplanes. The US military monitors them for national security reasons. If a UFO is flying in US airspace, it is a potential threat, and the military needs to know what it is and whether or not it belongs to a rival power. But many people hope that the UFO report will also provide new evidence of human contact with extraterrestrial life. In the past, UFOs were taken very seriously. In 1938, a radio dramatisation of HG Wells’s book The War of the Worlds, read by Orson Welles, was so convincing that people across America panicked, believing that the Earth really was under attack from flying saucers. But the interest in UFOs really took off in 1947, when a crash site was discovered near the town of Roswell in New Mexico. The US military immediately moved the debris and claimed that it was a weather balloon, but not before conspiracy theories had begun to spread about an alien spaceship and humanoid bodies found around the site. Ever since, people have reported thousands of UFO sightings every year. Despite these reports, scientists quickly lost interest. For years, the consensus was clear: even if alien life does exist, the chances that it would ever contact humans are vanishingly small. The universe is more than 13 billion years old and 93 billion light-years wide. Human beings have only existed for around 100,000 years, and the very furthest any human technology has travelled is 0.0025 light-years. To make contact with humans, aliens would have had to evolve in the same rough timespan and travel mind-boggling distances to find us. Some experts have pushed back on this scepticism recently. They point out that for an advanced civilisation, finding us would be quite easy: Earth constantly sends out radio signals that travel quickly and could be picked up by aliens. In January, renowned astronomer Avi Loeb argued that the solar system is already full of alien technology. Should we take UFOs more seriously? UFObia Yes, say some. UFOs might seem like a joke – or a mad conspiracy theory – but we now know they are much more common than we previously thought. There is growing evidence that alien technology might already have reached us from a distant star. And even if they do not contain visitors from a distant planet, UFOs could be a real military threat, and we need to be ready for anything. Not at all, say others. UFO sightings reached their peak during the Cold War, when people were on high alert against sudden attacks from the skies. UFO fever today is just the same: Americans fearful of the growing power of China and Russia are displacing their anxiety on to mysterious objects in the sky. All of these “UFO sightings” will turn out to be harmless mistakes. KeywordsOrson Welles - American director, actor, writer and producer (1915-1985). The panic caused by The War of the Worlds made him internationally famous. His first film, Citizen Kane, came out in 1941.

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