For decades, UFOs sat on the fringes of serious inquiry. People came forward claiming they had been abducted, had seen flying saucers in the sky, or that Area 51 is really a military base facilitating the study of UFOs and storing the bodies of extraterrestrial beings.
On the latter, Bob Lazar is top of mind. An alleged conspiracy theorist, Lazar became famous in the late 1980s for claiming that he worked on reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft for the U.S. government. He has appeared on multiple podcasts recently to promote his documentary, S4: The Bob Lazar Story.
My colleague Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, tells me the subject has been plagued by “a lot of delusion and projection” since the 1950s, when UFOs became intertwined with Cold War paranoia, fears of American technological inferiority, and, eventually, fraudsters and conspiracy theorists.
Still, Turner tells me, sightings of unidentified objects in the sky “are real.” And they are real enough that some effort has gone into rebranding the subject. “UFO,” for example, has largely given way to “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, a term that does not assume every flying saucer is piloted by a little green man. In August 2020, the Department of Defense established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, formally adopting the UAP terminology.
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