Ever since the first UFO sighting in 1947, the number of people claiming to have witnessed these flying saucers have grown. With the increasing attention to UFOs, pictures, videos, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories started to appear, and people began to consider the existence of UFOs. Are these unidentified flying objects evidence of intelligent life outside of earth, or are they simply hallucinations or weather balloons blown away too far? 

Some time ago, the US government’s policy on UFOs was to deny the existence of it. But now, their view of UFOs have changed. Some reasons for that is because of the many military UFO sighting footage and records, like the famous military report called the Gimbal video, which took place in San Diego, California. A fleet of aircrafts had seen some water roiling in the ocean, so a pilot swooped down to see what was going on, to discover a white tic-tac shaped object about 40 feet long that was bouncing and rotating over the surface of the water. As the pilot moved closer to take a closer look at it, the object zoomed away to keep distance from the aircraft. The pilot decided then to go full throttle and went aggressively for it. As soon as this had happened, the tic-tac shaped flying object disappeared in an instant. Five seconds later it was spotted by the radar 60 miles away. These and more videos were released by the Pentagon, along with a statement: “UFOs are real.”

Some UFO videos were proven to not have been touched by photoshop, but still there are many skeptics out there. If there are decades worth of UFO sightings and millions of dollars poured into programs that try to find proof of it, then why has nothing come out? Or perhaps the UFO videos untouched by photoshop are actually natural occurring incidents caught on video, like the Oumuamua, a red pancake shaped object that was twirling like a top. UFO believers were ecstatic, thinking that a UFO was coming to earth at last, but the Oumuamua was confirmed to be a part of nature and likely the result of a tidal fragmentation, therefore not alien technology. If a red pancake shaped object behaving so strangely was found to be a part of nature, then the other UFOs could be, too.

So are they real, or not real? The answer is not clear. An unidentified flying object does not necessarily mean UFOs or aliens are real, nor can we ignore the fact that these occurrences need to be investigated. Perhaps one day in the future, UFOs will be forgotten and a thing of the past, or maybe one day, humans will look back with our alien friends and laugh about the time we thought UFOs were fake.