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An unidentified flying object, or UFO, is any real or apparent flying object which cannot be identified by the observer and which remains unidentified after investigation. The term flying saucer is also sometimes used.

Reports of unusual aerial phenomena date back to ancient times (see Ancient astronaut theories)^{[citation needed]}, but reports of UFO sightings started becoming more common after the first widely publicized United States sighting in 1947. Many tens of thousands of UFO reports have since been made worldwide.^{[citation needed]} Many more sightings, however, may remain unreported due to fear of public ridicule because of the social stigma surrounding the subject of UFOs and because most nations lack any officially sanctioned authority to receive and evaluate UFO reports.^{[citation needed]}

Once a UFO is identified as a known object (for example an aircraft or weather balloon), it ceases to be classified as a UFO and is reclassified as an identified object.

History

Unusual aerial phenomena have been reported throughout prehistory (flying saucers in cave paintings in Hunan, 47,000 B.C., southern France, 20,000 B.C., etc.) and history. Some of these phenomena were undoubtedly astronomical in nature: comets, bright meteors, one or more of the five planets which can be seen with the naked eye, planetary conjunctions, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia and lenticular clouds. An example is the Comet Halley , which has been recorded the first time historically by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. and possibly as early as 467 B.C.. Other historical reports seem to defy prosaic explanation, but assessing such accounts is difficult at best, since the information in a historical document may be insufficient, inaccurate, or embellished enough to make an informed evaluation difficult.

• On September 24, 1235, General Kujo Yoritsune and his army observed unidentified globes of light flying in erratic patterns in the night sky near Kyoto, Japan. The general’s advisers told him not to worry — it was merely the wind causing the stars to sway.^[1][2]
• On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg, Germany were reportedly filled with a multitude of objects seemingly engaged in an aerial battle. Small spheres and discs were said to emerge from large cylinders.^[3][4](image right)

Whatever their actual cause, such sightings were usually treated as supernatural portents, angels, and other religious omens. Some contemporary investigators believe them to be the ancient equivalent of modern UFO reports. Art historian Daniela Giordano^[5] cites many Medieval-era paintings, frescoes, tapestries and other items that depict unusual aerial objects; she admits many of these paintings are difficult to interpret, but cites some that depict airborne saucer and domed-saucer shapes that are often strikingly similar to UFO reports from later centuries.

First modern reports

Before the terms “flying saucer” and “UFO” were coined in the late 1940s, there were a number of reports of strange, unidentified aerial phenomena. These reports date from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. They include:

• In July, 1868, The investigators of this phenomenon define the first modern documented sighting as having happened in Copiapo city, Chile.^[6]
• On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that local farmer John Martin had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying “at wonderful speed.” He compared its size when overhead to that of a "large saucer". ^[7]
• Reports of "mystery airships" appeared in American newspapers in 1887 and 1896-7, and another wave of sightings occurred in 1909-12 in New England, Europe, and New Zealand.
• On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the USS Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Battle Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and “soared” above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after 2 to 3 minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns.^[8][9]
• An unusual phenomenon on November 17, 1882 was observed by astronomer Edward Walter Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory and some other European astronomers. Numerous sighting reports were written up in Nature and other scientific journals. Maunder in The Observatory reported “a strange celestial visitor” that was "disc-shaped," "torpedo-shaped," "spindle-shaped," or "just like a Zeppelin" dirigible (as he described it in 1916). It was much brighter than the concurrent auroral displays, had well-defined edges and was opaque in the center, whitish or greenish-white, about 30 degrees long and 3 degrees wide, and moved steadily across the northern sky in less than 2 minutes from east to west. Maunder said it was very different in characteristics from a meteor fireball or any aurora he had ever seen. Nonetheless, Maunder (and some other astronomers) thought it was probably related to the huge auroral magnetic sunspot storm occurring at the same time; Maunder called it an "auroral beam." ^[10]
• The so-called Fátima incident or “The Miracle of the Sun,” witnessed by tens of thousands in Fátima, Portugal on October 13, 1917.

• On 5 August 1926, while traveling in the Humboldt Mountains of Tibet's Kokonor region, Nicholas Roerich reported that members of his expedition saw--high in the sky, above an eagle they had been watching--"something big and shiny reflecting sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed" (from his travel diary Altai-Himalaya, published 1929). While Roerich does not say what he thought the object might have been, surrounding passages discuss Theosophical accounts of ancient civilizations and their technology.^[11]
• In both the European and Japanese aerial theatres during World War II, “Foo-fighters” (balls of light and other shapes that followed aircraft) were reported by both Allied and Axis pilots.
• On February 25, 1942, the U.S. Army detected unidentified aircraft both visually and on radar over the Los Angeles, California region. The craft stayed aloft despite taking at least 20 minutes worth of flak from ground batteries. The origins of the aircraft were never identified. The incident later became known as the Battle of Los Angeles, or the West coast air raid.
• In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as “Russian hail,” and later as “ghost rockets,” because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. This was subsequently shown not to be the case, and the phenomenon remains unexplained. Over 200 were tracked on radar and deemed to be “real physical objects” by the Swedish military. A significant fraction of the remainder was thought to be misidentification of natural phenomena, such as meteors.