What is ufo

Dave Fravor and Lt. Alex Dietrich spotted the unidentified object during a training exercise but were unable to classify it. Fravor said he approached the mysterious object to take a closer look, and it began mirroring his movements.

When the pilot got to within a half-mile of the UFO, it suddenly vanished, he said. In , the U. Several of the UFO sightings reported by Navy pilots were of unusually shaped objects that flew at high velocities, often maneuvering around in ways that baffled aeronautics experts and with no visible propulsion.

But aliens aside, the Pentagon has been interested in UFOs because they could pose threats to national security. And Shostak applauded a newly enacted classified Navy policy, as reported by the Times, instructing pilots on how to report UFOs which the military, and many other people, now call "unexplained aerial phenomena," likely in an attempt to dodge the tinfoil-hat stigma associated with the term "UFO.

After all, we've learned over the past decade or so that our Milky Way galaxy is home to huge numbers of potentially habitable worlds. So, while the odds may be long that any UFO witnessed to date was an extraterrestrial craft, it's far from crazy to suspect that intelligent aliens are out there somewhere or at least were out there somewhere, at some point during the Milky Way's billion-year history.

That's why people like Shostak keep listening for signals from the sky. Follow him on Twitter michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter Spacedotcom or Facebook. Keep reading to find out!

Image via Pixabay. Although people have claimed to see strange objects in the sky for much of human history, UFO is a fairly new term. The term first appeared in the s, and up until then these weird objects were known by another name: flying saucers.

This is because many of the sightings described floating, disc-shaped objects. In , the existence of a secret U. Humans have scanned and searched the heavens for signs of other advanced civilizations in the universe. And we've found nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe we shouldn't focus on intelligent life. As the search for alien life heats up, scientists may need to step up their reporting game a bit.

Potential evidence of extraterrestrial radio signals from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, were likely just interference from human technology, researchers say.