Islamic leaders prohibit one-way trips to Mars

A fatwa is a ruling issued by Islamic scholars, and a recent one says participating in one-way trips to Mars is as bad as committing suicide.

According to the Khaleej Times, the fatwa committee of the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the United Arab Emirates issued the fatwa after determining that “such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam.” They continued, “There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.”

The committee says participating in the “hazardous trip” to Mars, will likely result in death for no “righteous reason.” This means that the unfortunate Mars adventurer will face a “punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter”.

You may be wondering why anyone would want to take a one-way trip to Mars, and honestly I wonder that myself. However, Dutch company Mars One plans to do just that, and they received over 200,000 applicants vying to take the trip. In December of 2013 the group was paired down to 1058 candidates. If there are any Muslim candidates they may now want to reconsider.

Reportedly, around 500 Saudis and other Arabs applied for the Mars One mission. The fatwa committee believes that some of them may be fleeing to Mars to escape punishment from Almighty Allah. However, the committee says not even traveling to Mars will allow one to escape Almighty Allah’s judgment. They say, “This is an absolutely baseless and unacceptable belief because not even an atom falls outside the purview of Allah, the Creator of everything.”

Mars One plans on releasing more information in early 2014 on further cuts as they continue their selection process for the final candidates. They say in the next stages, “We expect to begin understanding what is motivating our candidates to take this giant leap for humankind.”

Professor Dr. Farooq Hamada, who presides over the fatwa committee, shared the motivation for issuing the fatwa: “Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another. Indeed, Allah is to you ever merciful.”

Alejandro Rojas - OpenMinds

NASA sued for failing to investigate alien life

The plaintiff in a new lawsuit accuses NASA of failing to properly investigate an object on the Martian surface that he believes is alive.

In mid-January, NASA’s Opportunity rover photographed a mysterious object on Mars that had not been there when Opportunity photographed the same location just twelve days prior. Dr. Rhawn Joseph filed a petition for a writ of mandamus in a federal court on Tuesday, January 28 in which he requests that NASA “perform a public, scientific, and statutory duty which is to closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism.”

Dr. Rhawn Joseph. (Credit: Rhawn Joseph

NASA has already inspected the mysterious object. And as Popular Science explains, “For the record: NASA has identified it as a rock. A very special rock, with rare properties, even. But definitely a rock.” The organization believes this rock was simply kicked up by the rover.

However Joseph disagrees with the rock explanation. It is his belief that the “rock” was in that location the whole time. It just took time for it to grow enough to become visible to the rover. Joseph asserts in the suit that “The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre.”

Here is the filing:

UFO on radar prompts Indian Air Force to scramble jet

Radar at the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) Halwara air base detected a UFO moving towards India’s border with Pakistan sometime early last week.

An IAF Su-30MKI fighter jet. (Credit: g4sp/Wikimedia Commons)

According to the IAF, a Su-30MKI fighter jet was scrambled from Halwara air base to intercept the unidentified craft. The Economic Times reports that the slow-moving UFO, flying at 28,000 feet, was determined to be nothing but “a weather balloon [that] was flying with the wind towards the border and it returned from there after being airborne for around 20 minutes.”

Media reports also suggest that, during its attempt to intercept the UFO, the fighter jet came dangerously close to two civilian planes in the area. But according to the Economic Times, the IAF denies any “near-miss incident” took place. Still, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is investigating the incident.

In late 2012, the Indian army investigated reports of more than one hundred UFOs along India’s border with China. Although some news reports asserted that the UFOs had been identified as Chinese sky lanterns, the last official word was that the objects were still being investigated, and remain unidentified.

How Scientists Hunt Space For Dead Alien Civilizations?

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ says Ozymandias’s ruined statue in the desert of Shelley’s imagination. Shelley’s sonnet is often interpreted as a sober warning that human works are fleeting, but when I read it as a young boy it kindled a sense of adventure; it suggested a wonderfully mysterious past beneath my familiar suburban surroundings.

We use the word ‘archaeology’ to describe this effort, because looking into deep home stars in a technological shell, or a swarm of spacecraft, in order to capture its energy. A sphere with the radius of Earth’s orbit would have an interior surface area 100 million times as large as the surface area of our planet. In 1966, Carl Sagan suggested that such spheres might be detectable, but he cautioned that they would be hard to distinguish from natural objects that gave off a similar infrared signature. Decades later, Carrigan would tell New Scientist that he wanted to try anyway, that he ‘wanted to get into the mode of the British Museum, to go and look for artefacts’.

True to his word, Carrigan has conducted a series of searches for Dyson spheres, following earlier work by the Russian astronomers Vyacheslav Ivanovich Slysh and MY Timofeev. Carrigan combed IRAS, the infrared sky survey that dates back to the 1980s, looking for the distinct infrared signatures calculated for this purely theoretical Astronomers are puzzled by them because globular clusters — ancient cities of stars that sit in a spherical halo around the seti. According to Deutsch, we can distinguish between ‘prophecy’ and ‘prediction’, with prophecy being the discussion of things that are not knowable, while prediction deals with conclusions that are based on good explanations of the universe. As prognosticators from Thomas Malthus to the Club of Rome have demonstrated, we may be able to identify problematic trends in the present that can be extended into the future, but we cannot know what knowledge we will acquire in the future to manage those problems. This is why no scientific era has succeeded in imagining its successor. The scientists of the late 19th century discovered this firsthand, when confronted with the emergence of quantum theory and relativity early in the early 20th. Both theories raised questions earlier theorists couldn’t have even formulated.

n the context of interstellar archaeology, the problem is that we have no analogues in our experience for what advanced cultures might create. Interstellar archaeologists are tasked with sifting through gigabytes of data, not layers of soil, but the principle is the same. In a recent paper with Robert Bradbury and George Dvorsky, Milan Ćirković offered a paradigm for a new SETI, one that would include not only searches like these but a wide range of ‘future studies’ that would encompass how a post-biological intelligence might emerge and make itself known — intentionally or unintentionally.

Finding the monuments of civilisations more advanced than our own would challenge us to place ourselves in a totally unfamiliar context, as cosmic newcomers who can suddenly aspire to long lifetimes. If we found a lost city in the sky, it might fire our imaginations. It might give us reason to think we’ll outlast existential threats like nuclear weapons and biological terrorism. An interstellar Hisarlik would tell us that some civilisations do survive these dangers and learn to harness immense energies to grow. Rather than despair, we may see their mighty works and rejoice at what we can become.

Paul Gilster - Aeon Magazine

Clues to extraterrestrial life discovered in underground Antarctic lake

A newly discovered batch of microbial life has been found in a sealed brine lake located beneath 65 feet of Antarctic ice, providing scientists with a rare opportunity to examine how life may cope with extreme conditions on other planets.

A team of University of Illinois scientists have reportedly identified a diverse ecosystem in Lake Vida, an underground lake located in Antarctica. The findings, detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed light on the extreme limits at which life can live not just on Earth, but possibly alien worlds, including Mars, say scientists.

“Lake Vida is a model of what happens when you try to freeze a lake solid, and this is the same fate that any lakes on Mars would have gone through as the planet turned colder from a watery past,” says Peter Doran of the University of Illinois, Chicago, co-author of the study. “Any Martian water bodies that did form would have gone through this Vida stage before freezing solid, entombing the evidence of the past ecosystem.”

To investigate life in the sub-Antarctic lake the team of researchers collected samples of brine from ice cores. The results showed reduced and oxidized compounds as well as high levels of molecular hydrogen. To sample the unique environment researchers worked under secure, sterile tents on the lake’s surface to keep the site and equipment clean as they drilled ice cores, collected samples of the salty brine residing in the lake ice, and then assessed the chemical qualities of the water and its potential for harboring and sustaining life.

Geochemical analyses suggest that chemical reactions between the brine and the underlying iron-rich sediments generate nitrous oxide and molecular hydrogen. The latter, in part, may provide the energy needed to support the brine’s diverse microbial life.

“Geochemical analyses suggest that chemical reactions between the brine and the underlying sediment generate nitrous oxide and molecular hydrogen,” said

ass=”StrictlyAutoTagBold”>Fabien Kenig, also of the University of Illinois, in the press release. “The hydrogen may provide some of the energy needed to support microbes.”

While the discovery is seem as a major breakthrough in the search for forms of extreme life, scientists warn that the discovery reveals little if any information as to whether life exists in other isolated corners on Earth, most notably Lake Vostok and Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica.

“It doesn’t give us clues about whether there’s life in Vostok or Ellsworth, but it says that under these super-salty conditions, life does OK,” says Martin Siegert of the University of Bristol, U.K., and leader of an expedition to Lake Ellsworth.

The findings could provide NASA with key information as the space agency continues its search for life. The U.S. space agency is currently in the midst of its Mars Curiosity mission, with the main goal of revealing signs that life once existed on the Red Planet. The study’s findings could provide insight as to how life may exist in extreme environments on interstellar bodies throughout the solar system, including the moons Europa, Io, and Titan.

“This study provides a window into one of the most unique ecosystems on Earth,” said Dr. Alison Murray, the report’s lead author. “Our knowledge of geochemical and microbial processes in lightless icy environments, especially at subzero temperatures, has been mostly unknown up until now. This work expands our understanding of the types of life that can survive in these isolated, cryoecosystems and how different strategies may be used to exist in such challenging environments.”

According to Murray, additional research is needed to better understand how the microbes capture energy in order to survive the harsh conditions. The results of these studies could help explain the potential for life in other salty, cryogenic environments beyond Earth.

Funding for the Lake Vida research was supported jointly by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Staff, The Space Reporter

Statements from the Leading UFO Skeptic in the World

There are several researchers and believers out there who devote themselves to UFO sightings. But no one could ever imagine how Philip J. Klass spends almost all of his life on ufology and extraterrestrials.

A graduate of Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering which he finished at Iowa State in 1941, Klass has been continuing his research onunidentifiedflying object even at age of 80. He was still working more than 40 hours every week to study ufo cases and other ufo-matters. He did not mind of responding to reports even it comes from distant lands such as Russia and India.

Klass shared that he conducted his first ever major examination of a ufo case in Socorro, New Mexico in 1966. It was about an unknown flying object with a shape of an egg that landed in the area. However, he also pointed out the one of the interestingcasesaboutaliensheinvestigatedwasa UFO-photo case wherein a glowing flying object that looked like a plasma was photographed by a teenager named James Lucci. The event was recounted in his book “UFOs: Identified.”

Moreover, Klass recalled that the case in New Zealand in 1978 was what he considers as the most time-consuming case he ever investigated. He explained that this case drew a lot of attention that even media coverage was involved because of the video footage of several diverse UFOs in the country.

When asked about the unforgettable 947 Roswell case, Klass believed that book authors made some editing to help the government hide the truth behind the claimed crash of a UFO in the area wherein the dead bodies of aliens were recovered by the military.

Klass had written several books about aliens and ufos, including his best-selling “UFOs Explained.” He was also working as aerospace journalist for Washington.

Latest UFO Sightings

U.S. Presidents and UFOs

A Young Steven Spielberg Meets the President (Reagan) Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO On June 27, 1982, a year after Reagan entered the White House, Ronald Reagan made one of his most famous alien remarks when he hosted Steven Spielberg in the White House. Spielberg was at the White House to present a private screening of his soon to be released movie called “ET: The Extraterrestrial.”

Bush Says UFO Promise Still On Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Therefore, when Cheney arrived in Roswell a few months later, many thought it was a sign of positive things to come. Cheney, to the disappointment of many UFO watchers, simply made his speech with no mention of E.T.s or anything remotely close, and flew on to Wyoming. Disclosure didn’t come, but the UFO hopefuls still remained optimistic.

Carter White House Denied UFO Info Disclosure Project (Mar 2002) A former Defense Intelligence Agency official, a senior Stanford Research Institute policy analyst and famed constitutional attorney Daniel Sheehan have all confirmed that President Carter‘s attempts to obtain UFO information was thwarted by illegal actions by rogue military and intelligence entities.

Eisenhower’s 1954 Meeting With Extraterrestrials: The Fiftieth Anniversary of First Contact? Michael E. Salla, PhD, Exopolitics.org, Revised Febuary 12, 2004 This paper explores the evidence that the First Contact meeting had occurred with extraterrestrials with a distinctive ‘Nordic’ appearance, the likelihood of an agreement having been spurned with this ‘Nordic race’, the start of a series of meetings that led to a treaty eventually being signed with a different extraterrestrial race dubbed the ‘Greys’, and the motivations of the different extraterrestrial races involved in these treaty discussions. The paper will further examine why these events were kept secret for so long, the significance of the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s meeting with extraterrestrials, and whether an official disclosure announcement is likely in the near R

Extraterrestrial Politics in the Clinton White House (1993-2001) and the Laurance Rockefeller Initiative Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Records from the Clinton Office of Science and Technology Policy related to UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence and the Laurance Rockefeller Initiative. This paper is an attempt to provide an overview of what is contained in the collection, as well as provide a bit of background of what was going on related to UFOs in the Clinton White House outside of these documents which only with The Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is only one arm of the White House.

Former White House chief of staff supports openness of info about Area 51 October 23, 2002, Las Vegas Review Journal The federal government should conduct a review of what information could be made public about the top-secret Area 51 air base in Nevada, former White House chief of staff John Podesta said Tuesday. R

How Presidents Have handled The Topic Of UFOs Robert Barrow, Argosy UFO, Winter 1977-78 (Grant Cameron) Two men voiced their concern over the existence of UFOs before assuming the highest elective office in this country: Former President Gerald R. Ford and President Jimmy Carter.

Ike and the Alien Ambassadors (Eisenhower) Peter Carlson, The Washington Post, February 19, 2004 Fifty years ago tomorrow — on Feb. 20, 1954 — President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to a nearby Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. Or maybe not. Maybe Ike just went to the dentist. There’s some dispute about this.

Jimmy Carter, the Nobel Prize, and Extraterrestrials Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO The most recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, former President Jimmy Carter, has long been interested in the peaceful co-existence of humans on this planet. If historic records are any indication, however, it appears that the former President has long held a similar interest in peaceful relations with extraterrestrials who might be visiting this planet, since his sighting of a strange unidentified object in Leary, Georgia in 1969.

Jimmy Carter’s UFO Close Encounter Buck Wolf, ABCNEWS.com When a President Says He’s Seen a UFO, You Really Have to Wonder if the Truth Is Out There. President Carter filed two formal reports when he was governor of Georgia describing his observation of an unidentified flying object to organizations that collect and promote UFO sightings as unexplained phenomena.

Media Control and the Presidents Interest in Ufology Dennis Balthaser, 10/18/01 The general public has a hard time accepting the statements I make from time to time, that the news media is controlled to some degree by the government, and that the President of the United States is not totally informed about the UFO situation.

President Carter, Daniel Sheehan, and Donald Menzel : The Congressional Research Service UFO Studies for President Jimmy Carter Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Shortly after President Carter came to power in January 1977, Daniel Sheehan, then General Counsel to the United States Jesuit National Headquarters – National Office of Social Ministry in Washington, D.C., was reportedly approached by Marcia S. Smith, Director of the Library of Congress’s Science and Technology Division of the Congressional Research Service.from 1984-1985. Sheehan reported that he was asked by Smith “to participate in a highly classified major evaluation of the UFO phenomena, and extraterrestrial intelligence.”

President Eisenhower Meets the Aliens? William L. Moore, Gazette, Hollywood, California, March 29, 1989 The story about Eisenhower’s February 1954 trip to Palm Springs for a winter holiday, and his subsequent late Saturday night disappearance, has fueled rumors that Eisenhower traveled to nearby Edwards Air Force Base to meet with aliens. One of the best recounting of this rumor was done by William Moore a prominent California researcher who traveled to the Eisenhower Library to do research and actually interviewed the wife of one of the key witnesses to the story.

President George Bush (Sr.) and UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Of all the Presidents that have been faced with the UFO problem, George Bush seemed, on the surface, to be the best qualified President to have been given the secret. He spent a year as Director of Central Intelligence, the head of the entire United States Intelligence Community for President Ford. Then as DCI, he was in charge of giving intelligence briefings to Jimmy Carter during his transition to the Presidency in 1976.

President George W. Bush and UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO The second strong indicator that Bush was not open to UFO disclosure came from the experience of John E.L. Tenney, the co-founder of M.A.I.N, or the Michigan Anomalous Information Network. His efforts to get campaigner George Bush to talk about UFOs met with the same failure that Peter Robbins had experienced.

President Gerald Ford and UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Prior to becoming President Gerald Ford was a Representative representing Michigan in the U.S. Senate, and also Minority Leader in the Senate. In 1966 Michigan experienced hundreds of UFO sighting. The reports of weird dancing light produced quite a furor.

President Harry S. Truman and UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO President Harry Truman is the first President to have to deal with the UFO phenomena publicly. There may have been sightings and/or UFO crashes before Truman, but nothing that had to be dealt with publicly. More importantly, Truman was the first President who had to deal with the public relations problems that go along with the UFO phenomena.

President Jimmy Carter and UFO‘s Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO President Jimmy Carter has often been referred-to as the “UFO President” due to the fact that he publicly claimed to have had a UFO sighting prior to becoming president. Moreover, he was the only president on record to actually file a UFO sighting report related to his sighting. Thirdly, on at least one occasion while campaigning for president, Carter declared that, if elected, he would “make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and scientists.”

President Jimmy Carter‘s Actual UFO Sighting Report Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Many internet sites display a UFO sighting report related to President Carter‘s 1969 UFO sightings. The NICAP report, however, is only a retyped version of the original report which was filed with the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Below you will find the original handwritten report made by the Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter in 1973, along with the letter written to him by Hayden Hewes, the Director of IUFOB at the time, asking for the report. This copy was found at the Carter presidential library in Atlanta.

President John F. Kennedy and the UFOs: Was JFK silenced for knowing too much? Jim Marrs, 06/08/2000 President John F. Kennedy may have had more than the usual knowledge about UFOs, according to several credible sources. R

President John F. Kennedy and UFO‘s Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO As with many other U.S. presidents, there was a report that Kennedy had sighted a UFO. The event occurred in 1963, while boating off Hyannisport on Cape Cod. The object was “disc-shaped, about 60 feet in diameter, with a grey top, and shiny bottom.” It hovered above the water for 40 seconds, emitting a low pitched humming sound. Then it flew straight up in the air and was gone. Kennedy swore those present to keep the incident secret.

President Reagan saw UFO, often spoke of a world united because of alien invasion UFO Universe, 1998 Supermarket tabloids, that strange breed of sensationalistic American journalism, have been talking for most of the decade about Ronald Reagan‘s fascination with things like astrology and space aliens. Little attention was paid to the matter … after all, the stuff was printed in the tabloids and nobody sane is supposed to believe in them. Yet truth is becoming stranger than fiction in the case of Ronald Wilson Reagan and some of his more curious remarks.

President Richard Nixon and UFO‘s Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Even though the Nixon Presidency was short and rocky, a number of UFO stories and related space developments did take place. Nixon, for example, was the President who was able to take credit for an achievement dreamed of and initiated by President Kennedy. He presided over the landing of the first men on the moon in July 1969. Nixon described the Apollo 11 mission as the “greatest week in the history of the world since Creation,” a statement that brought criticism from his close friend Billy Graham.

President Ronald Reagan and UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO A question remains, however, as to how much of the UFO secret was given to Reagan the President. Reagan like the many Presidents before him had tens of thousands of issues being dealt with below him in the government. Only the most critical items were brought to the Oval office for his attention.

President’s Talk UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO The President of the United States of America is considered by many to be the most powerful man in the world. If that very powerful President is in change of the UFO cover-up, then that relationship is the key relationship to study in determining what is going on. If the President is not the head of the UFO cover-up, cut out of the loop by some Machiavellian group bypassing the constitution, then that is the key story to investigate. In short, the President’s relationship to the UFO situation is the key to understanding what happened, and how to end the cover-up. Rockefeller Tells Clinton to Tell All About UFOs (press report) New York Daily News, August 24th, 1995 President Clinton is being pressured to reopen supersecret government files on the world’s most baffling UFO incident. The man who wants the secrecy ended is billionaire philanthropist Laurance S. Rockerfeller, a personal friend of the president.

Ronald Reagan‘s legacy goes well beyond this world Billy Cox, FloridayToday.com – 6/10/2004 Tons of newsprint and airtime dedicated to Ronald Reagan‘s legacy this week, but — surprise — not word one about curiosity over unidentified flying objects. It’ll be the same way when Jimmy Carter dies.

Searching for the Truth: Media Control and the Presidents Interest in Ufology Dennis Balthaser, Oct 18, 2001 When doing radio or TV interviews and lectures, I am frequently questioned about the cover-up of the Roswell Incident and other related topics. The general public has a hard time accepting the statements I make from time to time, that the news media is controlled to some degree by the government, and that the President of the United States is not totally informed about the UFO situation.

The Role of the Presidency in the Politics of Disclosure: Part III – The Case for and against Gore Stephen Bassett, Paradigm Clock The public is fairly fed up with ludicrously expensive, winning-is-everything politics. Gore has embraced both adjectives with a passion. As a result, his willingness to touch the UFO/ET problem on moral/ethical grounds, knowing it will damage him politically and hurt his party, is most certainly in doubt.

The Role of the President in the Politics of Disclosure – Part II: The case for and against George W. Bush Stephen Bassett Let’s get one thing straight right up front. The politics of UFOs, how the presence of extraterrestrial beings in our world, now, is going to affect you, your government, and every other person on the planet, is not only bipartisan, it’s transcendent.

The Role of the President in the Politics of Disclosure: Part I: The Decline of the Executive Stephen Bassett One of the most important political trends in the second half of the 20th Century is the weakening of the American presidency – important because of its role in the intricate, constitutionally structured checks and balance system mentioned in the first column in this series.

The Shocking Truth: Ronald Reagan‘s Obsession With An Alien Invasion A. Hovni, UFO Universe, September 1988 This is an article on Ronald Reagan‘s reputed UFO encounter, and how that encounter may serve to explain his continued interest in UFOlogy and EBEs.

The White House Role in Crashed UFO Retrievals Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO – 1st UFO Crash Retrieval Conference, Las Vegas, Nov. 2003 The following are some of the stories that look at what the president might have known about the subject of crashed saucers. These few examples I have chosen, are the result of attempts to track down rumored stories, and investigate them with interviews and material from the various presidential libraries.

Vice-President Dick Cheney and UFOs Grant Cameron, Presidential UFO Because of Dick Cheney‘s high White House positions in past Ford and Bush Sr. administrations, the appearance of Cheney’s name on the George W. Bush Presidential ticket, led many ufologists to feel that Cheney might represent an attempt by the government to make a disclosure on UFOs.

White House Briefed on UFOs
Sarah McClendon, White House Correspondent, McClendon News Service, March 30, 1998
(This article is written by Sarah McClendon, the nation’s longest-serving White House Correspondent, who passed away on 9 January 2003.) Unidentified Flying Objects, a term given for many years to unexplained sightings of craft in the skies over every state in the Union, are actual visitors from other worlds, believe a community of scientists and technicians employed by government.

Facts about UFOs You Should Know

We all have heard and read a lot about UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) through books, movies and news reports. However, our knowledge on this subject continues to be limited as the information about these flying objects is kept secret from the world. Nevertheless, the curious minds have collected boatloads of information to disseminate.

People from different countries and professions have reported UFO sightings but still no substantial evidence have been found to claim these sightings to be true. Some people believe in UFOs and some still consider them as science fiction.

Here are some interesting facts about UFOs:

1. UFO is not the only term used to refer to these objects. The term Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) is used as a broader term by investigators. Another term is OVNI – popularly used by Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian.

2. People from different locations and professions have reported UFO sightings. As per ufoevidence.org 5 to 7 percent people in the world have seen UFOs and 10 to 15 percent people know someone in their contact who have seen a UFO.

3. So far, no UFO has been tracked on radar entering the Earth’s atmosphere. As per the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), some UFOs have unusual electromagnetic properties which disrupt microprocessors and adversely effect avionic systems.

4. There is a law in the US (under title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal regulations, implemented on July 16, 1969) which makes it illegal for US citizens to have any contact with the extraterrestrials or their vehicles.

5. Pilot Kenneth Arnold is known to be the first person to report UFO sighting on June 24, 1947. As per the report, he spotted nine disc-shaped objects flying over Mt. Rainer, Washington. A reporter labeled them “flying saucers,” and the term entered mainstream consciousness.

6. Flying Saucers from Outer Space was the first book to use the term “UFO”. The book was written by Donald E. Keyhoe in 1953.

7. 12,618 UFO sightings were reported to Project Blue Book between year 1947 and 1969. Project Blue Book was a UFO research agency that was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Even till date, 701 of these sightings remain ‘unidentified’.

8. In the late 1930s, Orson Wells’ radio show The War of the Worlds was so realistic that hundreds of people thought America was really been invaded by aliens and UFOs.

9. On August 15, 2013 the CIA finally acknowledged the existence of Area 51. This area and its surroundings are strictly off limits for public access. According to some videos and articles smuggled outside, living and dead aliens and spacecraft of futuristic designs were found on this land. But government still denies these claims.

10. According to some UFO aficionados, the Men in Black (MIBs) really do exist, and have been hammering on the doors of alien witnesses ever since the first appearance of flying saucers in 1947.

11. Area 51′s nickname DREAMLAND was allegedly derived from an Edgar Allan Poe poem by the same name. It admonishes that “the traveler, traveling through it, may not-dare not openly view it; Never its mysteries are exposed, to the weak human eye unclosed”.

12. Betty and Barney Hill had the first alien abduction. They claimed to have been taken by aliens from a New Hampshire road.

13. UFOs have inspired many clubs and organizations, such as the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), and the Fund for UFO Research.

14. The first photographs of a UFO were taken in 1883 by astronomer Jose Bonilla in Zacatecas, Mexico.

15. Most mainstream scientists consider UFOs (in their popular sense as extraterrestrial visitors) as so extraordinarily unlikely (though not impossible) as to deserve no investigation.

Manisha Goel