The post you are reporting:
Here's my take on it, whatever it's worth:
Ever since pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted his saucers that skipped on water in 1947 at Mt Rainer, Washington, UFOs have caught the public imagination. Since then hundreds of thousands of people all over the world have allegedly seen aerial phenomena that they cannot explain - how they rationalise their observations depends entirely on their cultural and religious background, their education, their mental state, credulity and so on. And yet after over 60 years of global sightings, independent research and military investigations, not a single shred of convincing evidence has ever been unearthed (or 'released' to those of a conspiratorial nature) to prove the existence of alien visitations. The recently released National Archives demonstrate this nicely - sightings were serious enough to warrant investigations, yet in almost every case the explanations were rational with a few left unexplained. However, unexplained does not equate to alien visitation.
The face of the UFOs and aliens has been very much subject to fads and changes throughout the years. Contrast the flying saucers in the 50s flown by kindly golden haired Nordic Venusians dispensing cryptic intergalactic wisdom, to the black triangles in the eighties flown by unpleasant small grey entities having flown halfway across the cosmos in order to eviscerate a cow or abduct people at 4am and give them probing interior medical once-over. The point is, there is little consistency over time and across cultural divides, it makes trying to find a single explanation akin to a Rorschach Test, or trying to define shapes in the clouds, entirely dependant on the subjectivity of the observer.
UFOs have spawned a lucrative industry, via films, books, TV series, lecture tours and tourism. Where would Roswell be without the multi-million dollar tourist industry built up around a bungled news story in an obscure New Mexico paper in 1947? Yet scarcely a month goes by without a new book or magazine popping up in the local newsagents on UFOs written by a limited pool of persons who endlessly recycle classic case reports, shortly to pop on a TV documentary spouting the same. Despite all the detailed scrutiny and intense examination of reports, sightings, photographs and occasionally 'hard' evidence by these 'researchers', never is the case closed, not once has that final 'smoking gun' been discovered for all to gasp at and force us reappraise our place in the universe.
Ultimately a UFO is only what it says on the tin, an 'Unidentified Flying Object' i.e. an object that cannot be identified. As the years go by one increasingly sees the UFO world as a lucrative industry fed by half truths, mistakes and on occasion outright deception. Yet never say never. Within the unknown lies a grey area out of which something may yet emerge. I just hope it does in my lifetime.
