Back in 2017, a New York Times<\/em> story claimed that a secret Pentagon-funded project had been looking at reports of UFOs by US Navy pilots and military sources since at least 2007. The official US government line has always been that the Air Force Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 to 1969, was the last government-funded investigation of odd things in the sky, and that a report from the University of Colorado concluded there was no scientific interest or defence threat.<\/p>\n Since then, Nasa\u2019s position has been that it isn\u2019t interested in UFOs, so the 2017 story was a big surprise. Nasa has always been very reluctant to discuss the subject of UFOs<\/a>. That was clear even back in the 1970s, when the US secretary of defense asked the space agency to consider reopening an investigation \u2013 long after Project Blue Book had closed \u2013 because the then president, Jimmy Carter, reported having seen a UFO [in Georgia in 1969]. Now Nasa has finally been dragged back into the UFO debate \u2013 and, as was the case in the 70s, it\u2019s because of a groundswell of public and media fascination about the subject.<\/p>\n People seeing odd things in the sky is nothing new. If you look at any British newspaper published just before the outbreak of the First World War, for instance, you will find people claiming that they had seen strange lights in the sky, beams of light coming down to the ground, and elongated objects moving around that they were convinced were German Zeppelins<\/a> sent to spy on the British Isles. People were anxious: they knew there was a war coming and they\u2019d been told that the Germans would be sending airships to drop bombs on the nation.<\/p>\n Resurgences in UFO sightings tell us something about the period in which they were made. There\u2019s a clear correlation between numbers and types of reports and the release of films and TV shows about UFOs. It\u2019s a crude metric \u2013 you can\u2019t say it\u2019s cause and effect \u2013 and today there\u2019s a continual drip-drip effect, so it\u2019d now be hard to make any correlation.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s definitely the case that around the 1977 release of the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind<\/em>, the number of annually reported sightings logged by the UK Ministry of Defence soared from a few hundred to a record-breaking 750, the highest total on record at that time. And people react to other prompts, too: whether it\u2019s a story in a local newspaper or a Nasa public statement, those kinds of things cause people to look up at the sky rather than at their feet, and to report memories of things they \u2018saw\u2019 years ago.<\/p>\n Our idea of what aliens look like has changed markedly over time. At the end of the 19th century, even before HG Wells published The War of the Worlds<\/em>, he wrote a short story called The Man of the Year Million<\/em>, satirising far-future prediction-making and describing what we might look like in the distant future. It claimed we would have tiny bodies, massive heads and huge eyes \u2013 and, interestingly, that\u2019s how people now often describe aliens.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also how they are depicted in Close Encounters<\/em> and in Whitley Strieber\u2019s hugely influential 1987 alien-abduction autobiography Communion: A True Story<\/em>. It\u2019s now burned into our minds and into pop culture. But between the 1940s and 1960s there were a range of other ideas, too.<\/p>\nKeep your eyes on the sky<\/h3>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>What aliens look like<\/h3>\n