While most sights described as UFOs turn out to be misidentified known natural and artificial phenomena, many hundreds do not. It is these that form the core of the UFO mystery. That UFOs constitute a distinct category of describable sights is based on hundreds of highly detailed and consistent descriptions by professionals (especially airline and military pilots) of their close-up, broad daylight observations of unique flying machines.
This is supported by the permanent files of the U. S. Air Force‘s Project Blue Book UFO investigation (1948-1969). Of 572 cases admittedly unidentified (and not simply lacking sufficient information), 15% (85) are from military pilots, most of them the USAF’s own. Adding to them the unexplained sightings by commercial airline and professional test pilots, the figure tops 100. This does not take into account at least as many additional reports from professional pilots that were unjustifiably “explained” by Project Blue Book.
These are the people with whom we trust our lives. They are healthy, well trained and highly experienced observers of the sky. They know from experience what should be there, and what should not. If they were unable to distinguish between common sights and highly uncommon ones, they could not be trusted to protect us from enemy intruders or to deliver us to our destinations safely and on time. What they describe, time after time, does not resemble anything remotely familiar.
UFO Shapes That Make Little Sense
UFOs are described as having shapes (discs, ovals, spheres, cylinders) that are not only unknown to the aeronautical world, but make little sense in light of current knowledge of the aeronautical sciences.
1. Discs and flat ovals may offer advantages in strength and low aerodynamic drag, but they would be hard to control and would lack stability. Despite widespread interest in such shapes, and the many designs that have been patented in the past few decades, there has yet to be a demonstration of a useful high-performance craft of such shape.
2. High-performance spheres make even less sense, as they would produce little or no lift, while creating a great deal of aerodynamic drag. Stability and control would be difficult. Such a combination makes them highly undesirable for flight (as we know it) within the atmosphere.
3. Cylindrical airplanes have been considered seriously for very high-speed flight, but would be difficult to fly at low speed, especially when flying in a level attitude. Rockets and missiles are cylindrical, but cannot fly level except at very high speed.
UFO Performance That Would be Impossible to Achieve
If the shapes of UFOs violate the laws of flight as we know them, their performance is even harder to explain.
1. Silent high-speed flight remains a dream of aerospace designers. As a rule, the greater the power of a flying machine, the more noise it makes. The latest airliners may be quieter than their predecessors, but none has yet approached silence. Stealth aircraft may be able to evade detection by radar and infra-red tracking, but they are about as noisy as non-stealthy aircraft of comparable size and performance.
2. Supersonic flight, within the atmosphere, but without the traditional accompanying sonic booms, would have great military and commercial value, and thus is the goal of many designers of high-performance airplanes. There is as yet no evidence that it has been achieved.
3. Silent hovering is just as far from accomplishment. VTOL aircraft such as the Harrier may be able to hover, but not without considerable noise. Balloons may be able to hover silently, but they are unable to accelerate visibly, to fly at high speed, or to make sharp maneuvers.
4. Violent maneuvers are out of the question for high-performance aircraft. Small, propeller-driven aerobatic airplanes can perform some violent maneuvers, but such activity is limited to practice flying, competitions and air shows. Truly fast airplanes, such as the 2,500+ mph SR-71 Blackbird spyplane, require almost 200 miles just to make a 180° turn. Right-angle turns at high speed, reported for many UFOs, would prove catastrophic to the crew and structure of any airplane.
5. Extreme acceleration, following prolonged hovering, is beyond the capability of any known aerospace craft. Acceleration that is apparent to an outside observer is not a characteristic of airplanes, even though the crew and passengers may feel acceleration in the form of g-forces. Time after time, veteran professional pilots have described their amazement as some UFO ended its formation flying with their airplane by shooting upwards at a steep angle and at an acceleration rate far beyond their experience or comprehension. While rockets can accelerate visibly, they cannot fly formation with subsonic airplanes for an extended period of time.
6. Novel flight attitudes, such as flying with the broad side forward, or flipping end-over-end, are impossible to achieve and make absolutely no sense for airplanes. They create major problems in the areas of control and stability, while greatly increasing the aerodynamic drag in exchange for no apparent gain.
The Impotence of the “Secret Aircraft” Explanation
There is always the chance that some highly classified aircraft currently being tested in the USA or elsewhere may have one or more of the flight characteristics of UFOs. Even if this turns out to be true, it would not account for sightings of radical-design, high-performance craft in our skies during the previous 50+ years.
Scientific revolution
It would require unprecedented leaps in scientific knowledge in order to produce aircraft of such vastly superior performance. We would have to have learned not merely how to fly discoidal and spherical aircraft, but to have solved the problems of sonic booms, the damaging effects of very high g-forces, aircraft engine noise, etc.
Winning wars
It would have made sense to put such super aircraft into service and make them available when they could have been used to quickly defuse dangerous situations, rather than keeping them in storage while inferior aircraft were operated in a way that would have unnecessarily risked human lives and national security.
Preventing war
Merely making potential enemies aware of our vastly superior weapons could have prevented some of the more foolish of them from risking war in the misguided view that our best aircraft could be defeated by their best.
Wasting money
Developing and perfecting a variety of superior aircraft for no known purpose would have wasted hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. If the taxpayers ever found out, they would revolt. There is no known example in all of the recorded history of a country developing vastly superior weapons and then acting for a long period of time as if it hadn’t. It hasn’t happened because it makes no sense. The above suggests that UFOs are not merely novel, but able to fly without regard for the air, and perhaps even for the g-forces created by their maneuvers. If this is the case, it would be difficult to describe their origins to any nation on Earth. Falling back on such explanations as multiple universes, unknown dimensions and time travel, is to reject science and to embrace fiction. This leaves the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as the least improbable of all the surviving suggested explanations. –Don Berliner, FUFOR Chairman,10/24/01