UFO is an abbreviation for Unidentified flying object. That there are things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why should we conduct it's a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more factual possibilities present themselves.
Many times Carl is asked, "Do you believe in UFOs". He says that he is always surprised by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. He says he is almost never asked..."How good is the evidence that UFO"s are alien spaceships?" Many people are convinced that eyewitness testimonies are reliable and that there must be a long standing, high level government conspiracy to keep the truth form the rest of us.
Due to some UFO reports Carl is perfectly prepared to believe that at least some of them and perhaps voluminous files, have been made inaccessible to the public. Carl believes its times for the files to be declassified and made generally available. If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of aliens form us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can push for declassification of relevant information from decades ago.
Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.
It's telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we really know so little. This is especially true of the more recent flurry of alien abduction reports. After all, if true, either hypothesis-invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or and epidemic of hallucinations- teaches us something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong feelings is that both alternatives have such unpleasant implications.
I always find it interesting that people think that the unidentified flying objects that they see in the sky are "alien" spacecraft, not that I believe that humans are alone in the universe. I think that most of the UFO sightings fall into two categories. The first being flat-out lies, either to attract notoriety or to fit in after someone else has claimed to see one. The second category is made up of legitimate sightings of UFOs just ones that are not alien in nature, its no surprise that most of the UFO sightings happen to be in areas that are near military flight corridors, its pretty easy to mistake a f-22 raptor at 30,000 ft at mach 1.3 as a UFO from that altitude the plane is barely visible, with only its flashing lights telling you something is there.
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