The Bottom Line: Fun facts about UFO's.
The Full Story:
In honor of World UFO Day, here’s a collection of facts about our otherworldly friends:
- There are an average of 70,000 reported UFO sightings every year, worldwide. That's an average of 192 per day.
- No UFO has ever been tracked on radar entering the Earth's atmosphere.
- 1 in 5 Americans believe in alien abductions. Interestingly, males are more likely to believe in abductions than females.
- 1 in 7 Americans say that they, or someone they know, have had an "encounter" with a UFO.
- 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.
- The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane. Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water.” In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.
- Between 1947 and 1969, 12,618 UFO sightings were reported to Project Blue Book, a UFO research agency that was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Today, 701 of those sightings remain “unidentified.”
- Peru’s air force is said to be reopening an office responsible for investigating UFOs due to increased reports of anomalous aerial phenomena. The Department of Investigation of Anomalous Ariel Phenomena (DIFAA), which was created in 2001, was dormant for five years until now.
- For some, UFOs are a religion – literally. The Aetherius Society is probably the best known and organized UFO religion. It was founded by George King in 1954. King claimed he received a command from interplanetary sources to become “the Voice of Interplanetary Parliament.”