Ufology is the study of reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)\n— known since the early 2020s, in official language, as unidentified aerial\nphenomena and then unidentified anomalous phenomena (both abbreviated\nUAP) — and of the larger question of whether any of those reports document\na non-human technological presence on Earth. It is an interdisciplinary field\npractised largely outside the universities: a body of case investigation,\nwitness testimony, physical-trace analysis, and archival work carried on by\ncivilian organizations, a handful of credentialed scientists working against\nthe grain of their disciplines, and, increasingly since 2017, government\nagencies. Mainstream science has never accepted it as a science, and any\ncareful account has to hold apart two things it routinely runs together — a\ndocumented record of sightings, hearings, and government programs, and the far\nlarger, contested claim that some of that record is evidence of visitors.
\nThe Wheel of Heaven framework reads ufology as the broader context for its own\nfounding case. Raëlism arose from a reported 1973 contact experienced by the\nFrench journalist Claude Vorilhon — later Raël — and the\nElohim of the canon are an advanced human civilization, not an\nunknown \"alien\" species. Read that way, ufology is the field within which that\ncontact report sits: the framework engages the wider UFO/UAP record with\ninterest, as consistent with its own account, without resting on it.
\nThe word ufology joins UFO — the acronym for unidentified flying object,\ncoined within the U.S. Air Force by Edward Ruppelt around 1953 to replace\n\"flying saucer\" — with the suffix -ology, and came into use late in that\ndecade. \"Flying saucer\" itself was an accident of the press: when Kenneth\nArnold described the objects he saw in 1947 as moving \"like a saucer if you\nskip it across the water,\" reporters attached the word to their shape rather\nthan their motion. Since 2017 the official vocabulary has shifted again, from\nUFO to UAP — first unidentified aerial phenomena, and since 2022\nunidentified anomalous phenomena — a change meant to drop the implication\nthat the objects are craft at all.
\nThe field should not be confused with the sciences it borders.\nAstrobiology studies the possibility of life beyond Earth\nwithout reference to sightings; SETI listens for radio signals rather than\ninvestigating objects in the sky; the\nAncient Astronaut Hypothesis reads\nhistorical and archaeological evidence for past contact; and exopolitics is\nthe narrower policy subfield concerned with governmental disclosure.
\nAccounts of strange things in the sky are far older than the modern field, and\nufologists have gathered them into a long prehistory: the disputed Egyptian\nTulli Papyrus; the \"wheels within wheels\" of Ezekiel's chariot\nvision (c. 593 BCE), which the framework reads as an early Elohim-craft\nencounter; Roman prodigy-lists such as Julius Obsequens's Prodigiorum Liber;\nthe Nuremberg (1561) and Basel (1566) broadsheet phenomena; the American\n\"airship\" reports of 1896–97; the \"foo fighters\" seen by pilots in the Second\nWorld War; and the Scandinavian \"ghost rockets\" of 1946. Jacques Vallée and\nChris Aubeck catalogued this material in Wonders in the Sky (2009). How much\nof it bears on the modern phenomenon is contested; that a record exists is not.
\nThe modern field begins with two events in the summer of 1947. On June 24 the\nprivate pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine crescent objects flying in\nformation near Mount Rainier at speeds he put near 1,700 mph, and the press\ncoined \"flying saucer\" from his description. Weeks later, in early July, the\nrecovery of debris near Roswell, New Mexico produced a U.S. Army Air Forces\npress release announcing a \"flying disc,\" retracted the same day in favour of a\nweather balloon. A 1994 Air Force review identified the material as the remains\nof Project Mogul, a classified high-altitude balloon program. Roswell has been\nargued over ever since; it remains the field's foundational case and its\nfoundational dispute.
\nThe Air Force studied the reports through three successive programs — Project\nSign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1952), and Project Blue Book\n(1952–1969). Ruppelt, Blue Book's first director, gave the field its acronym.\nBlue Book examined 12,618 reports and closed 701 as unidentified, but its\ninstitutional posture hardened into debunking, a stance formalized by the CIA's\n1953 Robertson Panel. The University of Colorado's Condon Report (1968),\nthe principal official scientific study, concluded that further work was\nunwarranted, and Blue Book closed in December 1969. For nearly five decades\nafterward the U.S. government acknowledged no UAP program.
\nThe vacuum was filled by civilian organizations — NICAP, APRO, CUFOS, and MUFON\n— that logged and investigated reports. The retired Marine major Donald\nKeyhoe, who ran NICAP through the 1960s, had already made the extraterrestrial\nreading a matter of public argument in The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950),\npressing the case that the Air Force was withholding what it knew. The field's\nmost important scholar was the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's own\nscientific consultant, who\nmoved from skeptic to cautious advocate and, in The UFO Experience (1972),\nproposed the close-encounter classification still in use: encounters of the\nfirst kind (a sighting at close range), the second (with physical traces), and\nthe third (with associated entities); Vallée later added a fourth for\nabductions. Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973. The\nFrench-American computer scientist Jacques Vallée, in Passport to Magonia\n(1969), set modern reports beside cross-cultural folklore of encounters with\nnon-human beings and argued that the phenomenon was older and stranger than a\nsimple visiting-spaceship model allowed.
\nFrom the 1960s a distinct kind of report emerged — not sightings but claimed\nabductions. Betty and Barney Hill described, partly under hypnosis, being\ntaken aboard a craft in New Hampshire in 1961, the template for much that\nfollowed. In the 1990s the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack drew academic\nattention and institutional controversy by treating abduction reporters as\nsincere subjects of a real experience rather than as patients to be dismissed;\nHarvard reviewed his work in 1994 and affirmed his academic freedom. The\nabduction literature is among the field's most contested: vivid first-person\ntestimony on one side, well-documented concerns about hypnosis, suggestion, and\nsleep phenomena on the other.
\nThe field's standing changed after December 16, 2017, when The New York\nTimes revealed the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program\n(AATIP, 2007–2012) and published Navy sensor videos of unexplained objects. In\nApril 2020 the Department of Defense officially released three of them — FLIR1,\nGimbal, and GoFast. A June 2021 assessment by the Office of the Director of\nNational Intelligence logged 144 encounters and could confidently identify only\none. The Pentagon stood up the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in\n2022; in July 2023 a congressional hearing heard Navy pilots describe\nencounters and the former intelligence officer David Grusch allege — at second\nhand, and without physical evidence — that the government holds non-human\ncraft. A NASA panel urged systematic study in September 2023. The documented\ncore of all this — that hearings were held, that the videos are real, that\nobjects went unidentified — is not in dispute; the extraordinary interpretation\nof it remains unproven. This government-secrecy dimension is treated on its own\nin military cover-up of exobiology.
\nRaëlism arose from within this field. On December 13, 1973, the French\njournalist Claude Vorilhon — Raël — reported being met at the\nPuy-de-Lassolas volcanic crater, in the Auvergne, by an occupant of a landed\ncraft, and conversing with him over six mornings; the account became Le Livre\nqui dit la vérité (1974, The Book Which Tells the Truth). A second reported\ncontact, on October 7, 1975, took him to the Elohim home\nplanet and produced a second book. On the canon these are not encounters with\nan unknown \"alien\" species but with an advanced human civilization, the Elohim,\nthe designers of life on Earth; in the framework's own voice, the contact is\nreal and its terms are known.
\nPlaced in the ufological record, Raël's account belongs to the contactee\ntradition — first-person reports of conversation with visitors — which\nmainstream ufology has treated with particular suspicion since the 1950s claims\nof George Adamski and Daniel Fry. The framework separates it from that\ntradition on other grounds: the detail of the message, the textual corpus and\norganization that followed, and its fit with the wider historical and\ncross-cultural record. Crucially, the framework does not need every UFO report\nto be genuine. Most, on its reading, are misidentifications, hoaxes, or\nordinary error; the wider record matters as independent context, not as the\nfoundation of the claim, which rests on\nMessage from the Designers itself.
\nThe framework also declines to read the modern secrecy story as the Elohim\nhiding. On the canon their model of contact is open and mutual — the\nEmbassy they ask humanity to build — and the argument that\nhumanity should be told its origins plainly was the position of the exiled\nLucifer faction, the faction of the Serpent. It\nis worth being exact here, because popular tradition collapses the distinction:\nthe opposed faction, led by Satan on the home world, argued not\nfor secrecy but for ending the human project altogether. Secrecy versus\ndisclosure, in the canon's terms, is a human quarrel, not the Elohim's.
\nUfology is not an accepted science, and the reasons are worth stating plainly\nrather than resenting. Its central claim is extraordinary; its evidence is\noverwhelmingly anecdotal, hard to reproduce, and subject to the ordinary\nfailures of perception, memory, and instrumentation. Skeptics have pressed the\ncase in detail for decades. The Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel, in a\nseries of books from the 1950s, argued that most sightings resolve into\natmospheric and optical effects. The aerospace journalist Philip Klass\nspent forty years finding conventional explanations — aircraft, balloons,\nplasmas, hoaxes — for celebrated cases, and doubting the residue. Carl\nSagan, who took the question seriously enough to co-organize a 1969 AAAS\nsymposium on it, held that the evidence never met the standard an extraordinary\nclaim demands, and in The Demon-Haunted World (1995) read the abduction\naccounts as a study in human suggestibility. The Committee for Skeptical\nInquiry (founded 1976 as CSICOP) has carried this critical program\ninstitutionally.
\nThe strongest documented facts establish less than enthusiasts claim: that\ngovernments studied the subject and sometimes concealed the fact, that trained\nobservers reported things they could not identify, that sensors recorded\nobjects that went unexplained. None of that amounts to proof of visitors. A\nresponsible account grants the documented record, withholds judgment on the\ninterpretation, and does not let the second borrow credibility from the first.\nThe Wheel of Heaven framework states its own reading in the canon's voice while\nkeeping that line clear: what the record documents and what it is taken to mean\nare different questions.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005.
\nArnold, Kenneth, and Ray Palmer. The Coming of the Saucers. Privately published, 1952.
\nRuppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Doubleday, 1956.
\nHynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Henry Regnery, 1972.
\nHynek, J. Allen. The Hynek UFO Report. Dell, 1977.
\nVallée, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space — A Scientific Appraisal. Henry Regnery, 1965.
\nVallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Henry Regnery, 1969.
\nVallée, Jacques. The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered about UFO Influences on the Human Race. E.P. Dutton, 1975.
\nVallée, Jacques. Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults. And/Or Press, 1979.
\nVallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Contemporary Books, 1988.
\nVallée, Jacques. Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact. Ballantine, 1990.
\nVallée, Jacques. Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception. Ballantine, 1991.
\nVallée, Jacques, and Chris Aubeck. Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009.
\nKeyhoe, Donald. The Flying Saucers Are Real. Fawcett, 1950.
\nKeyhoe, Donald. Flying Saucers from Outer Space. Henry Holt, 1953.
\nFriedman, Stanton T., and Don Berliner. Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO. Marlowe & Company, 1992.
\nFuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer. Dial Press, 1966.
\nWalton, Travis. The Walton Experience. Berkley, 1978. Revised as Fire in the Sky, 1996.
\nMack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.
\nMack, John E. Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. Crown, 1999.
\nHopkins, Budd. Missing Time. R. Marek Publishers, 1981.
\nJacobs, David M. Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions. Simon & Schuster, 1992.
\nDolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941-1973. Hampton Roads, 2000.
\nDolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991. Keyhole Publishing, 2009.
\nKean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Harmony, 2010.
\nU.S. Air Force. Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. 1955.
\nCondon, Edward U. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. Bantam, 1969.
\nOffice of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. June 25, 2021.
\nNASA UAP Independent Study Team. Final Report. September 14, 2023.
\nCooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. \"Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program.\" The New York Times, December 16, 2017.
\nBlumrich, Josef F. The Spaceships of Ezekiel. Bantam, 1974.
\nHarpur, Patrick. Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. Pine Winds Press, 1994.
\nKeel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. Saturday Review Press, 1975.
\nKlass, Philip J. UFOs: Identified. Random House, 1968.
\nKlass, Philip J. UFOs Explained. Random House, 1974.
\nKlass, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup. Prometheus, 1997.
\nMenzel, Donald H., and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age. Doubleday, 1963.
\nSagan, Carl, and Thornton Page, eds. UFO's: A Scientific Debate. Cornell University Press, 1972.
\nSagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, 1995.
\nSheaffer, Robert. Bad UFOs: Critical Thinking about UFO Claims. CreateSpace, 2016.
\nLoeb, Avi. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
\nElizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow, 2024.
\nMellon, Christopher. The Age of Disclosure. (Forthcoming.)
\n\"Ufology.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology.
\n\"List of ufologists.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ufologists.
\n\"List of reported UFO sightings.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings.
\n\"Unidentified flying object.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object.
\n\"J. Allen Hynek.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek.
\n\"Jacques Vallée.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vall%C3%A9e.
\n\"Project Blue Book.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book.
\n\"Roswell incident.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident.
\n\"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office.
\n\"2023 United States congressional hearing on UFOs.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_States_congressional_hearing_on_UFOs.
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Allen Hynek (close-encounter classification; *The UFO Experience*, 1972); Jacques Vallée (*Passport to Magonia*, 1969; the cross-cultural folklore framework); Donald Keyhoe (early popularization); Edward Ruppelt (Blue Book director; coined 'UFO'); John Mack (Harvard psychiatrist; abduction research)","principal_skeptics":"Donald Menzel; Philip Klass; Carl Sagan; the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP / CSI)","principal_us_government_programs":"Project Sign (1947–1949); Project Grudge (1949–1952); Project Blue Book (1952–1969); AATIP (2007–2012); UAP Task Force (2020); All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO, 2022)","status_in_framework":"The contemporary field within which the framework's founding contact case sits; documented record and ET-interpretation kept apart","type":"Interdisciplinary field studying reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and the question of a non-human technological presence on Earth; practised largely outside mainstream science"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","same_as":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q219611","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology"],"see_also":[{"description":"The government-secrecy and disclosure question that runs through modern ufology.","path":"wiki/military-cover-up-of-exobiology","title":"Military cover-up of exobiology"},{"description":"The historical past-contact tradition ufology sits beside and is often confused with.","path":"wiki/ancient-astronaut-hypothesis","title":"Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis"},{"description":"The chariot vision the framework reads as a pre-modern Elohim-craft encounter.","path":"wiki/ezekiel","title":"Ezekiel"},{"description":"The mainstream science of extraterrestrial life, distinct from ufology's investigation of sightings.","path":"wiki/astrobiology","title":"Astrobiology"},{"description":"The Elohim world Raël reports being taken to in 1975 — the framework's own contactee case.","path":"wiki/elohim-home-planet","title":"Elohim Home Planet"},{"description":"The cross-cultural folklore continuity Vallée traced through the phenomenon.","path":"wiki/comparative-mythology","title":"Comparative Mythology"},{"description":"The reading of ancient sky-visitors the pre-modern UFO record touches.","path":"wiki/plurality-of-gods","title":"Plurality of Gods"}],"timeline":["age-of-pisces","age-of-aquarius"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/ufology/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/ufology/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "military-cover-up-of-exobiology", "title": "Military cover-up of exobiology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/military-cover-up-of-exobiology/" },{"slug": "ancient-astronaut-hypothesis", "title": "Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/ancient-astronaut-hypothesis/" },{"slug": "ezekiel", "title": "Ezekiel", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/ezekiel/" },{"slug": "astrobiology", "title": "Astrobiology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/astrobiology/" },{"slug": "elohim-home-planet", "title": "Elohim Home Planet", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/elohim-home-planet/" },{"slug": "comparative-mythology", "title": "Comparative Mythology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/comparative-mythology/" },{"slug": "plurality-of-gods", "title": "Plurality of Gods", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/plurality-of-gods/" }] } }