From UFOs to drones, the US fascination with – and fear of – ‘anomalous detections’

A widespread panic about drones or other unknown low-flying objects has gripped New Jersey in recent days, but many other parts of the US remain cheerfully gripped by another very American mystery in the skies that has had a modern resurgence of interest: UFOs.

At the newly opened National UFO Historical Records Center – an array of beige buildings on the grounds of the Martin Luther King Jr elementary school in Rio Rancho, New Mexico – records detailing unexplained aerial objects and public fears around them fill literally dozens of filing cabinets.

For director David Marler, this first-of-its-kind public archive of historical UFO records is the culmination of a lifelong interest in and investigation of UFOs – or, as the military now prefers to designate, UAPs: unidentified anomalous phenomena.

It arrives at an opportune moment: in recent years, congressional and Senate hearings have thrust the subject – which rises and falls in public attention, often at times of national or political insecurity – back into the spotlight.

Marler’s collection of UFO books, journals, magazines, newspapers, microfilm, audio recordings and case files from the last 75 years is impressive, and includes files from the earliest US air force studies – Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book – as well as from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (once based in Alamogordo, three-and-a-half hours away) and the UFO Research Committee of Akron, Ohio.

One military report from 13 September 1959 details an object making seven angular turns, and was tracked by four military radar stations in New Mexico moving far faster than the fastest fighter jet of the time, the Convair 106.

“The air force was interested not from the quote-unquote ‘the alien perspective’ but from national defense, much as they are today,” Marler says. “Practical reasons, especially as you have qualified military and commercial pilots reporting these things.”

In congressional hearings last month, witnesses claimed the government is sitting on a trove of information on UAPs stretching back decades. Two former navy pilots have recounted firsthand sightings of unexplained objects routinely violating US airspace.

Retired major David Grusch, formerly part of the Pentagon’s UAP taskforce, said the US government has long run a secret program to reverse-engineer non-human material from crash sites.

But the US All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, formed in 2022, has said no single explanation addresses the majority of UAP reports, or “anomalous detections”, and it has not found any evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

In a Senate hearing, AARO director Jon Kosloski said “reports of unidentified anomalous phenomenon, particularly near national security sites, must be treated seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the US government”.

Marler, who has been obsessively following the subject since he and his father went looking for UFOs during a sighting uptick in Missouri, says he’s neutral on the phenomena.

“One must be skeptical, look at the evidence objectively, and suspend any conclusions or beliefs,” he says. “What I believe doesn’t really matter unless I have data to support it.”

Earlier this year, a New York software company released an app, Enigma, to collect sightings by uploading videos and photos with descriptions, and to organize the crowd-sourced data along geographic and other criteria.

The engineers, who screen for obvious hoaxes, determined that New Mexico is the top state for sightings per capita with 12.2 entries per 100,000 people, far higher than the next-closest states of Nevada and Arizona, with several strange videos submitted this year showing lights over Albuquerque and Gallup.

This is the state, of course, that produced the Roswell incident, which cemented the idea of aliens as humanoid with smooth skin and green slit-eyes, where hippies and new agers came to live in earth ships, and where a wan, flame-haired David Bowie came to act his alien persona in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

It’s also site of nuclear activity, military proving ranges and clear skies – ideal, in other words, for UFO spotting.

Along the way, UFO conceptions have evolved – new agers of the 1950s and the contactee movement, the alien-abduction movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Beautiful, ugly, super beings, alien rapists or genderless, spiritual guides – aliens bend to the metaphors of the day.

Contemporaneously, with the rise of AI dominating the cultural landscape, the term of choice is “non-human intelligence”, NHI.

“New Mexico has always been an important spot for the topic because you get more reports per person,” says Alejandro Rojas, an Enigma consultant and anomalous phenomena researcher.

Without data and information, Rojas points out, the public fills the gaps. “Often the assumptions they make are pretty extreme,” he says, adding that a better solution is one in which scientists write papers and counter-papers, “and that’s where we need to get to”.

The UFO obsession has been running in waves since Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, spotted some disk-like objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington state in June 1947. Newspapers latched on, dubbing them “flying saucers”. Similar observations poured in and have never really stopped.

Greg Eghigian, author of a recent global history of the UFO phenomenon titled After the Flying Saucers Came, traces the current swell of interest to a December 2017 article in the New York Times contending that the Department of Defense had run a secret UFO investigation program between 2007 and 2012.

But, he said: “It has to be recognized that in large measure, sightings of UFOs or UAPs are often grassroots phenomena that aren’t triggered by anything except people actually seeing things.”

The missing step is that, although people see things, they often don’t report them. Also, the places where sightings tend to happen are near military installations where by definition there is a lot of observing going.

“There’s an inherent observation bias going on,” Eghigian points out. But the idea that people in and around New Mexico would be reporting sightings isn’t especially surprising. “They have 75 years of experience looking for and reporting these things,” he says.

None of that answers the question of what purpose our interest in UFOs serves, given that objects are undoubtedly being seen.

“It’s a big question,” Eghigian concedes. “UFOs, in the classic sense, are concoctions of some superpower here on Earth or some technologically sophisticated other entity from another planet or people from another dimension or from our future.”

The idea that holds it all together is that they represent something futuristic.

Yet mass sightings of mysterious objects – such as the phenomenon playing out in New Jersey currently – can be rooted in contemporary fears.

Jeff Van Drew, a Republican representative for New Jersey, last week claimed that Iran had stationed a “mothership” off the Atlantic coast, spawning what are assumed to be drones that Van Drew wants shot down – an assessment the Pentagon rejected.

“Whenever this stuff crops up, the story of government conspiracy and secrecy pops up as well, but since 2016, with the advent of the notion of a deep state thwarting the efforts of the Republican party and god-fearing Americans, this notion of the UFO or UAP has been given new life,” says Eghigian.

Only one thing seems certain: seeing UFOs is not going away.

“There’s no question there’s a something there, and that keeps everyone involved and coming back to the mystery,” says Eghigian.