Talk:Unidentified flying object

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jjhake (talk | contribs) at 13:16, 29 August 2023 (→‎UAP should the page be named UAP now since US Government and mainstream media calling it that?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Foo Fighter

No explanation as to why it belongs under Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. See Foo fighter; no connection to ETH. Does not belong in that place. Kortoso (talk)—Preceding undated comment added 19:53, 7 November 2013

Richard Doty - Statements Made by Governmental Employees

I added a small portion concerning the allegations made by Richard Doty. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alanwilliams101 (talk • contribs) 03:39, 13 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't he former DIA agent in charge disinformation gave the story of Project Serco exchange program between US Government of Planet Earth and Grey Alien/Ebens live on Planet in the Zeta Reticuli Star system — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rkunreal93 (talk • contribs) 17:41, 17 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Cases of UFOs

The titles that are proposed for UFOs are originally from the world of conjectures and assumptions that originate from the real world. Mafmmfam84 (talk) 09:05, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I do not understand the point you are trying to make. The purpose of article Talk pages is to present and discuss content, with the goal being to improve the article. Do you have any specific, reliably-sourced additions (or removals) to make to this article? If not, I ask you to please read WP:TPG and WP:SOAP before posting here again. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 15:50, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Project Blue Book files

The whole Project Blue Book files (+10,000 documents) will be available on Commons soon. See c:Category:Project Blue Book. Yann (talk) 20:12, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Full matter 106.221.187.53 (talk) 01:19, 16 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why do the lede, images, and content in this article not reflect standard terms and topics?

This article looks and reads like a strange time capsule of past debates without engaging standard contemporary terms, categories, and events. For example, it strikes me as bizarre and ridiculous that the Pentagon UFO videos are not noted in the lede for this article. I get that Wikipedia should not reflect passing fads on these topics, but the standard concerns and language being used publicly in U.S. military and legislative work for a long time now (surrounding questions with what the military calls UAPs) has been entirely different in tone and technical content than what this article represents in it's current language and visuals. Can we talk about making some improvements here so that the lede and content reflects actual standard terms and images? The visually out-dated, childish, and head-in-the-sand feeling to this article is a serious public disservice. Wikipedia would actually go a long way toward helping the public to be better informed about the content of events such as the recent David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims if this main UFO article more accurately reflected the standard terms and thoughts of those working in the government and media related to this broad topic.

@Miserlou: based on a little that I have seen, I strongly suspect that editors such as you get left out of conversations and decisions that could significantly improve this main article if we could somehow agree on a slightly different and more constructive approach to this overall topic.

To everyone: while working on the David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims, I think I engaged with a few editors who are very active in this area. I really don't know much about it at all, but I appeal to everyone to weigh in with any thoughts about how we might seriously consider seeking a better paradigm. Jjhake (talk) 12:29, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I mean I agree, but I have no domain specific knowledge in this area, I'm just trying to untangle what the military/IC is talking about and the sci-fi/Art Bell/little-green-men stuff of old. It seems like this topic attracts rabid fanatics and deboonkers with a lot of history with each other, who seem unwilling to approach the topic from the standards of Wikipedia.
To me, what would be really useful is if somebody could find a really good neutral source, ideally academic, explaining the history of "UFO" vs "UAP". I've sort of seen it as "UAPs" = "UFOs + the Scientific Method", but a user on the other thread suggested I am a victim of manipulation for thinking that way. There are also a lot of "experts" out there, but anybody who calls themself a "UFO" or "UAP" expert doesn't seem trustworthy to me. I found this, but it's not a great source: https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/uaps.htm. IDK. This will get sticky. Miserlou (talk) 12:45, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I don't have any expertise here either. I'm a historian (with only the junior-most claim to the guild having an MLitt from St Andrews in Scotland) and a K-12 educator. But the fact that something is unhelpful and wrong in the current approach seems obvious. What to do about it is not so clear. One simple solution is to allow two different main articles on UFOs and UAPs so that the UFO article stays as this one currently is: focused on the long history and folk-lore and endless (much needed) debunking. Meanwhile the UAPs main article can focus on the technical questions of some currently unexplained category of observations that the U.S. government has clearly decided to address publicly to some extent. Just making this simple distinction would free good Wikipedia editors up to work more effectively and to make these distinctions as these distinctions are showing up regularly in news and events in recent years. Jjhake (talk) 12:57, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah I mean I think that sounds good in theory, but to a lot of people that's going to look like we're splitting into "UFOs" and "UFOs, but real this time", which isn't going to go over well. I think it's a fundamentally impossible problem - there's so much kookery and so much government opacity that until a paper examining exotic alloys recovered from a craft of unknown origin appears in Nature, there's never going to be an easy answer. One thing that might help, just for people who are trying to use Wikipedia the way it's supposed to be used and get some solid reference on a topic, is if there were a canonical page of the history of all US government UAP programs. There are pages for individual reports, but I haven't found anything discussing government UAP programs as a meta-topic. They're even actually hard to find because somebody on the boonk squad has been very insistent on calling the pages things like "UFO Report" rather than the actual name of the report (Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), so even just finding them on Wikipedia is difficult. Miserlou (talk) 13:56, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

UAP should the page be named UAP now since US Government and mainstream media calling it that?

US Government new name for UFOs Rkunreal93 (talk) 17:43, 17 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia does not automatically follow the euphemisms a few gullible people in the government of some random country happen to invent.
It follows what reliable sources write, and they have not switched over to the neologism. --Hob Gadling (talk) 18:23, 17 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
UFO, as this article notes, was a term invented by the U.S. government, and many reliable sources now use UAP. I'm genuinely perplexed by why you insult some nameless crowd as "gullible" when this is a very normal and matter-of-fact history of a government trying to speak technically about a zone of the unknown or unidentified while many others turn the unknown into folklore. The insulting terms used to browbeat and thereby maintain the bizarrely narrow categories in this UFO article are sad and are clearly preventing Wikipedia from accurately reflecting recent history in both the realms of government policy and popular folklore related to the broad and sprawling topic. Jjhake (talk) 20:37, 17 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The problem here is in your comment there. See WP:RECENTISM. We need to aim toward a long-term, historical view. HiLo48 (talk) 03:20, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
User talk:Rkunreal93, you're asking a perfectly valid question, and it's a disservice to readers in several ways when I look at how one-sided and narrow-minded the history of editing on this article appears to be. Jjhake (talk) 20:39, 17 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It is a disservice to other editors to describe their work that way. HiLo48 (talk) 03:21, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve seen so much narrow-minded ignorance in this area along some of the most active editors. They don’t have respect for some of the important layers like folklore, popular entertainment, or technical military questions and are only interested in hard debunking (which I agree is critical but which is not the full picture as found in the full range of scholarship on this topic when considered from multiple fields). Jjhake (talk) 19:02, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve seen so much narrow-minded ignorance in this area along some of the most active editors. I invite you to read WP:NPA. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 21:43, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Jjhake They Want to Believe Rkunreal93 (talk) 16:59, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia uses the most commonly used name, not the most recent name. MrOllie (talk) 17:01, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@MrOllie I think UFO better but page should be named both interchangeable. Rkunreal93 (talk) 17:04, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Articles only have one title, that is how the wiki software works. We install redirects or disambiguation notes for synonyms. That has already been done here, so there is no need to make any changes. MrOllie (talk) 17:08, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@MrOllie Ok is there information about Grey Aliens who allegedly crashed in Roswell New Mexico July 1947 is it under Conspiracy Theories? Rkunreal93 (talk) 17:11, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We just had a conversation about this topic in the section above ^^ Miserlou (talk) 22:54, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This should be included, but @LuckyLouie and @JoJo Anthrax does not think so:

NASA has declared that it will refer to such events as anomalous since they are not considered aerial-only, to be "consistent with the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, signed into law on December 23, 2022".[1]

I suggest that instead of just removing, factual relevant information regarding the acronym, that they edit the page like good wikipedians, and enlighten users about the ways of the wiki.

@Lobner: it looks like you are missing a signature above. Can you place one back in above so that this thread remains more readable? There is a definition or terminology section in the article that would be the place to start, and then the lede should very succinctly summarize what is agreed upon in that section of the article body.--Jjhake (talk) 13:15, 29 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

content added just now in the history of the "20th century and after" section

All, rather than just grumble and grump vaguely on the talk page here (as I have above recently), I tried to write up a history that gives a fuller and less exclusively polemical picture of this very long and messy UFO story in the United States (and beyond at this point). I'm dropping a note here to invite questions and requests from any other editors about this added content in this section as I know a little about the discipline of history but not much about UFOs or Wikipedia writing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object#20th_century_and_after

I hope that some of it might be helpful on this topic. --Jjhake (talk) 19:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Bill Ellis, another Penn State university folklore professor with UFO publications

I was surprised a few weeks back to find nothing in this voluminous Wikipedia article from Penn State professor Greg Eghigian. I'm finding another Penn State professor (emeritus), Bill Ellis, who has a specialization in contemporary folklore to also be absent despite several helpful books and articles on the topic. This critical approach through history and cultural studies seems glaringly absent in this article overall, and I hope that others will pick up on this and help. Jjhake (talk) 23:15, 25 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Non-Human Intelligence" (NHI)

First they renamed it to UAP. Now they call it NHI. What's up with all the renaming recently? Call it by another name just to confuse people or is it to deflect Freedom Of Information requests that must explicitly say UFO vs UAP vs NHI vs ...<yet unknown abbreviations> — Preceding unsigned comment added by Foerdi (talk • contribs) 04:26, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you’re interested in the history of “non-human” as a term, it’s used heavily in Diana Walsh Pasulka‘s 2019 book with Oxford UP which is interesting at several levels. Jjhake (talk) 03:57, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
My dog is non-human, and very intelligent. HiLo48 (talk) 09:30, 2 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
You mean it is again the Russians putting poor dogs inside flying crafts and sending these into US airspace to create UFO mass panic? I had the feeling Putin loved dogs ... Foerdi (talk) 06:08, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright violations

Sorry folks. I had to revert the article to a version prior to noted copyright violations [1]. I can provide more details if necessary, but I would rather not identify any particular editor at this point. Please feel free to continue editing this article. Thanks. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 03:45, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for catching my failure there to properly quote my hero Greg Eghigian. Jjhake (talk) 03:53, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"noted copyright violations"
Where were these alleged copyright violations noted?
What were they?
I notice that in the diff to which you linked
you made a number of editorial changes that seem to have nothing to do with copyright violations.
I don't want to dispute those, but it seems disingenuous to label all those changes as related to copyright violations.
Do you disagree? KHarbaugh (talk) 16:29, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
All revisions that contained copyright violations should be reverted, that's how it is done on Wikipedia. Actually, they should be deleted from the history as well. @Steve Quinn:, you should add a {{Copyvio-revdel}} template to the page to request that. Or alternatively, provide a url for the source that was infringed and I can do it. MrOllie (talk) 17:10, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@MrOllie: thanks for giving the above editor the straight story. As for myself, I am not familiar with dealing with a large copyvio as happened in this instance. I only knew enough to revert the page. If you could add the tag, it would be much appreciated. And I will watch what you do. I will have to ferret out the url's from which the plagiarism occurred if that is needed. This certainly needs to be dealt with. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 20:27, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Here is the url for one source that was infringed: [2]. I will have to find the other one. I am assuming two urls can be added to the template.---Steve Quinn (talk) 20:34, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Here is the other one: [3]. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 21:14, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I added the template, and admin should be along in a bit. MrOllie (talk) 21:17, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

20th century section

Individuals who are scientists may say things to newspapers but scientific journals show no “controversy” about UFOs whatsoever. We really should not assert in Wikipedia’s voice In addition to these controversies within the sciences. - LuckyLouie (talk) 13:31, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Makes sense. I'm sure this attempt to correct isn't the best, but I took a shot: In addition to these considerations about data collection and analysis within the sciences... Jjhake (talk) 17:43, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would resist the urge to create smooth-sounding transitions in Wikipedia's voice that characterize what came before and connect it to what's coming next. Leave it to the historians to "connect the dots". US government agencies like NASA may have scientists on staff, but that doesn't mean UFOs are being given attention "within the sciences". I'd leave that transition out altogether. - LuckyLouie (talk) 18:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Makes sense. One of the three transitions that you removed just now was reflected in a couple of the secondary sources, but the principle makes sense. The many news stories about NASA's UAP study team reference NASA's sated purpose of bringing the rigors of the science method (and such phrases) to the task of UAP data collection and analysis, but I see how this is a very different thing from such analysis showing up within scientific journals and how my phrasing implied the second. Jjhake (talk) 18:26, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Style notes

@Jjhake: Loving a lot of your contributions here, but please try to avoid over reliance on quotations. Many of the things you are including as quotations can be summarized or paraphrased without direct quotes. Only include quotes if it is important to the editorial point and cannot be handled any other way. So, for example, when emphasizing an opinion, a unique phrasing, or a longform analytical idea. Simple facts do not need to be attributed to a single person and, indeed, runs somewhat afoul of WP:ASSERT. jps (talk) 21:34, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is helpful. Thank you. In so far as others don't get to it ahead of me, I'll plan to circle back through and summarize or paraphrase where direct quotes are not an opinion, etc. Jjhake (talk) 21:55, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I see that you've got a good start on it already. Thanks. Jjhake (talk) 21:57, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Description of Greg Eghigian’s forthcoming UFO history with Oxford UP

Looks very good! Long wait. Description posted here:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/after-the-flying-saucers-came-9780190869878?cc=us&lang=en& Jjhake (talk) 03:56, 1 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Difference between "Investigations of reports" and "Studies"?

What is the difference between these two large, sprawling, and redundant main sections in the article body?

  • Investigations of reports
  • Studies

I can think of several differences, but it would help to start cutting down on some redundancy in the article body if these two main sections were consolidated under a common main heading. Thoughts? I'll also look through talk page archives some more to see if this organization has been talked about before. Jjhake (talk) 01:00, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Definition

Re this revert. That definition is pertinent to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office article and may be included there. This article is about UFOs in general, not just US government based perspectives. Thanks, - LuckyLouie (talk) 20:19, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Does this really belong in the lead? Someone please assist this new user with understanding how to use en.wikipedia.org. - LuckyLouie (talk) 22:39, 28 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed that content from the lede. It just doesn't fit there, as this is a general article about UFOs. The current perspective/vernacular of NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc. (or indeed any government) can perhaps be mentioned later in the article, but prominently presented in the lead as if it has definitive standing? No. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 01:52, 29 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team: Terms of Reference" (PDF). NASA. 18 May 2023. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 May 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2023.
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