Ufology

Ufology is the study of reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — known since the early 2020s, in official language, as unidentified aerial phenomena and then unidentified anomalous phenomena (both abbreviated UAP) — and of the larger question of whether any of those reports document a non-human technological presence on Earth. It is an interdisciplinary field practised largely outside the universities: a body of case investigation, witness testimony, physical-trace analysis, and archival work carried on by civilian organizations, a handful of credentialed scientists working against the grain of their disciplines, and, increasingly since 2017, government agencies. Mainstream science has never accepted it as a science, and any careful account has to hold apart two things it routinely runs together — a documented record of sightings, hearings, and government programs, and the far larger, contested claim that some of that record is evidence of visitors.

The Wheel of Heaven framework reads ufology as the broader context for its own founding case. Raëlism arose from a reported 1973 contact experienced by the French journalist Claude Vorilhon — later Raël — and the Elohim of the canon are an advanced human civilization, not an unknown "alien" species. Read that way, ufology is the field within which that contact report sits: the framework engages the wider UFO/UAP record with interest, as consistent with its own account, without resting on it.

The field and its name

The word ufology joins UFO — the acronym for unidentified flying object, coined within the U.S. Air Force by Edward Ruppelt around 1953 to replace "flying saucer" — with the suffix -ology, and came into use late in that decade. "Flying saucer" itself was an accident of the press: when Kenneth Arnold described the objects he saw in 1947 as moving "like a saucer if you skip it across the water," reporters attached the word to their shape rather than their motion. Since 2017 the official vocabulary has shifted again, from UFO to UAP — first unidentified aerial phenomena, and since 2022 unidentified anomalous phenomena — a change meant to drop the implication that the objects are craft at all.

The field should not be confused with the sciences it borders. Astrobiology studies the possibility of life beyond Earth without reference to sightings; SETI listens for radio signals rather than investigating objects in the sky; the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis reads historical and archaeological evidence for past contact; and exopolitics is the narrower policy subfield concerned with governmental disclosure.

A history of the field

Before 1947

Accounts of strange things in the sky are far older than the modern field, and ufologists have gathered them into a long prehistory: the disputed Egyptian Tulli Papyrus; the "wheels within wheels" of Ezekiel's chariot vision (c. 593 BCE), which the framework reads as an early Elohim-craft encounter; Roman prodigy-lists such as Julius Obsequens's Prodigiorum Liber; the Nuremberg (1561) and Basel (1566) broadsheet phenomena; the American "airship" reports of 1896–97; the "foo fighters" seen by pilots in the Second World War; and the Scandinavian "ghost rockets" of 1946. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck catalogued this material in Wonders in the Sky (2009). How much of it bears on the modern phenomenon is contested; that a record exists is not.

1947 and the modern field

The modern field begins with two events in the summer of 1947. On June 24 the private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine crescent objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier at speeds he put near 1,700 mph, and the press coined "flying saucer" from his description. Weeks later, in early July, the recovery of debris near Roswell, New Mexico produced a U.S. Army Air Forces press release announcing a "flying disc," retracted the same day in favour of a weather balloon. A 1994 Air Force review identified the material as the remains of Project Mogul, a classified high-altitude balloon program. Roswell has been argued over ever since; it remains the field's foundational case and its foundational dispute.

Government investigation and the skeptical turn (1947–1969)

The Air Force studied the reports through three successive programs — Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1952), and Project Blue Book (1952–1969). Ruppelt, Blue Book's first director, gave the field its acronym. Blue Book examined 12,618 reports and closed 701 as unidentified, but its institutional posture hardened into debunking, a stance formalized by the CIA's 1953 Robertson Panel. The University of Colorado's Condon Report (1968), the principal official scientific study, concluded that further work was unwarranted, and Blue Book closed in December 1969. For nearly five decades afterward the U.S. government acknowledged no UAP program.

The civilian field and its scholars

The vacuum was filled by civilian organizations — NICAP, APRO, CUFOS, and MUFON — that logged and investigated reports. The retired Marine major Donald Keyhoe, who ran NICAP through the 1960s, had already made the extraterrestrial reading a matter of public argument in The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950), pressing the case that the Air Force was withholding what it knew. The field's most important scholar was the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's own scientific consultant, who moved from skeptic to cautious advocate and, in The UFO Experience (1972), proposed the close-encounter classification still in use: encounters of the first kind (a sighting at close range), the second (with physical traces), and the third (with associated entities); Vallée later added a fourth for abductions. Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973. The French-American computer scientist Jacques Vallée, in Passport to Magonia (1969), set modern reports beside cross-cultural folklore of encounters with non-human beings and argued that the phenomenon was older and stranger than a simple visiting-spaceship model allowed.

The abduction phenomenon

From the 1960s a distinct kind of report emerged — not sightings but claimed abductions. Betty and Barney Hill described, partly under hypnosis, being taken aboard a craft in New Hampshire in 1961, the template for much that followed. In the 1990s the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack drew academic attention and institutional controversy by treating abduction reporters as sincere subjects of a real experience rather than as patients to be dismissed; Harvard reviewed his work in 1994 and affirmed his academic freedom. The abduction literature is among the field's most contested: vivid first-person testimony on one side, well-documented concerns about hypnosis, suggestion, and sleep phenomena on the other.

The modern UAP era (2017–present)

The field's standing changed after December 16, 2017, when The New York Times revealed the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP, 2007–2012) and published Navy sensor videos of unexplained objects. In April 2020 the Department of Defense officially released three of them — FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast. A June 2021 assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence logged 144 encounters and could confidently identify only one. The Pentagon stood up the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022; in July 2023 a congressional hearing heard Navy pilots describe encounters and the former intelligence officer David Grusch allege — at second hand, and without physical evidence — that the government holds non-human craft. A NASA panel urged systematic study in September 2023. The documented core of all this — that hearings were held, that the videos are real, that objects went unidentified — is not in dispute; the extraordinary interpretation of it remains unproven. This government-secrecy dimension is treated on its own in military cover-up of exobiology.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

Raëlism arose from within this field. On December 13, 1973, the French journalist Claude Vorilhon — Raël — reported being met at the Puy-de-Lassolas volcanic crater, in the Auvergne, by an occupant of a landed craft, and conversing with him over six mornings; the account became Le Livre qui dit la vérité (1974, The Book Which Tells the Truth). A second reported contact, on October 7, 1975, took him to the Elohim home planet and produced a second book. On the canon these are not encounters with an unknown "alien" species but with an advanced human civilization, the Elohim, the designers of life on Earth; in the framework's own voice, the contact is real and its terms are known.

Placed in the ufological record, Raël's account belongs to the contactee tradition — first-person reports of conversation with visitors — which mainstream ufology has treated with particular suspicion since the 1950s claims of George Adamski and Daniel Fry. The framework separates it from that tradition on other grounds: the detail of the message, the textual corpus and organization that followed, and its fit with the wider historical and cross-cultural record. Crucially, the framework does not need every UFO report to be genuine. Most, on its reading, are misidentifications, hoaxes, or ordinary error; the wider record matters as independent context, not as the foundation of the claim, which rests on Message from the Designers itself.

The framework also declines to read the modern secrecy story as the Elohim hiding. On the canon their model of contact is open and mutual — the Embassy they ask humanity to build — and the argument that humanity should be told its origins plainly was the position of the exiled Lucifer faction, the faction of the Serpent. It is worth being exact here, because popular tradition collapses the distinction: the opposed faction, led by Satan on the home world, argued not for secrecy but for ending the human project altogether. Secrecy versus disclosure, in the canon's terms, is a human quarrel, not the Elohim's.

Scientific and skeptical perspectives

Ufology is not an accepted science, and the reasons are worth stating plainly rather than resenting. Its central claim is extraordinary; its evidence is overwhelmingly anecdotal, hard to reproduce, and subject to the ordinary failures of perception, memory, and instrumentation. Skeptics have pressed the case in detail for decades. The Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel, in a series of books from the 1950s, argued that most sightings resolve into atmospheric and optical effects. The aerospace journalist Philip Klass spent forty years finding conventional explanations — aircraft, balloons, plasmas, hoaxes — for celebrated cases, and doubting the residue. Carl Sagan, who took the question seriously enough to co-organize a 1969 AAAS symposium on it, held that the evidence never met the standard an extraordinary claim demands, and in The Demon-Haunted World (1995) read the abduction accounts as a study in human suggestibility. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (founded 1976 as CSICOP) has carried this critical program institutionally.

The strongest documented facts establish less than enthusiasts claim: that governments studied the subject and sometimes concealed the fact, that trained observers reported things they could not identify, that sensors recorded objects that went unexplained. None of that amounts to proof of visitors. A responsible account grants the documented record, withholds judgment on the interpretation, and does not let the second borrow credibility from the first. The Wheel of Heaven framework states its own reading in the canon's voice while keeping that line clear: what the record documents and what it is taken to mean are different questions.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Military cover-up of exobiology
• PURSUE
• Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis
• Astrobiology
• Comparative Mythology
• Elohim Home Planet
• Ezekiel
• Embassy
• Plurality of Gods
• Elohim
• Raël
• Raëlism
• Message from the Designers
• Lucifer
• Satan
• Serpent
• Age of Aquarius

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005.

Foundational disciplinary works

Arnold, Kenneth, and Ray Palmer. The Coming of the Saucers. Privately published, 1952.

Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Doubleday, 1956.

Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Henry Regnery, 1972.

Hynek, J. Allen. The Hynek UFO Report. Dell, 1977.

Vallée, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space — A Scientific Appraisal. Henry Regnery, 1965.

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Henry Regnery, 1969.

Vallée, Jacques. The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered about UFO Influences on the Human Race. E.P. Dutton, 1975.

Vallée, Jacques. Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults. And/Or Press, 1979.

Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Contemporary Books, 1988.

Vallée, Jacques. Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact. Ballantine, 1990.

Vallée, Jacques. Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception. Ballantine, 1991.

Vallée, Jacques, and Chris Aubeck. Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009.

Keyhoe, Donald. The Flying Saucers Are Real. Fawcett, 1950.

Keyhoe, Donald. Flying Saucers from Outer Space. Henry Holt, 1953.

Specific case investigations

Friedman, Stanton T., and Don Berliner. Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO. Marlowe & Company, 1992.

Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer. Dial Press, 1966.

Walton, Travis. The Walton Experience. Berkley, 1978. Revised as Fire in the Sky, 1996.

Abduction phenomenon

Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.

Mack, John E. Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. Crown, 1999.

Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time. R. Marek Publishers, 1981.

Jacobs, David M. Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Historical and policy engagement

Dolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941-1973. Hampton Roads, 2000.

Dolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991. Keyhole Publishing, 2009.

Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Harmony, 2010.

Governmental documents

U.S. Air Force. Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. 1955.

Condon, Edward U. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. Bantam, 1969.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. June 25, 2021.

NASA UAP Independent Study Team. Final Report. September 14, 2023.

2017 disclosure

Cooper, 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.

Ezekiel engineering engagement

Blumrich, Josef F. The Spaceships of Ezekiel. Bantam, 1974.

Cross-cultural folklore framework

Harpur, Patrick. Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. Pine Winds Press, 1994.

Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. Saturday Review Press, 1975.

Skeptical engagement

Klass, Philip J. UFOs: Identified. Random House, 1968.

Klass, Philip J. UFOs Explained. Random House, 1974.

Klass, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup. Prometheus, 1997.

Menzel, Donald H., and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age. Doubleday, 1963.

Sagan, Carl, and Thornton Page, eds. UFO's: A Scientific Debate. Cornell University Press, 1972.

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, 1995.

Sheaffer, Robert. Bad UFOs: Critical Thinking about UFO Claims. CreateSpace, 2016.

Recent engagement

Loeb, Avi. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow, 2024.

Mellon, Christopher. The Age of Disclosure. (Forthcoming.)

Web resources

"Ufology." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology.

"List of ufologists." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ufologists.

"List of reported UFO sightings." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings.

"Unidentified flying object." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object.

"J. Allen Hynek." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek.

"Jacques Vallée." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vall%C3%A9e.

"Project Blue Book." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book.

"Roswell incident." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident.

"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office.

"2023 United States congressional hearing on UFOs." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_States_congressional_hearing_on_UFOs.

Ufology. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/ufology/

"Ufology." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/ufology/.

"Ufology." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/ufology/.

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  title        = {Ufology},
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}