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On this month's Morbidly Fascinating Page:

Was The X-Files' Fox Mulder right? Where are we today about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (aka UFOs)?

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In the Morbidly Fascinating Archives

Strange Tombstones from Over the World
The Haunted Lemp Mansion
Radium Poisoning in the 1920s
The Suicide Forest
Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Watch a military video of UFOs HERE

Where in America have UFOs been sighted in the past?

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In what areas does the government give crediblity to these sightings?

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How does the government decide which sightings to take credulously?

The reports are being examined by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), an office in the Pentagon created last year to review UAP incidents.

The AARO will focus on receiving and analyzing incidents with unidentified phenomena and work with intelligence agencies to further assess those incidents, according to the new declassified document.

Are the UFOs changing their flight paths?

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Idaho and New Hampshire have the most sightings more recently

While large, populated states may have been the place to be if you wanted to see a UFO years ago, the study found that these possibly alien visitors may be changing their flight paths. Over the last five years, more Americans have reported UFO sightings in Idaho than anywhere else in the nation, per 100,000 residents.

New Hampshire (313), Montana (223), Vermont (132), and New Mexico (391) round out the top five places for UFO sightings over the last five years. At the same time, big states like Texas (50th), New York (46th), and California (41st) now have the fewest reports of UFO sightings per 100,000 residents.

See more HERE

American sightings of UFOs are increasing (as of January 2023)

The office tracking reports of UFOs has added nearly 400 additional sightings to its catalog over the last year, either because of new sightings or older sightings discovered in existing files, bringing the total number of UFO sightings to over 500. 

On Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified version of its annual report on UFOs, or what the government calls unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). 

The assessment revealed that the office tracking UAPs has had a total of 510 sightings since 2004. This is significantly up from the 144 sightings included in the initial report in 2021. 

The 366 additional sightings were either new or discovered in the files. An office within the Department of Defense has determined that about half of the additional sightings displayed "unremarkable characteristics." 

Of the additional sightings, 26 have initially been characterized as drones, 163 as balloon-like objects, and 6 as aerial clutter. That leaves 171 unexplained, some of which exhibited "unusual flight characteristics or performance, and require further analysis."

The latest assessment suggests the uptick in reported sightings is partially due to reduced stigma surrounding UAP sightings. The majority of the new reporting is from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force aviators and operators who saw a UAP and reported it through official channels.

See more HERE

The missing plan for alien first contact

Humans are still searching for signs of intelligent alien life on other planets – but how would we react towards it if we ever did make contact?

According to the Drake equation, there’s a decent chance, statistically speaking, that intelligent extraterrestrials are out there somewhere – even if the stars would have to align for us to find and contact each other, given the vastness of our galaxy and enormous distance between planets.

So with the search ongoing for alien life and the possibility remaining that we encounter it, it's not amiss to consider how we might react if we ever did make contact – especially considering an intelligent alien species is likely to be very different to our own human one.

A clue for how we might treat aliens we ever do have contact with may lie in the rights we've afforded non-human species on our planet. Although many countries now recognize animals ranging from gorillas to crows as sentient, it's only recently that animal rights groups have made some legal headway in affording "rights" to animals based on this sentience – loosely defined as their ability to experience comfort or distress.

There are no international agreements or mechanisms in place for how humanity would handle an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, says Niklas Hedman, executive director of UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa). That's not to say a framework could never exist. The UN, as the "prime global intergovernmental organization", would be a fit for such mechanisms, he adds, but ultimately action and debate "boils down to the will of member states".

See more HERE

Did we already make first contact?

The Wow! Signal

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On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear Radio Telescope in Delaware, Ohio, received the most powerful signal it would ever detect during its decades of observations. The signal lasted just 72 seconds, but when an astronomer spotted it on a computer printout days later, he was so impressed that he quickly scrawled “Wow!” in red pen across the page. The data looked much like what SETI astronomers expected to see from an alien intelligence. However, despite many attempts to follow up on the find, the so-called “Wow! Signal” has never reappeared.

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What does the Pentagon say? The report suggests that the U.S. government appears to be taking UFOs seriously.

The unclassified "2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" was published by the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Thursday, January 12 after a months-long delay.

In all, the report covers some 510 cataloged UAP reports gathered from agencies involved in the report and the branches of the United States military. The document notes that the majority of these were gathered from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force personnel who reported them through official channels.

"It is clear that there is an urgent and critical need to improve aerospace safety by dedicating scientific research into UAP," said Ryan Graves, former Navy F/A-18 pilot and chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Integration & Outreach Committee (UAPIOC), in a statement following the release of the ODNI's report. "We must stop unscrupulous speculation, break stigma, and invest in science to address this national safety threat," Graves added.

See more HERE

Photos of possible UAPs (UFOs) taken by the United States Military (all branches)

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