The UFO question is very complex. Anyone who puts any serious time into studying it will know that. Any UFO sighting can be filed (immediately or eventually) into one of several categories:
1. The misidentification of a man-made flying craft (plane or something less familiar).
2. The misidentification of a meteorological or astronomical phenomenon.
3. The misidentification of some other light phenomenon (e.g., flares).
4. An outright hoax (this category seems quite rare, except for perhaps photographic or video evidence).
5. Some sort of imaginary or hallucinatory experience brought on by drugs, alcohol, or stress (this one also appears quite rare in the literature).
6. A sighting of an aerial craft or phenomenon that cannot be explained by the first five explanations.
I’m certainly not unique in breaking UFO sightings into categories. This blog is concerned only with those sightings that fall into the last category–the truly unexplainable sightings, or those for which the five alternatives cannot provide coherent explanation. Many people interested in UFOs, or who have had an unexplainable sighting, commit the logical fallacy of concluding that if the sighting is unexplained, what was sighted must be of extraterrestrial origin. This is purely opinion, not a factual conclusion. With enough investigation, the unexplained sighting may be found explainable in one of the other five, or new categories may emerge. The ET explanation is just one possibility.
With respect to this blog, I’m going to be focusing on how people assume that Category Six must be extraterrestrial, and how many people “sacralize” their sighting and their conclusion, thereby processing the sighting or experience in religious terms.
