The two major online websites which report UFOs sightings along with complete history, the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network – both of them have experienced a great decrease in worldwide sightings. The start of the decline was from the year 2014, after reaching a climax in UFO reporting. Since then, the sightings have drastically reduced to 55% compared to that year’s combined total. As a result, many UFO interest groups have folded and a number of previously classified government documents to have been disclosed.
One may be compelled to take the whole story of UFO sightings and the interest in it as a mere blip on the human cultural radar and that the UFO and alien knowledge gained as nothing more than the reflection of human culture, tied to the space age and motivated by conquering new existential frontiers.
Earlier to 1940s, sightings of unidentified objects were very rare. The recorded history does not give any account of any such activity. The UFO culture was born only at the predawn of the space-age, around the time of the Roswell conspiracy.
The reasons cited for the decreased sightings are varied. A key factor may be that the people are more concerned about the topic. Today, we are already having our platforms filled with news about tall claims made by the politicians, media and advertisers and any report of a UFO is not considered to be more than the long-range weather forecast.
In the earlier days, photographs were the staple of UFO evidence and then emerged the videos taken by those who sighted it. Any sighting of glowing objects in the sky was seen with curiosity and they seemed real and mysterious, and the same was displayed on television and were taken seriously by the audience hungry for amazement. Along with that, they were fed with conspiracy theorizing over the sighting.
According to the cultural historian Stuart Walton, “Belief in UFOs is definitely in a state of decline, along with much else that could be classed as paranormal. Part of the reason is that the technology for providing documentary evidence of such matters is now widely available to everybody with a smartphone, and such purported evidence as there is on YouTube looks extremely threadbare.”
He adds: “It isn’t so much that belief can exist without proof; it’s that it must emphatically avoid proof to remain belief. We are in the process, paradoxically, of proving a negative hypothesis with UFOs: there never was any such thing.”
This is a fact that, if we had indisputable evidence of intelligent life coming to Earth, then it could become the greatest news of its own kind. Yet, despite all those thousands of anecdotal, photo and video reports have come up over the decades. And the conclusion is that whatever comes up in video or film about an object in the sky, can surely be called as unidentifiable.
Moreover, now even if the government comes up with a disclosure of video footage, it is not at all helping in maintaining the belief. Joseph Baker, sociology professor at Tennessee State University, says: “It’s actually better for UFOs when ufologists can claim that ‘the powers that be know everything and are hiding it from us’ rather than seeing that the government appears to have basically the same info about UFOs as the public: namely grainy, inconclusive visual evidence.”
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