Do aliens exist? This question has mystified humans eversince prehistoric man noticed the bright stars in our sky. There are around 200billion galaxies out there andsmart(better word) people estimate around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets overall.

Are we reallythe only planet with intelligent (again, debatable) life on it?                                                                       We have beenfascinated by the bizarre, and alien sightings are top on that list. From themtaking over the world, to government conspiracies, many “knowledgeable” peoplehave tried explaining such phenomenon. Here are a few popular encounters of thethird kind. The most popular one is the Roswell incidentwhich occurred in 1947 where, Rancher William Brazel discoveredmysterious debris in one of his pastures. News headlines claimed that a “flyingsaucer” crashed in Roswell, but military officials claimed that it was merely aconventional weather balloon. Interest subsequently weakened until the late 1970s,when ufologists began promoting a varietyof increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, claiming that one or more alienspaceships had crash-landed, and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered bythe military, who then engaged in a cover-up.In the 1990s,the US military published two reports disclosing the true nature of the crashedobject: a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

Nevertheless, this incident continues to be of interest inpopular media, and conspiracy theories surrounding the event persist. Roswellhas been described as “the world’s most famous, most exhaustivelyinvestigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim”.But the UFOmania was first set up by an incident which occurred earlier that year withKenneth Arnold who claimed to see 9 blue glowing objects flying in a ‘V’formation approximately at a speed of 2700kmph, which was three times fasterthan any manned aircraft in 1947.  Whenhe described their motion as similar to “a saucer if you skip it across water,”the media coined the now-universal phrase “flying saucer.” Soon, there were otherreports of a group of nine UFOs across the region, including sightings by aprospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial flight in Idaho. Thegovernment never had a true explanation for the sightings—it simply claimedthat Arnold had seen a mirage or was hallucinating. Almost all sightings have a similar explanation which is neversatisfying. I personally very much believe that aliens exist and the governmentsurely has a lot which has been covered up.

For the past 44 years the NationalUFO Reporting Center has been taking a sincere effort of taking any story ifsomeone sees anything strange. Right now, they receive between 10-20written reports in a day through the website. But those sightings are going up.Most of them have mundane explanations or just cases of seeing an object thatthe witness was unable to identify. The most reliable reports involve multiplewitnesses who corroborate each other’s sightings. NUFORC believes serving as alistening ear is one half of the job. Presenting those stories aspublicly-available reports is the other.

The director, Peter Davenport feels, peopleshould have access to information about extraterrestrial activity,”without having to rely on a government which is lying to all of us aboutthe UFO phenomenon”. Another incident which was very poorly explained by the government isThe Lubbock Lights which occurred in 1951.  Three science professors fromTexas Tech were enjoying an evening outdoors in Lubbock. Suddenly they noticeda semicircle of lights flying above them at a very high speed. Over the nextfew days, dozens of reports flooded in from across town. Newspapers across thecountry and Life magazine also published photos of the incident snapped by aTexas Tech freshman, named Carl Hart Jr. Dr.

Grayson Mead claimed that the lights”appeared to be about the size of a dinner plate and they weregreenish-blue, slightly fluorescent in color. They were smaller than the fullmoon at the horizon. There were about a dozen to fifteen of these lights, theywere absolutely circular, it gave all of us an extremely eeriefeeling.”