UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects - flying saucers and dancing lights - have been sighted in the sky by ordinary people, credible witnesses, hardened skeptics - even celebrities and politicians. Former military personnel, and even high ranking officials, have come forward to describe their experiences - and in some cases, their own parts in massive cover ups. Thousands of books have been written, hundreds of documentaries shown on TV, dozens of blockbuster movies based on eyewitness testimony have been produced, and most have done well - especially those staying faithful to reality: less fantastic, more credible, less fictional, more chronicle.

All the polls show that the existence of intelligent life in outer space - including sightings of UFOs and encounters with aliens - are being taken seriously by a more enlightened modern majority. Still, for one to make claims of having been abducted by aliens: is to risk cultural exile and social isolation. To most people, perhaps, it is a joke - a sign of mental breakdown or instability - but to some, it is certainly not. These events are really happening - every day, all over the world. If it hasn�t happened to you yet: chances are, one day it will.

Typically, flying saucers tend to frequent out of the way areas, sparsely populated and largely uncivilized - like this 1981 photo (right), taken by hikers in the wooded mountains of British Columbia, Canada. Because of this, many ufologists have had to overcome a "hick factor" in analyzing modern sighting reports. And official government investigations, (the most famous being Project Blue Book, in the USA), have used this to their national security and political advantage - to perpetually trivialize the entire phenomenon. Because of this, most sightings go unreported, at least officially - the rare exceptions being mass public sightings: in which hundreds or even thousands of witnesses gaze up to the sky in broad daylight, while official sources spin the piles of evidence into something else entirely, or play it down as best they can.

SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - at least once turned up an impressive signal return (below left). Whatever the echo was, it is not known to have been heard again - at least not immediately. Originally a governmentally funded project and affiliated with NASA, shortly after the awe inspiring discovery, the US Congress pulled their funding, effectively killing the program. Shortly afterward, SETI was resurrected as a privately funded entity - and even today enlists the help of ordinary people, who analyze SETI data for any sign of alien radio signals with their PCs, while they surf the net. The very popular SETI@Home program is considered by many to be a "power to the people" grassroots movement. Many serious ufologists scoff at the methodology used to detect alien signals, however - citing that it would be vastly easier to detect the waves generated by Gilligan throwing stones into his lagoon, than the chance radio, or even laser, signal emanating from a planet dozens of light years away, through all the noise and background radiation of space, filtered through countless asteroids and clouds of space dust. Besides, critics go on, radio is not by any means a certain universal path of evolution - and even if it were, any culture advanced to the level of interstellar travel would have developed technologies that make radio look like smoke signals, or primitive cave drawings.

A scientist claiming to have worked at Area 51, the once secret military base in Nevada, has described the technology he was hired to reverse engineer for the US government. Far from the rockets, lasers or warp engines of popular science fiction; a small device (about the size of a basketball) is said to tap into properties of time, space, dimension and matter - elusive relationships and realities that we have only begun to theorize - literally "folding space," or essentially teleporting the craft to whatever point in space the controls are focused on. Many ufologists speculate that a great number of UFO sightings, cattle mutilations, and even abductions (especially near military bases) are actually being flown and even designed by human beings - having used one or more of numerous crashed UFOs as a guide or template.

In the USA, the shores around the Gulf of Mexico and those tropical waters all the way to Puerto Rico have a very paranormal reputation - not the least of which being the Bermuda Triangle - including some especially isolated military bases in Florida and Puerto Rico, which are rumored to have taken over for Area 51 in recent years, since it has become more of a household word than a top secret installation. The Great Lakes Region, parts of the American Northwest, and the entire American Southwest are all veritable hotbeds of UFO sightings. And now, since the 1997 Phoenix lights incident, and the mass UFO sightings in Mexico City throughout the 1990s (still continuing to this day); there are extensively documented, publicly monitored and redundantly videotaped flaps over heavily populated areas. The public is becoming aware - and somewhat more enlightened of our tiny place in the vast universe.

Look up. Chances are, you won�t see anything out of the ordinary - but every once in awhile, people do. The government and the media like to fuel the "laughter curtain" around the whole subject, by characterizing witnesses to such phenomena as ignorant rural drunkards - but such is most often not the case. Ordinary people have seen things in the sky that cannot be explained by any standard of innocent circumstance - sometimes in mass, while thousands stare and point.

Airline pilots, with decades of experience, are having more and more encounters with strange and enormous metallic craft: that pace their jets, fly circles around them, and vanish off into the distance at incalculable speeds. More often than not, these objects are invisible to radar - and almost needless to say, they have no transponder codes. It is an unwritten rule that reporting a UFO will result in getting a highly qualified and otherwise respected airline pilot fired - and black listed: branded unhirable for life. The FAA and airlines worldwide understand the situation - that there are things in the sky that cannot be explained. Part of their purpose is to maintain the level of secrecy on UFOs.

Without a doubt, any air force in the world would love to get their hands on this technology. Area 51 is known to have produced the latest generation in supersonic stealth fighters and bombers, originally designed in the 70s and 80s - flight tested during the end of the Cold War, under severest secrecy. But far from being the next logical step in aviation technology; the classic UFOs (flying saucers, blinking lights) perform mind boggling maneuvers, fly at amazing speeds, or hover motionlessly - as if the laws of physics were merely suggestions. When ordinary citizens witness such unlikely hazards to aviation, many of the "explanations" offered sound like the half thought through fantasy and lame excuses of a frightened child trying to lie his way out of trouble - when confronted with urgent inquiries like, "who broke this lamp?" The butler did it.

Nonsense. The very word evokes feelings of ridicule - as if something that is not easily explainable, that does not make sense, should be laughed off the face of the planet; the messenger chastised for gross inaccuracy and branded with the stamp of disapproval, from authority or the masses, or both. Few others will be so daring, in the future, as to even consider that something so unusual might actually be true. Be sure, when you report your particular perception of reality, that you run it through a nonsense filter first. For decades, since the Roswell incident, UFO proponents have been foretelling staggering world implications, that will soon turn science on its ear - and society upside down - as soon as the truth is revealed. But although our technology has increased dramatically since then, this grand universal epiphany has not happened yet - perhaps for that very reason. The truth of the matter is that UFOs have been sighted in the sky for as long as man has been looking up into it. Aliens have yet to hold a press conference, eliminate poverty or cure cancer - or blow up Congress, replace our neighbors and instill slavery through mind control (as far as we know). Instead, the people of Earth are free to feel safe in the assurance that the end of the world is not coming - or at least, it is probably not going to happen today. For all we know, this could be their world - our arrival or evolution, their curiosity.