Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2022

17 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING A report relating to the first year of activity of Project Blue Book, with the guidelines of a questionnaire (right) that the sightings investigators had to fill out based on the collected testimonies. Below is a form completed on January 30, 1956, following the sighting of what turned out to be a meteorological balloon. All such documents were initially covered by military secrecy. fied flying objects were extraterres- trial vehicles. During and after Project Blue Book, other nations besides the USA launched study campaigns into the phenomenon, obtaining the same inconclusive results. With the sole exception of ufology fanatics (often also lovers of conspir- acy), no government, no military force and no scientist has ever seri- ously believed that the Earth’s at- mosphere has been repeatedly visited by a jumble of alien tech- nologies. In the USA, this awareness, coupled with the fact that some sightings have taken place near military facilities, has gradually re- inforced the sus- picion that a not-insignificant part of the re- ported episodes might have to do with technologies from other na- tions, China in particular. This sce- nario led, in 2007, to the financing by the US government (and to the management by the Defense Intelli- gence Agency, or DIA) of the Ad- vanced Aviation Threat Identifica- tion Program (AATIP), a five-year in- vestigation that was supposed to es- tablish the level of danger of that phenomenon, which was now indi- cated with the less equivocal acronym UAP − Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Officially, the AATIP ended in 2012 without adding any-