Facts. Facts. Facts. What is a fact? A fact is a true statement about the world. When you know a lot of facts about a subject you are said to be knowledgeable in the subject. Is there really any knowledge about UFOs? Are there really any facts about UFOs? Isn't it all a mystery? What do you believe and not believe about UFOs? For sure, we only want to believe true things about the world. Facts. And lacking facts, we certainly only want to have informed opinions about UFOs.

In ufology, there are lots of facts about UFOs. We will list some important ones here. But since it is a field of study where new knowledge is developed on a regular basis, new facts are continually added to the store of knowledge already produced in the last 60 plus years of UFO research.

What's Known for Certain?

So what do we know for certain about UFOs? To answer that important question, we have to figure out what certainty means. Here's a quick idea about certainty in knowledge. It is what we teach people in college courses. It is what is written down in textbooks. This is consensus knowledge in modern societies. (This "certain" knowledge changes over the years as scientists and scholars discover and learn more about the world, but this is a working idea of what certainty in knowledge is about.) Taking courses at your nearest college is a reliable route to understanding the best of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

But we've got a problem with UFOs. There are no regular college courses teaching you about UFOs at any colleges in America. (It is true, however, that every so often a community college professor might sneak in a UFO course, but this is unfortunately rare. Actually, this is not quite completely true. David Jacobs, a history professor at Temple University has taught a regular course about UFOs for a number of years now. But this is it as far as Oregon MUFON knows. You get the idea. Don't go to your community college, four year college, or university if you want to know the facts about UFOs.) Take a look at our Opinion page for more on why there are no regular college courses.

Some UFO Knowledge Is Almost Certain

Despite the academic world's refusal to study UFOs, there are still plenty of UFO facts known with near certainty. These facts were painstakingly developed by the diligent work of ufologists during the last 60 years. These facts are documented in their many books, articles, and documentaries. Take a look at our Resources menu on the home page for these sources of UFO knowledge.

A Few Important Statements

The following UFO statements are believed to be true by ufologists. But it is safe to say that no ufologist would say that all the statements below are true; after all, ufology is a developing and very controversial field of study.

Suppose the top 50 ufologists in the world got together and developed a textbook for teaching a course in ufology at a four year college. Oregon MUFON believes that the following statements would probably be in that textbook and would be taught as the best information currently available about UFOs. (This textbook would, of course, leave out the extensive knowledge of UFOs believed to have been developed in secret by the U.S. and other governments around the world in the last 60 plus years! Because that knowledge is still very secret and very closely held!)

The number in parentheses that follows each statement is Oregon MUFON's estimate of the percentage of ufologists who would agree that the statement is true.

• Genuine UFOs appear around the world in all cultures. (100%) All the major countries around the world report UFOs. There are documented cases of the genuine UFO phenomenon in the following countries: the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Central American countries, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Urkraine, many other former USSR republics, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Union of South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, many other African countries, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Philippines, China, Korea, Japan, and others. These cases are documented in the long-running UFO magazine, Flying Saucer Review, published in the U.K. Many books document these cases also.
• It has been proved beyond a reasonable (scholarly) doubt that genuine UFOs do exist.(99%) MUFON and other organizations of ufologists like FUFOR, BUFORA, NIDS, NUFORC, CUFOS, etc., are all almost completely in agreement here. MUFON in particular now promotes this fact by asserting that the acronym "UFO" should stand for Unconventional Flying Object. If you have any doubts, for starters, you can throughly read through Richard Hall's The UFO Evidence and The UFO Evidence, Volume II. Then you can go on to read through the rest of this bibliography. Please note that genuine UFOs have not been proved beyond a reasonable scientific doubt to exist. The scientific establishment must engage in serious, long-term study of UFOs to prove this one way or the other. Sadly, the scientific establishment has decided to be intellectually dishonest and avoid this study. Thus, we are left with the beyond a reasonable (scholarly) doubt that genuine UFOs do in fact exist.
• Genuine UFOs are directly associated with the alien abduction phenomenon. (90%) This interesting aspect of the phenomenon has been documented most ably by David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins. Richard Hall notes in his book, Uninvited Guests, that around 30% of UFO abductees recall large parts of their alien-related abduction experiences without any recourse to hypnosis, which is a technique that needs to be done carefully to elicit coherent, consistent, factual information. Ufologists like David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins check important verifiable information obtained through hypnosis with the facts and circumstances surrounding an abductee's life.
• Genuine UFOs have appeared throughout history. (80%) Most ufologists have their hands full just trying to keep up with what is currently happening. But some ancient astronaut theorists specialize in combing through the historical record to see what it might say about UFOs and aliens. This seems like a reasonable assumption, but definitive studies of this area of ufology have yet to be done. Perhaps the most famous speculative historian in this area is Zecharia Sitchin.
• Physically real alien implants have been surgically recovered from suspected abductees. (75%) Podiatrist Roger Leir has courageously arranged for the surgical removal of genuinely anomalous objects from people who believe they are closely involved with the UFO phenomenon. Something like seven or eight people have now had these strange objects removed. See Roger Leir's books for lots more information about this important aspect of alien abduction research.
• The U.S. government is not divulging all that it knows about genuine UFOs. (100%) This is easily shown by the various Freedom of Information Act released UFO documents over the last 30 years or so. Many parts of the text of these documents are blacked out and unreadable. The government (NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, etc.) claims that this blacked out text is merely "sources and methods" information or other legitimately withheld information according to the exceptions in the FOIA law. However, some of these spy agencies continue to withhold whole documents that we know they have. Even though this is true, it is highly likely that all the FOIA UFO documents are simply "raw" intelligence and the occasional internal, uninformed analyst's opinion type documents and are not any of the documents related to the recovery of crashed saucers, alien bodies, or covert UFO-related operations that certainly exist judging from what ufologists know today. These latter documents are part of the compartmented, need-to-know part of the vast classified information store that the U.S. government maintains — all told probably approaching a trillion documents. See Stanton Friedman's writings for the best (but conservative) assessment of what the government is holding back from the people.
• The U.S. government actually has artifacts in storage from genuine UFO crashes. (95%) Despite the debunking efforts of the U.S. Air Force and various "ufologists" like Karl Pflock and debunkers like the deceased Phil Klass, the Roswell UFO crash/retrieval incident remains very well documented by Stanton Friedman, Bill Moore, Kevin Randle, Tom Carey, and Donald Schmitt with excellent work also done by Robert Galganski in showing that the Project Mogul hypothesis is bogus, and by Ron Regehr and others in interpreting the Ramey memo. If Roswell is not enough, then take your pick of the Aztec crash, the Cape Girardeau incident, the Canadian Shag Harbor incident, and the Kecksburg crash. If the military doesn't have crashed saucer artifacts, it is grossly incompetent.
• The U.S. government actually has alien bodies in storage. (80%) The evidence for this rests mostly with the documentation of the Roswell incident, but there is also the fine work of deceased UFO researcher Len Stringfield. Timothy Good, Nick Redfern, and Kevin Randle have all written books summarizing the evidence for "alien bodies on ice." The military/intelligence establishment has run undoubtedly many disinformation operations on this aspect of the UFO phenomenon because, even more than any "technological" artifacts from crashed saucers, alien bodies would be proof of the off-world existence of intelligent lifeforms.
• The Roswell Incident was actually genuine UFO/alien-related. (99%) A careful assessment of all the best Roswell Incident evidence compared with the best of the debunker and air force material convinces any person with operating rational faculties that Roswell is UFO/alien-related. Only the "improbability" of aliens and UFOs being real prevents any fair-minded scientist or scholar from concluding this. This over-riding prejudice in our society among establishment people about UFOs is so powerful that it distorts their will to do their intellectual duty to objectivity and fairness.
• The U.S. government instituted an almost immediate coverup of the Roswell Incident, which was directed from the Pentagon. (100%) This is completely factually documented now thanks to Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, Donald Schmitt, and William Moore. In fact, the U.S. government is still covering up in the 1990s as any fair-minded assessment would reveal of the atrocious response the air force made to the gathering call for more official investigation of the Roswell Incident. When Congressman Steven Schiff (deceased) asked the air force to respond to his inquiries about Roswell, they stonewalled him. Only when Schiff convinced the GAO to investigate did the air force respond with its own pre-emptive "counter" study of the incident. If there is nothing to the Roswell Incident, the air force would simply have invited Randle, Schmitt, Friedman, and others to present their best evidence in a session with Steven Schiff and the air force, and the air force would have provided plenty of convincing documentation from official sources at the time that the UFO researchers' conclusions were bogus. None of their "counter" study includes any official documentation from the time that something happened, but it was, for example, Project Mogul, which is more or less what the air force "counter" study claims. It is laughable as a response to Steven Schiff and his Roswell inquiry. However, officially UFOs don't exist so the major media ignorantly accepted the air force's ridiculous and unresponsive "documentation" of Project Mogul and other routine projects as an explanation for all the Roswell Incident evidence.
• The U.S. government has cooperated extensively with other governments around the world in the last 60 years to coverup the UFO situation. (90%) This somewhat surprising idea seems to smack of an impossible world-wide conspiracy to keep UFO information from the public. But this is not so surprising when you understand that by 1947 the U.S. had unofficially acknowledged that everything in the society would be subordinate to "national security" with the signing of the National Security Act of 1947 by Truman. This act created the CIA and other (at the time) supersecret spy and covert operation organizations meant to keep America economically and militarily dominant in the years ahead. Soon thereafter, the UKUSA agreement for sharing intelligence information among the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was instituted. And in the 1950s other countries were gradually added. How to handle the UFO problem was undoubtedly a subject of continuing concern among the various Western countries (and even probably including the Eastern Bloc countries, too). Also, remember that U.S. military superiority over the vast majority of countries meant that crashed UFOs and serious UFO incidents were routinely handled by quick acting UFO extraction teams followed by UFO disinformation teams. Any objections by the "host" country were either ignored or handled afterward by diplomacy. Despite this probable scenario, various countries of the world have, since the 1970s, issued official UFO statements that definitely support the idea that genuine UFOs are real. For example, France in the 1970s, through Defense Minister Robert Galley, announced in a series of talks on the radio that France was indeed interested in genuine UFOs. The Belgian Air Force in 1989 and 1990 released a full-fledged report of recent Belgian Air Force/UFO encounters stating that the encounters were with genuine UFOs. Brazil has variously through military officials occasionally confessed to the reality of genuine UFOs. There are a few others, too. But mostly, mum's the word. Additionally, just in the last few years (2004 to 2015), countries seem to be falling all over themselves to release formerly secret UFO information to the public (U.K., France, Brazil, Peru, and Chile). However, none of this information is the smoking gun indicating that genuine UFOs are indeed (at times) structured craft, intelligently guided by an apparently non-human intelligence.