World UFO Day 2021: This is why we imagine alien spaceships as "flying saucers"

 World UFO Day 2021: This is why we imagine alien spaceships as "flying saucers"...

As per the official World UFO Day website, they are classified as anomalies in the sky. UFOs may be completely unidentified or identifiable. UFO sightings are claimed when skywatchers are unable to identify a known flying object a natural phenomenon.

The goal of celebrating UFO Day is to raise awareness about the “undoubted existence of UFOs." The promoters of the day “encourage governments to declassify their files on UFO sightings.”

To celebrate the day, people organize sky-watching parties at UFO hotspots around the world in a bid to identify alien ships in the sky. More the eyes, merrier will be the findings, as they say.

Many hold UFO-theme parties where guests dress like aliens and watch sci-fi movies based on extra-terrestrial contact.

The day is chosen due to the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico incident, which is believed by many to have been a UFO crash on American soil.

The anatomy of a UFO

While the first World UFO Day was celebrated on June 24 by UFO researcher Haktan Akdogan in 2001, the date of July 02 gradually garnered wider acceptance. June 24 was chosen by Akdogan as the World UFO Day to celebrate what is historically the first widely reported UFO sighting in the US made by that aviator Kenneth Arnold in 1947.

Arnold had reported nine unusual objects flying over Washington, describing them “saucer-like” or “a big flat disk”. It was his highly publicized sighting that resulted in American newspapers popularizing the term "flying saucer".

However, this is not where our imagination of the “flying saucer” alien spaceships arises from.

The history of disc-shaped flying objects can be traced back to the Middle Ages. In contemporary history, the first UFO, described as a “flying saucer” was reported June 17, 1930 in the US, which is believed to have been a probable meteor falling over Texas and Oklahoma.

The term monopolized such sightings in mid-1900s until the term UFO was invented in 1952 to highlight the diverse shapes that were being reported. Other prominent shapes that UFO watchers have reported seeing are cigar or dirigible-shaped and triangles.

Some of the top objects/ phenomena that people confused for UFOs are lightning, missile tests, weird cloud formations, balloons, planet Venus, airplanes and military experiments.