UFO Quotes

“As Philip Morrison, one of the inventors of the SETI field, said, “Either we’re alone in the universe or we’re not, and either possibility boggles the mind.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“Our solar system, in turn, is just one tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy, that thick band of stars visible in the darkest night skies stretching far over our heads. We’re about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the rotating galaxy, which astronomers estimate contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars—and at least that number of planets—and stretches across some 87,400 light-years. What we see in our skies from Earth is the equivalent of staring at the side of the Milky Way stretching off before us, as if we’re looking at the edge of a plate or a Frisbee. It is spiral-shaped, like an enormous spinning pinwheel, first mentioned, as far as we know, by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in AD 964, recorded in his The Book of the Fixed Stars. In 1610, Galileo was the first astronomer to piece together, using a telescope, that the Milky Way visible in our skies was a collection of faint stars; a century later, Immanuel Kant surmised that it was a rotating body of stars, and over the next two hundred years, astronomers came to begin to grasp how enormous the universe truly is. Now we understand that our Milky Way is about 2.5 million light-years from the next closest galaxy, known as Andromeda. Together, these two massive galaxies—and all the stuff in between them, including a number of so-called dwarf galaxies and satellite galaxies, as well as a third large galaxy known as Triangulum—make up what astronomers call the “Local Group,” which is one corner of a larger cosmic structure known as a “supercluster.”II For most of the last fifty years, our particular galactic neighborhood was believed to be part of the “Virgo Supercluster,” a gathering of about one hundred galaxies, but in 2014 a team of astronomers led by Hawaii’s R. Brent Tully realized we were more connected to our neighbors than anyone had realized; they redrew the boundaries of the galactic map after realizing that our supercluster was far more vast and in fact consisted of what had been four separate superclusters that all moved in the same gravitational rhythm. They dubbed the new supercluster “Laniakea,” Hawaiian for “immense heaven,” and we now believe it encompasses about one hundred thousand other galaxies that astronomers define as “nearby,” despite the fact that they stretch across more than 520 million light-years of outer space. Laniakea, in turn, is now understood to be part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, an enormous structure of about sixty superclusters that together stretch across a billion light-years. The Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex is what’s known as a “galaxy filament,” the largest structures known to exist in our universe, in which NASA now estimates there are about 200 billion galaxies stretching across 46 billion light-years.III (Each of those galaxies is estimated to have perhaps 100 million stars—although the largest, known as supergiants, can contain 100 trillion.)”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“Our solar system, in turn, is just one tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy, that thick band of stars visible in the darkest night skies stretching far over our heads. We’re about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the rotating galaxy, which astronomers estimate contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars—and at least that number of planets—and stretches across some 87,400 light-years. What we see in our skies from Earth is the equivalent of staring at the side of the Milky Way stretching off before us, as if we’re looking at the edge of a plate or a Frisbee. It is spiral-shaped, like an enormous spinning pinwheel, first mentioned, as far as we know, by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in AD 964, recorded in his The Book of the Fixed Stars. In 1610, Galileo was the first astronomer to piece together, using a telescope, that the Milky Way visible in our skies was a collection of faint stars; a century later, Immanuel Kant surmised that it was a rotating body of stars, and over the next two hundred years, astronomers came to begin to grasp how enormous the universe truly is.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“The UFO story was journalistically elusive, contaminated by conspiracy theories, disinformation, and just plain sloppiness, all of which had to be carefully separated from the legitimate material”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“found that even after dismissing all the mistaken celestial objects, misidentified aircraft, misjudged astronomical events, and erroneous atmospheric phenomenon, about 5 percent of UFO sightings remained genuine puzzles, “completely unknown flying machines with exceptional performances that are guided by a natural or artificial intelligence.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“This is a day that we’ll remember. Vice President Al Gore, a bit of a science geek in his own right, was incredulous: “Wait a minute—our guys, government scientists, did this?”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“the Hynek now unleashed on the world was a far different man, thinker, and scientist than the one the air force had first approached in the 1940s.VI “He’s gone from initial hostility toward the subject to skepticism and misgivings, to cautious calls for more study, to muted criticism of the Air Force, and eventually to open hostility toward the Air Force and complete acceptance of the idea that UFOs represented potentially one of the most serious problems he had confronted,”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“To bolster their argument, Friedman and Moore cited witness testimony from a long-dead civil engineer named Grady “Barney” Barnett,”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“I do not think the evidence is at all persuasive that UFOs are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin,” the astronomer testified, “nor do I think the evidence is convincing that no UFOs are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin,”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“congressman who served on the science committee, a young Republican named Donald Rumsfeld”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“John Dewey’s maxim that “every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“For anyone who didn’t live through it, it is hard to imagine just how widespread and intense saucer excitement was during the mid- and late 1960s,”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“estimating that across the Milky Way there were probably “somewhere between one thousand and one hundred million advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“the nation year by year in the 1950s was squandering its postwar research lead when it came to space.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“One army lieutenant who had journeyed to Hiroshima to film the damage for a classified government review walked away thinking, “This kind of weapon cannot exist on earth and people live on earth too.”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

“focus on UFOs has been trying to understand where that critical line is between knowable secrets and unknown mysteries:”
― Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There