Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today:
A “doughnut UFO” in the skies over Switzerland. Strange green lights vanishing into the clouds above Canada. A saucer-shaped blob plunging suddenly into the ocean.
The year 2021 gave truth-seekers and alien hunters no shortage of mysteries to ponder. But it also gave them answers — from a hotly anticipated Pentagon report on military UFO sightings, to new insights on habitable exoplanets, to the truth about a so-called “alien signal” from the sun’s nearest neighboring star. Here are 9 things we learned about aliens (and where to look for them) in 2021.
UFOs are real (and the government knows it)
In June, the Pentagon released a highly anticipated report detailing 144 UFO encounters between 2004 and 2021. The report was meant to assess “the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP),” and officially confirmed several UFO sightings that had, until then, only been shared through viral media. On one hand, the brief, 9-page assessment confirmed that “most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects,” which range from birds and balloons to foreign surveillance equipment and top-secret U.S. government projects. However, anyone hoping for an acknowledgement of extraterrestrial intelligence may have been let down when the report failed to link any of the 144 encounters to alien activity.
