No. But lot's of people have. A UFO, or Unidentified Flying Object, can describe almost anything since it's unidentified. If someone sees a bright light in the sky and they don't know what it is, then to them it's a UFO. If someone else sees the same bright light and knows that it's the planet Venus, then to them it is not a UFO.

The Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia had this to say about UFOs.

By the mid-1960s UFO reports were more numerous than ever. For the first time they were coming in regularly from places outside the United States, including Canada, Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Australia. In February 1966 another UFO panel was convened. Like the others, this panel determined that the vast majority of UFO reports were either natural phenomena or outright hoaxes.

1. few scientists publicly disagreed with the panel's conclusions. This group, which included James E. McDonald, a meteorologist at the University of Arizona, and J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer at Northwestern University, maintained that since a few of the most reliable UFO reports had never been clearly explained, this was definite proof that Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials.

   In 1968 the United States Air Force asked Edward U. Condon, a physicist at the University of Colorado, to head a panel studying the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The committee's final report, 'A Scientific Study of UFOs', which covered detailed investigations of 59 UFO sightings, was reviewed by a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences and released in early 1969. The 37 scientists who contributed to the report interviewed UFO witnesses and studied physical and photographic evidence. The report, also known as the Condon Report, concluded that not only was there no evidence of extraterrestrial control of UFOs but also that no further UFO studies were needed.

2. on the recommendations of the Condon Report, Project Blue Book was closed in December 1969. By the time the project was disbanded, it had amassed some 80,000 pages of information on 12,618 reported UFO sightings and events, each of which was ultimately classified as either "identified" with a known astronomical, atmospheric, or artificial phenomenon, or as "unidentified," including cases in which information was insufficient.

The only other official and relatively complete records of UFO sightings were maintained in Canada, where they were transferred in 1968 from the Canadian Department of National Defense to the Canadian National Research Council. The Canadian records had totaled about 750 sightings and events in the late 1960s. Less complete records have been maintained by scientists in Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Greece.

Since the closing of Project Blue Book, the United States government has not had any official programs for studying UFOs. In 1973, however, a group of American scientists organized the Center for UFO Studies (now the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, in Chicago, Ill.). It is one of several private groups that continue to study the phenomenon.

Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia. Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 SoftKey Multimedia Inc. All Rights Reserved

Answer #% % filename A258.DOC page% % page 2 of% % numpages 2 % % date \@ "MMMM d, yyyy"May 31, 1998