A Morphological Guide to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

The Modern UAP Report: What the Data Shows

For decades, the public conversation about unidentified flying objects was driven by grainy photographs and anecdotal eyewitness accounts. The topic was, for the most part, relegated to the cultural fringe. That situation changed with the release of a 2021 preliminary assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). This report, commissioned by Congress, officially moved the UAP topic from a matter of tabloid speculation to one of documented national security and flight safety concern.

The report, and subsequent efforts by the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), established a new, data-centric baseline for studying these events. The 2021 assessment, which reviewed 144 incidents reported by U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021, was candid about its primary challenge: a “limited amount of high-quality reporting…hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions.” It found that the UAP reported “probably do represent physical objects,” as a majority were registered across multiple sensors, including radar, infrared, and visual observation.

To organize the analytic challenge, AARO and the ODNI established five potential explanatory categories for all UAP reports:

1. Airborne Clutter: This includes non-hazardous objects like birds, weather balloons, plastic bags, or drones.
2. Natural Atmospheric Phenomena: Events such as ice crystals, thermal fluctuations, or lightning that can register on sensors.
3. USG or U.S. Industry Developmental Programs: Secret or classified U.S. aircraft or technologies.
4. Foreign Adversary Systems: Advanced technologies or surveillance platforms from other nations, like China or Russia.
5. Other: A catchall “other” bin for any reports that remain unexplainable after all other analysis is exhausted.

With formalized reporting channels established, the number of reports has surged. As of 2024, AARO’s total caseload for review exceeds 1,600 reports. This new, larger dataset allows for the first official statistical analysis of what U.S. military personnel and pilots are actually reporting.

The findings from AARO’s unclassified annual reports are perhaps the most definitive – and surprising – data available. The reported morphologies, or shapes, are not what 75 years of popular culture have led the public to expect.

This official data provides two immediate, powerful revelations. The first is the “junk data” problem. The single largest category, at 53%, is “Not reported.” This means that in the majority of official incidents, the data is so poor – a fleeting radar blip, a distant light, an “ambiguous sensor contact” – that the observer or the system cannot even assign a basic shape. This reinforces AARO’s primary complaint: the problem is fundamentally a “lack of data” that hinders any real analysis.

The second revelation is a direct contradiction of the cultural archetype. The classic “flying saucer” or “Disk” accounts for only 2% of reports. The “black triangle,” a mainstay of 1990s UAP lore, accounts for a mere 1%. The most commonly identified shape, by an overwhelming margin, is the “Orb, Round, Sphere” at 25%. The modern, 21st-century UAP, as defined by official military sensor data, is not a complex, structured craft. It’s a simple, glowing, or metallic ball.

Despite this new flood of data, AARO’s official position remains consistent: it has found “no empirical evidence” that any of these reports represent extraterrestrial technology or off-world craft. The focus remains on resolving the explainable (clutter, foreign drones) and better understanding the unexplainable.

The Archetype: Discs and Flying Saucers

The entire modern phenomenon of unidentified objects began with one shape. On June 24, 1947, a businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 near Mount Rainier in Washington, searching for a lost military transport plane. He reported seeing a string of nine bright, flashing objects flying in formation.

What captured the public’s imagination was their description. Arnold calculated their speed at over 1,200 miles per hour, with some estimates as high as 1,700 mph. This was nearly three times faster than any known manned aircraft in 1947, a time before the sound barrier had been publicly broken. He described their movement as erratic, “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.” A newspaper editor at the Chicago Sun soon coined the term “flying saucer,” and a cultural icon was born.

Arnold’s report triggered a media sensation and a “wave” of hundreds of similar sightings across the United States within weeks. The “flying saucer” became the definitive archetype for an unknown object in the sky.

Over the decades, the characteristics of the “classic disc” were codified through thousands of civilian reports.

• Morphology: The craft is generally described as a round, metallic, or silver disc. The shape varies, from a simple flat disc to two saucers stacked together (a bi-convex shape) to, most famously, a “Saturn-like” craft with a raised “dome” or “protrusion” on top. Size estimates are wildly inconsistent, ranging from a few feet to, in some reports, over 2,000 feet in diameter.
• Signatures: The audio and visual signatures are just as contradictory. Some witnesses describe the craft as being “virtually silent,” while others report a “deafening” hum or whine. They are almost always associated with bright lights of “every color,” often flashing or pulsating. Even modern military-confirmed UAP footage has captured disc-shaped objects.

The most anomalous aspect of “flying saucer” reports isn’t the shape, but the reported physics. Witnesses consistently describe a “technology” that appears to violate known aerodynamics. The most common “anomalous observables” associated with discs are:

1. Silent Hovering: The ability to remain perfectly stationary, often at low altitude, for long periods. This implies an ability to offset gravity without any visible means of lift, such as wings, or thrust, such as rotors, jets, or propellers.
2. Sudden, Extreme Acceleration: Moving from a “dead stop” hover to “explosive,” hypersonic speeds almost instantaneously. Witnesses often describe the object as moving “faster than the eye could track.”
3. Angular Changes: Executing sharp, 90-degree or 180-degree turns at high speed without banking. A conventional aircraft must bank to turn, but these objects are described as changing direction instantly, as if in a zero-gravity environment.

This reported behavior is a physical puzzle. From an aerospace perspective, a “circular wing is largely such a bad idea.” A disc is an incredibly unstable and inefficient airfoil. It cannot generate lift like a conventional wing, which explains why the reports of its flight are so non-conventional. To fly as described, such a craft wouldn’t be using aerodynamics at all. It would require active, intelligent control systems and an exotic form of propulsion, such as “plasmodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic engines.” The shape, in this case, is simply the “container” for an impossible propulsion system.

The “flying saucer” also became an object of intense cultural focus. The 1950s, the dawn of the Space Age and the Cold War, saw a “saucer paranoia.” Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers cemented the disc-shape in the public’s mind as the preferred transport of alien invaders. This created a powerful cultural feedback loop. People, influenced by media, began reporting what they expected to see. It’s impossible to separate the thousands of “saucer” reports from the 1950s and ’60s from the psychological and sociological context of the era.

As sightings mounted, the U.S. Air Force launched its own formal investigation. Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 until its termination in 1969, was the government’s official shape-sorter. It collected 12,618 UAP reports, ultimately concluding that 701 of them remained “unidentified.”

Project Blue Book Special Report 14, a massive statistical analysis of the high-quality cases, gives us a window into the “official” taxonomy of the time.

This 1950s-era data reveals a classification system with a clear methodological bias. The Air Force “deliberately chose” a small, curated list of shape-names. These categories, rather than being neutral, “lent themselves to prosaic explanations.” The very inclusion of “Lenticular” (a known cloud type) and “Meteor or Comet” as UAP shape categories shows that the classification system was, in many ways, a tool for debunking. The categories were designed to lead investigators toward a prosaic, non-anomalous conclusion, a practice that defined the government’s public stance for the next 50 years.

The “Tic Tac”: A New Generation of Oval

For decades, the “flying saucer” dominated UAP reports. But in 2004, an encounter involving the U.S. Navy’s most advanced sensor suite introduced a new shape to the lexicon: the “Tic Tac.” This incident, more than any other, forced the U.S. government to re-engage with the UAP topic.

In November 2004, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSG) was conducting pre-deployment training exercises off the coast of Southern California. For approximately two weeks, the group’s advanced AN/SPY-1 radar, primarily on the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Princeton, had been detecting “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” (AAVs). These objects were not behaving like normal aircraft. Reports indicate they would appear suddenly on radar at 80,000 feet, then drop to 20,000 feet and hover, all in less than a second.

On November 14, two F/A-18F Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz were diverted from a training mission to intercept one of these radar contacts. The flight lead was retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor. His wingman was Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich. When they arrived at the target location, they initially saw nothing. Then, Fravor looked down at the ocean. The sea was calm, but for a large, cross-shaped patch of “whitewater” disturbance, as if a large object was submerged just beneath the surface.

Hovering erratically just above this disturbance was the object. It was not a disc. Fravor and Dietrich described its morphology with remarkable consistency:

• Shape: A “little white Tic Tac-looking object.” It was “elongated,” “oval,” or a “cylinder with convex ends.”
• Size: Approximately 40 to 46 feet long, about the same size as their F/A-18F.
• Surface: It was “smooth, seamless,” and uniformly “white.” It had no visible markings, no wings, no intakes, no cockpit, and most importantly, no “exhaust plumes” or other visible signs of propulsion.

The object’s behavior was its most anomalous characteristic. As Fravor began a spiral descent to get a closer look, the Tic Tac began to “mirror his movements,” climbing to meet him. It was, as Fravor described it, “aware” of their presence. When Fravor performed an aggressive maneuver to “cut off” the object, it reacted. It accelerated, as Fravor described, “like a bullet,” and vanished. Less than a minute later, the USS Princeton’s radar reacquired the object 60 miles away, at the strike group’s original rendezvous point.

Later that day, a different F/A-18F was launched, this one piloted by Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood. He was instructed to find the object, but this time, to not engage, but to use his ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared) pod to record it. Underwood, who never saw the object with his own eyes, is the one who coined the “Tic Tac” nickname. He succeeded in capturing what is now one of the most famous pieces of military footage ever released: the “FLIR1” video.

This 90-second, black-and-white infrared video shows a small, oblong object (appearing black, meaning it’s “hotter” than its background) being tracked by the targeting pod. The object makes a rapid, seemingly impossible lateral movement, and then “zips off” to the left of the screen, moving so fast that the advanced sensor pod cannot maintain its lock. Underwood himself later described the object’s tracked movements as appearing to defy the normal laws of physics, citing radar data that showed it moving from 50,000 feet to 100 feet “in like seconds.”

The Nimitz “Tic Tac” case is a flashpoint for debate, and it highlights a critical aspect of UAP analysis: the eyewitness report is not always supported by the sensor data, and vice-versa.

Skeptical analysts point out that the “FLIR1” video, while compelling, does not show the “dogfight” Fravor described. They argue the video shows a “distant object that’s not really moving” – most likely a “distant plane.” In this interpretation, the dramatic “zip off” at the end of the video is not the object’s acceleration, but a camera artifact created when the sensor pod automatically switched its zoom level or mode, breaking its lock.

This discrepancy suggests the “FLIR1” video, while famous, may be the least anomalous part of the entire encounter. The true “impossible” data remains the advanced radar returns from the USS Princeton. The reported physics of the 80,000-foot drop, if accurate, would require the object to withstand accelerations in the “thousands of gs,” all while exhibiting “no sonic booms” and “no evidence of excessive heat.”

The “Tic Tac” is significant not because its shape is novel – ovals and cigars had been reported for 100 years. Its significance lies in its data quality. This was a “physical object” registered across multiple sensor platforms (advanced radar, infrared targeting pods, and the visual/optical systems of four trained military pilots). It’s this “multi-modal” data from credible witnesses that separates the Nimitz incident from 99% of other UAP reports.

The Silent Observers: Black Triangles

While discs and ovals are defined by their speed, another UAP shape is defined by its lack of it. The “black triangle” is one of the most persistent, consistent, and menacing shapes reported by witnesses around the world.

The characteristics of triangular UAP reports are remarkably uniform, whether the sighting is in a Belgian farm field or a small American town.

• Morphology: The object is almost always an equilateral (three equal sides) or isosceles “boomerang” shape. Its most-reported feature is its size. Witnesses frequently describe it as “the size of a football field,” “massive,” or “larger than a 747.”
• Signatures: Its coloration is dark or black, making it visible at night only as a “hole in the stars” or a “shadow” that blocks the sky. It is almost universally described as “virtually noiseless” or “silent.” This silence, from an object so large and so low, is its defining anomalous characteristic.
• Behavior: Unlike the zipping “Tic Tac,” triangles are known for slow, methodical, low-altitude flight. They are often seen to “hover” silently for minutes at a time, before moving away slowly. They typically display lights at each of the three corners – often “pulsating” or “colored” (red, white, or green) – and a large central light.

The black triangle is the one UAP shape that is inextricably linked to human technology. Reports of massive, silent triangles surged in the 1_980s and 1990s. This was the exact same time the public was becoming slowly aware of the U.S. military’s actual secret programs involving black, triangular, and nearly-silent aircraft, namely the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter and the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.

This overlap has led to widespread speculation that “black triangles” are not alien, but a high-level, Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP) involving a hypothetical surveillance craft, sometimes dubbed the “TR-3A” or “TR-3B.” Aviation journals in the 1990s published speculative reports on a “boomerang-shaped platform… completely silent” with a massive 600- to 800-foot wingspan. The reported behavior – silent, low-altitude hovering – is consistent with a surveillance or mapping platform, and sightings are often clustered near Air Mobility Command and Air Force Materiel Command bases.

Two major “UFO waves” are dominated by this shape.

The Belgian UFO Wave (1989-1990): This wave of sightings involved thousands of witnesses, including on-duty police officers, who reported massive, silent triangles with bright lights moving slowly over the Belgian countryside. The Belgian military took the reports so seriously that it scrambled F-16 fighter jets to intercept the objects. The pilots reported achieving radar-lock on the targets, only to have the objects “disappear” from their screens after executing maneuvers far beyond the F-16’s capabilities. This incident remains controversial. Later analysis suggested the F-16s’ radar locks may have been “error” locks on each other. Other witnesses on the ground reported hearing a “low engine noise” and seeing what looked like a “turbine,” leading to the prosaic explanation that at least some of the objects were simply misidentified helicopters.

The Phoenix Lights (1997): This is one of the most famous UAP events in history, but it’s a classic case of data contamination. The “Phoenix Lights” were not one event, but two separate and distinct sightings on the night of March 13, 1997.

1. Event 1 (The Craft): A “V-shaped formation of six to ten glowing orbs” or a single, massive, V-shaped craft that flew silently over the state of Arizona for hours, seen by thousands.
2. Event 2 (The Flares): Hours later, a “line of glowing orbs” appeared and disappeared one by one over the Sierra Estrella mountain range, south of Phoenix.

This second event has a very strong prosaic explanation. The U.S. Air Force confirmed that A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft were conducting a training exercise and dropped high-altitude, long-burning LUU-2B/B military flares in the area. The illusion of a “formation” of lights appearing and disappearing was created as the flares, drifting on parachutes, were sequentially obscured from view by the mountain peaks. This explanation for Event 2, which was captured on the most famous videos, is often conflated with Event 1, which remains less easily explained.

The “triangle” phenomenon has even entered the official, modern UAP dataset. In 2019, video was captured from the USS Russell, part of a “swarm” of UAP harassing Navy ships, showing “blinking” objects that appear to be “pyramid” or triangular in shape. The Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of this footage.

The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence, in its own classified UAP study code-named Project Condign, offered a fascinating “third way” explanation for triangles. The report proposed that these shapes might not be solid “craft” at all, either human or otherwise. Instead, they could be “atmospheric gaseous electrically charged buoyant plasmas.” The report theorized that a “field… can exist between certain charged buoyant objects in loose formation” (like the orbs in the first Phoenix event) that creates a “shape, often triangular” that is simply an absence of light. This could explain both the “V-formation of orbs” and the solid “black triangle” as two different views of the same natural, but poorly understood, plasma-based phenomenon.

Orbs and Spheres: The Most Common Report

As the official AARO data shows, the 21st-century UAP is not a saucer or a triangle; it’s a sphere. At 25% of all morphologically-defined reports, the “Orb, Round, Sphere” category is the most common object military personnel and sensors now encounter.

This shape has a long and mysterious history. During World War II, both Allied and Axis pilots reported “foo fighters.” These were small, luminous orbs – often described as red, orange, or white – that would appear near their aircraft, follow them in formation, and perform maneuvers that seemed to defy aerodynamics. They were never hostile, but they were unexplained.

What was once a wartime curiosity has become the dominant UAP in modern sensor data. The “orb” category appears to be a broad “catch-all” for several different types of objects, which are likely unrelated.

• Luminous Orbs: These are self-illuminating objects, often described as “glowing orange-red orbs.” They appear to be a continuation of the “foo fighter” phenomenon. Some scientific analyses of these sightings suggest they could be a form of “spherical plasma condensation” or “luminous orb-like structures” with “coherent energetic signatures.” They are, in this interpretation, a natural but poorly understood atmospheric or electrical phenomenon.
• Metallic Orbs: This is the most common type reported by the military. They are described as “metallic,” “silver,” or “translucent” spheres. They are typically small, estimated at 1 to 4 meters (3 to 13 feet) in diameter, and are often observed at high altitudes, between 10,000 and 30,000 feet, often “hovering” or moving with the wind.

In April 2023, AARO released footage that perfectly matches this description. The video, taken by an MQ-9 Reaper drone operating in the Middle East in 2022, shows a small, “shimmering” “metallic orb” zipping past the drone. AARO’s analysis noted the object showed no “thermal exhaust” or other signs of propulsion. The case remains “unresolved.”

This single video represents a much larger pattern. Reports from military and intelligence personnel describe “thousands” of unexplained metallic orbs near U.S. military sites, both at home and abroad. The leading prosaic explanation is that they represent a new form of “airborne clutter” or, more concerningly, advanced (but conventional) foreign surveillance drones.

A key reported characteristic, often associated with orbs, is “transmedium travel.” This is the alleged ability of an object to move seamlessly between different physical domains, primarily air and water, without a significant change in performance. Human engineering is domain-specific: an airplane is designed for air, and a submarine is designed for water. A vehicle that can do both violates our understanding of engineering and physics.

Two cases, both captured on official government video, are primary examples.

• Aguadilla, Puerto Rico (2013): A video taken by a Department of Homeland Security aircraft’s thermal camera shows an object, often described as an orb, moving at high speed (up to 120 mph) over land. It then proceeds toward the ocean, where it enters the water without slowing down. The video shows the object moving underwater before splitting into two pieces and then re-emerging from the water, all without a significant loss of velocity.
• USS Omaha (2019): During a series of events in July 2019 where Navy warships were “swarmed” by UAP, the USS Omaha’s crew filmed a “self-illuminated sphere.” The video shows the small orb flying above the ocean before it stops, “eases down into the water,” and disappears.

The “orb” category is analytically weak precisely because it’s so broad. It’s highly unlikely that a 1-meter metallic orb (which behaves like a balloon or a simple drone) and a self-illuminating, transmedium “plasma-like” object are the same thing. “Orb” is likely the “junk drawer” of UAP morphology, lumping together everything from Mylar balloons to advanced surveillance drones to, in a small number of cases, genuine and perplexing natural or technological anomalies.

Cylinders and Cigars: The Elongated Anomalies

Before the “flying saucer” was born in 1947, the public was already reporting “mystery” objects in the sky. In 1896 and 1897, a massive “mystery airship” wave occurred across the United States. Thousands of citizens, from California to the Midwest, reported seeing large, “cigar-shaped objects” moving slowly through the night sky, often with bright searchlights. This was more than a decade before the first zeppelins or blimps were a common sight.

This “elongated” morphology has been a consistent, if less common, part of the UAP dataset ever since.

• During the 1950s, military personnel, including a doctor, reported seeing “silent, wingless,” “elongated” objects flying in organized “flotillas.”
• In 2007, a passenger plane pilot flying near the island of Sark in the Channel Islands reported “two large yellow cigar-shaped objects.” His report was corroborated by another pilot in the area and by radar, which tracked the objects for 55 minutes.
• In 2021, an American Airlines pilot on a commercial flight over New Mexico radioed air traffic control to report a “long cylindrical object” that had passed at high speed over the top of his aircraft.
• Other reports, including testimony given to Congress, describe massive objects, “as large as a football field, underwater,” suggesting a transmedium capability for these large, cylindrical craft.

The lines between these shapes are often blurry. The 2004 “Tic Tac,” the most well-documented modern UAP, is described as a “cylinder with convex ends” or an “elongated oval.” Project Blue Book’s data listed the “Highly Elongated Oval ‘Cigar'” as a sub-type of “Elongated Objects.” This suggests that “cigar,” “cylinder,” “oval,” and “Tic Tac” may not be distinct shape-classes at all, but rather different descriptions or viewing anglesof the same “elongated” class of object.

In 2017, the discussion of cigar-shaped objects took a surprising turn, moving from terrestrial skies to interstellar space. In October of that year, astronomers detected the first-known object to enter our solar system from another star system. They named it ‘Oumuamua.

‘Oumuamua baffled scientists. It had two deeply anomalous characteristics.

1. Its Shape: It was “highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide,” a “cigar-like shape.” This is unlike any known asteroid or comet in our solar system.
2. Its Acceleration: As it passed the sun and began to leave the solar system, it displayed “significant non-gravitational acceleration.” It was speeding up, as if being pushed by something. Comets do this when ice on their surface turns to gas, creating a “tail” and “outgassing” that acts like a small rocket. But ‘Oumuamua had no tail and no visible outgassing.

The scientific community scrambled to find a natural explanation. Theories included a “hydrogen iceberg” (which would outgas invisibly) or a “fluffy” object with a large surface area. A prominent minority of astronomers pointed out that its anomalies – an elongated shape and acceleration without a tail – were consistent with an artificial object, perhaps a “light sail” or a derelict piece of non-human technology.

The ‘Oumuamua controversy became a perfect microcosm of the UAP debate. Proposing an “ET hypothesis” for any anomaly is “THE biggest taboo in science.” The incident showed the powerful stigma that prevents open discussion of the topic, and the great lengths to which scientists will go to propose novel, and sometimes convoluted, natural explanations to avoid even considering an artificial one.

The “Exotic” Gallery: Irregular and Organic Shapes

This final category contains the “other” bin. These are the rarest, but by far the most bizarre, morphologies in the UAP dataset. These are reports that defy simple geometric classification. AARO’s own data includes a 6% slice for “Irregular shapes,” and recent reporting has included descriptions like “continuously changing shape,” “floating ‘brain'” objects, and “a jelly fish with [multicolored] flashing lights.”

Case Study: The “Jellyfish” UAP (2018): In 2024, footage and detailed reports emerged regarding a UAP filmed over a U.S. joint operations base in Iraq in 2F018. The object, captured by a thermographic/FLIR camera, is one of the strangest on record.

• Morphology: The object appears as a “jellyfish.” It has a “mottled” body, with some sections appearing “hot” and others “cold,” and a series of “hanging appendages” or “legs” that witnesses described as “rigid and motionless.”
• Thermal Signature: Its most striking feature was its thermal signature. The object was filmed “quickly changing colour from black to white” (in FLIR terms), indicating a “rapidly changing temperature.”
• Anomalous Behavior: It was reported to be flying “against the wind,” with “no visible means of propulsion.” It was also reportedly not visible with night-vision goggles; it could only be seen in the infrared spectrum.
• Transmedium Capability: The most extraordinary part of the report claims the UAP “actuated a controlled descent,” “submerging into… water” for “about seventeen minutes.” After this period, it reportedly “re-emerged from the body of water” and “shot-off at an extreme rate of speed.”

Case Study: The “Cube in a Sphere”: During the 2019 “UAP swarm” event off the coast of California, crew members on the USS Omaha reported seeing multiple types of UAP. One of the most unusual was described by witnesses as a “cube within a sphere.” While the official video from the event only shows a “spherical object,” the “cube” description persists in witness testimony.

The “Jellyfish” UAP, if the reports are accurate, is the ultimate anomaly. It combines all of the key anomalous “observables” into one object: 1) An irregular/organic shape. 2) Apparent “transmedium” capability (air-to-water). 3) Non-aerodynamic flight (flying against the wind). 4) Advanced “signature management” (invisible to night vision, rapidly changing thermal signature). This single case represents the entire UAP problem in its most extreme form.

These descriptions – “jellyfish,” “floating brain” – are significant. They are biological, not mechanical. They suggest that witnesses are at the limit of their vocabulary. They are resorting to biological metaphors to describe something that is clearly not a “craft” in the way a disc or triangle is. This could support the atmospheric plasma hypothesis, which describes plasma behaviors as “life-like” and “multicellular,” or it could simply be a case of human pareidolia – the brain’s innate tendency to see familiar (biological) patterns in random (irregular) shapes.

Sensor Signatures: A Morphological Deep-Dive

In the 21st century, UAP morphology is defined less by eyewitness sketches and more by sensor data. A UAP’s “shape” now includes its radar cross-section, its thermal signature, and its infrared appearance. This section translates what the sensors are seeing.

The 2021 ODNI report stated that “a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors,” including “radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.” AARO’s entire mission is to “follow the science and data” from these “multi-modal” sources.

Radar Signatures: Radar defines an object by its “Radar Cross-Section” (RCS). It tells operators the object’s size, shape, and velocity. The anomalous radar data from the Nimitz encounter, when independently analyzed, produced the staggering “5,370 g” acceleration figure for the 80,000-foot drop. It also produced a “peak power of about 1,100 GW” – a city-scale energy output from an object the size of a fighter jet.

Infrared (FLIR) Signatures: This is the source of the “big three” Pentagon videos: FLIR1 (Tic Tac), Gimbal, and GoFast. FLIR sensors see heat, not visible light.

• The “Gimbal” Video: This 2015 video is often presented as a “flying saucer” that “rotates” on screen. This is a classic, and now widely understood, case of sensor misinterpretation. Sensor experts have provided a powerful prosaic explanation. The “shape” is the “glare” of a distant, hot object (like the twin engines of a jet). The “rotation” everyone talks about is not the object. It’s the gimbal of the sensor pod itself rotating as it loses and regains lock on the hot target. This case is a perfect example of how “anomalous” data can be generated by the sensor, not the target, and how AARO’s own data can be attributed to “sensor anomalies.”
• The “Cold” Anomaly: This is a far greater physical anomaly than a hot object. Physics dictates that high-speed movement in an atmosphere creates friction and heat. A jet engine is hot. A re-entering rocket is hot. The Nimitz Tic Tac was reported with “no evidence of excessive heat.” This is its most physics-defying trait. Other field research groups, using their own FLIR cameras, have captured objects that appear “very cold, near −60°F” while moving. This lack of a thermal signature is a “negative” shape. It implies a technology that doesn’t just propel itself, but also shields itself from the surrounding atmosphere, preventing the normal effects of friction. This “cold” signature is perhaps the most “non-human” characteristic reported.

A World of Prosaic Explanations

To maintain an objective, professional analysis, it’s vital to examine the non-anomalous sources for UAP reports. As both AARO and Project Blue Book concluded, the vast majority of sightings have, or are likely to have, prosaic explanations. The sky is a busy place, and not all objects are easily identifiable to the public or even to trained pilots.

Airborne Clutter: This is the #1 explanation for many reports.

• Balloons: AARO’s reports list “airborne clutter” first, and “balloons” are the prime suspect. This includes everything from Mylar party balloons to high-altitude weather balloons. Weather balloons are large, can be “shaped funny,” and often travel in “trains,” which can be mistaken for a formation or a single large object. AARO has published multiple case resolutions where UAP reported by military pilots were “almost certainly” balloons.
• Blimps: Even large, conventional craft are misidentified. The Goodyear blimp, when flying over a populated area at night, has been mistaken for a massive, silent, cylindrical UAP.

Lenticular Clouds: Nature’s Saucers: This natural phenomenon is a perfect explanation for the classic “hovering” flying saucer.

• The Meteorology: When stable, moist air flows over a mountain, it creates a “wave-like pattern.” As the air rises and cools, it condenses into a “smooth,” “lens-shaped,” or “UFO-shaped” cloud.
• The “Hovering” Illusion: The key is that this cloud is stationary. It’s “continually forming and dissipating” in one spot as the wind passes through it. To an observer on the ground, this smooth, stationary disc, unrelated to all the other moving clouds, appears to be a “hovering” artificial object.

Formations of Light: Satellites and Flares: This is a key modern explanation for “triangle” and “orb” formations.

• The Starlink Solution: The proliferation of “mega-constellations” like SpaceX’s Starlink has introduced a new, widespread source of misidentification. A “train” of freshly-launched Starlink satellites is a common, and confusing, sight.
• How Flares Make Triangles: AARO published a detailed paper on a more subtle phenomenon: “satellite flaring.” A flare is a brief, bright “glint” of sunlight off a satellite’s flat, mirrored surfaces. AARO’s analysis showed that an observer on the ground can see “simultaneous flares from multiple satellites” in different orbits. These independent points of light, appearing and disappearing, can “trace out geometric shapes such as triangles.” This is a highly technical, non-obvious, and powerful prosaic explanation for one of the most persistent UAP shapes.

Fire in the Sky: Re-entry and Plasma:

• Re-entry: Spent rocket bodies breaking up on re-entry can look like a “flame” or a formation of fireballs.
• Plasma: Natural atmospheric plasma, or “ball lightning,” is a potential explanation for “foo fighters” and other luminous orbs. As the U.K. MoD report noted, these “buoyant electrically charged” phenomena are a strong candidate for many unexplained light-based sightings.

The Mind’s Eye: Psychology and Culture:

Finally, the UAP phenomenon is, and has always been, evolutionary. The reported shapes map almost perfectly to human technology and cultural anxieties.

• In the 1890s, at the height of the industrial revolution, witnesses reported “mystery airships” – cigar-shaped objects with moving parts.
• In the 1950s, at the dawn of the “Space Age” and the Cold War, witnesses reported “flying saucers” – sleek, fast, invasive craft.
• In the 1990s, when the U.S. government was deep in the development of stealth aircraft and The X-Fileswas on television, witnesses reported “black triangles.”
• Today, in an age of ubiquitous surveillance, AI, and drones, the most common military reports are of small, metallic “orbs” that behave like silent, advanced “drones.”

This implies that UAP reports may, in many cases, be a “psychosocial mirror.” We are, perhaps, simply projecting our own technological progress and anxieties onto the sky.

Summary

The study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena is, in effect, a study of their reported shapes. These morphologies are not monolithic; they are a diverse, evolving, and often contradictory catalog of objects.

The “flying saucer,” born from Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, became the cultural archetype for decades, its form cemented by popular media and its “impossible” flight dynamics defining the anomaly. Yet this classic shape is now a statistical rarity in official government data.

The modern UAP, as defined by the Pentagon’s AARO, is far more likely to be a simple “orb” or “sphere.” This category is itself a “catch-all,” likely containing everything from prosaic metallic balloons and surveillance drones to more baffling “luminous” or “transmedium” objects that challenge our understanding of physics.

The “black triangle” occupies a third space, a shape so tied to our own stealth technology that it blurs the line between a “UAP” and a terrestrial “Unacknowledged Special Access Program.”

For every anomalous report, a powerful prosaic explanation exists. The “hovering” saucer has its counterpart in the “hovering” lenticular cloud. The “triangular formation” of lights is now convincingly explained by the “geometric” flaring of multiple Starlink satellites. And even the Pentagon’s “Gimbal” video is most likely a sensor artifact, a case of misinterpreting the “shape” of the data itself.

The history of UAP shapes suggests a “psychosocial mirror,” where our own technological anxieties are projected onto the sky. We see “airships,” then “saucers,” then “triangles,” then “drones” – a progression that maps our own history.

Yet, this does not resolve the phenomenon. When the “junk” data is filtered out, a “small number” of high-quality, “unresolved” cases remain. These are the incidents, like the 2004 Nimitz “Tic Tac,” that were “registered across multiple sensors” and “probably do represent physical objects” exhibiting flight characteristics that appear to defy the normal laws of physics. The morphology of these core objects – seamless, wingless, and with no thermal exhaust – is defined by a “lack” of known features.

The U.S. government, through AARO and NASA, continues to state that it has found “no evidence” of extraterrestrial origin. But it also acknowledges that a small, persistent, and unresolved phenomenon is present in our skies. This phenomenon, whatever its origin, is a “scientific opportunity” and a matter of national security that demands a “rigorous, evidence-based approach.” The mystery is no longer if these objects are being reported, but what these varied and anomalous shapes truly represent.