A ufologist is someone who studies unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and related phenomena, collecting sighting reports, interviewing witnesses, analyzing physical evidence, and attempting to determine what people are seeing in the sky. Ufology isn’t a formally recognized scientific discipline, and most ufologists come from other professional backgrounds. Some are astronomers, engineers, or pilots. Others are hobbyists with a deep interest in unexplained aerial events. What unites them is a systematic effort to document and investigate sightings that don’t have obvious explanations.
What Ufologists Actually Do
The day-to-day work of a ufologist looks less like science fiction and more like detective work. The core activity is investigating individual sighting reports: talking to witnesses, visiting locations, checking weather data, and ruling out conventional explanations like aircraft, satellites, drones, or atmospheric phenomena. Most sightings, once investigated, turn out to be something identifiable. The goal is to document the ones that aren’t.
Witness interviews are central to the process. Organizations like the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) train their investigators to use open-ended, non-suggestive questioning, letting witnesses describe events from their own memory without interruption. Maintaining witness anonymity and confidentiality is treated as an ethical requirement, since many people who report sightings worry about being ridiculed.
On the technical side, ufologists draw from a surprisingly wide range of skills. MUFON’s field investigator training covers weather anomalies, astronomy, aircraft identification, satellite tracking, photography, soil sciences, and electromagnetic properties. Some investigators use consumer-grade surveillance technology. A network called Sky Hub, for instance, deploys smart sensor units with fisheye lens cameras and microcomputers built for machine learning to capture digital signatures of anomalous events across a global network of monitoring stations.
How the Field Got Started
Ufology as an organized pursuit traces back to the late 1940s, when a wave of UFO sightings prompted the U.S. Air Force to launch investigation programs. The most significant figure in giving the field credibility was J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who chaired Northwestern University’s astronomy department. In 1948, the Air Force brought Hynek on as a scientific advisor to investigate UFO reports at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. He continued in that role when the effort was reorganized as Project Blue Book in 1952.
Hynek initially approached the work as a skeptic, expecting to debunk reports. Over two decades of reviewing cases, his position shifted. He became the most prominent voice in the scientific community calling for serious study of UFOs, and in 1972 he published “The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.” That book introduced his famous Close Encounters classification system, which gave ufologists a shared framework for categorizing sightings. He also inspired Steven Spielberg’s film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The Close Encounters Scale
Hynek’s classification system remains widely used. It organizes UFO encounters into distinct types based on what the witness experienced:
- First kind: A visual sighting of a UFO with no physical evidence left behind.
- Second kind: A UFO leaves physical traces, such as burns on the ground or broken branches.
- Third kind: The witness sees occupants of a UFO or makes contact with a lifeform.
- Fourth kind: Added after Hynek’s death, this covers alleged abduction experiences.
- Fifth kind: Also added later, this describes direct communication between humans and non-Earth beings.
Most reported sightings fall into the first category. The higher levels are rare and far more controversial.
How Someone Becomes a Ufologist
There’s no university degree in ufology. Most people enter the field through organizations that provide their own training and certification. MUFON, the largest civilian UFO investigation group, runs a structured certification program. To become a field investigator trainee, you enroll in MUFON University, study a manual covering investigative techniques and technical knowledge, then pass an exam with a score of at least 80%. The exam tests knowledge across topics like light and optics, sound, electromagnetic properties, photography, radar, and celestial objects. After passing, you submit paperwork and a headshot to MUFON headquarters in Cincinnati for approval.
Before conducting investigations independently, trainees must demonstrate proficiency in interviewing techniques, investigative ethics, making collateral contacts to verify reports, and the technical knowledge needed to distinguish unusual sightings from mundane ones. It’s a volunteer role for most people, not a career.
Ufology’s Relationship With Science
Ufology occupies an uncomfortable space. Most mainstream scientists have historically dismissed it as pseudoscience, and many ufologists feel that dismissal is premature. Research published in the scientific literature suggests the tension isn’t simply a matter of ufologists being ignorant about scientific methods. It’s more a product of different research practices and a long history of mutual distrust between ufologists, academic scientists, and government investigative bodies.
The credibility gap is real, though. Ufology lacks peer-reviewed journals with the same standing as established scientific fields. Its practitioners can’t run controlled experiments. And the subject attracts a wide spectrum of participants, from careful, methodical investigators to people making extraordinary claims without evidence. That range makes it difficult for the field to present a unified standard of rigor.
Where Government Programs Fit In
One of the most significant recent developments for ufologists has been the U.S. government’s increasing openness about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the newer term that has largely replaced “UFO” in official contexts. The Pentagon now operates the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which collects and analyzes UAP reports from military personnel and other government sources.
A 2021 preliminary assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reviewed 144 UAP reports from government sources, most involving military aviators, covering incidents between 2004 and 2021. Of those 144, investigators were able to confidently identify exactly one: a large, deflating balloon. The rest remained unexplained, not because they were necessarily extraordinary, but because there wasn’t enough data to reach a conclusion. Eighty of the reports involved observation with multiple sensor systems, which gave them more weight than a single eyewitness account.
For ufologists, this government acknowledgment represented a turning point. Decades of advocacy for taking sighting reports seriously had been met with institutional indifference or secrecy. Having an official Pentagon office dedicated to the subject validated what many ufologists had argued for years: that unexplained aerial events deserve systematic investigation, regardless of what they ultimately turn out to be.