( UAP sometimes refers to “unidentified autonomous phenomenon,” which has a similar meaning.) Air Force officers will discuss their involvement in UAP incidents at nuclear missile bases and test sites during the Cold War era.
The term UAP first appeared in the late 1960s, while unidentified flying object has been around since 1947. How many other words have fallen out of favor for similar reasons? Few come to mind, although one might be “ping pong,” which serious players are more likely to call “table tennis.” UFO has been skunked not because it offends, but because it now seems a little… goofy. U.A.P., or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the revamped initialism for the perennial enigmas previously known as U.F.O.s the U.A.P.T.F. These might include, for example, the shift from “old-age home” to “assisted-living facility.” Most words that fall out of favor and get replaced by synonyms have been viewed as insensitive or offensive. UFO is skunked because even though its literal meaning is neutral (“unidentified flying object” means almost exactly the same thing as “unidentified aerial phenomenon”), people tend to equate UFOs with alien spacecraft, Martian invaders, etc.Īside from UAP’s more encompassing description, this term avoids the heavy cultural baggage attached to UFO, whose initial association with extraterrestrial origins, however true or untrue it may prove upon final analysis, sets up a narrow and inflexible framework for honest scientific research. Astrobiology FAQ: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs/UFOs) Does NASA search for extraterrestrial life One of NASA’s key goals is the search for life in the universe. ”A spate of shootdowns involving balloons and other flying objects over North America comes as the US military is becoming more sensitive to unidentified aerial phenomena.”Ī major reason why people might prefer UAP to UFO is that UFO is what language observers call “skunked.” This happens when a word’s use becomes problematic, either because it is likely to offend, or because it has lost its clarity of meaning.
In recent years some organizations and people have started replacing UFO with UAP, i.e. For the past 70 years most people who needed to describe a mysterious thing in the sky would use the word UFO, an abbreviation of unidentified flying object.
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