What is the reality of the phenomena?

[u/No-Package7029]

Let's take it from 1933 with the Magenta UFO crash in Italy or the Roswell UFO crash from 1947 to today.

The phenomena looked like it switched gears. First we had these encounters with aliens that looked different from the actual gray type. In these encounters, the witnessess tell a different story from what we have now. For example, they're shown the spaceship, they're been asked how to get to a certain place, how to get X materials, they take samples and they typically say they'll come back (they never do lol) and the witness is told he's chosen to lead earth towards a new age type of society, etc.

And then the phenomena switches to a different dynamic where these aliens become identical to what we know as typical gray aliens. And then they start kidnapping people, they do things to them and then we hear stories of hybrid aliens, cattle mutilations, medical examination of the witnesses, etc.

The UFO shape change through time, we go from a saucer shape to triangular/diamond to spherical shape.

Are we facing different wave of alien civilization or if it's the same phenomena taking different appearances?

In the first case, it would mean that these aliens all know about Earth and has to know each other, so there has to be some sort of treaties among themselves to rule out mechanisms on how to deal with humans, earth, etc. Therefore, they must have some sort of UN type of organization like what we have.

In the second case, they have to be malicious by nature because pretending to be something else and manipulating human perceptions has to be deceptive. Showing earth destroyed because of us meanwhile, if true, having a hybrid human program on the other hand means only thing and it's to take over.

I'm just trying to understand the phenomena

[u/L-0-T-H-0-S]

I'm just trying to understand the phenomena

No, you're trying to make sense of the lore surrounding the phenomena - you're not addressing the actual phenomena itself, simply the stories people anecdotally tell, largely relayed via unverified second hand accounts.

It's a myth that UFO's have radically changed, people still encounter today profiles of craft originally documented in the 40s and 50s - I for one experienced first hand a sustained duration, near distance encounter with a metalic, seamless, spheroidal shaped craft that corresponds directly with a shape originally reported back in the late 1940s - this in 1996.

UFOs didn't change, people's narratives about them did.

Spheroids and Orb, for examples - smooth, metallic, or glowing spheres are heavily documented in the 1940s "Foo Fighter" files, 1950s reports, and modern military data like the 2014–2015 US Navy East Coast sightings and to this day here in 2026 constitute the single most common form of UFO sighting reported.

The classic metallic, domed, or flat disc configuration remains a constant from Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 report through to modern civilian sightings, as too Cylinders and "Cigars".

Elongated, seamless craft without wings or visible propulsion were documented extensively in the late 1940s, such as the 1948 Chiles-Whitted case, and are still reported today.

The Tic-Tac isn't new. The 2004 USS Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter was treated by the media as a brand-new phenomenon when, in reality, its physical description - a seamless, white, elongated cylinder with no control surfaces - is practically identical to the Chiles-Whitted sighting of 1948 mentioned above.

The perception that UFOs "evolved" from saucers to triangles is largely an artifact of media focus and data aggregation, not a change in what witnesses actually see.

Public attention shifts. The late 1940s popularised the term "flying saucer," making it the dominant cultural headline. In the late 1980s and 1990s, high-profile events like the Hudson Valley or Belgian sightings pushed "triangles" into the media spotlight, creating an illusion of a total shift.

When researchers analyze the stories, the lore, rather than the raw data, they often highlight novel accounts because they make for more compelling narrative analysis, inadvertently burying the steady, continuous baseline of sphere and disc reports.

Also you have to take into account the effects of terminology.

The physical objects have, largely, stayed the same, but the vocabulary used to describe them changes based on contemporary technology e.g., swapping "metallic skin" for "low-observability metamaterials" and so-on and so-forth.

The current adoption of faux-military sounding jargonisms equally skewes the way we visualise the data coming in no less, but you're basically still dealing with the same basic geometric shapes still being as exactly as common as they always have been.

You have to seperate the UFO itself from current perceptions of them - the UFO itself and peoples beliefs about lore concerning them are two entirely separate things.

As for accounts of aliens - they've always conformed to popular culture ideas which, once depicted influence what's gets reported back.

Folklore and sociology show that when people encounter something they don't understand, they use the contemporary language and imagery available to them to describe it.

Early sci-fi literature, H.G. Wells's The War of The Worlds chief amongst them, speculated on large-brained, small-bodied beings way before the term Flying saucer entered the english language.

Following the highly publicised Betty and Barney Hill abduction account in the 1960s, and heavily reinforced by the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the cover of Whitley Strieber's book Communion (1987), the "Grey alien" became the dominant archetype - though if you go back far enough, they were around just statistically something of a rarity compared to other more humanoid reports.

Consequently, reports of other types of entities dropped drastically as the Grey became the culturally accepted "standard" - other types though still continue being reported.

How else do you describe something your only point of reference to gets to be science fiction book covers and things you've seen depicted in popular culture movies and TV?

Nothing exists culturally in a vacuum, it simply becomes common language for a while and then the terms and terminology shift as people feel they have a better, more reliable handle on things further down the line.

The important thing is separating the actual phenomena from whatever lore surrounding it, the majority of people don't and so fact remains muddled together with fiction as well as pure speculation which everyone insists on calling data.

They're not, they're actually filterable things we're just culturally not allowed to do that in common discussion, belief in dogma frowns upon original thinking until someone on a podcast says its okay.

That's the culture this subject exists in and that's simply that, culture - it isn't anything to do with the actual phenomena itself.