Shape Of the Unknown
Most common shapes of UFOs
The most iconic form of an UFO is the flying saucer. The term itself, altough based on misconseption,1 is 75 years old. As highlited in the Times article instead of describing apperance of the UFO pilot Kenneth Arnold was talking how the object “flew like a saucer if you skip it across the water.” Nevertheless, image of the flying saucer is what you and me would draw if asked to make a picture of an UFO.
Recently another form of the UFO has emerged in the popular discussion. I am talking about the orb. Perfect example of this is ”the Mosul orb” which made headlines2 January 2023. The now famous screen capture, taken from a video shot by spy plane, shows shiny blue ball flying over a street in Mosul, Iraq in April 2016.
The Mosul orb brings to mind Jeff Koons art piece Gazing Ball which Koons says “represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now”.3 Gazing Ball is often exhibited in front of copies of earlier master pieces such as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Monet’s Water Lilies. In the Mosul orb picture we see the Gazing Ball like object against the city made famous for modern audience by Iraq war
It seems that orbs are flying in North too. Here is a word cloud I made from Finnish UFO observations. I have included 1 400 descriptions4 and translated them from Finnish to English using Google translate API. Most of the observations are from 2010 onwards.
From the word cloud we can see that the most common descriptions of the shape of an UFO are “round”, “ball” and “oval”. Words round and ball seem to point in direction of the orb type UFO. Word oval is not as easy to interpret. For example, disc seen from below might have an oval looking shape.
I have also drawn a simpler graph from the same data. From it we can see that the fourth most common description of the shape is “triangle”.
Triangle is quite common shape in the UFO lore. To mention one theory: many have drawn links between triangle shaped UFOs and possible secret military planes such as TR-3 Black Manta which according to Wikipedia5 is “speculative surveillance aircraft purported to belong to the United States Air Force and to have been developed under a black project. It was said to be a subsonic stealth spy plane with a flying wing design.“
Another relatively well-known UFO type is the “cigar”. One of the most famous examples of the cigar shaped UFO is the Oumuamua: an interstellar object that scientist Avi Loeb speculated might be spacecraft in his book Extraterrestrial. In Finnish UFO sightings there are about 20 cigar shaped observations.
All in all, I am sure that most of shapes seen flying across the northern sky are something mundane like clouds, birds, Russian spy balloons or ball lightings. But maybe there sometimes is also something else. And that makes you wonder about the vastness of the universe.
Flying Saucers in the Sky: How the UFO Myth Got Its Shape | Time
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11666549/Classified-spy-plane-video-UFO-Iraq.html
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/09/jeff-koons-gazing-ball-paintings-its-not-about-copying
I have cleaned the data a bit by removing common “stopwords” etc. I am using Furora database which you can find here:
https://www.fufora.fi/
Black triangle (UFO) - Wikipedia