9 UFO Myths Scientists Wish Texans Would Stop Believing

The conversation about UFOs has changed a lot in Texas.

The Pentagon now has its own UAP office. NASA has a Director of UAP Research. Astronomers at major universities are openly studying the topic.

But the more seriously scientists take the topic, the more they want people to stop believing certain things.

Some of the most famous UFO stories of the last 80 years have been investigated, debunked, and in some cases, openly confessed to as hoaxes.

Here are nine of them.

The Roswell Crash Was an Alien Spacecraft

The Roswell story is the foundation of the modern UFO movement. It’s also one of the most thoroughly debunked.

In June 1947, a rancher named Mac Brazel found debris on his property near Roswell, New Mexico. The Roswell Army Air Field briefly issued a press release claiming they had recovered a “flying disc,” then quickly retracted it and said it was a weather balloon.

In 1994, the U.S. Air Force published a detailed report explaining what actually happened.

The debris was from Project Mogul, a top-secret program using high-altitude balloon trains carrying microphones to listen for Soviet nuclear tests.

The balloons were real, the technology was unusual for 1947, and the project was so classified that the Air Force preferred a UFO story to the truth.

A 1997 follow-up report titled “The Roswell Report: Case Closed” addressed the alleged alien bodies, suggesting witnesses had consolidated memories of parachute crash test dummies, an injured airman parachutist, and charred bodies from later airplane crashes into a single false memory of dead aliens.

The debris matched the description of Mogul balloon trains.

The launch records showed which flight crashed and when. The science is settled.

Roswell’s economy still depends on UFO tourism. The town hosts an annual UFO festival every July. The International UFO Museum and Research Center has been open since 1992.

None of this changes what actually crashed in 1947.

Area 51 Hides Aliens

Area 51 is a real Air Force facility in the Nevada desert. The CIA acknowledged its existence in declassified documents released in 2013.

What it has actually housed is well documented.

The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was tested there in the 1950s.

The SR-71 Blackbird followed. So did the F-117 stealth fighter, the Have Blue prototype, and various other classified aircraft programs.

These planes flew at altitudes and speeds that civilian observers had never seen, and the resulting sightings often got reported as UFOs.

According to the 2025 Wall Street Journal investigation, the Pentagon was happy to let those reports stand.

A UFO story was a useful cover for a top-secret aircraft program.

Some Air Force commanders were even told as part of a hazing ritual that they were joining a secret project to reverse-engineer alien technology.

In many cases, those commanders were never told the truth, that no such program existed.

The Pentagon was generating UFO myths on purpose for decades.

That doesn’t mean Area 51 was actively hiding aliens. It means the Pentagon found UFO stories useful for protecting classified aircraft programs from Soviet intelligence.

The base did important work. None of it involved extraterrestrials.

Bob Lazar Worked on Alien Spacecraft

In 1989, a man named Bob Lazar appeared on Las Vegas TV station KLAS claiming he had worked at “S-4,” a facility near Area 51, helping reverse-engineer nine alien spacecraft.

He said the propulsion system used a stable isotope of Element 115.

His story made Area 51 a household name. It also fell apart under almost any scrutiny.

Lazar claimed two master’s degrees, one from MIT and one from Caltech. Neither school has any record of him attending, ever.

He claimed to have worked as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The lab confirmed he was actually a technician for an outside contractor, not a physicist on staff.

Element 115 was eventually synthesized in 2003 and named moscovium, but every isotope ever produced has decayed in fractions of a second.

Lazar’s claim of a stable, technologically usable isotope contradicts everything nuclear physics has demonstrated about superheavy elements.

Lazar pleaded guilty to a felony pandering charge in 1990 related to a Nevada prostitution ring.

His scientific supply company was later raided by the FBI for selling restricted chemicals across state lines.

His central claim, that he worked at a secret base reverse-engineering UFOs, has never been corroborated by any documentary evidence, any other witness, or any physical sample.

The Phoenix Lights Were Extraterrestrial

On March 13, 1997, thousands of Arizona residents reported strange lights in the sky.

Some described a massive V-shaped craft. Others described a row of stationary orange lights hovering for about 10 minutes.

Both events have been thoroughly explained.

The V-shaped formation was five A-10 Thunderbolt II jets from the 104th Fighter Squadron of the Maryland Air National Guard, returning to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base after a training exercise.

They were flying under visual flight rules as part of Operation Snowbird, a winter training program.

The stationary orange lights were illumination flares dropped by another flight of A-10s on a training mission at the Barry M. Goldwater Range.

The flares fell slowly by parachute and burned for several minutes each. They appeared to disappear one at a time as they drifted behind the Sierra Estrella mountains southwest of Phoenix.

In 2007, Maryland Air National Guard pilot Lt. Col. Ed Jones publicly confirmed he had flown one of the aircraft that dropped the flares that night.

A police helicopter pilot in 2008 confirmed that a similar light display that year was caused by a civilian who tied flares to helium balloons in his backyard.

The Phoenix Lights weren’t a mystery. They were a routine Air National Guard training exercise that happened to occur on a clear, moonless night when thousands of Arizonans were already outside watching the Hale-Bopp Comet.

Crop Circles Are Alien Messages

Crop circles became a global phenomenon in the 1980s. Then, in 1991, two retired British men named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley walked into a newsroom and confessed.

They had been making crop circles since 1976, using a wooden plank, a length of rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a wire loop to help them walk in straight lines.

They had created over 200 circles across southern England.

To prove it, they made a circle in front of journalists.

A self-described “cereologist” named Pat Delgado examined the new circle and declared it authentic, then was told he had just been pranked.

After Bower and Chorley confessed, copycat circle-makers around the world started creating their own. Today, complex modern crop circles are made with GPS, lasers, and surveying tools.

Several have been documented being created in real time, and a few professional circle-making teams now create commissioned designs for advertising.

Nearly half of all UK crop circles in 2003 appeared within a 15 km radius of the Avebury stone circles, an area that draws New Age tourists who pay to see them.

They appear near roads, near population centers, and near tourist destinations.

They don’t appear in remote areas where nobody would see them.

The science is unambiguous. Every crop circle that has been investigated has been consistent with human creation. Every one.

Ancient Aliens Built the Pyramids

The Egyptian pyramids were built by Egyptians. Tens of thousands of them, between 2630 and 2500 BCE, using extensively documented techniques.

Archaeologists have found the workers’ villages where the pyramid builders lived. The skeletons buried there show injuries consistent with hard labor.

The bakeries that fed them have been excavated. The tools they used have been catalogued.

The quarries where the stone was cut have been mapped, including the unfinished obelisks that show exactly how the cutting and shaping were done.

The Egyptian writing system has been fully translated since 1822, when Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone.

The records of the pyramid construction projects exist. We know who managed them, how the workers were organized, what they were paid, and what they ate.

The “ancient aliens” idea, which became popular through a 1968 book by Erich von Däniken, has been criticized for implying that ancient non-European peoples weren’t capable of building their own monuments.

The same theory gets applied to Stonehenge, the Nazca Lines, the Mayan pyramids, and Machu Picchu, but never to medieval European cathedrals.

Scientists, archaeologists, and historians have all but begged the public to stop spreading this one.

The evidence for human construction is so detailed that “aliens did it” requires actively ignoring it.

The Pentagon UAP Videos Prove Aliens

In 2017, the New York Times published three Pentagon videos showing what appeared to be unidentifiable objects flying in unusual ways.

The “Tic Tac” video, the “Gimbal” video, and the “Go Fast” video became famous overnight.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, has since investigated all three.

Most of the apparent strangeness in the videos comes from sensor artifacts, parallax effects, and the limits of military targeting cameras.

The “Go Fast” video, which appears to show an object moving impossibly fast over the ocean, is now understood to show a slow-moving object that only appears to be moving fast because of the parallax between the jet and the water below.

The “Gimbal” video shows an object that appears to rotate in midair.

Analysts have demonstrated that the apparent rotation is a feature of the targeting camera’s gimbal mechanism, not the object itself.

The “Tic Tac” video has more debated explanations, but the AARO has noted that infrared cameras struggle to distinguish small temperature differences against ocean backgrounds, which can make ordinary objects appear strange.

In 2024, the AARO testified that one viral “transmedium” video that appeared to show an object splitting in half and entering the water was actually two objects close together, with the camera unable to distinguish them from the warmer ocean behind.

The 2022 Department of Defense investigation found that most UAP sightings can be explained by birds, balloons, optical illusions, foreign surveillance drones, and poor-quality imagery.

That’s been the conclusion every time the data has been reviewed.

The Mexico “Alien Mummies” Are Real

In September 2023, a Mexican journalist named Jaime Maussan presented two small mummified figures to the Mexican Congress, claiming they were “non-human beings.”

Within days, scientists in Mexico and Peru had identified them.

The figures were assembled from real human and animal bones, modified to look alien.

The bodies appeared to incorporate human skull fragments, llama bones, and other materials, glued and arranged into roughly humanoid shapes.

The “skin” was a paste of organic material applied to the assembled skeletons.

Peruvian authorities have called the figures pre-Columbian dolls or fakes assembled from looted archaeological remains. Mexico’s National Autonomous University ran imaging tests showing the figures were assembled, not naturally formed.

Maussan has presented similar “alien” remains multiple times over his career.

Every previous presentation has been debunked. The 2023 Congressional appearance was no exception.

The Government Has Been Hiding Aliens This Whole Time

This is the meta-myth that ties all the others together. And the reality is more interesting than the fiction.

The 2025 Wall Street Journal investigation, based on Pentagon records and interviews with former officials, revealed that the U.S. military actively spread UFO conspiracy theories for decades.

The campaigns date back to the 1950s.

Some Air Force commanders were intentionally given fake briefings about UFO programs as part of hazing rituals, then never told the truth.

At least a dozen personnel were introduced to a fictional alien-investigation program called “Yankee Blue” as part of those hazing rituals.

The practice continued from the 1980s until 2023, when the AARO flagged it during its review and the Pentagon formally banned it.

The Pentagon found UFO stories useful.

They distracted Soviet intelligence from real classified aircraft programs. They gave foreign adversaries something to chase that wasn’t the SR-71 or the F-117. They created plausible deniability for unusual radar contacts and odd-shaped aircraft seen in restricted airspace.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which now investigates UAP sightings, has been finding the same thing.

Most of the cases that look mysterious come from sensor errors, foreign surveillance technology, classified U.S. programs, or simple atmospheric phenomena.

There’s no government cover-up of alien bodies, alien spacecraft, or alien technology.

There is, however, a documented history of the government letting people believe in those things to protect classified human technology.

What Scientists Actually Want People to Know

The real scientific consensus on UAPs is more nuanced than either the believers or the dismissers usually acknowledge.

Yes, pilots see things they can’t immediately explain. Yes, some radar contacts remain unidentified after investigation. Yes, the topic is now considered a legitimate area of scientific study by NASA, the Pentagon, and several major universities.

But those open cases don’t translate to “therefore aliens.”

They translate to “we need better data.”

Almost every UAP case that has been carefully studied has turned out to be a balloon, a foreign drone, an optical illusion, a sensor artifact, or a misidentified aircraft.