Are UFOs Real?

UFOs might be a holographic projection of human consciousness.

Posted May 21, 2026 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

A personal UFO story: In late spring of 1995, shortly before I graduated from college, a friend and I headed out to western Maryland for an overnight camping trip. When most of the campers had gone to bed, we hunkered down at the campground edge overlooking the wooded hills. Everything was dark and quiet when all of a sudden two large, round, bright lights popped on at the bottom of the hill below us.

I was confused; there was no road down there, just woods, and these lights were too big to be headlights, anyway. A moment later, the lights started zooming up the hill toward us. Reflexes kicked in--I leaned to one side, ready to bolt out of the way. My friend did the same. And just as quickly, the lights disappeared about halfway up the hill.

Because we were in the greater D.C, area, where there's lots of military aerial activity, I now believe it could have been an early drone. But it also could have been something more interesting: a UFO.

The lights were huge, bigger than any vehicle headlights would look from our distance of several hundred feet away. Their movement was very smooth and swift. There was no sound as from construction equipment (which wouldn't be operating late at night ). Thirty years later we still don't know what we saw.

UFO sightings are either becoming more common or experiencing a heyday in pop culture. They're everywhere, in movies, podcasts, books, YouTube videos, and news broadcasts. Are these incidents increasing in frequency or are we simply becoming more aware of something that's always been there?

The paranormal as projection of human consciousness

Though I don't believe my friend and I imagined this UFO or projected it out of nowhere, I've always been fascinated by UFOs, aliens, and the wonder of our universe and so, in some sense, believe I might have invited it into my conscious experience much like ghost hunters invite shadowy apparitions and seance hosts invite cryptic messages from the deceased.

There are some common elements in the stories of UFO sightings that suggest human consciousness plays a part in the phenomenon.

UFOs mirror their surroundings. UFO sightings, and specifically the objects that people see during these events, tend to mimic their surroundings and seemingly some aspects of their observers' expectations. A great example is the USS Trepang Incident in 1971, when men aboard a submarine in the Arctic spotted a metallic, cylindrical craft closely resembling a submarine resting on the surface. Why did they see that kind of object and not a flying saucer?

Pilots flying in our air space tend to see flying objects, sometimes triangular in shape, that roughly resemble an airplane. Other UFOs farther up in the sky resemble stars or satellites, appearing more like little orbs of light. The observations suggest that UFOs might be able to camouflage themselves like animals do to hide in plain sight. It's also possible UFOs are shapeshifters, transitioning from water craft to air craft to something else entirely.

The fundamental takeaway is this: There seems to be an almost predictable synergy between how the UFO object appears and who is observing it in what context.

UFOs might in part be a projection of human consciousness. UFO sightings also seem heavily influenced by the observer's experience, training, and background. Military trained people often interpret UFOs as threatening, dangerous, or at the very least as on "reconnaissance missions", while untrained people see lights or strange objects and have no frame of reference for what it might be. Untrained observers bring less personal context to the experience and thus are less likely to infer a UFO's intention--or assume that it has any intention at all.

We seem to hold a cognitive dissonance when it comes to UFO intentions: We believe they are more technologically advanced than us but also (some) believe they want to harm or attack us. But is this assumption grounded? I'd argue that we don't yet know. If they intended harm, they could have ravaged us already. There have been some recorded incidents in which observers felt "attacked" by UFOs, but we still don't know the intention: We don't mean to kill a raccoon we run over on the highway.

To what extent are we "rendering" UFOs real? The "observer effect" in quantum physics suggests that our reality is at least partially rendered by human consciousness. This doesn't mean we're imagining what's out there but that what we take to be reality is necessarily a very particular human reality rendered real by our human sensory apparatus. So, if even the laptop I'm typing this on is somewhat rendered real (with color, shape, dimension) by my particularly human sensory apparatus, then certainly UFOs are too, as is all our reality. We see something and recognize it as an object (e.g., it has brightness, a circular shape, and movement) but can't readily identify what it is since it doesn't fit our familiar classifications of everyday objects. UFOs sit in this liminal space in which we register them but can't (yet) comprehend their exact nature.

UFOs are real in the sense that everyone is seeing them everywhere right now. Even those who haven't seen UFOs themselves are seeing videos of others' sightings. But the question of whether they're "real" or not is tricky. They might be real in a sense we're not yet capable of grasping. Like a hologram that flickers in and out of existence, UFOs might be rendered into some form in our reality and then manifest in another timeline or another dimension in a way we can't yet fully conceive. Physicists are now telling us that spacetime is on the conceptual chopping block. Perhaps UFOs are a clue to what's next in our human understanding of reality.

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Liz Swan, Ph.D. , is a writer and philosopher who teaches writing at the University of Colorado Boulder. She enjoys writing about all the facets of human nature—the light, the dark, and the shades of grey in between.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.