With balloons and other aerial objects being shot from the sky, what do we know after almost 80 years of Ufology?

Linnell was prompted by the rash of UFO speculation that accompanied the shooting down of various objects over North American airspace.

Things kicked off with the Chinese spy balloon, but at least one targeted object - a cylindrically shaped object, with no visible means of propulsion and no wings - should not have been up there, based on any scientific or engineering knowledge now in the public domain.

But there it was - until it was blown to pieces.

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None of us outside of those with the appropriate "above top secret" security clearance know what the secretive world of global intelligence agencies really know and think about the reality or otherwise of UFOs.

But I can tell you that those agencies have always taken the subject extremely seriously (despite their public disclaimers), from as far back as 1947, if not before.

That was the year that experienced US pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of nine circular objects - each about 30 metres diameter - skipping like "flying saucers" across the sky. And so the term UFO was born.

1947 was also the year of the infamous Roswell incident, in which the Roswell, New Mexico, army air field announced it had captured a flying saucer - making front page news - only to deny it the following day, and say instead that the crash wreckage found was from a weather balloon.

There's a welter of information about this - and every aspect of ufology - available online, but for me, one of the most fascinating parts of Roswell is the 1997 book, The Day After Roswell, by retired US Army Colonel Philip J. Corso, who said it had been his job to "seed" some of the Roswell crash wreckage with the private sector in efforts to "back engineer" what was found.

It was, effectively, a death-bed confession. Corso died the following year, aged 83.

The book has never been officially repudiated as far as I know.

According to this thesis, a whole lot of modern technology - from the transistor replacing valves or vacuum tubes, through to velcro and radar-evading stealth - all spring from recovered UFOs.

As the odd fact collector, Robert Ripley, used to say: "Believe it, or not."

Details of another alleged "back engineering" program caused a sensation in UFO circles in 2007, when someone who claimed to have worked on a 1980s program called CARET - Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology - posted a series of articles, with photos and design drawings, supposedly smuggled out of his classified workspace in Silicon Valley.

This program, he said, was the source of a series of mid-1980s sightings of small dragonfly-shaped craft - we'd call them drones now - but without propellers, using anti-gravity technology from non-human sources.

All involved had signed non-disclosure agreements with heavy penalties for breaching, and "Isaac", the author of the posts, "disappeared".

Individual attitudes to UFOs are often shaped by personal experience. I outlined my sightings in a 2013 column.

One sighting was over Williamtown RAAF base and I was watching because the Herald had been anonymously tipped off the day before, meaning that whatever I saw hovering over the base, and then zooming silently away at impossible speed, was something of ours.

I don't know, obviously, whether the origins of this technology were terrestrial or extraterrestrial. But I know what I saw.

Linnell asked why, with so many smart phones pointed at the skies, why "not a single one of them has produced a clear, high resolution snap of an alien spacecraft?"

I'll contest that and say there are any number of clear photos, but telling them from fakes is very hard, especially in this age of digital trickery.

But the real problem with phone pics is that even something the size of the moon comes up the size of a pea, meaning any "light in the sky" UFOs appear as little more than dots.

Various websites catalogue video and still photo sightings, including ufosightingsdaily.com, run from Taiwan by enthusiast Scott C. Waring, although his affection for seeing "ancient artifacts" in moon and Mars rover photos doesn't do it for me.

What does interest me is the sheer number of former high-ranking military personnel who have risked their legal obligation to keep state secrets by speaking out about their work on UFO programs, especially since (now retired) emergency medicine doctor Steven Greer kicked off the "UFO disclosure" campaign.

The War Zone, a US online news service with excellent defence sources, reported last month that reports on the "tic tac" and other unidentified objects bothering the US military were also shared with Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada as America's partners in the "Five Eyes" security bloc.

All of this only scratches the surface ...

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