unidentified aerial phenomenon

unidentified aerial phenomenon (plural unidentified aerial phenomena)

2. (aviation) Synonym of unidentified flying object.

   Alternative form: UAP (initialism)

   Synonyms: unexplained aerial phenomenon, UFO (synonymous in its broad sense)

   Hypernyms: UAP (“unidentified anomalous phenomenon”) < phenomenon

   • 2016, “Only Weirdos See UFOs”, in Jason McClellan, →ISBN:

     An Introduction to the Public's Misperception of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and Extraterrestrial Life.

   • 2017, Rafi Letzter, Scientific American, "The Truth about Those "Alien Alloys" in The New York Times UFO Story", ISSN 0036-​8733

     The company [involved in the DOD research] modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.

   • 2018, Sarah Scoles, Wired, "What Is Up With Those Pentagon UFO Videos?", ISSN 1059-1028

     The article describes a federally funded program that investigated reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs, the take-me-seriously acronym that includes UFOs). And within the story, the Times embedded videos of two such UAPs.

   • 2019, Kayla Epstein, The Washington Post, "Those UFO videos are real, the Navy says, but please stop saying ‘UFO’"

     The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena.

   • 2020, Rob Long, The National Review, "The Great Coronavirus Non-Freakout", ISSN 0028-0038

     So for the first time, video showing unidentified aerial phenomena was confirmed as just that, weird objects flying around the sky at a speed and in a trajectory that no known technology allows, and it was on television and cable news for a day, and then everyone just went back to talking about what Trump tweeted to the guy on CNN.

   • 2020, PRNewswire, Baker City Herald, "To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science Acknowledges the Pentagon's Official Release of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Video Footage"

     Pentagon officially released three videos of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

This term is etymonically hypernymous to the term unidentified flying object in the latter's precise sense of a phenomenon that seems to be a discrete object that is flying; the desire to speak precisely is what drove the coining of a hypernymous term. However, idiomatically, the term unidentified flying object in its broad sense covers all the same referents, making the terms synonymous in that sense. Because unidentified flying object and UFO are (mild) misnomers when used in that sense, though, some speakers and writers prefer the UAP term for that sense. The usage preference is thus not merely euphemistic, although it is sometimes accused of being so.