The astronomer Allan Hendry found that only 1.5 % of the sightings remained unidentified.
Allan Hendry study
"Like the Air Force, astronomer Allan Hendry found that only a small percentage of cases were hoaxes and that most sightings were actually honest misidentifications of prosaic phenomena. Hendry attributed most of these to inexperience or misperception.
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| Triangular UFO recognized hoax. |
Overall, in the three major categories, 42% of all cases had astronomical explanations, 37% were aircraft, and 5% were balloons. A further breakdown allowed 77% to be readily explained by five main classes of objects: 29% were bright stars or planets, 19% were advertising planes, 15% were other aircraft, 9% were meteors and reentering space debris, and 5% were balloons of various types (mostly weather or advertising balloons but also a few prank balloons)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_studies_of_UFOs#Allan_Hendry_study
In 2009, Peter Davenport, Director of the National UFO Reporting Center, posted this complaint online:
"We are receiving hundreds of reports every month of normal, terrestrial events, e.g. over-flights of the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, or satellites; “flares” of light from “Iridium” satellites; the appearance of typical meteors; and observations of normal, “twinkling” stars, planets, contrails, clusters of balloons, etc. In fact, the overwhelming majority of reports that we receive now are of these normal objects and events, and processing the reports is taking a huge amount of our time... I believe the majority of time I spend on the Hotline is devoted to trying to convince people who have been staring for hours at a star or planet that the object of interest is not a UFO."
From the The National UFO reporting centre NICAP :
WHAT ARE UFOS?
"The world view now varies between the "nuts and bolts" (ET), "earthlights", "plasmas", "time travelers", and "parallel universes". Since the alleged craft sometimes appear to "dematerialize" right in front of the witnesses,
many think UFOs cannot be real physical objects. As amply put by Richard Hall in "Uninvited Guests": "Popular authors have exploited these themes, especially since the ETH (Extraterrestrial Hypothesis) has bogged down for lack of proof, but they remain essentially science fiction notions inaccessible to scientific verification"."
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| Crop Circles Joke. |
"Between 5% and 10% of UFO sightings remain UFOs (ie, unidentified flying objects) after investigation. Most can easily be explained as Chinese lanterns, flocks of birds, balloons, aircraft and meterological phenomena. But why do UFOs have such a hold on the imagination? There are basically two explanations. There is the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) which holds that we really are being visited by aliens and there is the Psychosocial Hypothesis (PSH) which sees the whole UFO phenonemna as a form of modern folkore.
This latter view is particularly popular among UFO researchers in the United Kingdom, such as David Clarke, Hilary Evans, the editors of Magonia
magazine and many of the contributors to Fortean Times magazine. It is also popular in France since the publication in 1977 of a book written by Michel Monnerie, Et si les ovnis n'existaient pas? (What if UFOs do not exist?)."
"The psychosocial hypothesis is based on the finding that most UFO reports have mundane explanations like celestial objects, airplane lights, balloons and a host of other misperceived things seen in the sky. This suggests the presence of an unusual emotional climate which distorts observations and the perceived significance and strangeness of merely terrestrial stimuli."