UFOs continue to fascinate Turkey and the world

"They were half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear? They were silvery and shiny and seemed to be shaped like a pie plate or saucer..."

These words date back 68 years, to when American aviator Kenneth Arnold made the first widely reported unidentified flying object (UFO) sighting and the phrase "flying saucer" gained widespread public attention.

Since then, this phenomenon has attracted considerable attention and has sparked numerous debates among experts who either believe in extraterrestrial life or reject it.

"Though the Kenneth incident has been accepted as a milestone for the creation of the popular term 'flying saucers,' disc-shaped flying objects have been recorded since the Middle Ages," Haktan Akdo?an, chairman of Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center, told Anadolu Agency.

A well-known Turkish ufologist and a vigorous advocate of extraterrestrial intelligent life, Akdo?an established the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center in 1998 to communicate with other UFO research centers around the world and share the latest updates about these mysterious flying objects.

The center's website claims to work with researchers, anthropologists, physicists, pilots and psychologists from around the world, with its main objective being to prove human beings are not alone in the universe.

"UFOs have been in touch with human beings for ages," Akdo?an claimed, stating he had held many closed-door meetings attended by high-ranking military officials who claimed to have been in touch with extraterrestrials.

"There are hundreds of recorded photographs and video footage showing the existence of UFOs," he added.

"Besides the photographs and videos, there have been many UFO sightings in...