UFO

UFO: see unidentified flying objects.

---

unidentified flying object (UFO)

Aerial object or optical phenomenon not readily explainable to the observer. Interest in UFOs increased with developments in aeronautics and astronautics after World War II. A U.S. government panel investigating sightings in the 1950s reported that 90% coincided with astronomical or meteorological phenomena or sightings of aircraft, birds, or hot gases, sometimes under unusual weather conditions. Some remained unexplained, however, and in the mid 1960s a few scientists concluded that a small percentage indicated the presence of extraterrestrial visitors. This sensational hypothesis, promoted in the press, met with prompt resistance from other scientists. A U.S. Air Force UFO study begun in 1968 firmly rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but a large fraction of the public, and a few scientists, continued to support it. UFO reports vary widely in reliability. The unaided eye is easily fooled; radar sightings of UFOs, more reliable in some ways, may fail to distinguish physical objects from meteor trails, rain, or thermal discontinuities and are subject to radio interference. See also SETI.

---

UFO

(United Functions and Objects) A programming language developed by John Sargeant at Manchester University, U.K. It was designed for parallel computations and has both procedural and object-oriented capabilities.

---

UFO

(science and technology)

unidentified flying object

---

(language)

UFO - (United Functions and Objects) A hybrid functional and object-oriented language designed by John Seargant at Manchester University for general-purpose parallel computation. To a first approximation, UFO is a strict, higher-order functional language with an object-oriented type system, and strong support for numeric computation in the form of SISAL-style arrays and loops. Parallelism is implicit, and applies at various different levels of granularity, thereby facilitating implementations on a wide range of parallel architectures. It is planned to run it on a 64 processor KSR machine.