研究生科技英语阅读课文翻译对照(45)

通俗地说，所谓 UFO——或者不明飞行物——指疑似外星人的飞船，不过它的定义也包括无法解释的空中现象。在全世界各地不同时期都有 UFO 目击的报告，引起人们关于外星生命以及地外生命是否访问过地球的争论。在二战后火箭技术的发展下，它们成了人们感兴趣的一大主题——也是数不清的电影和书籍背后的灵感来源。
Flying Saucers
飞碟
The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane. Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water.” In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.
首个著名的飞碟目击事件发生在 1947 年，一个叫 Kenneth Arnold 的商人声称他在华盛顿的雷尼尔山附近玩小型飞机模型时看到了一组 9 个高速移动的物体。Arnold 估计这些月牙形的物体速度达每小时数千英里，还说他们的移动“就像是打水漂”。在后来的新闻中错误地报道成了这些物体是碟形的，于是就有了飞碟这一称呼。
Sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force began an investigation of these reports called Project Sign. The initial opinion of those involved with the project was that the UFOs were most likely sophisticated Soviet aircraft, although some researchers suggested that they might be spacecraft from other worlds, the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Within a year, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge, which in 1952 was itself replaced by the longest-lived of the official inquiries into UFOs, Project Blue Book, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. From 1952 to 1969 Project Blue Book compiled reports of more than 12,000 sightings or events, each of which was ultimately classified as (1) “identified” with a known astronomical, atmospheric, or artificial (human-caused) phenomenon or (2) “unidentified.” The latter category, approximately 6 percent of the total, included cases for which there was insufficient information to make an identification with a known phenomenon.