Consciousness and UFOs

Can consciousness explain UFOs?

This is a curios question, but worthy of pondering.  Both subjects are difficult to qualify as consciousness is a poorly understood reality while UFOs may be an abstract product of the other.  To look at this further, one has to separate the two with the hopes of defining each subject.

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

The above via Wikipedia is a decent definition, but based on years of observation and interaction with individuals suffering from neurological insults, I believe that "quality" of awareness can be omitted.  So consciousness is the state of awareness that is not dependent on quality as this is purely a subjective term that an outside observer would attach independent of the observed individual.

Someone suffering from the total degradation of cognition still presents as conscious and he/she attempts to interact or interpret the environment [milieu].  Interesting observations have shown to me that these individuals are quiet aware of who they are...the have a sense of self-awareness.  They know their names; they respond to their names.  They may not know where they are, the current date, age, or the names of spouses/children, but they know that they exist.

I believe that it's possible to say that consciousness exists somewhat independent of cognition.  But if we throw in all of the cognitive functions, such as, memory, learning, judgement, spatial, and executive functioning, we are presented with an operative functioning neuro-system.  But, these functionalities appear to be somewhat loosely independent of consciousness. 

An unidentified flying object, or UFO, is in its strictest definition any apparent object in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. However the term is widely used in popular culture to refer more specifically to supposed observations of craft of extraterrestrial origin. Most UFOs are later identified as conventional objects or phenomena.

Again from Wikipedia, we have a decent definition of the term "UFO."  The first part of the definition is spot on: "...object in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon..."  But the crux of the UFO cultural understanding is the last part, "...popular culture to refer more specifically to supposed observations of craft of extraterrestrial origin..."  This last part tends to be the universal definition.

You may recall that some years back I had spotted an object moving at high speed through my telescope and wrote a post about it.  To me, it was obviously a satellite of some kind, but I had one person commenting that I may have indeed seen an object of the ET variety...I did not.

But nonetheless, one's consciousness would be aware of the UFO as an external object.  The ability to comprehend the UFO would therefore fall under the realm of cognitive functioning, ie, memory, learning, judgement, etc.  As I had postulated in a previous post using a behavioral component with possible conditioning, then the individual is left to whatever interpretation fits his/her mental framework.

One's consciousness is aware of the UFO, but the actual interpretation of the object is an abstract construct of cognition.  The object may well exist in reality, but one must remember that reality is how things truly exist, not as they appear, nor how they are imagined.