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I think F for Flying simply refers to the fact that they are observed in the sky. O for Object also sounds suitably vague to me.
But how about S for Skyward. That would cover flying, floating, falling, and possibly other f words. And how about T for Thing. There's nothing less politically dangerous than a mere thing.
U for Unidentified does suggest a priori the Thing must have an identity, a name or number plate perhaps. I for Inexplicable would remove this.
But, no, thinking about Thing again, thing is TOO general.
One quality all UFO sightings have is that they are perceived as unusual and special and remarkable by the observer. So P for Phenomenon might be better. Phenomenon also conveys the brevity of the experience perhaps.
Thus we arrive at Inexplicable Skyward Phenomenon, or ISP.
However, ultimately every cloud shape is inexplicable, space is skyward and inexplicable, so are choirs of angels and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In contrast, our old familiar UFO sighting is very much localised, focussed, singular in both senses.
Also I note that "skyward" is a bit too poetic and Dylan Thomasish for your average hard-cased modern, so I will shorten it to "sky". It's fashionable, anyway, to use nouns as adjectives (not to mention adjectives as adverbs,
past tenses as gerunds, "alternative" for "alternate", "it's" for "its", etc. etc.)
So I will settle for Localised Inexplicable Sky Phenomenon, or LISP. This to me sounds as charming as my daughter's.
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The reason these things are inexplicable . ... no, I'm not reverting to LIST, a phenomen is also a thing ...
yes, the reason the things are inexplicable is (probably) paucity of information. If we could catch it, shoot it down or something, be there with our research equipment, we would almost certainly know what "it" was, whether little green man in a tin can or American spy craft or just a Google camera.
Conceivably, with full information, we might still be puzzled. Perhaps black holes shoot out uff particles that produce globes of ionised gas on faraway planets, and no-one is ever going to be able to figure how uff particles do that, when they have no other effect whatsoever, including no effect on any experimental apparatus. Possibly. But probably, the mystery is simply due to lack of information.
So it is natural that scientists are pretty cool about LISPs because a LISP is a case of an UP, an Unexplained Phenomen, and UPs are the meat and bread, and wine, too, of science. Science is all about turning UPs into EPS. I'm sure I don't have to explain what an EP is. So why get excited about an UP?
I suggest that those are truly disciples of the scientific method really should be a little interested in LISPs, because the LISP and the observer of it are part of the same phenomenon. If a lot of clever, sober, experienced people continue to say that they have seen weird things in the sky, then remembering Occam's Razor a scientific response would be "Perhaps there are weird things in the sky".
However, having been a little interested, I think a scientific person will soon become less interested, because if the LISP probably exists only because of lack of information, and there's no way of getting more information, well there are plenty of other UPs to turn into lovely EPs.
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