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Darkbird18
The Good The Bad and The Ugly
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Scientists are getting serious about UFOs. Here’s why and From UFO to UAP: how flying saucers became legitimate
Scientists are getting serious about UFOs. Here’s why
Understanding what are now called UAPs is crucial for national security and aircraft safety
For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead.
In the United States, unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, came into the national spotlight in the late 1940s and early ’50s. A series of incidents, including a supposedly crashed alien spaceship near Roswell, N.M., generated something of an American obsession. The Roswell UFO turned out to be part of a classified program, the remnants of a balloon monitoring the atmosphere for signs of clandestine Russian nuclear tests. But it and other reported sightings prompted the U.S. government to launch various projects and panels to investigate such claims, as Science News reported in 1966 (SN: 10/22/66), as well as kicking off hobby groups and conspiracy theories.
In the decades since, UFOs have often come to be dismissed by scientists as the province of wackos and thus unworthy of study. The term UFO has a smirk factor to it, says Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the school’s Center for National Security Initiatives.
But government agencies and officials are trying to change that attitude. Among the biggest concerns is that the stigma associated with reporting a sighting has the side effect of stifling reports from pilots or citizens who might have valuable information about potential threats in U.S. air space — such as the Chinese spy balloon that traversed North America and made headlines last year.
“If there’s something interfering with flights, people or cargo, that’s a problem,” Boyd says.
To help reduce the stigma, many serious investigators now refer to UFOs as “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs, coined by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2022. “The term UAP brings science to the issue,” Boyd says. It also rightly broadens the view to include natural atmospheric phenomena as well as things outside the atmosphere, such as satellites and particularly bright planets such as Venus.
An independent team of experts (shown meeting in 2023) suggested NASA help fill in gaps in collecting UAP data.Joel Kowsky/NASA
Investigators of all types have a lot of questions about UAPs that they believe deserve serious scientific scrutiny: Which UAPs are something real and which are merely artifacts of the sensors that detect them? If real, which may be a threat to aviation? A threat to national security? Do they point to some unknown natural phenomena?
Answers may be forthcoming. In June 2022, NASA announced an independent study to determine how the agency could lend its scientific expertise to the study of UAPs. Meanwhile, military and commercial pilots have felt more comfortable making reports and even providing videos taken during close encounters. Some of those reports were discussed as part of congressional hearings in 2022 and 2023, which were covered widely by the media and in part focused on more government transparency (SN: 5/19/22). Those were the first open hearings since the mid-1960s.
Americans for Safe Aerospace, an advocacy organization with a focus on UAPs, supports legislation that would help provide a way for pilots to confidentially report potential sightings to the government.
And government agencies increasingly recognize publicly that strange phenomena in the skies are worthy of attention — whether the phenomena are signs of aliens or not. In 2022, the Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to serve as a clearinghouse for government reports of UAPs and for analysts determining if UAPs pose threats. The National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit established in 1974, and other organizations continue to collate reports from the public.
By bringing UAPs into the realm of science, the hope is to make the unexplained explainable.Where do UAP sightings occur?
Since its founding, the National UFO Reporting Center has kept a database of UAP sightings, including past and recent incidents reported through its telephone hotline, the mail and online. The database includes almost 123,000 sightings in the United States from June 1930 through June 2022. It’s a trove of data that few if any peer-reviewed scientific studies have used, says Richard Medina, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
For a study reported in 2023, Medina and colleagues scoured the database to see if they could identify which factors, if any, might affect the number of sightings in a particular area. They focused on the almost 99,000 reports, or about 80 percent of the total, that came from the continental United States from 2001 through 2020. They stuck to the continental United States because tree cover was a factor they were studying, and detailed maps of forested land aren’t available for Alaska’s interior.
First, the researchers calculated the number of UAP sightings that occurred in each county in the Lower 48 states for the 20-year period. Then, they tried to correlate the number of sightings per 10,000 people that lived in each county with environmental factors.
Although many UAPs remain puzzling, experts have identified some common sources. Saucer-shaped lenticular clouds, birds in flight, thermal fluctuations in the atmosphere and other natural phenomena explain some sightings, as do celestial objects like Venus. And while no alien technology has been linked to UAPs, human tech has, including weather balloons, satellites, drones, airborne trash and military aircraft. Last year, a particularly spooky spiral in the sky over northwestern Canada turned out to be vapor from unspent fuel released from a SpaceX rocket.
Vapor from unspent fuel released from a SpaceX rocketTodd Salat
Perhaps ground-based instruments are the way to go. Several research teams are developing suites of instruments that can observe a broad range of characteristics and be deployed to sites where UAPs are frequently seen. Some of these packages could be ready to deploy late this year.
Wes Watters, a planetary scientist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, is on one team now developing such instrument packages. The observatories are intended to “determine whether there are measurable phenomena in or near Earth’s atmosphere that can be confidently classified as scientific anomalies,” he and colleagues proposed in the March 2023 Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation. Or, in simpler terms, “to figure out what’s normal versus what’s not normal,” he explains.
Designing such observatories is complicated by the fact that not all UAPs are the same. But previous fieldwork, as well as the observations made by people during UAP sightings, is a rich source of information about what measurements could be useful, Watters says. Besides sensors for detecting and characterizing a UAP itself, instrument packages will collect weather data, which could help researchers interpret the other measurements.
Watters and colleagues are developing three styles of instrument packages as part of the Galileo Project. Led by Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, the project seeks to bring the search for signs of extraterrestrial technologies into mainstream scientific research.
The most elaborate instrument package will sport arrays of wide-field cameras for targeting aerial objects and triangulating their positions; narrow-field cameras for tracking objects across the sky; radio antennas and receivers; microphones that can detect sound across a wide range of wavelengths; and computers that can integrate, process and analyze data. These weather-resistant systems will function autonomously 24/7 and be deployed at sites with electrical power and internet connectivity.
These observatories will likely cost around $250,000 each and be deployed to at least three sites for up to five years.
A second, more portable option will be designed for rapid deployment for up to two weeks to sites that don’t have access to electrical power or internet. Each costing about $25,000, these simpler packages will be monitored daily, with data recorded and then processed later and elsewhere. The instruments won’t necessarily be weatherized, restricting their operation to mild-weather locales.
The third, simplest and least expensive package will host low-end, consumer-grade sensors and instruments, Watters says. They’ll be easy to maintain, monitor the sky within a radius of five kilometers and operate continuously for up to a year, relying on solar and battery power if need be. Groups of these packages can be networked together to cover a broad region. Each package will probably cost about $2,500.
With these sorts of instrument packages — and open minds, Watters suggests — researchers are bound to make new discoveries. “It’s impossible to make sense of these phenomena until we collect the right kinds of data,” he says.
In their 2023 report, Watters and colleagues noted that though several teams are developing or using instrument packages, none have yet reported detection of UAPs in peer-reviewed papers. The Galileo Project, including Watters’ team’s research, is funded by private donations, including a recently received $575,000 grant to establish and monitor a ground-based observatory somewhere in the Pittsburgh area.
The goal is not to explain away UAPs, Watters says. Instead, he notes, “we’re about identifying and characterizing what they are or might be.”
From UFO to UAP: how flying saucers became legitimate
UFOs — or UAP as they are now called — are suddenly legit, and everyone from Barack Obama down is talking about them. Welcome to the conspiracy-rich world of UFOlogy.
Sometimes changes of acronyms reflect more than just bureaucratic nomenclature. Mystery aircraft, which have been seen since humans first took to the skies, are no longer UFOs. They’re UAPs — for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
A difference without a distinction, perhaps, but central to how it’s now legitimate to discuss what on earth, or beyond, flying objects, moving at incredible speed and in apparent defiance of basic laws of aerodynamics, actually are.
Three pieces of footage are central to the emergence of UAP as a legitimate topic of public debate — one from 2004 and two from 2015. All are by US Navy pilots, and were leaked online over the last 14 years.
As a result of a Trump-era add-on to a pandemic stimulus bill, a “detailed analysis” of UAPs by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI is also due with Congress in June. The countdown is on for UFOlogists.
The isn’t the first time Congress has expressed interest in these things. In 2017, it emerged that former Senate majority leader Harry Reid had driven a secret US$22 million program to investigate UAPs and in particular the 2004 footage — one which involved money for defence contractors and friends of Reid, so was indistinguishable from the usual Congressional pork-barrelling. Reid this month claimed that he was told Lockheed Martin had materials from a crashed UAP, but couldn’t confirm it himself. Reid has also suggested the UAPs were not extra-terrestrial in origin but might be Russian.
There is plenty of scepticism about the US Navy footage, and explanations that they are in fact optical illusions. That’s countered by pilots themselves, who speak of seeing UAP routinely while flying, and of being reluctant to report them because of stigma. More senior figures also talk about them. Former senior Pentagon official Christopher Mellon has described a “massive intelligence failure” that unidentified aircraft operate within US airspace.
If not misinterpreted ordinary aerial phenomena or optical illusions, the most likely explanations are decidedly this-worldly — secret aircraft developed by the United States itself, or by other powers. As critics of Reid pointed out, UAPs could be a new front to hype the threat to US defence interests, and thus stimulate further taxpayer funding of defence contractors.
That’s the most banal conspiracy theory in the rich tapestry of cabals, plots and deceptions that make up the world of UFOlogy. Theories abound both as to their origin — outer space, a hollow earth, various underwater bases (Bass Strait being one), other dimensions — and the willingness of governments, and especially the US government, to cover up their existence, exploit recovered alien technology and neutralise those who might reveal that They Have Already Landed/They Walk Among Us etc.
In fact the existence of UFO conspiracy theories has generated other conspiracy theories: the US UFO conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper, after becoming discredited within UFOlogist circles for using fake documents, then promoted a conspiracy theory that UFO phenomena were being faked by an elite cabal to convince people of an imminent alien invasion, necessitating the establishment of a global communist government. UFO researchers were thus either dupes of this plot, or active participants in it.
Problematically, there are claims by a participant of an actual US Air Force effort to use hoax UFO materials to discredit a UFO researcher who had accidentally observed USAF experimental aircraft. Allegedly.
The military-industrial complex and conspiracy theorists make for a potent mix, especially in our new Trumpian era of conspiracies run amok. That’s before you add the Russians or the Chinese — let along beings from other worlds. Quite why the latter would want to visit us is perhaps the greatest mystery of all.
Charles Wharry(Darkbird 18);
The UFO/UAP conspiracy has been going on in the USA for over 60 years and many ufologists from here in the USA and from all over the world have been lied to, and given misinformation to keep the truth about UFO/UAP; why?? The websites above will help you get to the bottom of the UFO/UAP conspiracy because I believe that they never give the hold truth. After all, they're in with the Alen agenda (Reptilian Alien Agenda ) and have been with them since the 1940s. Keep your mind open!!!
Charles Wharry(Darkbird 18);
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