What are some possible next steps for the scientific community for studying them? There are some initiatives from academics in this direction, so that is a good sign. We need, for example, fast-tracking cameras and optical, infrared and radar observations to collect more data to find patterns in the events’ behaviors.Īnd we need to share such data with scientists so that independent groups can reach a consensus. Kopparapu: Some of these are transient events. You need to measure a detection with multiple sensors and multiple wavelengths. It’s not enough for someone to just see something. Ideally, you’d have ground-based sensors and you’d have satellite coverage. So what you would need is to set up a network of detectors all around the world. These have been accidental, sporadic observations. Even if you had that data, from the government or commercial pilots or others, it has not been intentionally collected. I think we’re not going to get the kind of data from the government that we need to scientifically answer the question. Military instruments are probably classified for good reason, for our safety. The reality is if you want to understand a particular set of data, you need to know something about the instrument that collected the data. From the hearing, there does seem to be a plan to declassify some data, once it’s been vetted for possible security risks, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen soon. Haqq Misra: The problem with studying UAP so far is that all of the data are held by the government. And it’s also about safety for pilots too, especially if there’s something in the sky that pilots are seeing that they consider a flight safety risk. It could be anything, but any of those possibilities, anything from the most extreme to the most mundane, would teach us something. Maybe they’re a sign of something like new physics, or maybe it’s just instrumental artifacts that we don’t understand or things that birds are doing. With UAP, there seem to be some anomalous observations that are difficult to explain. Haqq Misra: As scientists, what we should do is study things that we don’t understand. The most critical point to remember is that when conducting those studies, we should not let our speculations drive the conclusions. We conduct scientific studies of unknown phenomena all the time. Should we scientifically study them? Why? So UAP is maybe a more all-encompassing term. It’s a little different from the term UFO in the sense that a phenomenon could be something that’s not necessarily a physical solid object. Unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, is the term that the military has been using. We don’t know what they are, and that’s what makes them interesting. Haqq Misra: “What are they” is the billion-dollar question. Their answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. Science News spoke with Haqq Misra, of Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, and Kopparapu, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to learn more about how and why. That’s something that other scientists can help with, say astrobiologists Jacob Haqq Misra and Ravi Kopparapu. “That’s one of the challenges we have,” Moultrie said.

While officials were able to attribute some of the sightings to artifacts of certain sensors or other mundane explanations, there were others the officials “can’t explain,” Bray said.īray stressed that nothing in the database or studied by a task force set up to investigate the sightings “would suggest it’s anything nonterrestrial in origin.”īoth Bray and Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, identified “insufficient data” as a barrier to understanding what the unidentified phenomena are. Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, shared new details on a database of images and videos that now includes about 400 reports of sightings of unidentified phenomena from 2004 to 2021.

Two Pentagon officials described efforts to catalog and analyze sightings, many by military personnel such as pilots, of the unexplained phenomena because of their potential threat to national security.

Congress held its first public hearing about these objects in decades ( SN: 6/26/71). And some researchers think the scientific community should too. defense and intelligence communities are taking unidentified flying objects, officially known as unidentified aerial phenomena, seriously.

Latest alien news today