The U.S. defense and intelligence communities are taking unidentified flying objects, officially known as unidentified aerial phenomena, seriously. And some researchers think the scientific community should too.
On May 17, the U.S. Congress held its first public hearing about these objects in decades (SN: 6/26/71). 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.
That’s something that other scientists can help with, say astrobiologists Jacob Haqq Misra and Ravi Kopparapu.
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. Their answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
What are unidentified aerial phenomena?
Haqq Misra: “What are they” is the billion-dollar question. We don’t know what they are, and that’s what makes them interesting.
Unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, is the term that the military has been using. 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. So UAP is maybe a more all-encompassing term.
Should we scientifically study them? Why?
Kopparapu: Yes. We conduct scientific studies of unknown phenomena all the time. This should not be any different. The most critical point to remember is that when conducting those studies, we should not let our speculations drive the conclusions. The collected data should do it.
Haqq Misra: As scientists, what we should do is study things that we don’t understand.
With UAP, there seem to be some anomalous observations that are difficult to explain. 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.
It could be anything, but any of those possibilities, anything from the most extreme to the most mundane, would teach us something.
So there’s the scientific curiosity. 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.
How can we study these phenomena?
Haqq Misra: The problem with studying UAP so far is that all of the data are held by the government. 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. It was nice to hear, though.
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. Military instruments are probably classified for good reason, for our safety. I think we’re not going to get the kind of data from the government that we need to scientifically answer the question. Even if you had that data, from the government or commercial pilots or others, it has not been intentionally collected. These have been accidental, sporadic observations.
So what you would need is to set up a network of detectors all around the world. Ideally, you’d have ground-based sensors and you’d have satellite coverage. It’s not enough for someone to just see something. You need to measure a detection with multiple sensors and multiple wavelengths.
Kopparapu: Some of these are transient events. We need, for example, fast-tracking cameras and optical, infrared, and radar observations to collect more data to find patterns in the events’ behaviors.
And we need to share such data with scientists so that independent groups can reach a consensus. This is how science progresses. There are some initiatives from academics in this direction, so that is a good sign.
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