You know it’s serious when the terminology gets changed, or maybe not, and when America’s national space agency gets involved, or maybe not.
The agency even held a press conference to announce its plans and named David Spergel to head up a team to develop an objective, scientific approach to studying UAP both past, present and future. Spergel is the current President of the Simons Foundation, a Professor Emeritus of Astronomy from Princeton University, and the former Director of the Center of Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He has authored more than 400 papers published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. NASA has chosen Spergel for this task to protect its reputation as it applies serious science to study a phenomenon that has been the subject of speculation since the 1940s when the first modern sightings were published in newspapers and recorded in pictures and film.
NASA has had its own reported sightings during the manned space program. From John Glenn’s historic comments on Friendship 7 to Buzz Aldrin’s claim to have seen UAPs while flying to the Moon on Apollo 11, there are NASA anecdotal references to things viewed in space that couldn’t easily be identified. What Glenn observed as hundreds of light objects outside the window of his Mercury capsule turned out to be small drops of liquid venting from it. And Aldrin’s alien report ended up being an aberration in light caused by reflections off the Apollo spacecraft’s surface.
America’s National Security Agency (NSA) published a preliminary report on UAPs last year. It studied 144 sightings spanning from 2004 to 2021. The majority appeared near military facilities with the biggest number reported by US Navy personnel. The NSA didn’t conclude these sightings were alien in nature but did note they could be deemed to be a flight risk. The report recommended improvements to the tools being used to record the encounters.
NASA has been searching for extraterrestrial life. When it sent the two Voyagers to study the outer planets, it placed a disc onboard with instructions should an alien technology encounter them in the future. The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, today, are sampling Martian air and rocks looking for signs of water past and present and evidence of previous or current life on the Red Planet. A mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is being built that will study its subsurface ocean and search for evidence of living things within it.
NASA’s earth-based and space-based telescopes look for exoplanets that lie within the Goldilocks Zones of their stars. The new James Webb Space Telescope can sniff the atmospheres of these exoplanets to determine their composition in search of gasses that would point to biology present. And telescopes NASA operates continue to study radio signals from space looking for ones that cannot be explained by natural phenomena.
Studying UAPs, however, is very different. It has the potential of becoming a reputational risk for the agency. For those who believe in conspiracies and coverups, even a NASA report will probably not alter mindsets that believe the phenomena represent visitors from Outerspace. Nonetheless, NASA has made the commitment to investigate sightings, assemble the data, and share its conclusions in a future report.
]]>Now in a report to the U.S. Congress, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has attempted to assess the phenomena. It begins by stating there isn’t enough hard data to draw firm conclusions about what UAPs are. Of course, that’s the mystery in all of this. We have visual evidence of objects captured by sensors, radar, infrared, electro-optical, and visual observation. Military pilots have even locked weapons on the phenomena but have never fired.
The one thing that is clear is the high degree of variability in sightings. Some UAPs have exhibited flight characteristics that have been deemed unusual. The report notes the human and equipment capture observations “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.”
The report notes that the observed data fit five categories:
The report does conclude that UAPs pose a flight safety risk for U.S. national security based on firsthand witnessing between 2004 and 2021. Only one of 144 reports of this nature has been demystified as attributable to a large deflating balloon. The vast majority of the remaining reports come from the U.S. Navy, and 80 have involved multiple sensor observations near military facilities interrupting preplanned training and other activity. In 21 reports involving 18 incidents, the UAPs have exhibited extraordinary flight characteristics that don’t correspond to any current U.S. engineering capabilities. These include UAPs that remain stationary even in high winds, change directions abruptly, travel at high speed, and exhibit no discernible means of propulsion. In a number of cases, sensors have recorded radio frequency (RF) energy signals emanating from the objects.
Whenever we see UAPs on film they appear fuzzy or indistinct. Why is this? Because the sensors and cameras used by military aircraft have specific mission purposes which are really unsuited to identify what UAPs really are? If we are to unravel the mystery, therefore, we need to close this technology gap and develop sensors and cameras that give us a clear picture and understanding of what we are observing.
That national security concludes UAPs are a flight safety risk shouldn’t be surprising. As reported, if UAPs represent an advanced technology from a foreign adversary, then they are indeed a military risk. And the fact that most appear in airspaces over military restricted areas lends to this concern. Of course, the limited dataset skews to military sightings in this report rather than to commercial ones. This deficiency needs to be addressed. And as a final risk, UAPs pose a distraction to military pilots with some reporting near misses when the objects suddenly change direction or fly directly at or by them at high speeds.
Because the majority of reports have come from one branch of the U.S. armed services, the navy, it is imperative that incidents from other service branches and government agencies, as well as reports from accredited civilian sources, such as the FAA, be captured using standardized incident reporting.
In November 2020, the U.S. Airforce began a six-month pilot program to collect and evaluate UAP encounters. This is part of an expanded effort to increase knowledge of UAPs and eliminate the current navy bias in the dataset. The FAA is also to encourage the reporting of UAPs by civilian and commercial aircraft operators. There is no mention of a standard dataset for the latter. But it is likely that a baseline for both military and civilian observations will emerge. For this purpose, the report recommends additional funding to study UAPs.
The U.S. Senate has requested a more comprehensive report be put together that includes:
So what can we conclude from this big government reveal? We know some of the things we think are UAPs are explainable. But a significant majority of sightings and incidents classified as “other” are not. Or to paraphrase a former U.S. Defense Secretary, “there are known knowns and known unknowns, and we don’t know what we don’t know.” That’s why the U.S. Senate is recommending the government throw some money at UAP sightings to turn unknowns into knowns and unravel the mystery.
]]>In the modern era, UFOs have been with us since 1947. The first report came from an amateur pilot flying over Washington state who described witnessing a number of objects, flying in formation at high speed with flashing lights and maneuvering unlike any known airplane of the time. He called the objects “unidentified” and soon the moniker was extended including the words “flying objects” coined by a reporter. Hence UFOs were born. UFOs soon morphed into “flying saucers” again based on the editorial enthusiasm of the media taking the descriptions given by the pilot of the way the objects flew like a saucer thrown across a water surface, skipping up and down. If he had said like skipping stones, would the press have described UFOs as “flying stones?”
In 1947 alone, there were 853 sightings after the initial story broke. The U.S. Air Force opened an investigation which became Project Blue Book. Blue Book may have been inspired by the report of a “flying saucer” crashing in New Mexico, near the town of Roswell. Blue Book finally ended in 1969 after a University of Colorado study reinforced these conclusions:
And yet regardless of the U.S. Air Force discounting thousands of sightings flying saucers became part of popular culture and extraterrestrial invasions of our planet were glorified in film and books. Probably the most riveting effort, Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” left this writer looking up at the night sky after leaving the theatre.
The origins of UFO-ology are well described in a piece written by Megan Garber, appearing in The Atlantic back in 2014. It’s a great read. But it’s not the origin story that made headlines in the last couple of weeks. Instead, it is a report from The New York Times of an upcoming presentation to the U.S. Congress followed by a government document release on June 25, 2021, that has the media in a new tizzy. A recent segment on “60 Minutes” featured interviews with U.S. Navy pilots describing unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs, the new term being entered into UFO-ology, describing these objects as real and inexplicable.
So what does the report that will be released on June 25th contain? An examination of 120 incidents spanning over two decades describes a number of objects exhibiting hypersonic capabilities. That is, the UAPs fly at speeds no current known aircraft can achieve. Nor do these objects maneuver in a manner similar to any existing aircraft. And finally, many of the reports suggest there are no visible means of propulsion powering them. In one observed report aired on “60 Minutes,” two Navy pilots in 2019 described witnessing their own close encounter with a spherical object hovering over the ocean in midair, moving back and forth like a game of Pong, and then diving into the water, all of it captured on video.
As one Pentagon investigator of UAPs described the phenomena: what U.S. military personnel were witnessing was technology capable of withstanding up to 700 G-forces (astronauts experience 3 to 4 Gs during ascent and re-entry), speeds of more than 21,000 kilometres (13,000 miles) per hour (the fastest aircraft today is the Lockheed SR-71 which clocks at 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles) per hour), with the ability to hover, change direction instantaneously horizontally or vertically, evade radar, and fly in the air, water, and probably space, and do all of this with no visible engine, no wings, and no avionic controls.
When the U.S. Senate convenes on June 25th to hear the report they supposedly will get the whole picture. What gets released to the public will be redacted (lots of black ink hiding whole sections).
I cannot even speculate on what UFOs or UAPs are. Could they be experimental technology from some military skunkworks either domestic or foreign? Could they be natural phenomena? Could our planet harbour a species we have never met that has advanced technology and is generally shy? The June 25th reveal has science-fiction aficionados salivating.
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