Throughout history, people have spotted mysterious effects or objects in the sky. Some have claimed such “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs, are alien spaceships. Others have shown that many UFOs have earthly explanations. Some could be aircraft, for example, or atmospheric phenomena. But not all of these mystery effects have been explained. That’s why the U.S. government takes them seriously. And some researchers think the scientific community should, too.
Unexplained sights in the sky are officially known as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP. On May 17, the U.S. Congress held its first public hearing about UAP in decades. Two U.S. government intelligence officials described efforts to catalog and analyze sightings. Many UFOs have been spotted by military personnel such as pilots. And the U.S. government wants to know if such unexplained phenomena could pose a threat to national security.
At the hearing, Scott Bray shared new details on a government UAP database. Bray is the deputy director of naval intelligence. The database he described contains about 400 UAP sightings from 2004 to 2021. Many of those sightings include images or video. Officials have pegged some sightings to sensor issues or other mundane explanations. But there are others that officials “can’t explain,” Bray said.
Bray stressed that nothing in the database “would suggest it’s anything [alien] in origin.” The same goes for UFO sightings investigated by a special government task force.
Ronald Mountie is the undersecretary of defense for intelligence & security. He and Bray both said “insufficient data” is a barrier to understanding UFOs. “That’s one of the challenges we have,” Mountie said.
That’s something scientists can help with, say Jacob Had Mishra and Ravi. These researchers are astrobiologies. They study the potential for life beyond Earth. Works at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, Wash. Based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA is also taking UFOs seriously. On June 9, the U.S. space agency announced it will begin a study of UAP. NASA is putting together a group of scientists and other experts to learn more about UAP.
Science News (the sister publication of Science News for Students) spoke with and to learn about how and why researchers should help study UAP. Their answers have been edited for clarity.
“What are they?” is the billion-dollar question. We don’t know what they are. That’s what makes them interesting.
“Unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, is the term that the military uses. It’s a little different from the term UFO. It allows for the possibility that mysterious sights in the sky may not necessarily be solid objects. So UAP may be a more all-encompassing term.
Yes. We conduct scientific studies of unknown phenomena all the time. This should not be any different. But when conducting those studies, we should not let our speculations drive the conclusions. The collected data should do it.
As scientists, what we should do is study things we don’t understand.
With UAP, there seem to be some strange observations that are hard to explain. Maybe they’re a sign of something like new physics. Or maybe they’re just instrument errors that we don’t understand. UAP could even be things that birds are doing.
It could be anything. But any of those possibilities, 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. That’s especially true if there’s something in the sky that pilots consider a flight safety risk.
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