Scientists shouldn’t be afraid to talk about, or even study, these mysterious flying objects. Perhaps we shouldn’t call them UFOs.
That was one of the conclusions of a panel discussion this weekend at Science Writers 2023, an annual gathering of hundreds of science journalists and communicators from Japan and abroad. This year’s event was hosted by CU Boulder and CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
On Saturday morning, the topic was all about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. UAP is a relatively new name for the strange sounds that flash on fighter jet instruments and in the stars. “look! Up in the sky! It’s not a UFO… it’s a UAP,” says a panel of journalists and scientists on how serious scientists should approach a subject that has been the butt of many jokes for decades. We tackled this difficult problem.
UW-Boulder’s Ian Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives and the Ann and H. J. Smeed Faculty Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering and Science, participated in the panel discussion.
The group resolved the most obvious topics early on. “UFOs are almost certainly not alien visitors,” said author and ufologist Mick West, who attended the session remotely. Other panelists included moderator Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor at Scientific American; Nadia Drake, physics editor at Quanta magazine. and Thomas Zurbuchen, director of ETH Zurich Space Center and former chief scientist at NASA.
But that doesn’t mean researchers shouldn’t investigate them more closely, the speakers agreed.
“Behind all of this there are really important contributions from the scientific community and the science communication community,” Boyd said.
In 2022, NASA convened an independent research team to begin the process of investigating UAPs from a scientific perspective. The group’s report, released in September, lays out a path for the research community to gather more data on unknown and strange objects in Earth’s sky.
Regardless of the cause, panelists said getting to the bottom of these sightings could help governments keep military and commercial aircraft safe. UAPs may also lead scientists to discover new natural phenomena that were previously unknown.
“When something is stigmatized, it really hinders data collection, so you don’t get the kinds of observations that would be useful,” said Drake, author of the NASA report.
The (Alien) Elephant in the Room
And there’s good reason to collect data on UAPs, Boyd says.
One reason for this is that there are always many man-made objects flying around in the sky, and governments don’t always know what they are. This includes drones, high-altitude balloons, etc. He pointed to the case of a Chinese balloon that flew over Alaska and much of the United States in early 2023 and was ultimately shot down by the U.S. Air Force.
“At a time of heightened international tensions, leaders must make difficult decisions,” Boyd said. “Can we shoot this down? Can we fly it over the United States?”
Military pilots have to make even faster and potentially more dangerous choices when they encounter something creepy in their path, Boyd said.
Panelists said scientists have avoided studying UAPs for decades, in part because they are often associated with green dwarfs and flying saucers. I pointed it out. But Zurbuchen at least hopes researchers can begin to shed that stigma.
“There are a lot of things that were once UAPs that are now well-known scientific phenomena because someone actually said, ‘Wow, this cloud looks really weird.’ Did you?” Zurbuchen said.
true science
Drake said researchers often struggle to study such phenomena because they don’t have the ability to make high-quality observations.
In the NASA report, she and her colleagues noted that researchers may already have access to a treasure trove of first-class data. For example, scientists can use the many scientific satellites orbiting the Earth to look for unexplained events in the atmosphere. All you need is a more precise definition of what you’re looking for.
“We also proposed some kind of citizen science campaign,” Drake said. “So we’re really leveraging the power of all these people who have all these smartphones to create reports and put that into our systems and metadata that really helps us understand what something is. We need to figure out a way to include the data.”
Meanwhile, Boyd said he would like a more comprehensive and accessible catalog of UAP sightings. That way, if a bystander captures a video of strange lights above Earth, researchers can quickly determine whether those lights appear to be new phenomena or can be easily explained. He also called on the assembled science writers not to succumb to sensationalism surrounding UFOs.
“This is important for the community to make sure that when there are stories that have a scientific component, the real science is being recorded,” Boyd said.