Unidentified flying objects are real. That's a fact. There's no need for further discussion. The issue is UFOs -- "things in the sky we can't explain" -- have become synonymous with alien visitation.
Many dictionary definitions include reference to extraterrestrials under "UFO. It ran a covert program between and that has since been disbanded. Considering unidentified aerial phenomena might pose a problem for national security, that's a smart thing to do. Defense agencies across the globe are concerned UAP might be spy planes from a rival nation, for instance. Investigating any reports makes perfect sense. But there's a gaping chasm between seeing something in the sky that you can't explain and believing it comes from another planet.
And yet, more and more publications are seriously entertaining the idea of E. In a not-an-April-Fools'-Joke piece earlier this year , the Washington Post published a column that suggested "perhaps we need at least to consider the possibility that these UAPs might also be extraterrestrial in origin.
As far as we can tell, there's no life in the solar system despite what some Mars fanatics might have you believe , and right now there's no evidence of life outside it, either. There are some tough questions here: Where did the spacecraft come from? How did they get here?
Why didn't we see them arrive? Navy saw fast-moving UFOs repeatedly off the East Coast throughout and , in one case apparently nearly colliding with one of the mysterious objects, The New York Times reported earlier this week. The Navy pilots said some UFOs reached hypersonic speeds without any detectable exhaust plumes, suggesting the possible involvement of super-advanced propulsion technology. Still, Defense Department officials aren't invoking intelligent aliens as an explanation, according to this week's Times story — and they're right to be measured in this respect, scientists say.
He pointed out, for example, that the sightings occurred off the coast, as did a similar observation unveiled in conjunction with the December stories.
That previous sighting occurred near San Diego. Coastal regions are where you might expect to find a rival nation's advanced reconnaissance craft, Shostak said, because incursions over the continental United States would be more obvious and easily detected.
Decades later, as America heads into another toasty summer, unidentified flying objects are in the headlines again. Many more of us are involved in the story this time, jammed together in the control tower of the internet, watching grainy, black-and-white videos from the U.
But just like in , some people are making the leap from strange, cloud-skimming phenomena to aliens. The report, out next month, is supposed to reveal what intelligence agencies know about these UFOs and what threat the objects pose to national security.
This is real; the videos are real; UFOs, in the most basic sense, are real. The military has spotted objects flying in the sky, and it has not identified what they are. These objects, whatever you want to call them, are worth close examination. Why not? Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University, gets this question a lot, especially recently. Wright works in the field of SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
His job is to look for signs of alien technology, so it seems logical that he might have some thoughts on UFOs and their rumored extraterrestrial origins.
But ufology and SETI are two entirely different fields. In fact, I would argue that the more rare a phenomenon is, the more insight it is likely to give us into how things work. As part of Project Blue Book, the Condon Committee was convened in , including such luminaries as the late Carl Sagan, and tasked with carrying out an independent analysis of available data on UFOs.
Perhaps not surprising, but disappointing to many, the committee did not find that any of the UFO reports they examined required extraordinary explanations. It is, however, interesting to note that roughly 6 percent of the 10, UFO reports the U.
Air Force investigated were classified as "unidentified. Of these unidentified cases, the Condon Committee concluded that , "most of the cases so listed are simply those in which the information available does not provide an adequate basis for analysis. For example, the Lakenheath-Bentwaters Incident , which took place in England in , involved both the U. Air Force and the Royal Air Force. About this case, the committee reported, "in conclusion, although conventional or natural explanations certainly cannot be ruled out, the probability of such seems low in this case and the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appears to be fairly high.
Who knows? This was over 60 years ago. Our scientific technology was far behind what it is now. Then again, so was our ability to pull off hoaxes. Much of the problem with cases like Lakenheath-Bentwaters is that they are not repeatable. When something happens just once and never again, it is really hard to test our hypotheses—and the bedrock of the scientific method is that a hypothesis simply must be testable to be handled scientifically.
Another famed example of a nonrepeating and unresolved case happened in with the "Wow! An extremely strong narrow-band radio signal was detected by the Big Ear radio telescope at almost exactly the frequency of a fundamental hydrogen transition line Fast-forward 40 years, and astronomers identify a previously unknown comet that was passing by back in and could have accounted for the "Wow!
Does this new discovery rule out an E. But Occam's razor suggests that a comet that we know exists—and we know could have caused the signal—seems a tad more likely.
Extraterrestrial life was also on the table as an option in when Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed short radio pulses coming from a fixed location in the sky—and repeating.
Because the pulses repeated, it was possible to rule out conventional explanations such as stars, or Earth-based emissions.
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