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Alas, No Extraterrestrials, NASA Says

September 15, 2023 | FlaglerLive | 10 Comments

In Nevada, where extraterrestrial dreams can still come true. (© FlaglerLive)
In Nevada, where extraterrestrial dreams can still come true. (© FlaglerLive)

By Chris Impey

NASA’s independent study team released its highly anticipated report on UFOs on Sept. 14, 2023.

In part to move beyond the stigma often attached to UFOs, where military pilots fear ridicule or job sanctions if they report them, UFOs are now characterized by the U.S. government as UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena.




Bottom line: The study team found no evidence that reported UAP observations are extraterrestrial.

I’m a professor of astronomy who has written extensively on astrobiology and the scientists who search for life in the universe. I have long been skeptical of the claim that UFOs represent visits by aliens to Earth.

From sensationalism to science

During a press briefing, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that NASA has scientific programs to search for traces of life on Mars and the imprints of biology in the atmospheres of exoplanets. He said he wanted to shift the UAP conversation from sensationalism to one of science.

With this statement, Nelson was alluding to some of the more outlandish claims about UAPs and UFOs. At a congressional hearing in July, former Pentagon intelligence officer David Grusch testified that the American government has been hiding evidence of crashed UAPs and alien biological specimens. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon office charged with investigating UAPs, has denied these claims.




And the same week NASA’s report came out, Mexican lawmakers were shown by journalist Jaime Maussan two tiny, 1,000-year-old bodies that he claimed were the remains of “non-human” beings. Scientists have called this claim fraudulent and say the mummies may have been looted from gravesites in Peru.

A controversial journalist presented the Mexican government with 1,000-year-old bodies that he claimed were aliens.

Conclusions from the report

The NASA study team report sheds little light on whether some UAPs are extraterrestrial. In his comments, the chair of the study team, astronomer David Spergel stated that the team had seen “no evidence to suggest that UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.”

Of the more than 800 unclassified sightings collected by the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and reported at the NASA panel’s first public meeting back in May 2023, only “a small handful cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena,” according to the report.

Many of the recent sightings can be attributed to weather balloons and airborne clutter. Historically, most UFOs are astronomical objects such as meteors, fireballs and the planet Venus.

Some sightings represent surveillance operations by foreign powers, which is why the U.S. military considers this a national security issue.




The report does offer recommendations to NASA on how to move these investigations forward.

Most of the UAP data considered by the study team comes from U.S. military aircraft. Analysis of this data is “hampered by poor sensor calibration, the lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata, and the lack of baseline data.” The ideal set of measurements would include optical imaging, infrared imaging, and radar data, but very few reports have all these.

The NASA study team described in the report the types of data that can shed more light on UAPs. The authors note the importance of reducing the stigma that can cause both military and commercial pilots to feel that they cannot freely report sightings. The stigma stems from decades of conspiracy theories tied to UFOs.

The NASA study team suggests gathering sightings by commercial pilots using the Federal Aviation Administration and combining these with classified sightings not included in the report. Team members did not have security clearance, so they could look only at the subset of military sightings that were unclassified. At the moment, there is no anonymous nationwide UAP reporting mechanism for commercial pilots.

With access to these classified sightings and a structured mechanism for commercial pilots to report sightings, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office – the military office charged with leading the analysis effort – could have the most data.

NASA also announced the appointment of a new director of research on UAPs. This position will oversee the creation of a database with resources to evaluate UAP sightings.

Looking for a needle in a haystack

Parts of the briefing resembled a primer on the scientific method. Using analogies, officials described the analysis process as looking for a needle in a haystack, or separating the wheat from the chaff. The officials said they needed a consistent and rigorous methodology for characterizing sightings, as a way of homing in on something truly anomalous.

Spergel said the study team’s goal was to characterize the hay – or the mundane phenomena – and subtract it to find the needle, or the potentially exciting discovery. He noted that artificial intelligence can help researchers comb through massive datasets to find rare, anomalous phenomena. AI is already being used this way in many areas of astronomy research.

The speakers noted the importance of transparency. Transparency is important because UFOs have long been associated with conspiracy theories and government cover-ups. Similarly, much of the discussion during the congressional UAP hearing in July focused on a need for transparency. All scientific data that NASA gathers is made public on various websites, and officials said they intend to do the same with the nonclassified UAP data.




At the beginning of the briefing, Nelson gave his opinion that there were perhaps a trillion instances of life beyond Earth. So, it’s plausible that there is intelligent life out there. But the report says that when it comes to UAPs, extraterrestrial life must be the hypothesis of last resort. It quotes Thomas Jefferson: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” That evidence does not yet exist.

Chris Impey is University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Greg says

    September 16, 2023 at 5:45 am

    Don’t believe anything Uncle Sam tells you.

  2. Atwp says

    September 16, 2023 at 5:50 am

    Love the report. This will not stop people from claiming they see flying saucers and aliens. I don’t believe they exist.

  3. There Here says

    September 16, 2023 at 7:13 am

    You really didn’t expect NASA to admit that our planet is populated with extra-terrestrials did you ? 13 million Americans have witness themselves UAP’S and/or Alien beings right here in our own backyard. Heck, most people don’t even know that NO crashed vehicle from outer space was found in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. The crash was found 75 miles away in Korana, New Mexico. And there wasn’t one but TWO UAP’S that crashed that day .

  4. Pierre Tristam says

    September 16, 2023 at 7:52 am

    Those were my great uncle twice removed’s luggage, lost on a Pan Am flight.

  5. DaleL says

    September 16, 2023 at 10:46 am

    Our planet is something like 4.5 billion years old. For nearly 300 million years, (Permain era to a few thousand years ago.), it was prime real estate with no intelligent species to contest settlement. Our limited knowledge of both solar and extra-solar planets seems to indicate that only a small percentage have life and are highly habitable. If there are actually space faring aliens, who have the technology to travel great interstellar distances, why did they not colonize Earth during those 300 million years? If they had, we would not have evolved; we would not be here to even ask that question.

    It is a statistic certainty that there are other habitable planets scattered through our galaxy. It is also statistically certain that on some of them intelligent aliens would have evolved. Since these aliens did not make it here, it is reasonable to conclude that there is no convenient short cut to star travel (wormhole or warp drive). At the sub-light speeds we can reasonably achieve, exploration is limited to only our immediate stellar neighborhood. (Even a 1% the speed of light, an unbelievable 6.7 million miles per hour, a trip to Proxima Centauri would take 425 years!)

    We are probably not alone in our galaxy, but we might as well be.

  6. Pierre Tristam says

    September 16, 2023 at 11:23 am

    To take Dale’s point a bit further: what if aliens from the leeward side of the galaxy (or any galaxy) were to arrive tomorrow on their version of Spirit Airlines. Would we really want to risk that? Given that all creatures made in god’s image tend to be rapaciously destructive and intolerant of anything unlike them, chances are those aliens would be more like those of “Independence Day” than those of Close Encounters or the Gandhi-like E.T. (Mahatma, not Indira). We have enough of those aliens here on Earth, here in Flagler County, to last us a few generations, assuming our pitiful species makes it that far. I’ll pass on exoplanetary beings.

  7. Michael Cocchiola says

    September 16, 2023 at 12:36 pm

    Oh, yeah, so how does NASA explain Trump… the hair, the um, body, the out-of-this-world claims and lies? How about Boebert, MTG, Gaetz, Hawley, Jordan, and Giuliani?

    They’re extraterrestrial moles I tell you. Alien moles!

  8. DaleL says

    September 16, 2023 at 12:39 pm

    Or perhaps the aliens would be like those depicted in the TV show, the Twilight Zone, Season 3, episode 24, “To Serve Man”.

    The late physicist Stephen Hawking said: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” He argues that, instead of trying to find and communicate with life in the cosmos, humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid contact. (2010)

  9. Pierre Tristam says

    September 16, 2023 at 12:43 pm

    I knew I was borrowing someone else’s idea, I thought it was Freeman Dyson. Thank you for the clarification.

  10. DaleL says

    September 16, 2023 at 1:22 pm

    That could explain how Marjorie Taylor Greene knew about the space lasers! Either they told her, or she’s also an extraterrestrial as well. Until they provide their legitimate birth (or hatching) certificates, to our satisfaction, I think we must consider them all space aliens.

    Snopes: “In a now-deleted Facebook post, Greene suggested that laser beams from space may have started the 2018 California wildfires, and that among the entities behind this conspiracy were former California Gov. Jerry Brown, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Rothschild Inc., an investment firm frequently targeted by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.”

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