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Oct 28, 2023 · Seager believes we'd confirm the existence of alien life only with sample-return missions — collecting samples from another planet or moon and bringing them back to Earth for study, in-situ...
- Patrick Pester
- Overview
- 1947-1969: Project Blue Book
- 1995: A U.S. senator takes interest
- 2004: An encounter off San Diego
- 2007: A new Pentagon investigation
- 2014: A near-collision on the East Coast
- 2017: Going public
- 2020: A scientific call to action
- 2021: DNI report
- 2022: NASA jumps in to investigate
Mysterious flying objects. Claims of crashed alien spacecrafts. The U.S. has spent decades inquiring into the unknown—here's what they've learned.
This image released by the U.S. Department of Defense shows a 2004 encounter between two Navy fighter jets and an unknown object near San Diego. But are UFO sightings like this one a sign of extraterrestrial life, spies from a rival nation—or just weird weather?
There’s something strange going on in the sky, but what?
Unidentified flying objects are much in the news lately after a whistleblower claimed that the United States had discovered the remains of a crashed alien spacecraft.
The Pentagon denied the report, but the U.S. Congress remained interested—and, in June, the House Oversight Committee announced it will hold a hearing on UFOS—or as the U.S. government calls them, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs). “In addition to recent claims by a whistleblower,” a committee spokesperson said, “reports continue to surface regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena.”
Such reports have been surfacing for decades. The modern era of UFO sightings and investigations started after World War II with a sudden surge of unexplained reports.
Over the course of two decades, the U.S. Air Force cataloged 12,618 sightings of UFOs as part of what is now known as Project Blue Book. These include lights, objects, and unexplained radar readings reported by military and civilian pilots, weather observers, astronomers and other sources.
The project came to an end in 1969 after a study by the University of Colorado concluded there was no evidence that UFOs came from other worlds, and that most sightings could be explained by natural phenomena, or even hoaxes. “Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” said the study leader, Edward U. Condon. Further investigation, he said, “cannot be justified.”
The Condon report didn’t put an end to interest in UFOs. So-called “UFOlogists” spent the next few decades filing open records requests with federal agencies to uncover what was known about the sightings.
(The legend of Area 51—and why it still fascinates us.)
In 1995, businessman Robert Bigelow convened a small group in Las Vegas to discuss the possibility of alien life: He called the group the National Institute for Discovery Science. Participants included two former astronauts, Ed Mitchell and Harrison Schmitt, and one sitting U.S. senator: Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada.
“A lot of people said it would ruin my career,” Reid later said. That didn’t quite happen: Reid would eventually become a key figure in driving the U.S. government’s investigation of UFOs.
In November 2004, two Navy pilots on a training mission were ordered to intercept a mysterious craft. They saw—and captured on video—an unusual oval-shaped craft, about 40 feet long, hovering over the Pacific Ocean about a hundred miles off San Diego. It streaked away before the pilots could get near. “I have no idea what I saw,” said one of the pi...
With backing from Reid—now the U.S. Senate’s majority leader—the Pentagon launched the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to investigate the latest round of sightings.
“What was considered science fiction is now science fact,” the agency said in briefing papers. The program was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, and worked hand-in-hand with an aerospace research company run by Bigelow.
In a series of incidents during this time, Navy pilots reported—and made video recordings—of a series of encounters with unidentified craft near Florida and Virginia that could reach high altitudes and hypersonic speeds. One pilot reported a near-collision in 2014. Another later told 60 Minutes that the craft were hard to explain. “You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I don't know. I don't know what it is, frankly.”
One possibility? Surveillance craft from another country.
These incidents and investigations mostly went unreported to the broader public—until December 2017, when the New York Times reported the existence of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Although Pentagon officials said the program had ended in 2012, Elizondo told the paper he continued its work informally with cooperation from the Navy and CIA until his resignation in the fall of 2017.
That sparked a new wave of interest in UFOs among the public, the media, and even scientists.
In July 2020, Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq-Misra—a NASA scientist and astrobiologist, respectively—wrote in Scientific American that it was time to revisit the conclusions of the Condon report. “Perhaps some, or even most, UAP events are simply classified military aircraft, or strange weather formations, or other misidentified mundane phenomena,” they wrote. “However, there are still a number of truly puzzling cases that might be worth investigating.”
(Here's where earthbound travelers can search for extraterrestrial life.)
In April 2021, the Navy confirmed video of unidentified objects “buzzing” U.S. warships near California. The incident would be added to the list of sightings under investigation.
In June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released its “preliminary assessment” of UFO sightings from 2004 to 2021. The report suggested that the UFOs—now known as UAPs—could fall into five likely categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, public and private aerospace developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, “and a catchall ‘other’ bin.” More funding and reporting was needed, the report said.
In April 2022, the Pentagon announced the formation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to investigate objects “that might pose a threat to national security.”
The following June, NASA announced it was setting up an independent study program to cover the issue from a scientific perspective. “We will be identifying what data—from civilians, government, nonprofits, companies—exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyze it,” said David Spergel, the study team leader.
- Joel Mathis
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- Is E.T. phoning us from Proxima Centauri? The answer to weird signals happening in the universe is never aliens, until maybe it is. Earlier this month, researchers announced that they had captured a very mysterious beam of energy in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum at 980 megahertz, coming from the closest star to our own.
- Alien bacteria might live in the clouds of Venus. Astrobiologists were a-twitter with anticipation and skepticism in September when news broke of potential evidence of life in the upper clouds of Venus.
- 'Oumuamua could still be an alien artifact. Two years ago, scientists spotted a cigar-shaped object hurtling through the solar system. Dubbed 'Oumuamua, the entity is considered by most to be an interstellar comet flung out from around another star.
- Navy declassifies UFO videos but don't believe the hype. A fair number of Earthlings don't care what ambiguous evidence scientists come up with to show that aliens are out there.
Apr 15, 2024 · 10 min read. If Alien Life Is Found, How Should Scientists Break the News? At a recent workshop, researchers and journalists debated how to announce a potential discovery of extraterrestrial...
- Flying Saucers. The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane.
- The Roswell UFO Incident. The same year that Arnold saw the flying objects, rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel came across a mysterious 200-yard long wreckage near an Army airfield in Roswell, New Mexico.
- Project Blue Book. Sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force began an investigation of these reports called Project Sign.
- The Robertson Panel and the Condon Report. An American obsession with the UFO phenomenon was under way. In the hot summer of 1952, a provocative series of radar and visual sightings occurred near National Airport in Washington, D.C.
Nov 25, 2023 · Aliens are having a moment. But the evidence says all possibilities remain in play, including the possibility that we are alone.
Mar 12, 2024 · Alien life, if it exists, has not made itself easily known. Early attempts to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called Seti, began in the mid-20th Century, with astronomers looking in vain ...
