Continued reporting by the widely respected New York Times provides fact-checked discussion of materials possibly retrieved from UFOs.
Do We Believe in U.F.O.s? That’s the Wrong Question
Reporting on the Pentagon program that’s investigating unidentified flying objects is not about belief. It’s about a vigilant search for facts.
By
Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
We were part of The New York Times’s team (with the Washington correspondent Helene Cooper) that broke the story of the Pentagon’s long-secret unit investigating unidentified flying objects, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, in December 2017.
Since then, we have reported on
Navy pilots’ close encounters with U.F.O.s, and last week, on the current revamped program, the
Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force and its official briefings — ongoing for more than a decade — for intelligence officials, aerospace executives and Congressional staff on reported U.F.O. crashes and retrieved materials.
We’re often asked by well-meaning associates and readers, “Do you believe in U.F.O.s?” The question sets us aback as being inappropriately personal. Times reporters are particularly averse to revealing opinions that could imply possible reporting bias.
But in this case we have no problem responding, “No, we don’tbelieve in U.F.O.s.”
As we see it, their existence, or nonexistence, is not a matter of belief.
We admire what the great anthropologist Margaret Mead said when asked long ago whether she believed in U.F.O.s. She called it “a silly question,” writing in Redbook in 1974:
“Belief has to do with matters of faith; it has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge that is based on scientific inquiry. … Do people believe in the sun or the moon, or the changing seasons, or the chairs they’re sitting on? When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown to anyone, we have to begin with an entirely different set of questions. What is it? How does it work?”
That’s what the Pentagon U.F.O. program has been focusing on, making it eminently newsworthy. And to be clear: U.F.O.s don’t mean aliens. Unidentified means we don’t know what they are, only that they demonstrate capabilities that do not appear to be possible through currently available technology.
In our reporting, we’ve focused on how the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Intelligence and members of two Senate committees are engaged with this topic. Current officials are now concerned about the potential threat represented by the very real, advanced technological objects: how close they can come to our fighter jets, sometimes causing a near miss, and the risk that our adversaries may acquire the technology demonstrated by the objects before we do.
So if U.F.O.s are no longer a matter of belief, what are they and how do they do what they do?
And if technology has been retrieved from downed objects, what better way to try to understand how they work?
Our previous stories were relatively easy to document with Department of Defense videos of U.F.O.s and pilot eyewitness accounts backed up by Navy hazard reports of close encounters with small speeding objects.
But our latest article provided a more daunting set of challenges, since we dealt with the possible existence of retrieved materials from U.F.O.s. Going from data on a distant object in the sky to the possession of a retrieved one on the ground makes a leap that many find hard to accept and that clearly demands extraordinary evidence.
Numerous associates of the Pentagon program, with high security clearances and decades of involvement with official U.F.O. investigations, told us they were convinced such crashes have occurred, based on their access to classified information. But the retrieved materials themselves, and any data about them, are completely off-limits to anyone without clearances and a need to know.
The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program has been using unclassified slides like this to brief government officials on threats from Advanced Aerospace Vehicles — “including off-world” — and materials retrieved from crashes of unidentified phenomena.Credit...Leslie Kean
We were provided a series of unclassified slides showing that the program took this seriously enough to include it in numerous briefings. One slide says one of the program’s tasks was to “arrange for access to data/reports/materials from crash retrievals of A.A.V.’s,” or advanced aerospace vehicles.
Our sources told us that “A.A.V.” does not refer to vehicles made in any country — not Russian or Chinese — but is used to mean technology in the realm of the truly unexplained. They also assure us that their briefings are based on facts, not belief.
Ralph Blumenthal was a Times reporter from 1964 to 2009. Leslie Kean has written a book and articles on U.F.O.s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/insider/UFO-reporting.html
EDIT:
And now Scientific American has something to say.
POLICY & ETHICS | OPINION
‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,’ Better Known as UFOs, Deserve Scientific Investigation
UAP are a scientifically interesting problem. Interdisciplinary teams of scientists should study them
UFOs have been back in the news because of videos initially
leaked, and later
confirmed, by the U.S. Navy and
officially released by Pentagon that purportedly show "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP) in our skies. Speculations about their nature have
run the gamut from mundane objects like birds or balloons to visitors from outer space.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to say what these actually are, however, without context. What happened before and after these video snippets? Were there any simultaneous observations from other instruments, or sightings by pilots?
Judging the nature of these objects (and these seem to be “objects,” as
confirmed by the Navy) needs a coherent explanation that should accommodate and connect
all the facts of the events. And this is where interdisciplinary scientific investigation is needed.
The proposal to scientifically study UAP phenomena is not new. The problem of understanding such unexplained UAP cases drew interest by scientists during the 1960s, which resulted in the U.S. Air Force funding a group at the University of Colorado, headed by physicist Edward Condon, to study UAP from 1966 to 1968. The resulting Condon Report concluded that further study of UAP was unlikely to be scientifically interesting—a conclusion that drew mixed reactions from scientists and the public.
Concerns over the inadequacy of the methods used by the Condon Report culminated with a
congressional hearing in 1968 as well as a
debatesponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1969 with participation by scholars such as Carl Sagan, J. Allen Hynek, James McDonald, Robert Hall and Robert Baker. Hynek was an astronomy professor at the Ohio State University and led the
Project Blue Book investigation, while McDonald, who was a well-known meteorologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and AAAS, performed a thorough investigation of UAP phenomena. Sagan, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, was one of the organizers of the AAAS debate. He dismissed the extraterrestrial hypothesis as unlikely but still considered the UAP subject worthy of scientific inquiry.
Recent UAP sightings, however, have so far failed to generate similar interest among the scientific community. Part of the reason could be the apparent taboo around UAP phenomena, connecting it to the paranormal or pseudoscience, while ignoring the history behind it. Sagan even wrote in the afterword of the 1969 debate proceedings about the “strong opposition” by other scientists who were “convinced that AAAS sponsorship would somehow lend credence to ‘unscientific’ ideas.” As scientists we must simply let scientific curiosity be the spearhead of understanding such phenomena. We should be cautious of outright dismissal by assuming that every UAP phenomena must be explainable.
Why should astronomers, meteorologists, or planetary scientists care about these events? Shouldn’t we just let image analysts, or radar observation experts, handle the problem? All good questions, and rightly so. Why should we care? Because we are scientists. Curiosity is the reason we became scientists. In the current interdisciplinary collaborative environment, if someone (especially a fellow scientist) approaches us with an unsolved problem beyond our area of expertise, we usually do our best to actually contact other experts within our professional network to try and get some outside perspective. The best-case outcome is that we work on a paper or a proposal with our colleague from another discipline; the worst case is that we learn something new from a colleague in another discipline. Either way, curiosity helps us to learn more and become scientists with broader perspectives.
So, what should be the approach? If a scientific explanation is desired, one needs an interdisciplinary approach to address the combined observational characteristics of UAP, rather than isolating one aspect of the event. Furthermore, UAP phenomena are not U.S.-specific events. They are a worldwide occurrence. Several other countries studied them. So shouldn’t we as scientists choose to investigate and curb the speculation around them?
A systematic investigation is essential in order to bring the phenomena into mainstream science. First, collection of hard data is paramount to establishing any credibility to the explanation of the phenomena. A rigorous scientific analysis is sorely needed, by multiple independent study groups, just as we do for evaluating other scientific discoveries. We, as scientists, cannot hastily dismiss any phenomenon without in-depth examination and then conclude the event itself is unscientific.
Such an approach would certainly not pass the “smell test” in our day-to-day science duties, so these kinds of arguments similarly should not suffice to explain UAP. We must insist on strict agnosticism. We suggest an approach that is purely rational: UAP represent observations that are puzzling and waiting to be explained. Just like any other science discovery.
The transient nature of UAP events, and hence the unpredictability about when and where the next event will happen, is likely one of the main reasons why UAP have not been taken seriously in science circles. But, how can one identify a pattern without systematically collecting the data in the first place? In astronomy, the observations (location and timing) of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), supernovae and gravitational waves are similarly unpredictable. However, we now recognize them as natural phenomena arising from stellar evolution.
How did we develop detailed and complex mathematical models that could explain these natural phenomena? By a concerted effort from scientists around the world, who meticulously collected data from each occurrence of the event and systematically observed them. We
still cannot predict when and where such astronomical events will occur in the sky.
But we understand to an extent the nature of GRBs, supernovae and gravitational waves. How? Because we have not dismissed the phenomena or the people who observed them. We studied them. Astronomers have tools, so they can share the data they collected, even if some question their claim. Similarly, we need tools to observe UAP; radar, thermal, and visual observations will be immensely helpful. We must repeat here that this is a
global phenomenon. Perhaps some, or even most, UAP events are simply classified military aircraft, or strange weather formations, or other misidentified mundane phenomena. However, there are still a number of truly puzzling cases that might be worth investigating.
Of course, not all scientists need to make UAP investigation a part of their research portfolio. For those who do, discarding the taboo surrounding this phenomenon would help in developing interdisciplinary teams of motivated individuals who can begin genuine scientific inquiry.
A template to perform a thorough scientific investigation can be found in James McDonald’s paper “
Science in Default.” While he entertains the conclusion that these events could be extraterrestrials (which we do not subscribe to), McDonald’s methodology itself is a great example of objective scientific analysis. And this is exactly what we as scientists can do to study these events.
As Sagan concluded at the 1969 debate, “scientists are particularly bound to have open minds; this is the lifeblood of science.” We do not know what UAP are, and this is precisely the reason that we as scientists should study them.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of NASA or their employers
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...own-as-ufos-deserve-scientific-investigation/
