Astrocomical ends

JENNY RANDLES says ufology needs to keep up with the science of UAPs or risk being sidelined

Perceiving UFOs as novel phenomena occurring within our atmosphere, as they are by any reasonable definition, appears both common sense and good science. But as we saw last month, it took a long time for UFO investigators and scientists to reach that sensible starting point amid much mutual distrust. Indeed, while they eventually did so, they still seem reluctant to credit one another with sound reasoning or to trust the ‘other side’ at all when dealing with what we now call UAP: Unidentified Atmospheric (or Aerial) Phenomena.

Assuming as a start point that UAP are machines constructed on another world to fly across vast reaches of the galaxy and kidnap someone driving home, scare the heck out of them and promptly ‘fly off’ is – when you put it like that – a bit of a stretch, and not what someone thinking objectively would choose as a primary hypothesis. It’s akin to finding a preferred theory and looking for anything to prove it, as opposed to collating data and following scientific method wherever it may lead – which would reasonably see the UAP concept as the right starting point; let’s first eliminate the scientifically possible before tiptoeing into la-la land.

Happily, we do now seem to have reached the point of recognising that UAP are real; we have evidence supporting them and agree that before we go hunting for little green men it might be wise to figure out the cause of the little green blobs of energy in the atmosphere that may or may not pose a threat to the extensive air traffic crisscrossing our skies.

That threat definitely exists. In a coming issue I will look at some of the possible instances outside of the UFO records where a UAP might indeed have constituted a major threat to life, and how the UAP/UFO divide might have too long delayed sensible research that could save lives.

However, for now we do have some good news. The footage of UAP made public in the US two or three years ago – as discussed in these pages by Nigel Watson and myself – has shaken both the military and scientists out of their slumber over whether to take ‘UFO’ data seriously.

Professor Carol Cleland at the University of Boulder in Colorado is one scientist who has made the shift. As a girl, she was fascinated by science fiction and became a UFO enthusiast, collating reports in a scrapbook, just as many UFO investigators (me included) did back in the day. However, she abandoned her active interest in ufology after she entered the realms of academia, and it’s not hard to see why. The divide between what science does and what ufology proclaims is often a gulf too wide to breach.

Her university has a very close association with UFOs: it was where the Condon report, which ended the days of Project Blue Book and all ‘official’ US government interest in UFOs, was based in the late 1960s. I had the good fortune to drive there with Dr J Allen Hynek – Blue Book’s science adviser throughout its existence (as recently seen on TV, very loosely dramatised in two series of Project Blue Book with Aidan Gillen as Hynek). In 1983 (just three years before Cleland arrived there as a young postgrad) I met some of the scientists at the Boulder complex who were involved in the study, and through Allen’s eyes saw why he felt they had let a big opportunity slip through the hands of proper scientific research. Giving up legitimate UFO science left it to the conspiracy theorists, which is why Hynek and others then formed the Center for UFO Studies to try to redress the balance.

Cleland is now living her dream as part of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) team, where she engages in the scientific search for life ‘out there’. She admits that as a young UFO enthusiast she was driven by the hope that these reports described alien visitors, as this seemed a reasonable possibility to consider. Indeed, it was for a time – but the gap between a scientist and a ufologist seems to be

– as she soon discovered – knowing the difference between possibility and reality and understanding the kind of evidence you need, beyond hope or expectation, to separate one from the other.

Even so, she agrees that the images captured off the Pacific coast by military aircraft with sophisticated cameras and technology are key and have transformed the debate on UAP from an academic one to one based on hard science. Cleland thinks that, as of now, no known atmospheric phenomenon can explain them. I agree; but the next step for a scientist should be to ask what other kind of novel atmospheric phenomenon (UAP) might these things represent? SETI would only be a consideration if these others were off the table. Either way, science is at long last embracing the UFO (or UAP) mystery and that is a very good thing.

I mooted a plan in a recent column in which the UFO community would coordinate a team of high-spec video cameras trained on the sky, especially in known areas of UAP activity. In this way, remote surveillance could transform investigation from the old skywatch days that older UFO enthusiasts will recall – a modern way of upping our game. Needless to say, nothing came of my suggestion. There is no coordination left to any UK-based UFO investigation these days – just random pockets of Internet activity.

Elsewhere, however, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has seriously argued that a strangely shaped object a few hundred feet long that passed through our Solar System in 2017 and was named ‘Oumuamua ( FT404:14) might have been an unmanned extraterrestrial probe sent across deep space looking for ‘alien’ life – that life being us! While many scientists dispute that option, and the debate goes on as to what the rocky object really was, it has nonetheless helped attract finance of $1.7 million from rich backers, allowing Loeb to announce Project Galileo ( FT410:30, 414:6-7) – a network of small, high resolution telescopes located globally and set up to record the sky remotely, hoping to capture a definitive image of what we used to call a UFO. Of course, what I had suggested was nothing like as sophisticated – though in our case money was a barrier as vast as space.

Nonetheless, we are on the verge of a major breakthrough in the legitimisation of this phenomenon, one that UFO researchers whose minds are stuck in the 1950s need to embrace swiftly; if they don’t, then science alone will run with it and take over the subject we have researched for many years. If we’re not careful, we will (deservedly) forfeit all input into the understanding of the UFO mystery and become merely an astrocomical footnote, bystanders in the history of our own subject. It’s now or never for ufology to make that final step into the real world…