UFOs: The truth is still out there
After months of heated anticipation and leaks, the Pentagon has finally released a task force’s report into unidentified flying objects, said Daniel Politi in Slate.com. “And its big conclusion is that there is no conclusion.” The task force focused on 144 reports by military pilots since 2004 of encounters with UFOs, or as the military calls them, UAPs— unidentified aerial phenomena. The study found no evidence the UAPs were alien spacecraft, but offers “no good explanation for what they may have been.” The report essentially casts doubt on four possible explanations: a secret technology from an adversary, our own classified technology, “airborne clutter” such as weather balloons, and “natural atmospheric phenomena.” That leaves a fifth category, the suggestive catch-all “Other.” The government’s striking admission that it can’t explain the sightings is sure to “fuel conspiracy theorists and people convinced of the existence of extraterrestrial life.”
The report offers one particularly startling finding, said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in NewYorker.com. It said 80 of the sightings “involved observation with multiple sensors” and concluded that these UFOs were actual physical objects. And 18 of these objects demonstrated inexplicable capabilities, such as maneuvering abruptly or moving at intense speeds without obvious “means of propulsion.” The presence of 18 such recent cases “seems to suggest that ‘Other’ might not, after all, be a negligible bin.” These sightings probably have “mundane explanations,” said former Harvard University astronomy chair Avi Loeb in Scientific American.com, but we can’t rule out that they are spacecraft from alien civilizations so far advanced that their technology looks “magical” to us. It’s time for “the scientific community to take a closer look” by intensively studying the sky with our finest detection devices and computers.
Come on, said David Axe in TheDailyBeast.com. We may not know what these objects are, but “we can say with reasonable certainty what they’re not”—and that’s aliens. Why would extraterrestrials travel “galactic distances” to Earth, fly “loop-de-loops” around military jets, and then zip away “without making any effort to communicate”? After decades of unanswered questions, will this mystery ever be solved? asked astronomer Seth Shostak in NBCNews.com. If you’re disappointed, “take solace in the fact that the story is not over.” And “despite the fervent hopes of many, I’m not sure it ever will be.”