Look up at the sky! It’s a bird! Airplanes, weather balloons, rockets and satellites. No wait! Is it — an interstellar probe from somewhere in the galaxy?
As always, Earth’s skies are full of mysteries. There is no shortage of possible explanations that do not evoke alien civilizations frolicking among the stars. It has continued throughout history, from Biblical tales of encounters with angels to more modern accounts of flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
But aside from the recent rebranding of UFOs to the more neutral term “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP)”, not everything is the same about the longstanding issue of strange aerial phenomena. Combined waves of technological innovation have greatly increased and proliferated the capabilities of flying machines, especially remote-controlled drones. And smartphones and other sophisticated data-gathering devices are now almost ubiquitous. Today, pilots, military personnel and civilians have more ways than ever to observe and record strange events in the skies. It is therefore not surprising that UAP reports and the systematic efforts to investigate them appear to be increasing in tandem.
In the United States, encounters with the UAP and growing government interest are evident, published Jan. 12 Uncategorized version Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Report to Congress on UAP. His ODNI report going forward will be published annually, as required by legislation recently passed by UAP-savvy legislators. “This increase in reporting provides more opportunities to apply rigorous analysis to resolve events,” said a recently released report by ODNI. The agency was established last year by the Department of Defense to synchronize all of its various efforts to study past and current reports of “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, underwater, and ultra-medium objects.” Coordinated with Resolution Authority (AARO). and associated national security implications.
Beyond the defense realm, other parts of the U.S. government are also ramping up UAP investigations. Last year, NASA launched her 16-member UAP Research Team of Excellence. The team seeks to advance our scientific understanding of the UAP by scrutinizing the vast archives and assets of space agencies and other private and commercial data sources for relevant sightings. The team’s nine-month independent study of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon is well underway. It is intended to develop a roadmap of recommendations for possible further NASA UAP research and a subsequent public report detailing the results.
Add to this, one might conclude, that the combination of a diverse, growing and active private sector research effort is witnessing a bold new era in UAP research. Again, success is not guaranteed. If pushing more and better research does not lead to meaningful breakthroughs, this ‘Bold New Era’ will be remembered as a time when serious re-engagement with UAPs went nowhere fast. There is a possibility.
a million blurry images
Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, former chair of the university’s astronomy department, and current director of the Galileo project, said: The latter effort, launched in July 2021, has already built and deployed sensitive astronomical instruments to jam the UAP’s scientific measurements.
Last December, the project’s research team began collecting high-quality scientific data at a custom-built observatory temporarily installed on the roof of the Harvard University Observatory. Built at a total cost of about $300,000, the observatory can capture continuous video of the sky in infrared, optical, and radio bands, as well as record ambient sounds. The plan is to analyze the data with artificial intelligence algorithms before making the results available to the scientific community and the general public, says Loeb. As a first step, the team drafted a paper describing the project’s methods and goals and submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal.
“We plan to make three copies of this system in the spring of 2023 and deploy them wherever we want as we continue testing the first system at Harvard University,” says Loeb. “He needs tens of millions of dollars to get 100 such systems to get enough statistics on UAPs in the next few years.”
The Galileo project’s likely UAP haul will prove to be a “mixed bag,” he says, with most events associated with human-made or natural terrestrial phenomena.
“The reason they have not been identified is that the US government does not have data of sufficient quality to decipher their nature,” adds Loeb. “The only way to advance our knowledge of the nature of UAPs is to collect high-quality data from instruments that are fully calibrated and deliver reproducible results.”
The need for rigor goes hand in hand with the wildest notion of the most unusual UAPs observed. In other words, regardless of their origin, UAPs are products of “new” physics that go beyond what defines our scientific understanding of reality. Rough data cannot test such a serious possibility, argues Loeb. “The hurdles for such discoveries are very high, and conventional interpretations have to be proven to fail,” he says. “Only the highest quality data can remove reasonable doubt.”
Setting standards
But that demand for impeccable data is likely to find itself increasingly in tension with the growing number of amateur investigative efforts to document UAPs.
For example, UAPx is a Florida-based non-profit organization that specializes in UAP scientific research. Its team includes physicists, engineers and other experts. And, similar to the Galileo project, we will deploy equipment with customized sensors in search of more data. UAPx instruments include infrared, visible and ultraviolet cameras and spectrometers. In July 2021, a UAPx team member trucked the sensor to his alleged UAP hotspot Catalina Channel off the coast of California. Data collected during the five-day outing revealed “potential anomalous activity,” say UAPx team members, but the group has yet to release the full results.
As with other relatively grassroots UAP research efforts, the non-governmental nature of the organization and the “giggle factor” associated with its research topic have contributed to the pedigree of UAPx as a stable source of high-quality data and analysis. has proven difficult to establish.
Matthew Szydagis, a member of the UAPx team and associate professor of physics at the State University of New York at Albany, characterizes the problem as a lack of cohesion. “Governments, military, scientists, and civilians all have their own reporting methods and standards, and those that obtain their own data all use different technologies,” he observes. How can anyone move forward against such a hodgepodge?
“With UAPx, our solution is to look only at our data,” says Szydagis. “A myriad of other non-governmental organizations have examined sightings and other data, making UAPx’s mission inherently complementary.”
Another data-driven approach comes from Enigma Labs, a New York City-based private company that develops a mobile platform for crowdsourcing UAP reports. The company’s newly launched smartphone app provides both a repository of approximately 270,000 historical sightings from the last 100 years and a way for users to record, upload and rate new sightings. Each observation is subject to an “enigma score”, a rating from 1 to 100 that depends on various factors such as the number and distribution of witnesses and the conceptual quality of the data collected.
“To take in the hundreds of thousands of sightings reported in each country and learn from past sightings to build a standardized reporting model that makes sightings around the world comparable, queryable and accessible. ,” says Chief Operating Officer Mark Douglas. of the Enigma Labs.
According to Douglas, one of the company’s most important goals is to educate the public about UAPs. isn’t it By highlighting instances of false identity where observers were baffled by balloon-carrying lanterns, flying satellites, falling space debris, and even fireworks-clad skydivers showing off their aerial acrobatics. . “We hope that by doing so, the overall quality of the report will improve,” he concludes.
Whistleblower Recruitment
According to Leslie Keene, a veteran investigative reporter who has covered UFOs and UAPs for decades, the most important short-term advances on the topic have come from Capitol Hill, not science labs or smartphone apps. It is highly likely that Thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, the next year and a half should be the time to be ready for her UAP revelations, she says. Please come forward.
Keen says the process has already begun. “A person who has signed a confidentiality agreement related to the UAP is now free to disclose previously protected information to AARO and Congress without fear of reprisal or prosecution,” he said. explains Mr.
A congressional committee can then make efforts to verify the information provided by the whistleblower. Keane foresees that this could include recovering material from crashed UFOs and traditional investigative programs that go back decades. “Of course, we do not know how much of the information provided will be made public,” she adds. “Some of it could have national security implications and should be put on hold.” It helps verify previous reports from good eyewitnesses.
give me more money
Ultimately, of course, law alone is not the most important factor in solving the UAP mystery. We need better data. But no one can really predict when or when those data will arrive.
“History shows that obtaining strong evidence related to UAP is no trivial matter,” said a director of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Research, an organization that advocates for more rigorous UAP investigations. says Robert Powell. Understanding the phenomenon requires more than just expecting a ton of data from an accidental UAP sighting, he says.
“Congress must allocate funding to the scientific community to solve the UAP mystery,” concludes Powell. “It won’t be easy. The military has been investigating this phenomenon intermittently for his 75 years. Where have we been? We need change.”
Thanks to the continued proliferation of scientific research and data-gathering projects, and the efforts of US whistleblowers and lawmakers, perhaps 2023 will be the time Powell and his associates crave change.
