They’re here…?
The distances between stars indicate that interstellar travel is not feasible at our level of science. The chances of having intelligent life on any of our solar planets is unimaginably small. How, therefore, is it credible that beings intelligent enough to build flying machines could be seen over the Earth?
It is unlikely that they are all lenticular clouds which are shaped like ‘flying saucers’. During the Second World War, RAF pilots reported what later became known as “Foo Fighters” which overflew some aerial combats and which flew at high speed but which were not recognised as being normal aircraft.
Since then, many ‘flying saucers’ have been reported, to such an extent that the US Air Force opened up their Project Blue Book which was later closed due to ‘lack of credible evidence’. About 700 of the more than 12,000 cases remained “unidentified” at the close of the project.
Despite this, distinguished scientists including astronomer Carl Sagan, physicist James E. McDonald and astronomer J. Allen Hynek thought UAP should be investigated scientifically. McDonald, a professor of meteorology and member of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted a rigorous analysis of a few UAP cases that Project Blue Book highlighted as unexplainable.
The US government is now re-opening that project. Why? It is unlikely that China, America, Europe or even Japan have the capability of producing craft capable of the speeds and acceleration reported in Blue Book. Is it possible that some of our laws of physics are wrong? Maybe we are looking in the wrong direction.
With a government report due in June on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and a recent “60 Minutes” story on U.S. Navy pilots’ sightings and videos of mysterious images, prominent people in politics, the military and national intelligence are finally asking: What are we looking at?
If we want to understand what UAP are, then we need to engage the mainstream scientific community in a concerted effort to study them.
Decades ago, the notion of serious research on UFOs wasn’t out of the question.
Without robust, credible data mined by mainstream scientists, UAP studies will always be viewed as fringe science. With a systematic collection of new data, and access to all existing data, we can apply scientific rigor to what has been observed and documented.
Ultimately, understanding UAP is a science problem. We should treat it that way.
Alan Stevenson spent four years in the Royal Australian Navy; four years at a seminary in Brisbane and the rest of his life in computers as an operator, programmer and systems analyst. His interests include popular science, travel, philosophy and writing for Open Forum.
