NASA to investigate UAPs - what are they, and are they real?

NASA recently held a press teleconference where they announced that they will be investigating UAPs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This is a new term being used instead of UFOs, given that UFO suffers from both not being very descriptive (Unidentified things people see in the sky might not be Flying, and they might not be Objects - planets, clouds and aurora are often mistakenly thought to be mysterious objects, but none of them are flying; and the Northern and Southern aurora aren't objects, just cool light shows caused by solar particles), and having a lot of baggage attached to it - when people read UFO, they instantly think aliens. Here's NASA announcing their project:

Of course, many people think that this is vindication of the idea that aliens are not only real, but they're also visiting us - organising fly-bys at night, abducting people and cows, and implanting us with alien microchips. But when we look with a skeptical eye at this idea, it quickly falls apart. I often like to look at a) the plausibility and b) the evidence for an extraordinary claim, and in this case both are flimsy at best.

Firstly, the plausibility of aliens visiting earth is pretty low...

I accept that it's plausible, maybe even likely, that there are aliens out there in the universe right now. Astrophysicist Frank Drake created what's known as the Drake Equation, which is a simple multiplication of numbers, such as the number of stars in an average galaxy and the number of galaxies in the known universe, and probabilities, like the probability of a star having a habitable planet. There's a lot of guesswork still in some of the numbers, but the upshot is that it's perfectly acceptable to believe that there will be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe at this point in time.

However, from everything we know of physics and astronomy, it's very, very unlikely that any life elsewhere in the universe would know we exist, and if they did that they would be able to travel the huge distances involved between stars to get here. Star Trek, Star Wars and most other science fiction has been lying to you - there's never going to be a warp drive, hyperdrive or any other way of travelling faster than light. And despite what some popular science books might tell you about how Einstein-Rosen bridges (wormholes) could be used for interstellar travel, it seems unlikely that these currently theoretical constructs could ever be used in a practical way to travel long distances. And sadly, in the real world even getting to 1% of the speed of light would be a massive feat of engineering (the current fastest man-made object in space is unmanned, and travelling at 0.05% of the speed of light).

At 1% of the speed of light, travelling from our closest star (4 light years away) would take 400 years - in what's known as a generation ship, where the ship would have to be capable of being totally self sufficient (another massive technical feat) and allow its inhabitants to live as a community for generations - whoever's on board at the start of the journey would be long dead by the time their great great great, etc grandchildren arrive at their destination. And, of course, that is only for the nearest star, which is unlikely to have planets with intelligent life. The Drake Equation tells us that it's more likely the closest planets with intelligent life will be thousands of light years away in our galaxy. And, if life is rare enough that it would be in another galaxy, that's another huge hurdle - as the distances between galaxies are mind boggling. Our galaxy is around 100,000 light years across, but it's about 3 million light years to our nearest decently sized neighbour - Andromeda.

Secondly, the evidence for UFOs is not great either...

As part of a COVID Relief bill, Donald Trump signed into law legislation that forced the Department of Defence to release a report on all the unidentified sightings it had amassed over the years. This report, and the videos it contained, led to a flurry of activity where people who think aliens are all around us somehow managed to be featured on US news shows as “experts”. These experts made all sorts of fantastical claims about how video footage was evidence of advanced technology in the skies that couldn't possibly have been made by humans.

However, these videos have already been debunked online. Several YouTubers have taken on the task of figuring out what can explain the sightings in some of the most “compelling” videos. And the explanations are both believable and mundane - the main culprits include birds, clouds and aeroplanes, as well as some lens flare and other tricks of the light.

So, what have NASA said they're going to get from this study? Well, in the teleconference they claim that maybe they'll learn some new scientific phenomena. This seems unlikely, but I can accept that there's a possibility some of the recorded anomalous sightings could be caused by a natural process we don't yet understand - maybe an undiscovered way that light might bounce off a cloud, for example. They also say that they may learn about advanced technology being used by other countries. This I find less believable, as I'm pretty sure the DoD will be much better placed than NASA to figure out if any of the videos contain evidence of other countries' advanced military hardware.

My thought is that NASA's reason for doing this is probably not because they think there's any merit to claims of UFO (or UAP) sightings, or even that there's something valuable to be learned from the kinds of sightings that have been collected. I'm guessing that NASA's not going to make any friends by just ignoring the recent public interest in UFOs and hoping it goes away. Instead, if they're seen to be treating it seriously, they can say that they aren't ignoring the evidence - they're not just being armchair skeptics and dismissing people's concerns that the truth is being hidden from them. The fact that NASA - a $25 billion a year organisation - has committed “up to” $100,000 to this project, suggests that it's not something they're taking too seriously.

Having listened to the three capable scientists in the press meeting talking about what they're planning to do, and how they're planning to be scientific and methodical, I'm pretty sure that if this initial study ends up with any actual research being done, they're going to conclude that none of the UAP evidence that's out there is evidence of E.T. visiting us. They'll likely just show how there are perfectly rational and terrestrial explanations for what's in the videos. Dr Thomas Z (Zurbuchen) made a really good point about how the scientific method is the best tool we have for looking at questions like this one, as well as many others:

“One of the outcomes of the study for me would be to communicate to everybody that the science process is a valid process for any and all problems, including that one… These kinds of processes that have proven to be so transformative for how we understand our universe are very much useful including for those problems”

One thing that stood out in the conference was the great pains that everyone went to to claim that they haven't been pressured by NASA's current administrator, the man at the top, Bill Nelson. Given that Bill Nelson has previously talked to the media about how he believes some UFO sightings may be evidence of alien visitors, and also somehow squeezed Jesus into a speech he gave when the James Webb telescope was launched, I'm wondering if maybe he's had some influence over this, despite the proactive denials.

As well as being confident NASA will conclude the evidence that's out there doesn't prove aliens are here, I'm also confident that the UFO community will respond by putting their fingers in their ears and saying “Na na na na, I can't hear you”, and continuing to claim that pictures of dustbin lids thrown into the air are evidence that UFOs are real.