The recent release of a Pentagon report on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” generated the expected flurry of hyperbole from the media and the usual gaggle of quacks and pseudoscientists. “Pentagon says UFOs are real!” they gibbered.
Well, yes. “UFO” means, remember, Unidentified Flying Object. If they were identified, then they wouldn’t by defintion be UFOs. But just because they might be (currently) unidentified, does not mean that they must therefore be alien spacecraft.
Most of them are unidentified, almost certainly, for a simple reason: most people are simply crap at actually identifying aerial phenomena.
I got an object lesson in the ludicrous credulity around aerial phenomena, and the amazing inventiveness of eyewitnesses at “seeing” things they most certainly did not see, in the mid-90s.
Alighting from my morning commute in Melbourne’s CBD just before a winter sunrise, I glanced up at the sky as I habitually do, and noticed an unusual phenomenon: two bright lights in the pale sky. I recognised them at once as a conjunction of the planets Venus and Jupiter. A beautiful and unusual phenomenon, but entirely identifying.
Yet, by the time I arrived at the office, local radio was flooded with “UFO” sightings. People gibbered about seeing “a Mother Ship, with a smaller ship circling around it”. This was patent nonsense: even allowing for an over-excited imagination seeing a “Mother Ship” instead of a very bright star, the two objects were hanging apparently motionless in the sky. Nothing was “circling” anything.
This is why eyewitness testimony should be regarded with deep scepticism – whether UFOs or crimes (remember “Hands up, don’t shoot”?).
Some scientists are advocating a new, instrument-based project to seek out and identify UAP.
This is the rationale for the new Galileo Project that I initiated recently to scientifically explore the nature of UAP. The primary objective of this research endeavor is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.
This is a laudable enough goal. But then, SETI seemed the same. More recently, that project was questioned as pseudoscience, particularly on the question of falsifiability: because SETI is not trying, as science should, to disprove a hypothesis, but to prove a hypothesis which by its nature cannot be disproved.
So, it’s important that Galileo keeps its goal strictly scientific — trying to identify what UAP really are, rather than trying to find something they desperately want to find.
The Galileo Project follows three major avenues of research. The first involves obtaining high-resolution images of UAP using an array of dedicated small-aperture telescope at various geographical locations. Extensive artificial intelligence/deep learning (AI/DL) and algorithmic approaches are needed to differentiate atmospheric phenomena from birds, balloons, commercial aircraft or drones, and from potential technological objects of terrestrial or other origin surveying our planet, such as satellites[…]
The second goal of the Galileo Project involves searching for ‘Oumuamua-like interstellar objects. The project aims to utilize existing and future astronomical surveys, such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO), to discover and monitor the properties of interstellar visitors to the solar system. The research team will conceptualize and design a launch-ready space mission to image unusual interstellar objects such as ‘Oumuamua by intercepting their trajectories on their approach to the sun or by using ground-based survey telescopes to discover interstellar meteors.
Here, it should be stressed that there is no presumption that objects like ‘Oumuamua are alien spacecraft. ‘Oumuamua is an unusual object spotted in 2017, which is believed to be the first detected interstellar object passing through the Solar System. All the current evidence is that ‘Oumuamua is a splinter of rock and ice similar to Kuiper belt objects – the halo of leftover rubble of the protoplanetary disc that surrounded the infant Sun.
Then comes the kicker.
Finally, the Galileo Project will be searching for potential ETC satellites orbiting Earth. Discovering meter-scale or smaller satellites that may be exploring Earth, e.g., in polar orbits a few hundred kilometers above Earth, may become feasible with VRO in 2023, but if radar, optical and infrared technologies have been mastered by an ETC, then sophisticated telescopes on Earth will be required, with advanced algorithmic and AI/DL methods that the Galileo Project intends to develop and deploy, initially on non-orbiting telescopes.
Scientific American
So, this is yet another alien-hunting project. SETI 2.0… and probably just as (un)successful.
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