WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT THERE ARE EXTRATERRESTRIALS?
From: “The Meaning of Human Existence” by Edward O. Wilson
WHY MICROBES RULE the GALAXY
Beyond the Solar System there is life of some kind. It exists, experts agree, on a t least a small minority of Earth-like planets that circle stars as close as a hundred light-years to the Sun. Direct evidence of its presence, whether positive or negative, may come soon, perhaps within a decade or two. It will be obtained by spectrometry of light form mother stars that passes through the atmospheres of the planets. If the analysis detects “biosignatures” gas molecules of a kind that can be generated only by organisms (or else are far more abundant than expected in a nonliving equilibrium of gases), the existence of alien life will pass from the well-reasoned hypothetical to the very probable.
I a congenital optimist, one can add credibility to the search for extrasolar life from the history of Earth itself. Life arose here quickly when conditions became favourable. Our planet was born about 4.54 billion years ago. Microbes appeared soon after the surface became even marginally habitable, within one hundred million to two hundred million years. The interval between habitable and inhabited may seem an eternity to the human mind, but it is scarcely a night and a day in the nearly fourteen-billion-year history of the Milky Way galaxy as a whole.
Granted that the origin of life on Earth is only one datum in a very big Universe. But astrobiologists, using increasingly sophisticated technology focused on the search for alien life, believe that at least a few and probably a large number of planets in our sector of the galaxy have had similar biological geneses. The conditions they seek are that the planets have water and are n the “Goldilocks” orbit – not close enough to the mother star to be furnace-blasted, yet not so far away that their water is forever locked in ice. It should also be kept in mind, however, that just because a planet is inhospitable now does not mean it always has been so. Further, on a seemingly otherwise barren surface there may exits small pockets of habitats – oases – that support organisms. Finally, life might have originated somewhere with molecular elements different from those in DMA and energy sources used by organisms on Earth.
One prediction seems unavoidable: whatever the condition of alien life, and whether it flourishes on land and sea or barely hangs on in tiny oases, it will consist largely or entirely of microbes. On Earth these organisms, the vast majority too small to see with unaided vision, include most protists (such a amoebae and paramecia), microscopic fungi and algae, and smallest of all, bacteria, archaens (similar in appearance to bacteria but genetically very different), picozoans (ultrasmall protists only recently distinguished b biologists), and viruses. To give you a sense of size, think of one of your own trillions of human cells, or a solitary amoeba or single-celled alga, as the size of a small city. Then a typical bacterium or archaean would be the size of a football field and a virus the size of a football.
Earth’s overall microbial fauna and flora are resilient in the extreme, occupying habitats that might at first seem death traps. An extraterrestrial astronomer scanning Earth would not see, for example, the bacteria that thrive in volcanic spumes of the deep sea above the temperature of boiling water, or other bacterial species in mine outflows with a pH close to that of sulfuric acid. The E.T. would not be able to detect the abundant microscopic organisms on the Mars-like surface of Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, considered Earth’s most inhospitable land environment outside of the polar ice caps. E.T. would be unaware of Deinococcus radiodurans, an Earth bacterium so resistant to lethal radiation that the plastic container in which it is cultured discolors and cracks before the last cell dies.
Might other planets of the Solar System harbor such extremophiles, as we Earth biologists call them? On Mars, life could have evolved in the early seas and survive today in deep aquifers of liquid water. Abundant parallels of such subterranean regression exist on Earth. Advanced cave ecosystems abound on all continents. They include the least microbes, and in most parts of the world insects and spiders and even fish as well, all with anatomy and behavior specialized for life in totally dark, impoverished environments. Even more impressive are the SLIMES (subterranean lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems), distributed through soil and rock fissures from near the surface to a depth of up to 1.4 kilometers and comprising bacteria that live on energy drawn from the metabolism of rocks. Feeding on them are a recently discovered new species of deep subterranean nematodes, tiny worms of a general kind abundant everywhere on the surface of the planet.
There are places in the Solar System in addition to Mars to search for organisms, at least those with the biology of what we call extremophile on Earth. It makes sense to look for microbes in aquatic islets beneath or around the ice geysers of Enceladus, Saturn’s super active little moon. And an opportunity arises, we should probe the vast aquatic oceans of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, as well as Titan, a larger moon of Saturn. All are encased in thick shells of ice. Brutally cold and lifeless on the surface they may be, but underneath are depths warm enough to hold liquid organisms. We can eventually, if we wish, drill through the shells to reach that water – just as scientific explorers are now doing above Lake Vostok, sealed off by the Antarctic ice cap for a million years or more.
Someday, perhaps in this century, we, or much more likely our robots, will visit these places in search of life. We must go and we will go because the collective human mind shrivels without frontiers. The longing for odysseys and far-away adventure is in our genes.
The ultimate destiny of the outward-bound astronomers and biologists is of course to reach still farther, very much farther, across almost incomprehensibly far distances into space, to the stars and potentially life-bearing planets around them. Because deep space is transparent to light, the detection of very remote alien life is very much a possible dream. Many potential targets will be found in the mass of data collected by the Kepler space telescope, together with other space telescopes planned and the most powerful land-based telescopes. By mid-2013 almost 900 extrasolar planets had been detected, with thousands more believed likely to be found in the near future. One recent extrapolation predicts that a fifth of stars are orbited by Earth-sized planets. In fact, the most common class of systems detected thus far include planets one to three times Earth’s size, thus with gravity similar to that of Earth. So, what does that tell us about the potential of life in outer space? First, consider the estimate that ten stars of various kinds exist within ten light-years of the Sun, about 15,000 within 100 light years, and 260,000 with 150 light-years. Keeping in mind life’s early origin in the geological history of Earth as a clue, it is plausible that the total number of life-bearing planets as close as 100 light-years could be in the tens or hundreds.
To find even the simplest form of extraterrestrial life would be a quantal leap in human history. In self-image, it would confirm humanity’s place in the universe as both infinitely humble in structure and infinitely majestic in achievement.
Scientists will want (desperately) to read the genetic code of the extraterrestrial microbes, providing such organisms can be located elsewhere in the Solar System and their molecular genetics studied. This step is feasible with robotic instruments, eliminating the need of bringing the organisms to Earth. It would reveal which of two opposing conjectures about the code of life is correct. First, if the microbial E.T.s have a code different from that on Earth, their molecular biology would be different to a comparable degree. And if such proves to be the case, an entirely new biology might be instantly created. We would further be forced to conclude that the code used by life on Earth is probably one of many possible in the galaxy, and that codes in other star systems have originated as adaptions to environments very different from those of Earth. If, on the other hand, the code of extraterrestrials is basically the same as that of native Earth organisms, it could suggest (but not prove, not yet) that life everywhere can only originate with one code, the same as in Earth’s biological genesis.
Alternatively, perhaps some organisms manage interplanetary travel by drifting through space, living in cryogenic dormancy for thousands or millions of years, protected somehow from galactic cosmic radiation and surges of solar energetic particles. Interplanetary or even interstellar travel by microbes called pangenesis, sounds like science fiction. But it should be considered as at least a remote possibility. We know too little about the vast array of bacteria archaeans, and viruses on Earth to make any call about the extremes of evolutionary adaptation, here and elsewhere in the Solar System. In fact, we now know that some Earth bacteria are posed to be space travelers, even if (perhaps) none has ever succeeded. A large number of living bacteria occur in the middle and upper atmosphere, at altitudes of six to ten kilometers. Composing an average of around 20% of the particles with diameters of 0.25 to 1 micron in diameter, they include species able to metabolize carbon compounds of kinds found all around them in the same strata. Whether some are also able to maintain reproducing populations, or on the contrary are just temporary voyagers lifted by air currents away from the land surface, remains to be learned.
Perhaps the time has come to seine-haul for microbes at varying distances beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The nets could be composed of ultrafine sheets towed by orbiting satellites through billions of cubic kilometers of space, then folded and returned for study. Such a foray conducted out into space might produce surprising results. Even new, anomalous species of Earth-born bacteria able to endure the most inhospitable conditions – or the absence of such organisms – would make the effort worthwhile. It would help answer two of the key questions of astrobiology: What at ethe extreme environmental conditions in which current member of Earth’s biosphere can exist? And might organisms originate in other worlds in conditions of comparable severity?
A PROTRAIT OF E.T.
This is speculation but not pure speculation. It is that by examining the myriad animal species on Earth and their geological history, the extending this information to plausible equivalents on other planets, we can make a rough sketch of the appearance and behavior of intelligent extraterrestrials organisms. It is a scientific game, with the rules changing to fit new evidence. The game is well worth playing. The payoff, even if the chance of contact with human-grade aliens or higher proves forever vanishingly small, is the building of a context within which a sharper image of our own species can be drawn.
There is a temptation to leave the subject to Hollywood, to the creation of nightmarish monsters of Star Wars or the Americans-in-punk makeup populating Star Trek.
Learning about extraterrestrial microbes is one thing, it is not difficult to imagine in broad principles the self-assembly of primitive organisms at the level of Earth’s bacteria, archaeans, picozoans, and viruses; and scientists may soon find evidence of such microbial life on other planets. But it is an entirely different matter to picture the origin of extraterrestrial intelligence at the human grade or higher. The most complex level of evolution has occurred on Earth only once, and then only after more than six hundred million years of evolution within a vast diversity of animal life.
The final evolutionary steps prior to the human-level singularity, that is, altruistic division of labor at a protected nest site, has occurred on only twenty known occasions in the history of life. Three of the lines that reached this final preliminary level are mammals, namely two species of African mole rats and Homo sapiens – the later a strange offshoot of African apes. Fourteen of the twenty high achievers in social organization are insects. Three are coral-dwelling marine shrimp. None of the nonhuman animals has a large enough body, and hence potential brain size, needed to evolve high intelligence.
That the prehuman line made it all the way to Homo sapiens was the result of our unique opportunity combined with extraordinarily good luck. The odds opposing it were immense. Had any one of the populations directly on the path to the modern species suffered extinction during the past six million years since the human chimpanzee split – always a dire possibility, since the average geological life span of a mammal species is about five hundred thousand years – another hundred million years might have been required for a second human level species to appear.
Because of all the pieces that likely must also fall in place beyond the Solar System, intelligent E.T.s are also likely to be both improbable and rare. Given that, and assuming they exist at all, it is reasonable to ask how close to Earth might E.T.s at the human grade be found. Here is an educated guess. Consider first the many thousands of large terrestrial animal species that have flourished on Earth in the last four hundred million years, with none but our own making the ascent. Next, consider that while 20% or more star systems may be circled by Earth like planets, only a small fraction may carry liquid water and also possess a Goldilocks orbit (not so close to the mother star to be baked, not so distant to be kept permanently deep-frozen). These pieces of evidence are admittedly very slender, but they give reason to doubt that high intelligence has evolved in any of the 10 star systems within 10 light years of the Sun. There is a chance, slight but otherwise impossible to judge reliably, that the event has occurred within a distance of 100 light-years of the Sun, a radius encompassing 15,000 star systems. Within 250 light years (260,000 star systems), the odds are dramatically increased. At this distance, if we work strictly off the experience of Earth, the uncertain and marginally possible changes to the probable.
Let’s grant the dream of many science fiction writers and astronomers that civilized E.T.s are out there, even if at this almost incomprehensible distance. What might they be like? Here is a second educated guess. By combining the evolution and peculiar properties of hereditary human nature with known adaptations by millions of other species in the great biodiversity of Earth, it’s possible to produce a logical albeit very crude hypothetical portrait of human-grade aliens on Earth-like planets.
E.T.s are fundamentally land-dwellers, not aquatic. During their final ascent in biological evolution to the human grade of intelligence and civilization, they must have used controlled fire or some other easily transportable high-energy source to develop technology beyond the earliest stages.
E.T.s are relatively large animals. Judging from Earth’s most intelligent terrestrial animals – they are, in descending rank order, Old World monkeys and apes, elephants, pigs, dogs – E.T.s on planets with the same mass as Earth or close to it evolved from ancestors that weighed between ten and a hundred kilograms. Smaller body size among species means smaller brains on average, along with less memory storage capacity and lower intelligence. Only big animals can carry on board enough neural tissue to be smart.
E.T.s are biologically audiovisual. Their advance technology, like our own, allows them to exchange information at various frequencies across a very broad sector of the electromagnetic spectrum. But in ordinary thinking and talking among themselves they use vision just like us, employing a narrow section of the spectrum, along with sound created with waves of air pressure. Both are needed for rapid communication. E.T.s unaided vision may allow them to see the world in ultraviolet in the manner of butterflies, or some other, still unnamed primary colour outside the range of wave frequency sensed by humans. Their auditory communication may be immediately perceived by us, but it could also easily be at too high a pitch, as used by katydids or many other insects, or too low, as practiced by elephants. In the microbial worlds on which E.T.s depend and in probably most of the animal worlds on which the E.T.s depend, and in probably most of the animal world, most communicate by pheromones, secreted chemicals that convey meaning in their smell and taste. The E.T.s, however, cannot employ this medium any more than we can. While it is theoretically possible to send complex messages by the controlled release of odour, the frequency and amplitude modulation required to create a language is possible across only a few millimetres.
Finally, might E.T.s read facial expressions or sign language? Of course. Thought waves? Sorry, there’s not any way that’s possible, except through elaborate neurobiological technology.
Their head is distinct, big, and located up front. The bodies of all land-dwelling animals on Earth are elongated to some extent, and most are bilaterally symmetrical, with the left and right sides of their bodies reciprocal mirror images. All have brains with key sensory input located in the head, adapted in location for quick scanning, integration, and action. E.T.s are no different. The head is also large compared to the rest of the body, with a special chamber to accommodate the necessarily huge memory banks.
They possess light to moderate jaws and teeth. Heavy mandibles and massive grinding teeth on Earth are the marks of dependence on coarse vegetation. Fangs and horns denote either defence against predators, or competition among males of the same species, or both. During their evolutionary ascent, the ancestors of the aliens almost certainly relied on cooperation and strategy rather than brute strength and combat. They were also likely to be omnivorous, as are humans. Only a broad, high-energy meat-and-vegetable diet could produce the relatively large populations needed for the final stage of ascent – which in humans occurred with the invention of agriculture, villages, and other accoutrements of the Neolithic revolution.
They have very high social intelligence. All social insects (ants, bees, wasps, termites) and the most intelligent mammals live in groups whose members continuously and simultaneously compete and cooperate with one another. The ability to fit into a complex and fast-moving social network gives a Darwinian advantage both to the groups and individual members that form them.
E.T.s have a small number of free locomotory appendages, levered for maximal strength with stiff internal or external skeletons composed of hinged segments (as by human elbows and knees), and with at least one pair of which are terminated by digits with pulpy tips used for sensitive touch and grasping. Since the first lobe-finned fishes invaded the land on Earth about four hundred million years ago, all their descendants, from frogs and salamanders to birds and mammals, have possessed four limbs. Further, among the most successful and abundant land-dwelling invertebrates are insects, with six locomotory appendages, and spiders, with eight. A small number of appendages is therefore evidently good. It is moreover the case that only chimpanzees and humans invent artifacts, which vary in nature and design from one culture to the next. They do so because of the versatility of soft fingertips. It is hard to imagine any civilization with beaks, talons, and scrapers.
They are moral. Cooperation among group members based on some amount of self-sacrifice is the rule among highly social species on Earth. It has arisen from natural selections at both the individual and group levels, and especially the latter. Would E.T.s have a similar inborn moral propensity? And would they extend it to other forms of life, as we have done (however imperfectly) in biodiversity conservation? If the driving force of their early evolution is similar to our own, a likely possibility, I believe they would possess comparable moral codes based upon instinct.
Thus far, E.T.s are envisioned as they were at the beginning of their civilization. It is the equivalent of a portrait of humanity drawn during the Neolithic era. Following that period our species worked its way by cultural evolution, across ten millennia, from the rudiments of civilization in scattered villages to the techno-scientific global community of today. It is likely by chance alone that extraterrestrial civilizations made the same leap not just millennia ago but thousands of millennia ago. With the same intellectual capacity we already have, and possibly a great deal more, might they have long since engineered their own genetic code in order to change their biology? Did they enlarge their personal memory capacities and develop new emotions while diminishing old ones – thereby adding boundless new creativity in the sciences and arts?
I think not. Nor will humans, other than correcting disease-causing mutant genes. I believe it would be unnecessary for our species’ survival to retrofit the human brain and sensory system, and, in one basic sense at least, it would be suicidal. After we have made all of the cultural knowledge available with only a few keynotes, and after we have built robots that can outthink and outperform us, both of which initiatives are already well under way, what will be left for humanity? There is only one answer: we will choose to retain the uniquely messy, self-contradictory, internally conflicted, endlessly creative human mind that exists today. That is the true Creation, the gift given us before we even recognized it as such or knew its meaning, before movable print and space travel. We will be existential conservatives, choosing not to invent a new kind of mind grafted on top of or supplanting the admittedly weak and erratic dreams of our old mind. It is comforting to believe that smart E.T.s, wherever they are, will have reasoned the same way.
Finally, if E.T.s know of Earth’s existence at all, will they choose to colonize it? In theory, it may have seemed possible and contemplated at any time by many of them over the past millions or hundreds of millions of years. Suppose a conqueror E.T. species has arisen somewhere in our neighbourhood of the galaxy since the time of Earth’s Paleozoic Era. Like our species, it was from the beginning driven by an impulse to invade all the habitable worlds it could reach. Imagine that its drive for cosmic lebensraum began one hundred million years ago, in an already old galaxy. Also, imagine (reasonably) that it took ten millennia from launch to reach the first habitable planet, and from there, with the technology perfected, the colonists devoted another ten millennia to launch and armada sufficient to occupy ten more planets. By continuing this exponential growth, the hegemons would have already colonized most of the galaxy.
There are two good reasons why galactic conquests have never happened, or even begun, and hence why our poor little planet has not been colonized and never will be. A remote possibility exists that Earth has been visited by sterile robot probes, or in some distant future age might yet be visited, but they will not be accompanied by their organic creators. All E.T.s have a fatal weakness. Their bodies would almost certainly carry microbiomes, entire ecosystems of symbiotic microorganisms comparable to the ones that our own bodies require for day=-to-day existence. The E.T. colonists would also be forced to bring crop plants, algae-equivalents, or some other energy-gathering organisms, or at the very least synthetic organisms to provide their food. They would correctly assume that every native species of animal, plant, fungus, and microorganism on Earth is potentially deadly to them and to their symbionts. The reason is that the two living worlds, ours and theirs, are radically different in origin, molecular machinery, and the endless pathways of evolution that produced the life-forms then brought together by colonization. The ecosystems and species of the alien world would be wholly incompatible with our own.
The result would be a biological train wreck. The first to perish would be the alien colonists. The residents – us and all of Earth’s fauna and flora, to which we are so exquisitely well adapted – would be unaffected except briefly and very locally. The clash of worlds would not be the same as the ongoing exchange of species of plants and animals between Australia and Africa, or between North and South America. It’s true that considerable damage to native ecosystems has recently occurred due to such intercontinental mixing, caused by our own species. Many of the colonists hang on as invasive species, especially in habitats disturbed by humans. A few manage to crowd native species to extinction. But it is nothing like the vicious biological incompatibility that would doom in interplanetary colonists. In order to colonize a habitable planet, the aliens would first have to destroy all life on it, down to the last microbe. Better to stay at home, for a few more billion years anyway.
The second reason why our fragile little planet has nothing to fear form extraterrestrials is that E.T.s bright enough to explore space surely also understand the savagery and lethal risk inherent in biological colonization. They would have come to the realization, as we have not, that in order to avoid extinction or reversion to unbearably harsh conditions on their home planet they had to achieve sustainability and stable political systems long before journeying beyond their star system. They may have chosen to explore other life-bearing planets – very discreetly with robots – but not to undertake invasions. They had no need, unless their home planet was about to be destroyed. If they had developed the ability to travel between star systems, they would also have developed the ability to avoid planetary destruction.
There live among us today space enthusiasts who believe humanity can emigrate to another planet after using up this one. They should heed what is a universal principle, for us and for all E.T.s there exists only one habitable planet, and hence only one chance at immortality for the species.
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What we know from decades of UFO government investigations
Mysterious flying objects. Claims of crashed alien spacecrafts. The U.S. has spent decades inquiring into the unknown—here’s what they’ve learned.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE
Such reports have been surfacing for decades. The modern era of UFO sightings and investigations started after World War II with a sudden surge of unexplained reports.(How the Pentagon learned to start worrying and investigate UFOs.)
U.S. officials didn’t necessarily dream of meeting extraterrestrials in their investigations: As the Cold War with the Soviet Union got underway, American leaders worried that UFOs represented a threat from a rival nation. Aliens never invaded, although new sightings happen all the time—as do investigations into those reports.
How to keep track of it all? Here’s a timeline of our ongoing fascination with UFOs.
1947-1969: Project Blue Book
Over the course of two decades, the U.S. Air Force cataloged 12,618 sightings of UFOs as part of what is now known as Project Blue Book. These include lights, objects, and unexplained radar readings reported by military and civilian pilots, weather observers, astronomers and other sources.
The project came to an end in 1969 after a study by the University of Colorado concluded there was no evidence that UFOs came from other worlds, and that most sightings could be explained by natural phenomena, or even hoaxes. “Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” said the study leader, Edward U. Condon. Further investigation, he said, “cannot be justified.”
Still, rumors and sightings persisted—sometimes to the annoyance of the original investigators. The Air Force announced in a 1985 fact sheet that “there are not now nor ever have been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,” where the investigation was headquartered.
1995: A U.S. senator takes interest
The Condon report didn’t put an end to interest in UFOs. So-called “UFOlogists” spent the next few decades filing open records requests with federal agencies to uncover what was known about the sightings.
(The legend of Area 51—and why it still fascinates us.)
In 1995, businessman Robert Bigelow convened a small group in Las Vegas to discuss the possibility of alien life: He called the group the National Institute for Discovery Science. Participants included two former astronauts, Ed Mitchell and Harrison Schmitt, and one sitting U.S. senator: Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada.
“A lot of people said it would ruin my career,” Reid later said. That didn’t quite happen: Reid would eventually become a key figure in driving the U.S. government’s investigation of UFOs.
2004: An encounter off San Diego
In November 2004, two Navy pilots on a training mission were ordered to intercept a mysterious craft. They saw—and captured on video—an unusual oval-shaped craft, about 40 feet long, hovering over the Pacific Ocean about a hundred miles off San Diego. It streaked away before the pilots could get near. “I have no idea what I saw,” said one of the pilots, Cmdr. David Fravor, at the time. “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.”
2007: A new Pentagon investigation
With backing from Reid—now the U.S. Senate’s majority leader—the Pentagon launched the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to investigate the latest round of sightings.
“What was considered science fiction is now science fact,” the agency said in briefing papers. The program was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, and worked hand-in-hand with an aerospace research company run by Bigelow.
2014: A near-collision on the East Coast
In a series of incidents during this time, Navy pilots reported—and made video recordings—of a series of encounters with unidentified craft near Florida and Virginia that could reach high altitudes and hypersonic speeds. One pilot reported a near-collision in 2014. Another later told 60 Minutes that the craft were hard to explain. “You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, frankly.”
One possibility? Surveillance craft from another country.
2017: Going public
These incidents and investigations mostly went unreported to the broader public—until December 2017, when the New York Times reported the existence of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Although Pentagon officials said the program had ended in 2012, Elizondo told the paper he continued its work informally with cooperation from the Navy and CIA until his resignation in the fall of 2017.
That sparked a new wave of interest in UFOs among the public, the media, and even scientists.
2020: A scientific call to action
In July 2020, Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq-Misra—a NASA scientist and astrobiologist, respectively—wrote in Scientific American that it was time to revisit the conclusions of the Condon report. “Perhaps some, or even most, UAP events are simply classified military aircraft, or strange weather formations, or other misidentified mundane phenomena,” they wrote. “However, there are still a number of truly puzzling cases that might be worth investigating.”
(Here’s where earthbound travelers can search for extraterrestrial life.)
In August 2020, the Pentagon announced the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to “improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins” of the unidentified objects.
2021: DNI report
In April 2021, the Navy confirmed video of unidentified objects “buzzing” U.S. warships near California. The incident would be added to the list of sightings under investigation.
In June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released its “preliminary assessment” of UFO sightings from 2004 to 2021. The report suggested that the UFOs—now known as UAPs—could fall into five likely categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, public and private aerospace developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, “and a catchall ‘other’ bin.” More funding and reporting was needed, the report said.
2022: NASA jumps in to investigate
In April 2022, the Pentagon announced the formation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to investigate objects “that might pose a threat to national security.”
The following June, NASA announced it was setting up an independent study program to cover the issue from a scientific perspective. “We will be identifying what data—from civilians, government, nonprofits, companies—exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyze it,” said David Spergel, the study team leader.
And 2022 also brought another acronym change: “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” are now officially called “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”
2023: The truth is still out there
Whatever is happening up above, it still hasn’t entirely been explained. The DNI released a follow-up report in June 2023, identifying an additional 510 sightings—of which 171 remained unexplained. In those cases, unidentified craft often “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities,” the report said.
Most explosively, a former intelligence official named David Grusch came forward in June with a whistleblower report alleging the U.S. government was in possession of “intact and partially intact vehicles” from UFO crash sites. The craft, he said, were of “non-human” origin. But he also said he had never personally seen the objects, inviting skepticism from outside experts.
“In the long history of claims of extraterrestrial visitors, it is this level of specificity that always seems to be missing,” said Boston University’s Joshua Semeter, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the NASA team examining these reports, told BU Today. The evidence may be wanting, but the questions—and the sightings, and the investigations—continue.
2024 Inside Capitol Hill’s Latest UFO Hearings
Americans had a pandemic on their minds back in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that stimulated the slack economy and averted a government shutdown. Tucked inside the bill, however, was another bit of business entirely—a provision requiring the Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go by the more decorous-sounding “unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).” Lawmakers wrote the requirement into the must-pass legislation in the hope that it might help explain cockpit footage of UAP sightings that the Navy had declassified earlier that year and that had been burning down the internet ever since.
The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics—loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. None of the objects produced detectable exhaust. Some turned with a suddenness that would have produced g-forces deadly to any human being who might be aboard. Others dove into the ocean and then flew straight back out.
The military’s verdict? A shrug. The objects weren’t U.S. Air Force or Naval aircraft, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power—terrestrial or otherwise—was impossible to say. “These things would be out there all day,” one pilot told the New York Times in 2021. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “twelve hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
Inauguration day for Trump’s second term is still more than two months away, but when the once-and-future president returns to Washington, he’ll find the mystery of UAPs again there waiting for him. On Nov. 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” during which they heard from four witnesses who spent just over two hours making the case that American skies are indeed being plied by un-American—and quite possibly unearthly—machines.
“Let me be clear,” testified Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who spent 10 years running a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, “UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars, and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies.”
What caused both the lawmakers and the witnesses at the hearing particular concern is not just the fact that the sightings keep occurring, but where they’re occurring—with a disproportionate share of them happening over military or other secure installations. Committee chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) put the question directly to Elizondo. “I suppose, hypothetically, you could have incursions over just regular airports,” he said, “but is it obvious that these incursions are more likely over military facilities than over a random airport?”
“There is definitely enough data to suggest that there is some sort of relationship between sensitive U.S. military installations, also some of our nuclear equities, and some of our Department of Energy sites,” Elizondo answered. “This is not a new trend; this has been going on for decades and that information has been obfuscated, unfortunately, from folks like you in this committee, and I think that’s problematic.”
Elizondo was not the only witness to charge that the government is playing cute with what it knows or doesn’t know about the origin of UAPs. Retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet was deployed off the east coast of the continental U.S. in Jan. 2015 when one of the cockpit videos that was declassified in 2020 was first captured. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other Naval officers received an email with the video attached—an email that vanished from all of their inboxes “without explanation” the next day. The anomalous object, he said, exhibited “flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.” For Gallaudet, the content of the video, not to mention its disappearance, served as “confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity.”
Some of the most sensational claims of the two-hour session came from journalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of the news site Public on the Substack platform, who submitted 214 pages of testimony into evidence. Last month, Shellenberger published an article alleging that the government was running what he described in his testimony as “an active and highly secretive” program called Immaculate Constellation, which includes “hundreds, maybe thousands” of images and videos of UAPs. “And it’s not those fuzzy photos and videos we’ve been given,” he testified. “It’s very clear, very high resolution.”
Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator and a member of the space agency’s UAP independent study team, weighed in too, lamenting what he described as “the pernicious stigma that continues to impede scientific dialogue and open discussions” about UAP. “Science requires data which should be collected without bias or prejudice, yet when the topic of UAP arises, those who wish to explore the phenomena are met by resistance and ridicule.”
That’s not only a disservice to public knowledge, but a risk to public safety—one that Gallaudet, with his military pedigree, was quick to point out. “There is a national security need for more UAP transparency,” he said. “In 2025, the U.S. will spend over $900 billion on national defense, yet we still have an incomplete understanding of what is in our airspace.” Added Elizondo: “We are talking about technologies that can outperform anything we have in our inventory. And if this was an adversarial technology, this would be an intelligence failure eclipsing that of 9/11 by an order of magnitude.”
Whatever the unexplained technology is, the witnesses stressed, it is the government’s responsibility not just to figure out its origin, but to share what it learns with the taxpaying public. “The intelligence community is treating us like children,” Shellenberger testified. “It’s time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it.”
