We need better data! If only everyone could carry a high-quality camera and apps to share pics...
Video Experts leading NASA's study on unidentified anomalous phenomena – what we now call UFOs – have studied 800 unclassified events recorded over 27 years, and found that only two to five percent of cases are truly unexplainable.
The panel, formed last year, is made up of 16 people ranging from scientists and biz execs to federal employees and a former astronaut. They've been studying reports of UFO sightings over the past seven months.
In the panel's first public hearing, held on Wednesday, David Spergel, a retired astrophysics professor of Princeton University, called for the need to collect better data to study and understand UAP.
"Right now there's a very limited number of high quality observations and data curation of UAP," he said in his opening remarks.
[...] NASA defines UAP as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective." Although people, generally speaking, look at weird stuff in the sky and wonder, however briefly, if it's evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the US government is more interested in whether these sightings are of foreign hardware that poses a threat to national security.
[...] "The defense and intelligence agency data on UAP are often classified primarily because of how the data is collected," he said, "not because what's in the data. The camera on an F-35 took a picture of a bird: it's classified. Spy satellite takes an image of a balloon, as we've had in the news some balloons recently, that's classified, and that's because of a desire to not reveal our technical capabilities to other nations."
Instead, NASA should focus on encouraging public collection of data in a more systematic way, and reduce the stigma of reporting UAP: if you see something odd, you're not a loon for letting Uncle Sam know. He even suggested that the agency could develop a mobile app that allows people to submit and share sightings.
"The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event," he concluded.
"They're often uninformative due to lack of quality control, and data curation. To understand UAP, better targeted data collection, thorough data curation, and robust analyses are needed. Such an approach will help to discern unexplained gap sightings, but even then there's no guarantee that all sightings can be explained."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by cobaco on Sunday June 04 2023, @03:05PM (5 children)
so that makes between 16 and 40 unexplainable events (out of a mere 800 studied)
... I'd hardly call that 'found little'
... I'd call that a significant number of unexplainable events
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday June 04 2023, @03:16PM (1 child)
I understand the point that you are making but that isn't because they are genuinely inexplicable, but perhaps because there is simply insufficient information for any conclusion to be drawn from the data.
If 760 events are definitely NOT UAPs, then there is no reason to assume that there is a higher probability of finding evidence in the 40 reports which are lacking in detail. Not impossible, but not probable either.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2023, @05:49PM
For example, maybe 760 torso scans are very clearly no cancer, but 40 have blurry stuff.
So does that mean the 40 blurry stuff really have the same chance of not being cancer as the 760?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2023, @04:32PM (1 child)
I've seen UFOs on two occasions. One was a shiny, metallic, flattened triangular object hovering in the distance. The other time I saw two brilliant lights (like airplane landing lights) that were flying near each other and moving in relation to each other (they looked like some of the objects in "Close Encounters").
Fortunately, I was able to watch each long enough to determine precisely what they were. They were all airplanes. The first one was a jetliner flying away from me and gaining altitude, which made it appear to be standing still. It was just after sunset and the sunlight was bouncing off the wings and tail of the plane, making it appear to be a flattened triangular shape. The pair in the second occasion were two WWI type bi-wing airplanes flying toward me, each with a spotlight mounted on the plane facing forward. They were flying slow (60-80 mph?) and low altitude, and since they were flying into the wind, their engine noise couldn't be heard until they passed.
If I hadn't been able to watch these until I figured out what they were, they would have fallen into your "significant number of unexplainable events".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday June 04 2023, @06:13PM
I've seen a UFO too. My dad phoned me up one evening to say there was a mysterious object hovering in the southwest sky. Three of us went outside to look. It was a spectacularly starry evening and there was a strange throbbing sound, a bit like a distant helicopter. We looked to the south west and saw a bright, glowing ball hovering in the sky flashing through all the colours of the spectrum one by one.
I went back in to get my binoculars and looked at it. The colour changes were more intense, and the distant throbbing sound was still happening. The others took turns to look through the binoculars and were amazed at what they saw.
I expected to see the glowing ball move. It hung there for what seemed like many minutes. I could still hear the distant throbbing. It was really puzzling. I looked around at the rest of the bright twinkling stars all across the sky and looked back where the glowing ball still was, rapidly changing colour.
Once more I looked around in the patch of sky next to the ball.
It was Sirius, low in the sky. I phoned my dad back and told him I had identified his UFO.
The throbbing sound was the diesel engine of a ship far out at sea which could be heard due to the calm night air.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 04 2023, @05:29PM
A much larger percentage of homicides are unexplainable. https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/latest-news/today-in-security/2022/july/nearly-half-us-murders-went-unsolved-in-2020/ [asisonline.org] Should we assume that all those homicides are the result of the supernatural? Or, aliens? Or . . . just fill in the blank with your favorite explanation.
"Unexplainable" means, you don't have an explanation. Nothing more, and nothing less.
It is true that if you are looking for aliens, or the supernatural, you're more likely to find them among unexplained events, than you are to find them among mundane events. But, there is no logical reason to jump to any such conclusion in any event.
From a slightly different point of view - if any of those events had proved that there were aliens behind the sightings, then the event would no longer be unexplainable.