I grew up believing in UFOs.
I watched every TV show about aliens, spaceships and aliens in spaceships. I voraciously read magazines and books on the topic, credulously soaking up everything I saw and believing it wholeheartedly because, after all, if someone published a book saying these things are real, they must be real, right?
Right?
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Over the years, though, I took up science as a career and critical thinking as a passion. It didn’t happen suddenly, but gradually, over time, I looked back at all the information I had taken in as a kid and realized it was overwhelmingly baloney. It was just scads and scads of nonsense: bad photography, sketchy witnesses, wild speculation and evidence-free claims.
That was more than 30 years ago. Sadly, nothing’s changed.
In this modern age, we don’t call them UFOs anymore but UAPs, for unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena. I can’t help but think that’s to distance the idea from the old “flying saucers” stigma. But no matter what you call them, it’s all still just the same breathless headlines and lack of substance behind them. There’s no there there.
Still, we’ve been so primed by so many stories of alien visitations over the years that even the thinnest of testimony gets reported far beyond its merit.
One of the more recent blips on the extraterrestrial radar is a collection of videos declassified by the Department of Defense that contain what are purported to be UAPs—true by semantics, if not by implication. Taken from F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets using visible light and infrared cameras, three videos in particular—called FLIR, GOFAST and GIMBAL—show small objects moving at terrific speeds, whirling like the spaceships in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and apparently following the planes as if piloted. FLIR was filmed in 2004, while GOFAST and GIMBAL are from January 2015.
These videos made quite a splash in 2017, especially because Navy officials flatly stated the objects were unidentified. Certainly the pilots don’t seem to know what they’re seeing; in the GIMBAL video one can be heard remarking that the object is going against the direction of the wind, again implying that the UAP was under some sort of control.
So are these objects alien spacecraft? I would bet a lot of money—a lot—on “no.”
Mick West, a retired computer programmer and prominent UFO skeptic, has examined the videos very carefully and applied trigonometry and physics to what’s seen to find far more plausible explanations than interstellar visitors. For example, the object apparently moving against the wind in the GOFAST video is likely a balloon. In a video analysis, West convincingly argues that the object is at low altitude and not moving very quickly; it’s the jet’s motion that makes the object appear to zip across the sky. This effect, called parallax, is the same that makes roadside trees whoosh by when you’re zooming down a highway while distant buildings seem to move much more slowly. The other UAP videos have similar mundane explanations.
Occam’s razor, the well-worn rule of thumb for scientific inquiry, applies well here: the simplest explanation is usually the best. Or, as critical thinkers sometimes say, “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.”
That it was Navy pilots who encountered these objects would seemingly enhance the credibility of these reports. Certainly pilots have more experience looking at things in the sky than the average person, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to error. For example, in 2011 an Air Canada First Officer reportedly put a plane in a nosedive because he saw Venus. I’ve seen countless reports of UFOs that for real and for sure turned out to be Venus, Jupiter, the moon, airplanes, satellites, meteors, rocket launches, floating paper bag lanterns and, in one very famous case, military flares.
The fact is, everyone can make mistakes—even experts. There’s a reason the term “argument from authority” is considered a logical fallacy.
Astronomers are no exception; we’ve sometimes been fooled—or at least momentarily baffled—by unexpected observations. Not that long ago, some of us got excited by what seemed to be a radio observatory’s detection of a new type of astrophysical signal; further investigation showed, however, that the signal was electromagnetic interference from a nearby microwave oven. Another time, an astronomer accidentally discovered Mars. Another discovered the sun.
The important part of all these stories is that the scientists involved didn’t immediately run to the media claiming they had found little green men. Skepticism and careful analysis won the day.
That’s not always the case. For example, Avi Loeb is a renowned astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. He is also a vocal proponent of the idea that small spherules of metal he and collaborators found on the ocean floor are interstellar in origin and may even be from aliens.
This is, well, unlikely. The idea is that a meteor from interstellar space (determined from its estimated incoming trajectory and high speed) burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, dropping debris into the ocean. An expedition led by Loeb then dredged some of the seafloor where the researchers expected that debris to be and found tiny metallic balls that they argue are from another star.
Many other experts hold extremely dim views of these claims. One of the most outspoken has been astrophysicist and science writer Ethan Siegel, who bluntly calls them “embarrassing.” Current consensus is that the meteor’s interstellar origin is far from proven, the location where debris might have fallen is quite uncertain, and Loeb’s spherules could originate from modern-day coal ash or ancient volcanic eruptions rather than the breakup of some interstellar object in Earth’s atmosphere.
Despite this—and many other critiques, some published in reputable peer-reviewed scientific journals—Loeb still maintains that the meteor was interstellar and the spherules are from that very event. He has even co-founded a multimillion-dollar project to investigate his own claims.
Of course, Loeb’s prestigious status adds an air of authority to this, but his claiming something, no matter how strenuously, doesn’t make it so.
Should we bother studying unidentified phenomena, aerial or otherwise? Of course! Not all have been explained, though we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that they’re unexplainable. NASA itself funded a small project to look into UAPs, if only because they could conceivably be a potential threat to airspace safety and national security. But in the case of UAPs at least, time and again there turn out to be simpler explanations, and at some point we have to admit that in all likelihood we’re throwing good money after bad.
To be clear, none of this means we should abandon our searches for extraterrestrial life. We now know that planets in the Milky Way probably number in the hundreds of billions, and certainly some may resemble Earth and might even host life. But if our own world is any guide, we should expect few if any of these living worlds to harbor much more than microbes, let alone anything capable of building starships or radio telescopes. (Earth has had only single-cellular life for most of its history.) We need to carefully distinguish between the possibility of life’s mere existence elsewhere in the cosmos and its even more rare evolution to intelligence and being able to trek among the stars.
Until we get much better and more reliable data, assume those hoofbeats are horses.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.