I ran these notions by Arlan Andrews, a retired mechanical engineer and author who is the founder and director of SIGMA, a think tank of sci-fi writers that advises the government and N.G.O.s. He responded by throwing up his hands in exasperation. “If you start to do the woo-woo stuff with interdimensional and time travel, I can’t say they’re wrong, but there’s no place to start,” he told me. “As an engineer, I like to have a starting place.”
A civilization that’s millions or billions of years ahead of us would probably know physics that we don’t yet comprehend. Its technology might seem like magic to us. In that case, practically anything is possible. A NASA report on U.F.O.s, released in 2023, acknowledges that “it is difficult to put physical constraints on them at present.” How would you turn something without constraints from woo-woo into science?
The Society for U.A.P. Studies (SUAPS) is a think tank attempting to define U.A.P. studies as a field. “Not only is there not a science but there’s no academic field,” Michael Cifone, a philosopher of science at St. John’s University and one of the group’s founders, said. “How do we study this phenomenon? Who’s involved? What are the methodological principles that should guide us?” He cares less about people’s out-there theories than about what steps should be taken to resolve U.F.O. cases. He wants to avoid “endless, unconstrained, undisciplined speculation.” In his view, we’re at “a crucial transition point between the older ‘ufology,’ ” akin to forensic investigation, and modern scientific methods.
The first step to making something a science usually involves data. NASA’s report focusses on the agency’s potential role in collecting data, and in using A.I. to analyze it. According to the report, the agency’s sensors could be supplemented with crowdsourced data from apps; one example is Enigma, which uses algorithms to rate the credibility of people’s sightings and triangulate objects using video recordings. UAPx, a Florida nonprofit, has developed a suite of sensors specifically for analyzing odd aerial phenomena. And then there’s the data contained in past reported sightings, which could be regularized and collated somehow. Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who testified about U.F.O.s in Congress, founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, which encourages pilots to report U.F.O.s. The group vets the cases and has brought them to Congress; the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is part of the Department of Defense; and, lately, to an F.B.I. working group. But, as some argue, the plural of anecdote is not data. “I don’t trust pilots’ sightings,” Matt Mountain, the president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, told me. “They’re on a mission, not doing scientific exploration.” We should keep in mind, Mountain told me, that most criminal convictions that are overturned by DNA evidence were based in part on eyewitness testimony.
Graves said that he was agnostic about aliens. “I’m not jumping to conclusions,” he told me. “But I want to figure it out, damn it.” Still, he seemed skeptical of expert analysis. In November, 2024, AARO announced that it considered the GOFAST video mystery resolved; the object’s altitude, it said, gave it an exaggerated appearance of speed. “Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis and using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” the agency’s director told CBS. Graves wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. “Some of these cases aren’t quote-unquote debunked or no longer of interest,” he has said.
When I spoke to people who supported an alien hypothesis, I was often struck that relatively patchy evidence—what Frank had described as fuzzy blobs—had inspired such in-depth theories. I’m as puzzled by the U.F.O. videos as the next guy, but, as far as I can tell, nothing in them requires us to accept the existence of warp drives or time travel. Until someone produces high-definition videos of flying saucers and little green men, the evidence might not be extraordinary enough to demand such extraordinary explanations. And to the extent that U.F.O.s do need explanations it’s worth asking whether aliens are the best one. People have seen weird stuff in the sky for thousands of years, and only in the last eighty have flying saucers been a popular interpretation. Before that, we tended to credit the supernatural.
After all my conversations, I thought the odds that aliens or their tech had visited Earth were probably south of five per cent. Most U.F.O.s. are likely balloons, airplanes, weather events, visual illusions, or technical glitches. Even so, there are enough unknowns, and unknown unknowns, that the margin of error seemed enormous. A person who thinks the odds are much higher, I’d argue, shouldn’t be met with ridicule.
One more question: Why would aliens even visit us? Coming up with an answer forces us to speculate about alien motives. “I’ve always said that aliens are going to alien,” Andrews, the sci-fi writer who founded SIGMA, told me. “We have no idea what an alien person or being or intelligence or machine would be motivated by. . . . We don’t know what motivates the Kremlin, for God’s sake.” Extraterrestrials, he suggested, could be as different from us as we are from centipedes. (That could be an understatement.) Robert Powell, a chemist who serves on the board of the Scientific Coalition for U.A.P. Studies, has argued that some U.F.O.s are intelligently controlled and do not come from Earth. But, in his view, we shouldn’t try to study extraterrestrials as if they’re lab rats. “We’re the rat, and we’re trying to figure out what the doctor is doing,” he said.