According to recent media reports, between 2014 and 2015, US Navy pilots detected several Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) during training. Their radars detected these UFOs flying at hypersonic speeds at altitudes just over 9000 metres, despite having no obvious means of propulsion.
In total, six pilots who were stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt during that time period spotted UFOs during flights along the Southeast coast of the US, The New York Times reported late last month.
Two of the Navy pilots interviewed by The New York Times have also appeared in the new History Channel documentary series: Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, which also premiered late last month.
The objects had “no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume,” Lt. Danny Accoin, one of the pilots said. “It seemed like they were aware of our presence because they would actively move around us.”
Accoin had told the Times that although tracking equipment, radar and infrared cameras on his aircraft had detected the UFOs twice, he was unable to capture them on his helmet camera.
Meanwhile, Lt. Ryan Graves, the other pilot featured in the documentary said that a squadron of UFOs followed his Navy strike group up and down the eastern coast of the US for months. After the USS Theodore Roosevelt was deployed to the Arabian Gulf in March 2015, the UFOs reappeared.
Such accounts would surely fire up the imagination of those of us who are fascinated by the thought of extra-terrestrials visiting our planet. However before we get too excited about this prospect, it’s worth noting that none of the pilots interviewed by the Times suggested that the UFOs they detected were alien in origin.
So, what were they? Well, the pilots themselves thought that they might have been part of a highly-classified drone programme using cutting-edge technology. There are other possibilities.
SECRET BEHIND UFOS
Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extra-terrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.”
Among the examples he gave were “bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”
Meanwhile, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) offers a few other possibilities. The UFOs could be drones from rival countries. He highlighted the fact that the sightings which mostly occurred off the coast and coastal regions are where you might expect a rival superpower’s craft to fly over.
He also noted that these pilots began spotting the UFOs after their plane’s radar system was upgraded, which suggests that the sightings might be due to some software bug. “As anybody who uses Microsoft products knows, whenever you upgrade any technical product, there are always problems,” he told Space.com.
For those hoping these UFO sightings are proof of alien visitations to Earth, such comments by the likes of Shostak may be a bit of a disappointment. But while a more mundane explanation for these sightings is the logical one, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t efforts to investigate and search for aliens from outer space. In fact, there are quite a few.
Shostak’s SETI itself is the leading organisation doing just that. But long before SETI there were various US organisations investigating the UFO and alien phenomenon.
UFO fans would be familiar with the name: “Roswell”. Persistent stories of a UFO landing near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, has led to many conspiracy theories of a US Air Force cover-up.
The report published by the Air Force in 1948 stated that the things people saw were real but pointed out that “some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena” while others may be related to domestic or foreign aircraft.
A LOOKOUT FOR UFOs
Project Blue Book, a US Air Force programme, conducted a series of studies between 1952 and 1969 to figure out if UFOs could hurt national security. Investigators collected more than 12,000 sightings and classified them as either “identified”, meaning the events could be explained by astronomical, atmospheric or human phenomena or “unidentified”, meaning there was no official explanation for the sightings. That category made up about 6 per cent of the total reported cases.
Project Ozma (named after the Wizard of Oz), a programme funded by the US National Science Foundation, monitored two stars: Tau Ceti (in the constellation Cetus) and Epsilon Eridani (in the constellation Eridanus) for six hours a day from April to July 1960. No signal was found, except for an early false alarm caused by a secret military experiment.
SETI is the biggest effort of all. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began conducting SETI searches using advanced antennas in the 1970s and that lasted until 1993, when the observations were ended when funding from the US Congress ended.
The SETI Institute in California however carried on – with private funding – the search for advanced life forms in the universe. In a joint project with the University of California, Berkeley, it built 42 individual telescopes that function as a single massive instrument. Dubbed the Allen Telescope Array (named after its benefactor, Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen), it began observations in 2007.
According to the SETI Institute, the telescopes should allow scientists to observe up to 1 million nearby stars for radio or optical signals in the next two decades.
There are also many other informal SETI searches being conducted by universities including the University of California, Berkeley which has several SETI programmes, Italy's University of Bologna which has a radio SETI search, and Harvard University in Boston which has an optical SETI search.
So, while the US Air Force’s detection of UFOs might not be what UFO enthusiasts are hoping for – signs of alien life, and indeed visits to Earth – the various SETI efforts around the world might just one day lead to such a discovery.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him atoonyeoh@gmail.com.