UFO’s: Lots of answers … and some enigmas

The sky seems to be full of blips and blobs and blinking objects.
Any one of those might be little Billy’s new drone, or maybe Venus. It might be benign or a spy balloon or …
Our minds often leap to UFO’s, the sort (shown here) depicted in old movies. That’s “pretty harmless,” Mick West told the Television Critics Association. “People seeing things in the sky and thinking they’re UFO’s or aliens or whatever, there’s no real harm in that.”
He’s a lifelong science-fiction fan, but in a new “Nova” documentary (9 p.m. Jan. 22, PBS), he creates practical explanations for events that seem exotic.
Some people call him a “de-bunker,” but that word draws scowls.
“People are seeing real things,” said Shelley Wright, an astrophysicist and professor at the University of California, San Diego. “We’re not debunking them. We’re identifying them.”
And sometimes failing to identify. That’s the concern of Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who saw enigmatic things a decade ago.
“My primary concern at the time was that this was a potential adversary that could be spying,” he said, adding: “I’m fearful that this could represent a national security issue.”
There’s been some progress in that area, he said. “Reporting mechanisms have been introduced within the military system.” Now he supports legislation to have a similar system for commercial pilots.”
All of this involves taking sightings seriously, Wright said. “I would like to remove the giggle factor.”
Even the description has changed. Instead of “UFO,” scientists prefer “UAP,” for “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” Either way, the key word is “unidentified”; it’s just that people linked “UFO” to extremes.
That surged with two events in 1947 – a UFO sighting and the discovery of metallic debris near Roswell, New Mexico. The film blames cover-ups for letting the issue grow. The military kept secrets about Roswell (the debris was apparently from a spy balloon being tested) and Area 51 (where top-secret crafts were tested); that left room for rumors to soar.
The Air Force did launch a study (billed as projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book). For its scientific advisor, it chose J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who called the whole subject of UFO’s “utterly ridiculous.”
That view would change, said Chris Schmidt, a producer of the film. “He started as a skeptic, but he came away feeling that there was a good 5 or 10 percent that he couldn’t identify what they were.”
Over a 22-year stretch, the projects studied 12,669 cases and found 701 it couldn’t explain. With modern technology, there would probably be much fewer left open
Anything that’s unexplained needs to be studied, Graves said. He and other pilots stayed quiet, he said, until one almost collided with an object. “I’m fearful that this could represent a national security issue.”
On the flip side, people say most blips and blinks are easy to explain.
“There’s a potential chance it could be a satellite flare – the reflection of the sun that’s no longer visible,” Graves said.
“And now we have drones,” West added. “People sometimes send drones up at night, and they have a bright light attached to them.
“Sometimes, planes that are on approach to an airport appear to be hovering in the sky, because they’re quite a long distance away….
“Sometimes Venus – or even Mars can be exceptionally bright. Or Jupiter …. I once thought Venus was an approaching plane. I once thought the star Sirius was a police helicopter.”
He’s also done experiments to show that sightings, recorded by pilots, could simply be a quirk of infrared cameras or of camera movements.
He and others researchers have managed to explained away many of the sightings. The others – the 5 per cent or 1 per cent or whatever – are the ones that scientists aren’t giggling about.