Over the past ten years, I’ve looked at over a thousand UFO photos and videos. They all share one fundamental problem: they are ambiguous.
They’re not simply ambiguous in the sense of being unidentified; after all, the acronym stands for unidentified flying object. But they are ambiguous in that we cannot rule out mundane explanations. The search for UFOs is not simply a search for something we can’t identify; I can do that by looking out of my window at a distant white dot. It’s instead a search for something novel, something that’s unambiguously not a bird, plane, balloon, lens flare, atmospheric effect, or radar glitch. It’s something that could only represent new technology or a new natural phenomenon—or even aliens.
The photos and videos we see do not fulfill that goal. Most are lights in the sky at night or blurry blobs during the day. Some are larger but blurred by motion. Some seem to clearly show an unusual craft, but a lack of provenance for the image makes it impossible to rule out forgeries.
UFOs seem to exist in what I call a low information zone, defined loosely as the distance or situation where the camera cannot record enough information to resolve what it is looking at. The location of this zone seems to vary with the capabilities of the camera. The information content of a cell phone photo of a UFO matches the information content of photos taken with advanced U.S. Navy targeting pods or more powerful telephoto cameras. It’s almost as if the UFO knows the capability of your camera and stays just out of range, just behind a veil of ambiguity. Harvard professor Avi Loeb seeks to pierce that veil.
‘Oumuamua
In 2017, Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk made a historic discovery. Using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, he identified an object heading toward the sun. Initially it was classified as a comet.
Analysis of the object’s trajectory led to a startling conclusion. The object was coming in at a nearly straight line and was projected to leave on one. It was the first interstellar object ever detected—seemingly entering the solar system from the space between stars, perhaps from another distant star. Over the next three months, it would slingshot around the Sun and head back into interstellar space. They created a new designation, an interstellar object, and gave it the name ‘Oumuamua (a Hawaiian word for scout).
This in itself would be fascinating enough, but there were other things about it that were unusual. The light it reflected from the Sun varied periodically, suggesting it was a cigar- or disk-shaped tumbling object. Also, ‘Oumuamua did not behave like a typical rock. It exhibited nongravitational acceleration. Its velocity away from the Sun was greater than predicted by physics unless there was some additional means of acceleration.
Most astronomers felt this was due to some sort of outgassing. The object could be composed of frozen gasses such as helium. The side facing the Sun would heat up, causing gas to sublimate and be violently ejected, pushing the object slightly along its path. Professor Loeb was not convinced.
A year later, in October 2018, Loeb published a paper that strongly suggested that ‘Oumuamua was an alien artifact, perhaps a solar sail. Few scientists were willing to assign the same degree of likelihood to the ET hypothesis. In January 2021, Loeb published the book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, arguing even more forcefully that ‘Oumuamua was artificial, hence alien.
UAP and the Galileo Project
This year has also seen the culmination of a UFO flap that had been brewing for years. At the same time as ‘Oumuamua’s discovery, a New York Times story initiated a media storm that eventually led to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence producing a report on U.S. military encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP (UFOs), in June 2021. This report, and remarks made by former senior government officials that seemed to give the ET hypothesis credence, prompted Loeb to start the Galileo Project, announced on July 26.
The Galileo Project is billed as “the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts.” The simple idea being that if there were alien civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy, they might have visited us in the past or perhaps be visiting us now. Why not look for evidence of this? The project initially had three parts. First, there was to be an attempt to obtain high-resolution photographs of lower altitude UAP using networks of ground based telescopes scanning the skies. Second, there would be a search for more objects like ‘Oumuamua, with the goal of sending an intercept mission the next time one came along. Third, there was to be a search for unusual satellites in Earth’s orbit that might be of extraterrestrial origin.
Interest shifted away from the latter two goals. Small orbiting objects are already tracked and detected by existing networks, and the next ‘Oumuamua will be detected just like the first one. But a clear photo of a UFO? That would be gold! Finally, someone was actually on a quest to find the holy grail of UFOlogy. Loeb described what this project might look like:
The task boils down to getting a high resolution image of UAP. A picture is worth a thousand words. More specifically, a megapixel image of the surface of an unusual object will allow us to distinguish the label: “Made in China” from the alternative: “Made on Exo-Planet X”. […] For visible light, the desired resolution in our example can be obtained by a telescope with a diameter of a meter, which can be purchased off-the-shelf online. The telescope should be linked to a suitable camera, with the resulting data stream fed to a computer system—where optimized software would filter out the transients of interest as the telescope tiles the sky with its field of view. The initial survey could start from a large field of view, but then zoom-in on the object of interest as it is tracked across the sky. (Loeb 2021)
What Could Go Wrong?
The project has some significant challenges. An actual close encounter with a UFO (regardless of what they might actually be) is a very rare event. If you simply put a telescope in a random location, then is it actually reasonable to expect something to show up?
Atmospheric distortion is an issue. I’ve taken photos of objects, including planes, with a variety of long lenses. For objects over five miles away, the turbulence of the atmosphere is the limiting factor. A bigger telescope won’t help unless the object is overhead or the telescope is at a high altitude—and therefore above the worst effects of the atmosphere. But that limits your coverage areas.
How do you aim the telescope? A simple method would be to have one camera (or camera array) that covered the whole sky, looking for moving objects. The control system could then take potential targets and aim a larger telescope at that spot to take a photograph. Because we want a close-up image of a distant UFO, we need extreme magnification of a relatively small object in the atmosphere. This means the telescope will have a very narrow field of view, so pointing it in exactly the correct direction will be very important. I anticipate considerable challenges in capturing a good image, especially of a moving object.
What Is a Picture Worth?
If we have objects flying around in the sky, then surely taking a close-up photograph of them would be the best way of figuring out what they are, right?
Consider what the goal of an investigation into UFOs should be. UFOlogy as an investigation seeks to answer two questions: Are some UFOs nonhuman-controlled craft? and What exactly are those UFOs?
What, exactly, will a photo tell you about these questions? Suppose you were to get a good close up of something that looked like a flying propane tank. How would you “distinguish the label” of “made by E.T.”? What if it was a silver helium balloon in the shape of a flying saucer?
We already have a variety of photos of supposed UFOs, and they often look like balloons. Some were taken from the cockpits of fighter jets, relatively close up. But they remain ambiguous because we can’t tell how big they are or how they move.
Most UFO sightings are memorable not because of what the UFO looked like (which is often too far away to be distinct) but instead because of how it moved. Hovering, sudden changes in direction, and rapid acceleration and deceleration are the mark of something unusual in the sky. This information is not something that can be recorded in a single image, but it’s something you want. If you can accurately record the motion of an object in three dimensions, and it performs maneuvers that no human craft possibly could, then that is an unambiguous indication of UFO = ET (or at least some novel technology unknown to science). That in itself, without a photograph, is approaching the holy grail, something that nearly answers the question of if UFOs are nonhuman-controlled craft.
I suggest that a significant focus should be on obtaining accurate 3D tracks. I asked Professor Loeb how this might be done (West 2021), and he said two telescopes a few tens of meters apart could be used for triangulation. This will work to some degree but would probably not be particularly accurate. It would also have the issue of doubling the cost—good large telescopes cost tens of thousands of dollars. Loeb pointed to one possible telescope that cost $500,000, although he suggested they would mostly use cheaper ones.
I suggested two other alternatives to Professor Loeb. First, a network of cheap but sufficiently high-resolution full-sky cameras (or camera arrays) could be arranged in a sufficiently dense way that UFOs would be visible from multiple locations and 3D tracks could be calculated. While no photos could be taken, proof of nonhuman-object motion could still be obtained. This approach has been used for many years by the Global Fireball Observatory coalition, which is looking for meteor fireballs at night (Howie et al. 2017).
Second, a very cheap network of multistatic radar receivers could theoretically cover an even larger area at less cost. This technique uses the signal from existing commercial FM transmitters and times the differences in reflected signals to multiple receivers to triangulate positions.
If nothing is found, then the significance of this result will depend on the coverage area. You can’t prove that all UFOs are mundane, but you could at least demonstrate that most of them probably are. My concern is that focusing primarily on getting a high-resolution image with expensive telescopes will result in a very small coverage area and hence greatly reduce the chance of finding anything interesting. When nothing interesting is found, then this small coverage area can be cited as an excuse. We need a large-scale survey to demonstrate evidence of absence.
While I would love to see a close-up photo of a UFO and/or a 3D track showing extraordinary motion, I don’t expect this project to produce it. Photos and videos are likely to remain ambiguous. UFOs, as they have for over seventy years, will stay just too far away.
References
Howie, Robert, Jonathan Paxman, Philip A. Bland, et al. 2017. How to build a continental scale fireball camera network. Experimental Astronomy 43: 237–266. Available online at https://dfn.gfo.rocks/documents/papers_reprints/Howie+_2017_How_to_build_a_continent_scale_fireball_camera_network.pdf.
Loeb, Avi. 2021. Getting a megapixel image of UAP. Available online at https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/hires.pdf.
West, Mick. 2021. Avi Loeb and the Galileo Project. Tales from the Rabbit Hole (August 10). Available online at https://www.tftrh.com/2021/08/10/episode-55-professor-avi-loeb-the-galileo-project/.