Don't Believe Everything You Hear About UFOs. A Little Skepticism Is in Order | Opinion

On July 26, members of a House subcommittee convened a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) to determine if they are, in fact, the spacecraft of extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs); extraordinarily advanced Russian or Chinese surveillance technologies; secret U.S. military craft; or ordinary aerial phenomena. For two hours, members of Congress grilled ex-Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch and two others. Grusch came forward on News Nation as a whistleblower with gripping stories of alien spaceships and "biologics" (bodies). The other two were former pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor, who witnessed aerial phenomena that they believe cannot be explained by current physics and engineering.

Fravor, for example, recounted his 2004 UAP encounter off the coast of San Diego in which a mysterious object—now known as the "Tic Tac" because of its resemblance to the oval-shaped candy—hovered just above the water and then climbed straight up to 12,000 feet in an instant, after which it accelerated to 60 miles away in less than a minute, which would put its speed at 3,600 miles per hour and produce g-forces that would kill a pilot. "I think what we experienced was, like I said, well beyond the material science and the capabilities that we had at the time, that we have currently or that we're going to have in the next 10 to 20 years," Fravor told the hearing.

Graves described the UAP he and his co-pilot witnessed from an F/A-18 jet flying near Virginia Beach in 2014 as an object "dark grey or black cubes ... inside of a clear sphere, where the apex or tips of the cubes were touching the inside of that sphere." As he told the hearing members: "If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue."

While "national security" was the official concern of all involved in the hearing, the overwhelming take home seemed to be that these UAPs are possibly foreign assets (Russian or Chinese) but probably alien technology. According to Grusch, the Pentagon knows about this and has been involved in "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program."

UAP, by the way, is the government's lexical redesign of the more stigmatized "UFO" label.

The Pentagon, in fact, funds the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate over 800 reports of UAPs, some of which remain unexplained. The day after the hearing, however, the director of AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick, issued a statement that largely denounced the witnesses. Their testimony was "insulting to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO" in their insinuation of deception, cover-up, and retaliation against any such witnesses. Kirkpatrick concluded his statement by noting: "AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology."

Kirkpatrick is not the only skeptic of these extraordinary claims about UAP technology. The renowned astronaut, naval aviator, and commander of the International Space Station, Scott Kelly, for example, told Space.com: "I remember one time I was flying in the warning areas off of the Virginia Beach military operating area there. And my RIO [radar intercept officer] was convinced we flew by a UFO. So, I didn't see it. We turned around and went to go look at it. It turns out it was Bart Simpson, a balloon."

Judging size of UAPs can be difficult, Kelly noted: "If you see something that you know is an airplane, and you know generally how big airplanes are, you can tell relative distance. But when you have no reference points, whether it's in space, or flying over the water, it just is really an environment that's really prone to optical illusions." For example, Kelly recounted another incident told to him by the commander of a 2008 STS mission, that when they were getting ready to close the payload doors of the Space Shuttle they noticed that there was something floating around in the cargo bay area, maybe a tool or a bolt, until they realized that it was the International Space Station 80 miles away.

Kelly added that it's not just pilots who are subject to such misperceptions, but that many of the sensors aboard aircraft have similar issues. Take, for example, the "Gimbal" UAP video, one of the most widely cited as evidence of "off-world" technology. According to Kelly: "it looks to me like the FLIR [forward-looking infrared] camera is just reaching its gimbal limit. [A gimbal is any kind of mount or support that allows an object, such as a camera, to rotate along an axis or multiple axes.] And it's because it has gimbal limits. You know, it turns 360 degrees in one direction, or whatever the limits are, and it gets to that stop. It's got to turn back around the other way. Kind of what it looks like to me."

The other UAP video presented as unexplainable by ordinary physics, "Go Fast," was analyzed by the director of Boston University's Center for Space Physics, physicist Joshua Semeter, who applied "basic trigonometry" from the information provided with the video to determine that the object was, in fact, only traveling at around 40 mph.

The point is that it is entirely possible Graves and Fravor are simply mistaken in their assessment of what they think they saw the UAPs doing, and that they were not, in fact, moving at speeds and turns impossible by current physics. The principle here is that before you say something is out of this world first make sure that it is not in this world.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, executive director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.