Could unidentified anomalous phenomena — a new catch-all term for unidentified objects in the sky, oceans or space — be pushing the United States towards another "Sputnik Moment"?

That's the belief of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who compared the uptick in reported unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) sightings in recent years to the Cold War paranoia stirred up when the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to circle Earth in 1957.

Isaacman made the comments in a recent interview with Blake Burman, host of NewsNation's "The Hill" broadcast on Sept. 25 that touched upon a range of space-related issues. And one of those was probing the space agency chief about he thinks UAP might be.

Flight characteristics

Burman made note of pilot reports and videos released of objects with flight characteristics unlike anything previously seen.

"When you watch these videos," Burman asked Isaacman, "do you believe that anything that we've seen in any of this is potentially extraterrestrial. Is it military? What is it?"

Isaacman said that NASA has had "a seat at the table" since U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this year called for releasing Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) and UAP files. That call is now officially known as the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).

"My position going into every one of these: one, be open-minded. I mean, it is kind of our job to go out and try to answer the question 'are we alone?' And I said look, if it's aliens, I think NASA should have a seat at the table in this for sure," Isaacman said.

The NASA Administrator also said that, "if it's a Sputnik moment, we did really well the last time that happened. Which means, is this potentially red technology? Is this an adversary that's testing some next generation propulsion? It's certainly in the realm of the possible." (In military exercises, adversary forces are generally referred to as "red.")

TV host Burman then asked Isaacman, "but what does your gut tell you?"

"I would say I would lean toward it's either some phenomenon that can happen," Isaacman responded. "There are things that can happen just like natural phenomena that can be observed. I also think there's a good chance that there could be a Sputnik Moment that's happening and people are testing new stealthy or next generation type technologies," he said.

Our own backyard

Isaacman continued by noting that space missions have barely explored our own backyard.

"Do you know there are moons out there […] Saturn's moon Enceladus has an ocean. Europa has an ocean. It has complex chemistry. We couldn't tell you conclusively that there isn't life in our own backyard let alone the billions of other stars in the Milky Way galaxy, or the two trillion other galaxies out there. It's why NASA's mission is so important," Isaacman concluded.

Whistleblower woes

In a related UAP side saga, in early September, the U.S. Department of War issued a "legal waiver" for those wishing to disclose information regarding UAP, a hybrid term also linked to Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).

Military service members, civilian personnel, and contractors are purportedly green-lighted to disclose once protected information, such as under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

What's old news is that this waiver is not really new, said Robert Powell, an executive board member for the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies in Austin, Texas. This same protection was provided to whistleblowers if they reported UAP information to the U.S. government's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

"This was established via the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which stated that, 'Individuals with current or previous access to UAP-related information subject to a U.S. government NDA are authorized to provide that information to AARO representatives.' This waiver simply adds a second agency that can collect information," Powell told Space.

PURSUE and release

It is important to note that this is not permission for a whistleblower to talk to the press, a researcher, or the public," said Powell. "The same is true of this latest whistleblower waiver."

The new waiver states, "This waiver removes those barriers by explicitly authorizing covered disclosures to PURSUE representatives without triggering breach-of-agreement penalties or standard NDA violations."

"The NDA relaxation is only if the whistleblower reports their information to PURSUE representatives," said Powell.

"However, the waiver does not state how a whistleblower can identify the PURSUE representatives or how to reach them. So will anything change? It will take a year or two to determine if any whistleblower stories are made public or if a whistleblower realizes that an individual's story will go no farther than the PURSUE representative," Powell said.

He said/she said

Furthermore, Powell points out, this new waiver does not clearly waive criminal statutes, for example Espionage Act/unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

"How does a whistleblower know if their information violates criminal statutes versus civil statutes? The new waiver does not protect a whistleblower from an NDA with a civilian corporation," said Powell.

Let's assume someone comes forth and says that they know that there is an alien spacecraft being held at Edwards Air Force Base in California, said Powell. How is that claim verified?

"If it is not verified then there is little value in the efforts put forth by the whistleblower. To date, Congress has not seemed willing to use its subpoena powers to force a military branch to provide information, concluded Powell, and until Congress is willing to push the point and investigate claims, "it just remains 'he said, she said.'"

Whatever they are and from where, UFOs, now known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAP, are the subject of serious scrutiny at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

In June 2026, the White House established a new UAP Science Advisory Council in coordination with the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI Deep diving into the UAP landscape is Avi Loeb, noted Harvard astrophysicist. He is also director of the Galileo Project at Harvard, which aims to search for signs of extraterrestrial activity here on Earth. As the council chair, Loeb said the goal of this group is to advise the U.S. government on how to resolve the nature of UAP.

Members of the UAP Science Advisory Council recently gathered at a private meeting, held on Aug. 31 at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Loeb told Space.com. "I cannot disclose the contents but I will say that the U.S. government is sincere in its efforts to understand UAP based on the scientific method of data collection," Loeb said.

Council membership

One of the council's members is Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. As a serial technology entrepreneur, he's no stranger to diving into complex challenges. Colossal is advancing the use of genome editing technology to "de-extinct" previously lost species such as the Wooly Mammoth.

Working along with the council's group of scientists and experts, Lamm is bullish about bringing clarity to a long-standing investigation and wonder of UAP.

"I've been fascinated by this topic for a long time, so having the opportunity to help examine the evidence firsthand and contribute to a serious scientific effort is incredibly exciting," Lamm told Space.com.

"Our mission is straightforward," Lamm added. "This is not about belief, it is about evidence. We want to apply rigorous scientific methods to both historical UAP records and new observations, collecting and analyzing data that meets today's scientific standards," he said.

Lamm said that the expectation is to bring transparency and accountability to the field by objectively evaluating credible evidence and sharing findings openly with the scientific community and the public.

"It's time to search for answers around the science because they could reshape our understanding of the world and, potentially, become one of the most significant discoveries in human history," said Lamm.

New polling data

Meanwhile, and serving as a backdrop to studying UAP, is a new Gallup poll, conducted in July. That poll found that about half of Americans, 49 percent, think all Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomena.

The poll also found 37 percent believe at least some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies while another 13 percent do not have an opinion.

Interestingly, rather than becoming increasingly convinced that some sightings have been alien spacecraft, the percentage of Americans who are unsure has grown, from 7% in 2019 to 13% in 2026 the Gallup poll found.

The new poll also notes that a majority say the U.S. government is withholding UFO information. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it is telling the public, higher than the 68 percent and 71 percent who said so in 2019 and 1996, respectively.

These findings come as the Department of War continues to release a mix of UFO files under a President Donald Trump executive order.

In August 2026, the UAP Science Advisory Council announced their support for the Trump administration to provide legal assurances, including immunity where necessary, for current or former government employees and military personnel to share information with the council "regarding alleged technology from a non-human origin and help guide the council's scientific evaluation."

As "The X Files" famously told us, "the truth is out there." But at the same time, inquiring minds are immersed today in finding out whether or not the proof is out there — specifically, proof that at least some unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) come from somewhere beyond Earth.

The UAP acronym originally stood for "unidentified aerial phenomena," a term that itself was a rebranding of "unidentified flying object" (UFO). And UFO was a replacement of sorts for the long-lasting and stylish "flying saucers."

Whatever the terminology, truth and proof in today's fractured and somewhat conspiratorial society could be construed as strange bedfellows.

UAP study team

Mike Gold is president at Redwire Space, an innovative aerospace and defense company. In 2022 and 2023, he served on the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team, a council of 16 experts across diverse areas on matters relevant to potential ways to investigate UAP.

Gold's past roles include NASA associate administrator for space policy and partnerships, acting associate administrator for the Office of International and Interagency Relations, and senior advisor to the administrator for international and legal affairs. While at NASA, he led the development and implementation of the Artemis Accords.

That past also includes 13 years at Bigelow Aerospace, during which he established the company's Washington office and oversaw the launches of Bigelow's Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 spacecraft, which showcased the use of expandable habitat technology.

Exposing the truth

Gold's ongoing UAP interests were highlighted in 2024 during a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Accountability titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth."

"We must be thorough in collecting information, fearless in making conclusions and open to following the data no matter how mundane or extraordinary the results may be," Gold told the lawmakers. "As the saying goes, the truth is out there. We just need to be bold enough and brave enough to face it."

Space.com caught up with Gold recently to discuss his current UAP views and his work with The Disclosure Foundation as an advisory board member.

Follow the data

"I would say that I came out the same way I came in," Gold said of his past work for the NASA UAP study team, "and that was objective and wanting to follow the data."

While the NASA group's final recommendations seem to be lost in the fabric of time and space, Gold said that, under the current presidential administration, NASA is taking the UAP issue quite seriously, as is the rest of the federal government.

"NASA is doing its best to contribute to the Department of War releases on UAP," said Gold. "I will note that what is being released by NASA is publicly available and has been. But I think it's beneficial for the White House to flag some of the most interesting aspects that we have from NASA archives."

Gold said, for instance, that the 1972 Apollo 17 moon landing report included imagery showing three lights in a triangular shape that was flagged in recent Department of War (DOW)/NASA-released documents.

"NASA is a proactive participant in all of this," he added, noting that having imagery identified as anomalous is "very powerful in fighting the stigma."

There are champions inside the space agency who want to pursue the UAP issue, according to Gold.

"They feel a lot more comfortable when you've got the White House putting out some of the NASA imagery and saying that this is indeed anomalous," he said.

Disclosure process

Gold brought up the fact that he is a "recovering lawyer." However, that status doesn't free him from pondering the implications of a UAP "full disclosure" — if that ever happens.

"As I think about disclosure, we are absolutely in the disclosure process. This is what the White House documents are. You have to applaud this Trump administration. This is unprecedented what's occurring. At the very least, I view this as evolutionary disclosure," Gold said.

"It's a process of looking at the information objectively," he added. "I think when others use the term 'disclosure,' it can be inherently attached to the revelation of the existence of non-human intelligence."

But that's not the way Gold views disclosure.

"It is a process where we are objectively evaluating information and then following the data and the conclusions wherever they take us," he said. "That may be something extraordinary; it may be something ordinary. The point is that we don't know."

The big reveal?

Still, if the outcome is literally out of this world, could the public handle it? Gold is optimistic on some fronts.

"I think the public could deal with the fact that extraterrestrials exist," he said. "Polls already indicate that they believe that. I also think the public can deal with the fact that we've had an extraterrestrial crash retrieval program."

Nevertheless, there are more challenging questions, Gold said, like "where we came from. Who are we? And what about the abduction phenomenon? Those secondary questions might be more difficult."

However, even if there were good reasons for keeping this issue secret, "what you can't do is keep it secret from Congress, because then we are no longer a democracy," Gold advised. "So at a minimum, our elected officials have to be briefed. They have to know. We have to have oversight."

Common sense action

Gold thinks that what's happening now is a huge shift and of great benefit to the country.

"I know that there's disappointment relative to perhaps the nature of what's being released," he said. "But you have to understand the bureaucratic process. It's what can be done immediately."

A year from now, Gold said that he anticipates even more releases from the government that will be even more interesting.

"I'd like to see NASA adopting a recommendation from the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team to include UAP and the aviation safety reporting system," he said. "That, to me, is a common-sense action that would dramatically increase the amount of UAP data that we have.

"It would not be just for science but for national security purposes. Because when I say UAP, that includes adversarial drones that are unidentified," Gold said. "Doing so could be done with little money and be so valuable," he added.

In the end, objectivity is Gold's north star when it comes to UAP.

"I am critical of people who say that this is definitely nothing extraordinary and those who say that this is definitely something extraordinary. We need to go right up the middle of this and take a look at the data. Let the data speak for itself," said Gold. "So, apologies. I am remaining violently neutral."

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been appointed as the head of a new White House group to study unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP, a new catch-all term for UFOs that might appear not just in the air but also in space or underwater. Loeb says the group is focused on evidence, instrumentation, data analysis and collection standards.

The move follows recent Trump administration initiatives to bring more transparency to the topic of UFOs, or UAP. The UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb explains, was established by the White House, the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other members of the Intelligence Community.

Loeb co-founded and leads the Galileo Project, designed to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations "from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research."

As chair of the just-formed UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb has built a team of researchers that he describes as "an amazing A-team of exceptional scientists and experts."

Members of the group come from a wide range of disciplines from data science and instrumentation to biology, oceanography, anthropology and psychology.

The council's stated purpose is to help government agencies study the nature of UAP through rigorous scientific methods, with an emphasis on collecting and analyzing higher-quality data rather than relitigating older material that cannot be independently verified.

Meet the team

But first things first.

What is the current membership makeup of Loeb's Council? It's quite a mix of talent to undertake a new look at UAP:

• Liberty Capito is a professor of practice in data science at the Olin Business School at the Washington University in St. Louis.
• Carol Cleland is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
• Richard Cloete is a computer scientist at Harvard University and a member of Loeb's Galileo Project.
• Omer Eldadi is in the department of psychology at Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel.
• Tim Gallaudet is a retired Navy admiral and oceanographer.
• Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University statistics and economics.
• Ross Howard is producer of John Michael Godier's Event Horizon podcast that explores the technosignatures of alien technology. He is also with the Sol Foundation aimed at addressing the UAP issue and preparing society for its social implications.
• Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany.
• Ravi Kopparapu is a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center expert having research interests in extrasolar planet habitability, atmosphere modeling and characterization.
• Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO Of Colossal Biosciences, the world's first de-extinction company.
• Jacob Haqq Misra, of Blue Marble Space, is a meteorology and astrobiology specialist.
• Devesh Nandal is a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian.
• Garry Nolan is professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine and is executive director of the board of the Sol Foundation.
• Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and an educator on critical thinking.
• Peter Skafish is a sociocultural anthropologist and secretary of the Sol Foundation.
• Matthew Szydagis is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Albany.
• Jennice Vilhauer is a clinical psychologist with expertise in quantitative psychology and the psychological dimensions of potential disclosure.

Data-driven, physics-based

Space.com reached out to several of the UAP Council members to get their personal views on this new study approach.

"I expect the council and myself to follow methods and techniques deeply rooted in the scientific principles," said Devesh Nandal.

"The UAP Science council in particular is focused on a data-driven and physics-based approach on the topic of UAP," said Nandal. "We approach this topic with the same rigor we apply in our respective scientific fields and we hope to provide an unbiased analysis on this topic."

Nandal said his role is to help with quantitative data analysis and apply his expertise in astrophysics to help the council decipher the origin of UAPs.

"My first and foremost passion is in stellar astrophysics where I study the life and death of massive and supermassive stars," Nandal said. "I also find the anomalous nature of UAP sightings to be quite intriguing, and whether these events are of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin, I am excited to apply my understanding of physics to decipher their true nature," he said.

If such events can be explained using known principles, "that's excellent," Nandal advised, as this gives him a chance to test the laws of physics to explain a phenomenon that is captivating fellow humans.

"If such events are beyond our current understanding, I see this as a brilliant opportunity to learn all that I can about the Universe and share my findings with everyone," Nandal concluded.

Public trust in science

Council member Liberty Capito said she's honored to be a part of the study group.

"Avi is one of the most brilliant scientists of our time and what he has put together, is what I believe to be a blueprint for re-establishing the public's trust in science by having people with vastly different views, beliefs and science on it," Capito said.

From Council member, Robin Hanson: "It's an honor to be invited, and it's a great cause. I worried at first if we could find much useful to do, but it seems that we do have some promising ideas."

Another member of the UAP Council is Carol Cleland, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute Affiliate and a member of CU Boulder's Center for Astrobiology.

"I anticipate having a council of outside experts will pressure the government to be more open about releasing information and allowing members of the council to interview UAP witnesses," Cleland told Space.com.

Potential positive

Identifying the unidentified deserves a high priority within the U.S. government and the scientific community, explains Loeb.

Nevertheless, for organizations that also continue to diligently sort out what's behind unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the past and the current UAP tag line, they are taking a cautiously optimistic attitude.

"The involvement of serious, independent scientists is a potential positive development, and the government requires that for any thorough and credible investigation of UAP," said Mark Rodeghier, president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies since 1986.

The key issue is not the credentials of the people involved, Rodeghier said, but the structure they are working within.

"If the Council lacks a clear mandate, access to relevant data, a collaborative relationship with those actually grappling with the UAP problem in the government, and then a path for public reporting, its practical value may be quite limited," Rodeghier told Space.com.

Wait and see

Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, said he's adopting a "wait and see" attitude regarding the UAP Council at this point in time.

"Since the UAP Council seems to have the ear of some in Congress," Powell told Space.com, "I hope that they will spend some of their time advocating that Congress appropriate funding specific to the study of UAP through the National Science Foundation."

In SCU board meetings, Powell added, they are a strong proponent of making funding available to the scientific community and academia.

"We never know from where a breakthrough may occur in the study of UAP," Powell said, "and the more scientists involved from all areas of research, the better."

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Defense released what it termed "new, never-before-seen files" on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), tagging it as a historic effort in transparency.

The UAP release came courtesy of the Trump administration's Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE for short.

The posting involves 158 files — documents, photos and videos from NASA, the FBI, Defense Department, and State Department. Additional files are forthcoming, to be issued by the Department of Defense (DoD) "on a rolling basis." In a press statement, DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth remarked that his department is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unparalleled transparency regarding the government's understanding of UAP.

"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it's time the American people see it for themselves," Hegseth said.

But just what are we seeing here? Space.com reached out to specialists to unravel what's behind sightings of UAP — or, as they used to be known, unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

'A useful beginning'

For some, there is a "so what" — maybe a ho-hum — reaction to the UAP data release. Those familiar with UFO records, documents, or even astronaut sightings note that almost all of the "never-before-seen" files have long been known.

"I would view this first tranche as a useful beginning in what I hope becomes regular releases of documents not previously available, well documented sighting investigations and videos that aren't stripped of all necessary information," said Mark Rodeghier, president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.

Many of the FBI and other government files were already available, Rodeghier said, but fewer redactions and centralized access are still valuable.

"They allow researchers to check details more carefully and better reconstruct how official agencies received, evaluated and sometimes simply filed away UFO reports," Rodeghier added.

"Short videos and unresolved case summaries can be intriguing, but without the supporting metadata, investigative history and analysis, they are hard to evaluate," he said. "The real test will be whether future tranches provide complete case files, not just provocative fragments. True transparency means context, not just clips."

Similar in view is Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

"Recent government UAP disclosures have been valuable. They have confirmed that the public and the media regard this phenomenon as a matter of genuine importance," Powell said.

"But redacted files and the absence of credible scientific evaluation are not answers. They are a mandate," said Powell. "Academia and the scientific community can no longer afford to leave this field to institutions that operate in secrecy. The science of UAP must be conducted in the open, by those whose obligation is to the scientific evidence," he said.

More questions than answers

Also taking on "does it matter and who cares" is Alejandro Rojas, a consultant for Enigma Labs, a group appraising UAP via the use of cutting-edge technology and social intelligence.

"The UAP transparency movement didn't start with this administration," said Rojas. "It's been building in Congress for several years, driven by bipartisan oversight and persistent public pressure. What we're seeing now is the continuation of that effort, not the origin of it," he said.

As for the recent DoD release, "it feels somewhat unfinished," Rojas said. "There are many cases with minimal context, missing sensor data, and little accompanying analysis, as if the priority was getting something out the door rather than something useful."

But imperfect data released publicly, Rojas added, is still more valuable than perfect data sitting in a vault. "Even a messy dataset reveals patterns over time, and every case added to the public record is one more data point researchers and citizens can work with. The question is what comes next, because this release raises more questions than it answers," he said.

Missing: context and data

On the lack of context and data, Rojas said that, for any meaningful scientific analysis, you need more than a grainy infrared clip and a one-paragraph summary.

"These reports are largely missing the basics — coordinates, sensor parameters, altitude, speed confirmation. Many cases appear to have been flagged as UAP simply because there wasn't enough data to identify them, rather than because they exhibited genuinely anomalous behavior," said Rojas.

"That's not a criticism of the release," he added, "it's just the reality of what we're working with. Real analysis requires real data, and hopefully future releases include more of it."

Enigma Labs has built a website offering anyone  — researchers, journalists, curious members of the public  — the opportunity to search and explore these files as they come out, rather than hunting through a government portal.

"We're also collecting public sighting reports and giving people a community to discuss and analyze what's being released," Rojas added. "The goal is to make this process as open and accessible as possible, because transparency only works if people can actually find and use the information."

Real and inexplicable phenomena

For the first time in history, the White House and a number of government agencies "have acknowledged that there is a real and inexplicable phenomena occurring on a global basis that demands attention," said Michael Gold, president of Redwire Space, a space and defense company focused on advanced technologies.

Gold has experience delving into uncanny oddness in the skies. He served on NASA's UAP Independent Study Team that ran from 2022 to 2023. He said he's particularly grateful that the DoD (which the Trump administration has unofficially rebranded the Department of War) and NASA acknowledged that the object in the Apollo 17 imagery was real and unknown.

"The most powerful words in science are 'I don't know,' and I appreciate NASA and the Department of War being modest enough to acknowledge when a good explanation doesn't currently exist," said Gold. "Acknowledging anomalies is the first step to discovery, and is how scientific progress is made."

Gold emphasized that it's important to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of the White House's treatment of UAP. "I would like to compare the White House release to similar actions by prior administrations, but I can't, since there are none," he said.

The Trump administration and the agencies involved, Gold said, "should be applauded for supporting transparency despite what I'm certain were incredible and historic challenges to not just releasing information, but even just treating the UAP issue with the seriousness that it deserves."

Beginning, not an ending

In his 2024 testimony before Congress, Gold urged NASA to conduct a review of its archives for UAP.

"Another recommendation I made to Congress and supported by the NASA UAP Independent Study Team was for UAP to be added to NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System [ASRS]," said Gold.

ASRS provides the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration with confidential data relative to safety anomalies. ASRS has provided the federal government with hundreds of thousands of confidential reports and has successfully operated for years, Gold said.

If UAP were added to the anomalies that ASRS collects, Gold said, every commercial pilot, crew member, and even passengers could act as sensors for UAP, providing a treasure trove of data.

"I hope that more files will be released soon that will show even more definitively anomalous behavior," Gold concluded. "I expect we are at the beginning, not an ending, of a very important moment in the history of science."

The Apollo photos really shouldn't have been part of the big UFO drop.

Last Friday (May 8), the Pentagon released its first batch of declassified "UFO files," responding to a directive that President Donald Trump issued in February.

Many of the 158 files focus on recent sightings by advanced U.S. military sensors — a "misshapen and uneven ball of white light" flying over Syria in October 2024, for example, and a small, bright dot cruising through a field of windmills in that same year. But some of them go back decades — all the way to the 1940s in several cases. (There has apparently been a slight cull or consolidation in the past week; there were 161 files when the drop was first announced.)

The older material includes 14 files related to NASA's human spaceflight programs — two from the Gemini 7 mission to Earth orbit in December 1965, one from Apollo 11 in July 1969, six from Apollo 12 in November of that year, four from Apollo 17 in December 1972 and one from crewed flights to the Skylab space station in 1973 and 1974.

The Apollo 11 file is a "technical crew debriefing," in which astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins discuss a few strange things that they saw and experienced during their historic mission. Aldrin, for example, states that he saw "what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin" — a phenomenon that he attributes to "some sort of penetration" or perhaps static electricity.

There are crew debriefings from Apollo 17 and Skylab, too, as well as other transcripts and/or audio excerpts from Gemini 7, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17. The UFO file drop also features photos captured on the lunar surface during those latter two missions, with the Pentagon highlighting supposedly mysterious features.

For example, one Apollo 17 photo "contains three 'dots' in a triangular formation in the lower right quadrant of the lunar sky that is clearly visible upon magnification of the image," its description reads. Another, captured during Apollo 12, "features five highlighted areas of interest, labeled 'Area 1' through 'Area 5,' above the horizon, in which unidentified phenomena are visible."

These photos and transcripts got a lot of attention shortly after last Friday's drop, with outlets like CBS News and Fortune discussing the material. Some of these stories used verbs like "reveal," which is a bit misleading, because this old NASA material has been publicly available for decades.

A number of folks have pointed this out. "Every single image released today from Apollo has simply added yellow boxes to images that have otherwise been public for half a century," astrophysicist Grant Tremblay noted on X on May 8.

"I am making no comment on aliens or UAP here, and am happy to see the release. But a bunch of serious people are suggesting that the Apollo stuff is 'newly declassified,' and that is simply not true," he added in another X post on that same day. (UAP, short for "unidentified anomalous phenomena," is the U.S. government's preferred term for UFOs these days.)

In a May 9 X post, Tremblay guided followers to the Project Apollo Archive on Flickr, inviting them to see the photos in bulk there. Such a perusal will reveal that many Apollo images sport "film defects," he added, highlighting a likely cause of the lunar "UFOs."

Graphic designer Jason Major, a space fan and veteran processor of space imagery, made a similar point.

"This is dumb. There are blue spots, specks, scratches, flares, and bits of crud in almost ALL of the Apollo photos. They were TAKEN WITH FILM CAMERAS IN SPACE — not to mention chemically developed and then scanned by various methods over the course of six decades," Major wrote in a May 8 X post about the Pentagon UFO-file drop.

This isn't to say that you should ignore the files or dismiss folks who are interested in them; some UAP observations are genuinely mysterious, and keeping an open mind is generally a good thing.

But keep a little perspective, too, and know that people have been poring over the Apollo material for longer than most of us have been alive.

UFO enthusiasts just got a big old bone to sink their teeth into.

The Pentagon released its first tranche of declassified "UFO files" on Friday (May 8), responding to a directive that President Trump issued in February.

The new release consists of 161 files, most of which are PDFs recounting investigative reports and eyewitness testimonials (including from a few Apollo astronauts, who saw some strange things near the moon). But there's also quite a bit of imagery, including nearly 30 videos, which feature a range of intriguing unidentified flying objects — or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), as they were recently rebranded.

Space.com combined all of those newly declassified videos into a supercut, which you can see above or via Space.com's YouTube channel. And the new footage is definitely worth a look.

For example, one submission from U.S. Central Command features five seconds of imagery captured in Syria by a full-motion video (FMV) camera in October 2024.

"An accompanying mission report, DoW-UAP-D32, described the UAP as consisting of a 'misshapen and uneven ball of white light,' and reported that a 'light/glare halo effect' occurred at the top of the FMV feed," Pentagon officials wrote in a description of the video.

Another video, submitted by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, features a nine-second observation gathered in 2024 by an infrared sensor aboard an unspecified U.S. military platform.

"The sensor focuses on an area of contrast that resembles a football-shaped body with three radial projections: one oriented vertically, and two oriented downward at a 45-degree angle relative to the major axis of the main mass," Pentagon officials wrote in a description of the video.

Another 2024 infrared video from the same command has a more artistic feel, and not just because it's considerably longer (100 seconds). It shows a small, bright dot cruising through an array of windmills, looking like a wanderer lost in a ghostly forest of monstrous mechanical trees.

The Pentagon does not attempt to explain the UAP featured in these videos. Indeed, the accompanying text features the following disclaimer: "Readers should not interpret any part of this description as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination regarding the described event’s validity, nature or significance."

And, of course, "unidentified" does not necessarily mean "alien" where UAP are concerned. Experts stress that there are a variety of possible earthly explanations for such observations, from advanced drone technology to software bugs and instrument issues.

Releasing the files will get more eyes on UAP footage, which military officials say is a good thing.

"The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena," the Pentagon wrote on the new UFO files website. "This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data, and the Department of War welcomes the application of private-sector analysis, information and expertise."

And there will be more files coming soon, according to that page: "Given the scope of this task, the Department of War will be releasing new materials on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified, with tranches posted every few weeks."

President Donald Trump has issued a statement that he will instruct the federal government to begin releasing all of its files related to UFOs, or UAP, as they're now known.

Just days after former president Barack Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that he saw "no evidence" of alien life or a conspiracy to hide it while in office, Trump took to social media to make the announcement. "Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important matters," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

While many believers are hailing the announcement as another step toward disclosure, more skeptical observers point out that this is not the first time Trump has made similar promises, nor is it the first time members of the federal government have called for the release of UFO files specifically. Will this finally be the time we learn what alien skeletons are in the U.S. government's closet? Don't count on it.

The move from Trump follows many of the promises his administration campaigned on, including promising greater transparency from the federal government. Trump's administration has even gone so far as to call itself "the most transparent administration in history" in promotional videos on the White House website.

To that end, Trump has previously promised to release U.S. government files about some of the most conspiracy-theory-laden topics out there. Just last year, for example, Trump issued an executive order calling for the release of all of the files the U.S. government has on the assassinations of President John. F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In November 2025, Trump also signed into law the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which called for the release of all unclassified records and documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier indicted in 2019 for child sex trafficking.

But longtime observers point out that those moves by Trump came up short in terms of what was promised.

"Even if an official declassification order is issued regarding UAP/UFOs, what we learn from past releases like the JFK files and, more recently, Department of Justice files related to Jeffrey Epstein, is that much of the documentation will likely be released with significant redactions," Micah Hanks, a longtime researcher into the history of UFOs with relation to the U.S. intelligence community, told Space.com. "Further, some of the documentation may still be withheld altogether, based on national security concerns, which we have also observed in past releases."

The U.S. government has routinely blocked the release of documents, images and videos of alleged or reported UFOs due to the fact that releasing them could reveal sensitive capabilities of satellites, aircraft sensors, or other technologies.

The federal government has also declassified and released large tranches of UFO files before. But none of them contained a "smoking gun" that proved the existence of extraterrestrial visitation or that the U.S. government has concealed an alien presence on Earth.

"While the President's announcement is promising for those who have advocated for broader U.S. government transparency on such issues, it remains to be seen whether anything significant will result from this," Hanks said. "And as past releases have shown, we still have every reason to anticipate that the most sensitive information currently held by the U.S. intelligence community will remain secret."

Other skeptics say there could be an ulterior motive behind Trump's announcement. "I'd be delighted if some interesting UFO files get released, especially if those files contain evidence of aliens. It would be a huge step for science and our understanding of the universe," Mick West, a science writer who has published books on how to debunk sensational claims, told Space.com. "However, I suspect this is largely performative."

West said that leaked UFO videos and other historical documents show little more than ambiguous or misinterpreted data, or even the U.S. government's "embarrassing missteps" into researching pseudoscience or paranormal topics.

But many believers and UAP disclosure proponents remain optimistic.

"It would be fantastic if President Trump could provide us with more details on anomalous objects and how they might related to aliens, and I would be delighted to be involved in any further studies related to this topic," Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said on his YouTube channel. Loeb has previously claimed that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS could be an alien spaceship visiting our solar system.

Some members of Congress even took to social media to praise Trump's announcement. Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who chairs the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, thanked Trump in a post on X.

"As the Chairwoman of the Task Force that investigates these subjects, we are incredibly grateful for you doing this! I look forward to going through all the footage, photos, and reports with the public!" Luna wrote. The Florida congresswoman has previously stated that she has been shown evidence of interdimensional beings that can "actually operate through the time spaces that we currently have."

But many critics and skeptics are pointing out the timing of Trump's announcement. It coincides not only with Obama's statement about aliens earlier this week, but also with increased scrutiny on the president due to his former ties with Epstein and his appearance in documents in the U.S. Department of Justice's latest release of files related to the indicted sex trafficker.

One such critic, the comedian and talk show host Seth Meyers, called his shot last year. "We're just one Epstein story away from Trump announcing that UFOs are real," Meyers said in July 2025.

The veil has finally been lifted for Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg's clandestine sci-fi project centered around UFOs and an extraterrestrial incursion that's been speculated on and whispered about for more than a year, and it's one of the best early Christmas gifts we’ve been given in years! Plus it's kinda scary!

Universal Pictures just unwrapped this somber new trailer for Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" and it's an uncanny exploration of an alien invasion as initially experienced by a meteorologist (Emily Blunt) and a passionate UFO whistleblower (Josh O'Connor) who want to share the truth with the world all at once.

The official teaser synopsis describes the Spielberg-directed event film as "If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to … Disclosure Day."

Here in this tense preview offering some serious "Signs" and "Three Body Problem" vibes, Blunt ("Oppenheimer," "A Quiet Place") is overcome by a strange alien brain scramble while conducting a live Kansas City weather report. O’Connor ("Challengers") portrays a passionate man who wants to reveal the truth of alien life to the rest of the world, while Colin Firth ("The King’s Speech") appears as some scientist wired up to a sinister mind-melding machine.

Spielberg's long fascination with UFOs, aliens, and outer space began at a very early age when his father woke him up late one night to go witness the Perseid meteor shower while lying in a field outside the suburbs of Haddon Heights, New Jersey. This led to one of his first amateur film projects at the age of 17, a 1964 feature-length sci-fi movie called "Firelight" that he screened at a local Phoenix, Arizona theater for family and friends for the price of $1 per ticket.

His Hollywood explorations of flying saucers and science fiction came to glorious fruition with 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," then later in 1982's "E.T the Extra-Terrestrial," and more recently for 2005's "War of the Worlds." Now he's firmly back in the UFO business with a dark descent into traditional alien invasion fare, complete with crop circles, sentient cardinals, herds of odd elk, and some positively creepy clicking voices. But so far, no actual aliens or spaceships!

"Disclosure Day's" screenplay, based on an original Spielberg story, was penned by frequent collaborator David Koepp, who helped write "Jurassic Park," "Jurassic Park: The Lost World," and "War of the Worlds."

Not to be a killjoy here, but is anyone slightly fatigued by Emily Blunt in yet another alien-centric sci-fi film after her turns in two "A Quiet Place" installments and "Edge of Tomorrow?" No? Okay, let's move on then. Oh, but did we mention that the legendary John Williams is doing the film's score?! Now we did.

Produced by Spielberg with Kristie Macosko Krieger at Amblin Entertainment, and also starring Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, and Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Universal’s "Disclosure Day" drops into theaters June 12, 2026.

In the 1950s, mysterious flashes of light were captured on photographic plates taken at the Palomar Observatory in California. Two new studies claim that these flashes were caused by reflective objects in high-Earth orbit connected to sightings of alleged unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new catch-all term for UFOs not only in the sky, but also in space or even that travel through water.

For the past few years, astronomers including Beatriz Villarroel, of Nordita, Stockholm University, have been scrutinizing photographic plates exposed in the years before the Space Age began, as part of the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project. The aim of VASCO is to use archival data, now digitized, to search for new astrophysical transients, which are objects that brighten or fade, sometimes dramatically. These objects can appear as a spot of light in one image of the sky or space, only to vanish in the next.

Villarroel and study co-author Stephen Bruehl, a professor of anesthesiology from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, say their data show a statistical correlation between these flashes of light and reported sightings of unidentified objects. “We speculate that some transients could potentially be UAP in Earth orbit that, if descending into the atmosphere, might provide the stimulus for some UAP sightings,” they write in one of the new studies.

When VASCO launched, it had the stated aim of looking for stars that had vanished, which could for example signal a massive star collapsing into black hole without exploding as a supernova. VASCO could potentially also reveal new types of variable stars, active galactic nuclei, stellar flares or even brand new phenomena.

Sometimes the transients VASCO studies are unexplained, which has previously led Villarroel to a startling conclusion: that some of the objects detected on the plates are metallic objects in high Earth-orbit, before the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.

“Today we know that short flashes of light are often solar reflections from flat, highly reflective objects in orbit around the Earth, such as satellites and space debris, but the photographic plates analyzed in VASCO were taken before humans had satellites in space,” Villarroel said in a statement.

VASCO researchers analyzed 106,000 transients that look like stars that appeared and swiftly disappeared in a single exposure between the years 1951 and 1957. In particular, the appearance of the unidentified transients were 68% more likely to occur the day after a nuclear weapons test in Earth’s atmosphere than on other day, Bruehl added in the statement.

“The magnitude of the association between these flashes of light and nuclear tests was surprising, as was the very specific time at which they most often occurred – namely, the day after a test,” said Bruehl. “What they might represent is a very fascinating question that needs further investigation.”

In their study, Villarroel and Bruehl also found that the transients captured by the photographic plates increased by an average of 8.5% for each UAP sighting that was reported.

In a second study, which also included researchers from Algeria, India, Nigeria, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States, they found that one anomalous transient coincided with a cluster of flying saucer sightings over Washington, D.C., on 27 July 1952. This particular transient, along with several others, was an instance where multiple flashes of light were seen along a narrow band. This, says Villarroel, suggests flat, reflective objects in motion high above Earth that were reflecting sunlight – a hypothesis supported by the fact that the number of mystery transients drops off in parts of the sky in Earth’s shadow, where sunlight can’t reach.

“You don’t get those kinds of solar reflections from round objects like asteroids or dust grains in space, which leave streaks during a 50-minute exposure, but only if something is very flat and very reflective and reflects the sunlight with a short flash,” said Villarroel.

Villarroel and Bruehl propose another possible explanation, however: that nuclear weapons tests triggered some unknown atmospheric phenomenon that went unnoticed at the time. But Villarroel and Bruehl are skeptical that such a phenomenon would stand still in the atmosphere for 24 hours between the weapons test and when the plate was exposed at Palomar in California. The transients do not seem to be particles of nuclear fallout that have drifted down onto the photographic plate either, since such particles would produce foggy, diffuse spots, not pinpoint, star-like objects.

The explanation Villarroel and Bruehl focus on most in their papers is that these transients are UAP of some kind. Their study connects the nuclear tests to sightings, which have been reported in the vicinity of nuclear sites for decades. "Significantly more UAP sightings were reported within nuclear weapons testing windows (test date + /- 1 day) than outside of testing windows," they report in their study.

There are, of course, many caveats. Critics have claimed that the transients could be photographic defects, or contamination, especially as the plates are quite old and were stored away for many decades before being digitized.

Villarroel and Bruehl perhaps also give too much credit to reports of UFO sightings. Their reported correlation of 8.5% between the appearance of the transients and flying saucer sightings is only relevant if it can be assumed those UAP sightings are credible in the first place. There may also be an observation bias – the 1950s were the heyday of UFO sightings, so it is perhaps not too surprising that there were sightings coinciding with the appearance of transients, since UAP sightings were reported on many different days.

Ultimately, correlation does not necessarily mean causation, and Villarroel and Bruehl do acknowledge this in their study.

In SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, researchers tend to assume that any unexplained phenomena isn’t aliens, and to exhaust every possible natural explanation before invoking an extraterrestrial one. This approach would be helpful here, although what those alternative explanations might be are not yet certain.

Because of the nuclear test-ban treaty there is, quite rightly, no way to test the hypothesis that the transients are related to atmospheric phenomena caused by nuclear explosions, of which there were at least 124 above the ground between 1951 and 1957.

For now, the discovery of the transients remains an intriguing puzzle. One possible way forward that has been suggested is to try and repeat the observations on the modern day sky. If geosynchronous satellites that we know about produce similar patterns of transients on photographic plates, then that would strengthen the hypothesis that the transients on the Palomar plates could depict metallic objects reflecting sunlight in high orbit.

The two studies are published in Scientific Reports and Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

UFOs are coming back to Washington, D.C. tomorrow.

A hearing titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection" will be held by the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, a task force established in January 2025 by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At the hearing, three U.S. military veterans will share their experiences witnessing UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena, a new term for UFOs that encompasses strange objects or events not only in the sky but also in water or space, or that appear to travel between these domains.

The hearing begins at 10 a.m. ET (1400 GMT) on Tuesday (Sept. 9). Watch it live here courtesy of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The Task Force is chaired by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who has alleged that the U.S. government is hiding the truth about many other conspiracies. "It is time to give Americans the answers they deserve, which is why I am honored to lead this bipartisan task force that seeks truth and transparency," Luna said in a House statement announcing the task force. "We will also investigate UAPs/USOs, the Epstein client list, COVID-19 origins, and the 9/11 files."

Luna says tomorrow's hearing is intended to compel Congress to reexamine what types of information should be classified and which should be available to the public, mostly when it comes to UAP. "The American people deserve maximum transparency from the federal government on sightings, acquisitions, and examinations of UAPs and whether they pose a potential threat to Americans' safety," Luna said in a House statement announcing the hearing.

In addition to the three military veterans who claim to have witnessed UAP, the hearing will also include longtime investigative journalist George Knapp. For decades, Knapp has claimed the U.S. government is hiding evidence of UFOs and/or alien life. In the late 1980s while working as anchor for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, Knapp rose to fame helping popularize the claims of UFO-lore stalwarts Bob Lazar and John Lear.

Lazar claims to have worked at the U.S. Air Force's infamous Area 51 facility where he helped reverse engineer crashed flying saucers. His claims have never been substantiated.

Lear, meanwhile, was a former CIA pilot who promoted theories that the U.S. government was involved in a long-term conspiracy to hide the fact that it colluded with extraterrestrial beings.

Ultimately, Tuesday's hearing is intended to send the message that "whistleblowers who provide details on spending information and policies and procedures regarding the classification and declassification of UAPs should be able to do so without retribution," according to Luna's statement.

We've heard similar sentiments in previous congressional hearings. In November 2024, former U.S. counterintelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who claims to have investigated UAP while working for secret Pentagon program, testified that we are "in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race  — one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies."

Elizondo, who has shared easily debunked imagery as proof of UAP in other congressional briefings, suggested the U.S. government should offer protections to UAP whistleblowers so those who are "desperate to do the right thing can come forward without fear."

For decades, purported whistleblowers have argued that classified military and intelligence sensors and satellites regularly record evidence of unexplained phenomena or advanced craft, potentially piloted by alien beings.

But because those records are classified by the U.S. government in order to not reveal the full extent of its surveillance or sensing capabilities, these whistleblowers argue, the truth is being withheld from the American public and the world.

When XYZ Films’ Swedish sci-fi adventure movie "Watch the Skies" has its American debut on May 9, 2025, Hollywood and fans will also get a remarkable look at its AI-driven TrueSynch “visual dubbing” administered by the British startup firm Flawless AI.

This nostalgic feature film is set in 1996 and focuses on a small town teenage girl named Denise, whose father mysteriously vanished one night years ago while investigating a flying saucer sighting in the nearby forested hills. Determined to unravel the reality behind his disappearance, the feisty girl bonds with a group of antisocial enthusiasts at a local UFO club called UFO Sweden, who aid her in searching out the truth about her dad in true "The X-Files"-like fashion.

Directed by Victor Danell for his Crazy Pictures production shingle, "Watch the Skies" will be the first flick to demonstrate this immersive technology, where the film's original Swedish-speaking cast has re-recorded their lines in English for AI tools to match lip movements. Once foreign films leave their home territory, an immediate language barrier exists. This pioneering new AI technology of "visual dubbing" opens up a whole new way to release and introduce their Swedish film (and countless others) to a far wider audience and helps retain the actors' screen performances.

Part of the movie’s originality and warmth comes from the natural inclusion of cultural customs unique to the Swedish people, and that means the obligatory communal sipping of coffee and munching on tarts.

"It's a traditional Swedish thing that we do called Fika, where you have kind of a coffee break," Danell explains to Space.com. "Especially in these types of volunteer associations, what you do is have meetings where you’re drinking coffee and having Fika and eating buns and tarts. And that's something we wanted to bring into the movie, because it's a bunch of outsiders that want to solve this big mystery, but they also just want to be together having Fika, coffee, and tarts."

The misfit UFO cult that forms "Watch the Skies"' core is based on an actual flying saucer society in the country called UFO Sweden, giving the project an engaging authenticity.

"We all grew up in the '80s and '90s with these old-fashioned sci-fi movies as our base in our filmmaking," he adds regarding project influences. "Who doesn’t love early Steven Spielberg and films like that? So we were inspired by those movies and we heard about this group in Sweden, a real association called UFO Sweden. We saw a documentary about them and knew we had to look them up. Are they for real? What we found out is that UFO Sweden is based in our hometown called Norrköping.

"Not only that, but their headquarters are across the street from my apartment. So we just went down the street and knocked on the door and asked if we could come in to learn about their work. So we all sat down for Swedish Fika and they told us that they're a UFO investigation group and if you see something in the sky you can call them and they'll help find out what you saw. They're gathering an archive of UFO sightings from around the world in their basement and it's the largest UFO archive in the world. They showed us around and when we left their headquarters we knew that this was our next movie. We just needed to find a story that could take these lovely guys out on an adventure larger than they usually went on."

"Watch the Skies" is imbued with a heartfelt reality even though its story is rooted in paranormal events, and its striking cinematography enhances a certain retro appeal.

"The cinematographer is Hannes Krantz, one of our partners in Crazy Pictures. Actually, I built the lenses for this movie myself. It's a mix of old Contex still photography lenses with the anamorphic block off an old projector combined together. It's kind of nerdy but the look of the movie is a big part of making the audience feel like this is an old nostalgic throwback to the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was hard work making that look.

"Sweden doesn’t do a lot of genre movies. We went into this thinking it would be quite hard to make a Swedish science fiction movie. It actually wasn't. I think the Swedish audience also is ready for one so it went quite easily. But it’s still hard to make a good sci-fi movie. We're so excited to see what will happen with this movie. We released it in Sweden and now it's coming out in the U.S. and we're so thrilled to see how it will go."

"Watch the Skies" stars Inez Dahl Torhaug, Eva Melander, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey, Håkan Ehn, Isabelle Kyed, Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson, and Mathias Lithner.

Flying saucer enthusiasts and curious Ufologists will be craning their necks toward the heavens after checking out our exclusive clip for "Watch the Skies," a refreshing Swedish sci-fi movie being released on May 9, 2025, from XYZ Films ("Ash").

Titled "UFO Freak," the uncanny 2-minute sneak peek reveals strange phenomena erupting around a group of teens hanging out at a late-night gathering in an abandoned building, causing them to scatter.

This charming, nostalgic film is also being billed as the world's first "AI-dubbed" international flick using a procedure developed by Flawless to match up the lip movements of the characters from Swedish to English, and the results are pretty impressive. The process required the original foreign actors to record their dialogue in English prior to applying the pioneering TrueSynch technology.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Victor Danell, "Watch the Skies" involves a spunky teenager named Denise whose father has vanished and was possibly abducted by extraterrestrials seen in the nearby forests.

She hooks up with a local investigative association called UFO Sweden and its misfit band of colorful characters who help her discover the truth of this UFO mystery.

"Watch the Skies" arrives in U.S. theaters on May 9 with an ensemble cast that includes Inez Dahl Torhaug (Denise), with Eva Melander, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey, Håkan Ehn, Isabelle Kyed, Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson, and Mathias Lithner.

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling novelist and Ph.D. roboticist Daniel H. Wilson ("Robopocalypse," "The Clockwork Dynasty," "The Andromeda Evolution") is one of the brightest minds in his field and an extremely good friend to have if some sort of robot uprising ever occurs around the globe.

His upcoming science fiction novel, "Hole in the Sky," lands on Oct. 7, 2025, from his longtime publisher, Doubleday. It depicts a most unusual alien first contact event on a Cherokee Indian reservation in Oklahoma, and has already been snapped up by Netflix and Aggregate Films for a feature film. Wilson will also act as an executive producer and adapt the screenplay from his own book.

Hollywood has a real appetite for Wilson’s brand of storytelling, and the Portland-based writer has at least a half-dozen Tinseltown projects in various stages of development.

"I had a book come out right when COVID started, so I switched over and started writing screenplays and television for a few years," Wilson tells Space.com. "Then we had a big strike, and so there was a great time to put on my novelist hat and go back and write a book. This really digs into two of my favorite things: where I’m from in Oklahoma, and robots and science fiction. I was really inspired to have a native take on first contact. You see so many alien invasion movies, and they’re really a dark reflection of what colonizers have already done to indigenous people. The aliens show up, and it’s like fear projection. They enslave people, they extract our resources, they destroy our monuments and our culture. It’s kind of the same story."

Wilson's thought process while composing this extraterrestrial arrival tale was focused on what the native perspective would be on the unknown, particularly the Cherokee perspective since he was raised in what's now the Cherokee reservation in North Tulsa.

"I'm a Cherokee citizen and I spent the summers with my grandparents on our original land allotment,” he explains. "It was about a mile or so away from this place called Spiro Mounds, which is the westernmost outpost of the Mound Builder civilization that disappeared thousands of years ago. But they've left these mounds all over the United States, and it's this ancient and mysterious place. Those tribes were the precursor tribes to all the tribes we know now.”

"Hole in the Sky" starts out with NASA's first observation of an interstellar object with its rapid approach and an impact on Earth that results in first contact.

"It's told through the lens of a by-the-books CIA weapons expert, the sort of person you'd expect to deal with this stuff, an anti-social NASA astrophysicist, and a really determined Cherokee father who lives in the place where this happens," Wilson adds. "All of these characters have a different perspective on the unknown. Typically, scientists want to understand it. Usually, they want to exploit it. Soldiers are afraid of the unknown, they want to destroy it. My native characters are comfortable with it. This guy lives with the unknown in his backyard. That was fun to tell that story and get to subvert that genre and put my own spin on first contact."

Mound Builders had a massive civilization on the scale of the Mayans, mainly in the Eastern portion of the United States. These earthworks were created anywhere it was useful to have a city, a place that had commerce and was easily defensible. As a result of these ancient people’s engineering, many mounds were eventually bulldozed over and major cities built atop them.

"We're talking about ten or fifteen thousand years ago, which plays into the story," says Wilson. "There's a lot of looking back to look forward. I ended up thinking a lot about what is indigenous technology. Right now, in Oregon, Washington, and California, they’re looking back at the way indigenous people dealt with their forests to prevent forest fires. They're trying to find that old knowledge to apply it now."

Netflix and Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films were offered a draft of Wilson's book while the author and his agent pitched both the novel and the screenplay, which prompted constructive feedback that altered some elements of the story.

"I found the process really fun because film is so visual and you're thinking about how to make it super visual, and some of that can go into the book," he notes. "But in the book, you can go straight into people's heads and get into what they’re thinking. That’s something that’s harder to do in a film and get all the exposition out. We spoke to a lot of top-notch production companies, really amazing minds, and each had a territory to go out to, different studios they work with. Aggregate hit it out of the park, and we found a great creative partner.

"I'm excited because we’re shooting for an "Arrival"-level film. Obviously, "Contact" was an influence, but really this is much more along the lines of "Stalker," which is based on the book, "Roadside Picnic." Like movies that are smaller in scope but very deep and heartfelt. "Hole in the Sky" takes place in Oklahoma, and it's just as big of a character as anything in this film. It's literally going back to where I grew up, which is very fun."

"Hole in the Sky" will be published by Doubleday on Oct. 7, 2025.

Not since the days of Erich von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods," director Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and publisher Bob Guccione's "Omni" magazine has there been this much interest in the study, history, and research of UFOs, an arena of curiosity branded as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

The latest entry into the mysterious mire of flying saucer mania is a new abduction thriller from Sweden called "Watch The Skies." The ominous title is a nostalgic nod to the finale of director Christian Nyby's "The Thing From Another World" from 1951, where Scotty the newspaper reporter character warns the whole world of potential extraterrestrial visitors over the radio.

"Watch the Skies" was also the original name of Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," his sci-fi classic of 1977.

Premiering in theaters May 9, 2025 after a 2023 film festival circuit run and heralding from XYZ Films ("Ash") and directed by Swedish filmmaker Victor Danell, "Watch the Skies" is centered around a headstrong teenage girl named Denise who' s convinced that her missing father was snatched by aliens. She embarks on a daring rescue mission with a motley band of crazed UFO cultists to try and finally discover the truth.

"Watch the Skies" stars Inez Dahl Torhaug (Denise), with Eva Melander, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey, Håkan Ehn, Isabelle Kyed, Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson, and Mathias Lithner. Harnessing the evolving power of Artificial Intelligence with impressive results, the actors' real voices were translated into English by Flawless using their visual dubbing technology to synchronize lip movements from Swedish. We think this judicious use of AI and this dubbing process is definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.

"Watch the Skies" was originally titled "UFO Sweden" and hits U.S. theaters on May 9.

The internet is absolutely full of myths and urban legends about space and just about everything else, so readers must be a skeptical these days.

From claims of aliens crashing on Earth and UFOs being hidden on military bases, to Mars being abnormally large and the moon turning green, space tends to attract some outlandish or at least highly unproven claims that should be vetted carefully.

Here are some of the biggest space myths and conspiracy theories that just won't go away.

1. The Apollo moon landings were fake

Twelve NASA astronauts walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, but in the decades since Apollo 11 astronauts first set foot on the moon, many theories have been put forward claiming that the whole Apollo program was staged. However, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has since released photos of the landing sites as they appear on the lunar surface many years later.

Some of the questions moon landing deniers ask are "Why are there no stars in the sky in the moonwalkers' photos? Why are the U.S. flags fluttering on the surface? Why do you see footprints in the pictures, but no marks from the lunar modules that landed there?"

It turns out those questions are easy to answer than you may think.

There are no stars in the sky for the same reason you don't see stars during the day on Earth, according to NASA: The bright glow of daylight on the surface washes them out.

U.S. flags planted into the lunar soil had metal rods sewn in them to appear as though they were moving, according to NASA. Without these wires, the flag would have hung straight down, making for a pretty lackluster photo prop.

And the lunar modules, though heavier, didn't put prominent marks in the surface in some places because their mass was more evenly distributed than the astronauts' weight was in their boots.

2. NASA is a lie

Some people actually believe NASA's whole function is not to explore space, but to generate space-related hoaxes. (The Apollo moon landing is a famous example that we'll explore in the next slide.) People who believe this conspiracy, sometimes flagged with the hashtag "#NASAhoax" on social media, will say that amazing space pictures of Mars, Pluto and even Earth are fake, computer-generated imagery (CGI).

NASA was formed in 1958 "to provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes," according to the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law shortly after the start of the space race against the Soviet Union.

Since then, NASA has launched hundreds of satellites into orbit around Earth, the moon and several other worlds. In fact, NASA spacecraft have orbited, flown by or landed on every planet in the solar system. NASA also sends astronauts into orbit, where they conduct research at the International Space Station (ISS).

If you're not convinced, you are free to travel to Florida's Space Coast to watch a rocket launch for yourself. It's also quite easy to see the space station and other satellites with your own eyes with the help of a satellite tracker.

3. The Earth is flat

This myth is so popular that there is even a group named after it: the Flat Earth Society. Members of the organization argue that the horizon is always at eye level, which they say would not be possible if the Earth were round. They also say there is no full movie of the Earth rotating from space — which is not true, as NASA has published multiple videos taken from satellites, including a live video of Earth from the ISS, which orbits our planet 16 times per day.

One way of demonstrating to yourself that the Earth is round is to consider how orbits of satellites work. Satellites constantly "fall" around the Earth as they are pulled around by our planet's gravity; they just need to be traveling fast enough at a high enough altitude to not slam into the atmosphere. Or, you can look at the amazing pictures taken by astronauts at the ISS.

4. Planet Nine will kill us

In April 2016, the New York Post tweeted, "A newly discovered planet could destroy Earth as soon as this month." The newspaper was referring to Planet Nine, a theoretical planet at the edge of the solar system. An accompanying video also claimed that the new planet would be throwing all sorts of asteroids and comets at Earth, which would supposedly end up pummeling our planet.

Although the existence of a ninth planet has not been confirmed, astronomers are actively looking for one to help explain motions of some objects in the icy Kuiper Belt, a vast region of icy objects beyond Neptune. If the planet is actually found, the planet will pose no threat to us, according to the California Institute of Technology's Mike Brown (who is one of the original backers of the Planet Nine theory).

5. Alien research is happening at Area 51

The 1996 movie "Independence Day" is one of the main sources of the Area 51 hoax, which claims that aliens and their technology — recovered from crashed flying saucers — are being studied secretly at a classified military base about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. Some people in the area around the base claim that they have seen strange lights or objects flying in or out of this area.

While the testing and development conducted at Area 51 is classified, the U.S. government has acknowledged its existence (although the CIA officially calls it "Homey Airport" or "Groom Lake").

A part of Edwards Air Force Base, the area was a known location for high-technology airplane flights in the 1960s and 1970s. It first served as a proving ground for Lockheed U-2 and A-12 OXCART spy planes as early as 1955. UFO sightings reported in the area were indeed unidentified objects, but only because the planes were top-secret — not because they were flown by aliens.

6. There is a killer planet known as "Nibiru"

Conspiracy theorists say another dangerous planet is Nibiru, which was first mentioned in the 1976 book "The Twelfth Planet," by Zecharia Sitchin. In the book, Sitchin translated ancient Sumerian cuneiform and claimed that the text is proof of a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru that orbits the sun every 3,600 years.

Years later, self-proclaimed psychic Nancy Lieder claimed to have communicated with extraterrestrials who said Nibiru would collide with Earth in 2003. When that didn't happen, the date was moved to 2012 (and linked, of course, with the 2012 doomsday predictions). Of course, the collision never occurred, the world didn't end in 2012 and no astronomer has ever found a planet on a collision course with Earth.

7. There is a face on Mars

In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft took a picture of what appeared to be a face on Mars. Immediately, some people said there must have been aliens on the Red Planet that left that face behind as evidence of their existence. NASA, however, pointed out that the suspected face is really just a pile of rocks casting shadows that resemble face-like features.

NASA followed up with better-resolution pictures taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 and 2001, respectively. These new images made it quite clear that the "face on Mars" is nothing more than a trick of light and shadows on a completely normal Martian mound.

8. The moon Iapetus is an alien Death Star

Iapetus is a moon of Saturn that looks somewhat like the infamous Death Star in the "Star Wars" franchise, with a large crater that resembles the fictional weapon's superlaser focus lens. The Death Star is a planet-killing machine that destroys entire worlds with its outrageously powerful laser. It was prominently featured in the 2016 movie "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," as well as in 1977's "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope."

A Daily Mail article published in May 2016 claimed Iapetus is an artificial object crafted by aliens. As "evidence," the article cited a photo taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2004. In the photo, there's a line around the moon's equator that resembles the equatorial trench around the Death Star.

But this line isn't nearly as interesting as the Death Star's trench, which houses the battle station's engines, thrusters and docking bays. That line is nothing more than a mountain ridge, and Iapetus is actually just made up of boring old rock and ice. Cassini has flown by the moon to take pictures several times without being blasted by deadly alien lasers.

Saturn's moon Mimas, with it's giant crater Herschel, also looks surprisingly like the Death Star.

9. Saturn's hexagon is alien technology

Saturn's hexagon was first spotted when NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by the giant, ringed planet in 1980. The bizarre, six-sided structure on the round planet's north pole caused quite the stir, because straight lines and polygons are not so common in nature.

Immediately after the Voyager returned its first images of Saturn's strange feature, even stranger theories arose to explain it, including that it was somehow related to alien technology, or perhaps even was a gateway to hell. The hexagon is not artificial, but rather a weird-looking hurricane at Saturn's pole.

NASA has done several flybys of this region with the Cassini spacecraft, studying the haze particles and other features of the storm, to try to learn more about its unusual properties.

10. Mars is as big as the moon

Originating in 2003, the infamous Mars hoax asserts that Mars was closer to Earth than it had been in the 60,000 years prior, and that the planet will appear as large as the full moon. What started out as a misconstrued email turned into a recurring rumor that gets reshared every August and, naturally, has spread to social media as it became more popular.

Although Mars is indeed relatively close to Earth in a cosmic sense, it will never be as large as the full moon. It will appear as a red dot in the sky, just as the ancient astronomers saw it. If you'd like to see Mars magnified, take out a telescope or look at one of NASA's spectacular Mars pictures.

11. The moon will turn green

In spring 2016, there was a rumor that the moon would turn green because several planets had aligned and caused an eerie glow, according to EarthSky. This was supposed to happen on April 20 and again on May 29 for the first time since 1596, the rumor alleged.

The moon never actually turned green, although it can appear red during a lunar eclipse, when the moon passes through Earth's shadow. In the same way sunsets often appear red, sunlight is scattered as it passes through Earth's atmosphere, casting a reddish shadow on the moon's surface.

Skywatching columnist Joe Rao debunked this green-moon myth. He pointed out that a full moon actually took place on April 22, 2016, and speculated that the April 20 date of the "green moon" might have to do with "National Weed Day," popularly known as 4/20. Considering that the last green moon supposedly happened 420 years ago as well, this doesn't appear to be a coincidence.

12. Earth will go dark for two weeks

In July 2015, a website called "NewsWatch33" wrote an article claiming that Earth would have 15 days of complete darkness that year. The website, which is actually a fake news site, was borrowing from an older version of the tale that has been circulating for years, according to debunking website Snopes.

As we all know, Earth did not actually experience that much darkness that year. (The article claimed that the alleged darkness was partly due to a Jupiter-Venus conjunction, which actually took place more than 500 million miles apart.) Darkness occurs when the Earth rotates, causing the sun to "set" on the local horizon. Brief periods of darkness can also happen when the sun is totally obscured during total solar eclipses, which occur rarely in any particular spot on Earth. But even during an eclipse, Earth is never completely in the dark.

13. Zero-gravity day will make you weightless

If you ever wanted to leap into the sky and soar like Superman, this hoax is for you. In late 2014 and early 2015, a widely shared story claimed that on Jan. 4, 2015, everyone on Earth would experience weightlessness due to a rare alignment of the planets. A doctored image of a purported tweet from NASA's Twitter account that went around on social media fooled a lot of people into believing the hoax.

But, of course, nobody floated off the surface of Earth that day. Earth's gravity is too strong for people to become weightless. The only way to experience weightlessness without going to space is to ride aboard a plane that performs parabolas, with some including a few seconds of weightlessness. This is sometimes nicknamed the Vomit Comet.

14. Alien spacecraft caused a mysterious explosion

Back in 2004, an expedition of Russian researchers working in Siberia claimed to have discovered "an extraterrestrial device" close to where the mysterious Tunguska explosion occurred. Scientists still aren't sure exactly what it was that blew up in the sky over Siberia that day in 1908, but the leading theory is that it was a large meteorite or an asteroid, according to Live Science.

The Tunguska incident flattened hundreds of square miles of forest, and signs of the destruction were visible even decades afterward. At the time, news reports claimed that evidence of aliens was found at the site, but this claim was never substantiated. "The Russian team stupidly stated long before they went to Siberia that the main intention of their expedition was to find the remnants of an alien spaceship," Benny Peiser, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., told Space.com. "And bingo! A week later, that's what they claim to have found."

15. UFO was caught "refueling" at the sun

NASA has a fleet of sun-gazing spacecraft that keep an eye on space weather, especially during solar eruptions. In 2012, telescopic images appeared to show something in the shadows. On YouTube, some viewers said this could be a UFO that was refueling by using the solar plasma.

However, NASA pointed out that the feature is actually something called a "prominence," which has cooler and denser plasma than the outer atmosphere of the sun, or the corona. Scientists are still trying to figure out how solar prominences develop, but they're pretty sure it has nothing to do with aliens.

16. There is a ______ on Mars!

With NASA's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers regularly taking pictures of the Martian surface, viewers have the chance to check out what they're doing in almost real time. NASA puts the raw images online for the public to see. But over the years, some weird shapes have cropped up. In 2008, for example, the Opportunity rover appeared to photograph a female figure. Other photos have shown things shaped like animals, spoons or other items.

You can imagine that, with all of the rocks available on Mars, some of them would happen to look like familiar objects. In fact, the human brain tends to perceive meaningful images in random patterns — a phenomenon known as pareidolia.

When evaluating the claims, consider that the Martian environment is extremely harsh to life as we know it; the surface is baked with radiation, the "air" is mostly carbon dioxide and there's not much atmospheric pressure.

17. I just saw a bright UFO!

It's a familiar trope for police stations and astronomy writers. From time to time, somebody will call (or write) in to say they just saw a UFO in the sky. While UFO is the term used for any flying object that an observer cannot identify, many people claim that they are alien spaceships. They spotted a bright light around sunset, or saw a light moving around in an unfamiliar way.

While every situation is different, one common explanation for "UFOs" is actually another extraterrestrial object: Venus. Venus can be extremely bright when it's at its closest, because it's relatively near Earth. The planet is also extremely reflective because the sun's light bounces off the clouds. So before calling to say you've spotted a UFO, check your sky charts!

18. NASA can travel faster than light

If you've seen the "Star Trek" clips that show the Enterprise spaceship warping into another sector, you might have wondered how fast NASA is making progress on being able to move at the speed of light. The EmDrive has created years of speculation, with some breathlessly saying NASA must be on the verge of breaking the famed barrier.

In reality, NASA is downplaying the reports. The engine in question is a prototype that is producing some interesting results, such as appearing to create thrust when there was no reason for this to happen – and thereby violating Newton's Third Law of Motion. That said, NASA has not yet verified the results from these tests, and the engine has not been widely discussed in peer-reviewed research.

19. We've launched balloons into space!

With the advent of high-resolution, miniature cameras, several people have decided to strap these cameras on to high-altitude balloons and take pictures from up high. They've caught glimpses of blackness and, at times, taken interesting tiny passengers along (such as 1000 Lego minifigures). So they must be in space, right?

There's no way a helium balloon can get into space, according to the California Institute of Technology, and simple physics explains why. When a balloon rises into the sky, the air inside will expand in response to the dropping atmospheric pressure and eventually pop. Even Felix Baumgartner's stunning high-altitude balloon jump in 2012 was not actually from space, but from the stratosphere, which extends to roughly 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

At that altitude the air is thin enough to see the blackness of space, but thick enough to support special high-altitude balloons. The boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space is about twice as high as the upper limits of the stratosphere.

20. There are canals on Mars

Author Percival Lowell became one of space's first popularizers when he wrote many books for the general public back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In these books and other writings, he said there were canals on Mars built by an intelligent civilization, perhaps to move water into desert-stricken areas. He claimed to have seen the canals in his own telescope, and produced several sketches that are still available on the internet today.

There are no artificial canals on Mars. Several spacecraft have flown by the planet or orbited it, and not one has caught signs of aliens from orbit. What they have seen, however, are smaller channels that were created by nature – likely from water, ice or other processes that cause erosion.

21. A star is flinging comets at Earth

A long-standing theory known as Nemesis supposes that there is some sort of "death star" on the outer edge of the solar system, whose orbital motions perturb comets in an icy region of objects known as the Oort Cloud. According to the myth, the star's gravity throws these comets toward the inner solar system, and these comets collide with Earth and cause mass extinctions once every 27 million years.

However, a 2011 study concluded that this idea is unlikely, because the comet strikes in recorded history haven't happened with any regularity. The pattern that was recorded in the hoax is actually a statistical artifact, or the result of researchers trying to find patterns in nature where they do not exist, the study's authors found.

22. There's life on Venus

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union sent several uncrewed missions to study Venus. Ten of these Venera probes landed on the surface of Venus and were able to transmit data and images for a few minutes before succumbing to the planet's extreme atmosphere. In 2012, the Russian news service RIA Novosti reported that Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a scientist who worked on the Venera missions, suggested that the photographs showed living objects moving around on the planet's surface. (RIA Novosti ceased operations in 2013.)

These alleged life-forms on Venus are just an example of "letting your mind see patterns in low-resolution data that simply aren't real," Jonathon Hill, a research technician who processes images taken during NASA's Mars missions, explained to Space.com's sister site, LiveScience, in 2012.

According to NASA, the objects that appeared to be moving were actually camera-lens covers that automatically popped off of the cameras after landing LiveScience reports. These half-circle objects were seen in images from Venera-13 and Venera-14, two identical spacecraft that landed about 590 miles (950 km) apart. Both had two identical cameras — one in the front and one in the back — so it makes sense that the covers would appear in different places. Another photograph that Ksanfomaliti said was a scorpion is actually a blur in the image.

23. An asteroid is about to crash into Earth

This recurring rumor claims that a threatening "doomsday" asteroid is about to slam into our planet. An example from 2015 had an asteroid purported to hit Earth in late September, when it would supposedly wreak devastation from its impact point near Puerto Rico. NASA quickly dismissed the reports — which turned out, as usual, to be false. But that's not to say that asteroids will never hit our planet.

NASA and a network of monitoring telescopes across the world are cataloging all known asteroids wider than 459 feet (140 meters) across in line with a 2005 congressional mandate. (Smaller asteroids, if found, are also cataloged.) Of the space rocks discovered so far, NASA has not found a single asteroid that has a high probability of hitting Earth in the foreseeable future.

24. Aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico

On a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico, so the story goes, an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. While the accounts of exactly what happen vary, the legend claims that a disc or some sort of spacecraft was found on a ranch, and that the government quickly covered up the evidence.

While rumors of aliens circulated, some people speculated that the crash was just a plain old weather balloon that might not have been recognized by the local community. The U.S. military acknowledged the "spacecraft" was actually a weather balloon sent aloft as part of Project Mogul, which involved flying microphones on high-altitude balloons to listen for sound waves generated by possible Soviet Union nuclear tests.

25. Climate change isn't real

Earth is on an abnormal warming trend. Arctic ice is melting, the sea level is rising and temperatures are going to extremes in many locations around the world. Why is this happening? Anti-climate-change conspirators have many explanations: solar activity, radiation, the Earth's (and sun's) movements around the Milky Way, among other theories.

While there are many components of climate change, the fact that humans have contributed to it is indisputable, according to NASA. Temperature graphs show that the climate has not warmed this much, this quickly in all of Earth's history (as seen in geological records), and that the increase correlates with increased industrialization.

Additional resources

For more myths about space, you can read this article by How It Works magazine. Additionally, you can watch this video by BBC Earth Lab.

Bibliography

"National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (Unamended)". National Aeronautics and Space Administration. https://history.nasa.gov/spaceact.html

"Modern myths of Mars". Proc. SPIE 6309, Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology IX, 63090C (14 September 2006). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.676304

It seems fair to say that this year has arguably been a page-turner in defining and refining interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), a new term — rightly or wrongly — for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), those unknown events or craft seen in our skies.

There have been back-to-back open Congressional hearings and several classified gatherings in hush-hush, closed-door sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) settings. "Whistleblowers" toot tales of retrieved objects and super-secret reverse engineering efforts to look under the hood of recovered vessels. Even claims of non-human "biologics" being pulled out of the wreckage of crashed craft.

No single explanation addresses the majority of UAP reports, points out the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the U.S. Government lead for diving in and deciphering the nature of now joined at the hip and lip lingo, UAP/UFOs. So what should happen in 2025 to move the UAP/UFO story forward? Are we at a dead-end? Conversely, is the coming year one of "full disclosure?"

Perhaps humanity is going to be on the receiving end of a shocking revelation that we are accompanied minors in a grown-up universe of intelligent civilizations?

Whatever the case, adult supervision seems advisable. On that pursuit, Space.com asked several leading UFO/UAP experts to look ahead into 2025.

Promising promises

A number of civilian institutions are making promising progress said Mark Rodeghier, president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, based in Chicago, Illinois.

What Rodeghier personally hopes to see in 2025 is continued progress with these groups, and others, new people entering the field with expertise and energy, and more development of the academic/professional UFO community.

"All of that will move the story forward, though at a sedate pace," Rodeghier said. To truly make a significant difference — barring some amazing case, or "disclosure" with a capital D, or a detection by SETI researchers of an alien signal — he would like to see:

• NASA take an active role and decide to fund proposals directly on the UAP subject
• Congress mandate funding via, for example, the National Science Foundation, to support research on UAP
• AARO to be more open, within understandable constraints of classification, to releasing their case investigations, and especially, of course, the case investigations for sightings which they cannot resolve.

"I'm not that hopeful, even given good intentions, that more Congressional hearings will be much help, without new whistleblowers with firsthand testimony," continued Rodeghier. "Otherwise, I want Congress to make certain that AARO has the resources required and to conduct thorough oversight of AARO's work," he said.

Hearings, legislation

Next year will see more congressional hearings, possibly additional legislation, and holding the DoD's AARO office publicly accountable, observes Jeff Gould who runs the UAP News Center, an informative website that finds and links to UFO daily news.

"Congress has clearly been deeply interested in the issue in the past three years. I anticipate that they will continue to pursue the UAP topic," said Gould. He expects more former government officials coming forward to speak on the topic.

Wild card ahead?

Gould said the scientific community will advance in two ways.

"There will be increased willingness by the larger scientific community to broach the topic," and anticipates more papers of greater depth going forward. This year, he said, academic papers included a civilian astronomer's guide to UAP research, the commissioning of an all-sky infrared camera array for detection of airborne objects, as well as detecting extraterrestrial life with astophotonics.

Additionally, there are research organizations focused on UAP that will continue to deliver relevant research, Gould said, including Harvard's Galileo Project, Stanford University's Sol Foundation that's a think tank undertaking cutting-edge inquiry into all aspects of UAP, as well as The SETI Institute.

"The wild card is the Trump administration," Gould said. "They seem to have a bias towards declassification. Will they declassify UAP related documents? We'll see," he concluded.

Conspiratorial-driven mythos

In 2025, science needs to get serious about studying UAP, "or we will be stuck at a dead end of the conspiratorial-driven mythos," said Alejandro Rojas, a consultant for Enigma Labs that labels itself as the "#1 destination for UFO sighting alerts."

The newly found credibility of the topic, said Rojas, "has highlighted a blind spot the Pentagon had toward detecting low-tech small craft flying within secured airspace on land and sea."

While concerning, that's a very terrestrial and human problem, Rojas added.

Government conspiracies

"Regarding the anomalous side of the issue, public interest is centered on unsubstantiated claims of government conspiracies regarding aliens and Roswell [New Mexico]. To some, UFO disclosure only means 'tell me what I already know, aliens are here and the government interacts with them.' Opportunists, many of them longtime proponents of alien conspiracies, tell the public what they want to hear sans evidence," said Rojas.

The outcome is that this creates a lot of distrust and foments a hostile attitude towards scientists and those trying to research the topic methodically, Rojas said.

"I think that we will never know what is truly going on until we make a space where we can publicly and transparently engage in and encourage hard data collection from sensor systems and careful scientific analysis of that data," Rojas advised.

Increased transparency and openness

Delving into the topic for 18 years, Robert Powell, executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) explains that he's confident about one fact. "The UFO/UAP subject is not hindered by our calendar and will continue to move forward well past the year 2025," he said.

In the coming year, Powell spelled out SCU's agenda, promoting three areas:

• Federal and private investments in unclassified UAP science research by academia and the scientific community. Increased collaboration between scientists, researchers, and government agencies could foster a more rigorous and multidisciplinary approach to the study of UAP. This is an approach that we have never taken since the phenomenon began in 1942.
• Development of advanced UAP detection and sensor technologies. Significant sums of money are needed for the development and the deployment of networked sensor arrays.
• Increased transparency and openness in the study of UAP. We must move away from a military-based study of the phenomenon to a science-based study. The former is controlled by secrecy while the latter depends on openness and collaboration.

First contact

"It matters not whether one believes that UAP are controlled by an advanced intelligence," Powell said. "The more exoplanets we discover, the more we know that someday the time will come when we will make first contact with another intelligence."

Powell said there's need to start now to establish clear definitions of near-Earth technosignatures, communication protocols, and the responsible and ethical sharing of knowledge gained from such contact.

"Furthermore, we must consider who should represent humanity in such a momentous event," Powell observed. "Should it be a nation-state's military organization or an entity that speaks for all of humanity? This is a critical question with far-reaching implications for the future of our species," he said.

The recent sightings of puzzling unidentified aircraft in New Jersey and other states have triggered yet another round of unanswered questions — and fueled conspiracy theories.

For one, the odd objects have sparked a visual public mayday and melee — one that might be mirroring elements of the ongoing unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) issue, spurring talk of secretive saucer crashes by run-amok alien crewmembers with expired driver licenses.

Mischaracterization of what's seen. Public anxiety about what's not known. Government officials seemingly not clear on what's happening. Toss in Capitol Hill lawmakers demanding answers about what to do next. It's all enough to give you a case of the high- and low-altitude heebie-jeebies.

People don't usually look up

Jamey Jacob, executive director of the Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, has some thoughts about what's likely going on.

Related: UFOs and UAP: History, sightings and mysteries

"This is a case of the general populace not being familiar with the density of air traffic in the national airspace, particularly on the Eastern Seaboard," Jacob told Space.com. "Most people today generally don't spend much time looking up at the night sky, and when you do, you finally start to see what's around you."

Jacob said that, while the possibility of drone threats is something that we should be concerned about — particularly since we're largely unprepared to deal with it — the present scenario appears to be mostly misidentification of piloted aircraft.

The drones that have been sighted, Jacob added, look to be generally operating under the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's night authorization for drone pilots.

"Nefarious operations would as a rule of thumb not fly with navigation lights so [as] to be harder to track," said Jacob. "The misidentification of commercial airliners and private aircraft as drones are predominantly due to the difficulty of determining size and distance of a vehicle without a reference scale. Research that we have done on estimating size and location of both drones and manned aircraft back this up."

Does the government know more?

Others have different ideas, however. For example, the drone sightings are real and they are government- and/or industry-operated drones, said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies in Austin.

"There are too many, and they are too large for them to be civilian," Powell told Space.com. "I don't think any adversary of the United States would dare try to fly drones into our territory at this level, and if they did, I would think we would respond."

Powell added that that he feels confident that government officials know much more about the drones than they are telling the public.

"This of course leads to the same type of problems as with the UAP issue. Anxiety kicks in and people see drones everywhere they look," said Powell.

Moreover, the media is not capable of distinguishing between reports of drones versus reports of normal aircraft, nor are they adept at asking the right questions of government officials, Powell said.

Kernel of truth

"Conspiracy theories start to grow because the government withholds information and makes nonsensical statements, such as 'We don't know where the drones come from or what they are, but we know they pose no risk,'" Powell said.

Some members of the public are indeed seeing drones, Powell said. "Amazingly, the same debunkers that argue against UAP are arguing against drones. They cite examples of misidentification, which of course exists."

Bottom line from Powell: "There is a kernel of truth in these drone reports, and I think the government knows the truth. I hope people will understand that as long as the government withholds information that this is the type of mess that unfolds."

Standard practice

"Many of these fly like human-made drones and others appear to be airplanes or helicopters," said Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb.

"It is standard practice for the U.S. military to notify law enforcement authorities of any plans to fly drones over residential areas," he told Space.com. "Therefore, unidentified drones must have originated from civilians or an adversarial nation."

Loeb is a co-founder of the Galileo Project initiative. Its goal is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.

Inappropriate smoke screen?

As for drones from adversarial nations, Loeb said that possibility should come as no surprise, since a Chinese spy balloon was spotted back in early 2023 flying at a high altitude across the United States.

Even though the balloon was nearly 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter, Loeb recalled, it took a while for the U.S. Air Force to shoot it down off the coast of South Carolina.

Drones are used routinely in the current conflict in Ukraine, which began with the Russian invasion in February 2022. And drone technology has advanced considerably in recent years, especially in China, Loeb said.

"The primary question that needs to be clarified is whether these flying objects are used for espionage or pose any other national security threat," Loeb said. "Alluding to an extraterrestrial origin is an inappropriate smoke screen to hide the incompetence of the U.S. intelligence agencies."

It's never aliens.

At least, it hasn't been yet. The United States Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities heard testimony on Tuesday (Nov. 19) from Jon T. Kosloski, director of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The U.S. Department of Defense created the office in July 2022 in order to have a single place for military and government personnel to report UFO sightings, or UAP, as they're now known. The new term, short for unidentified anomalous phenomena, encompasses not only unidentified objects or events in the sky, but also those in water, in space or those that appear to travel between these domains.

During today's hearing, Kosloski came in strong, stating that "it is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology." Still, despite having resolved hundreds of cases with prosaic explanations, Kosloski noted that his office does not believe that every UAP is a bird, balloon or drone. "We do have some very anomalous objects," he said.

Kosloski also reported on the office's latest analysis of UFO/UAP cases, stressing that his office will "continue to follow the science and data wherever they lead" and keep both Congress and the public as informed as possible  —  at the unclassified level, he clarified.

That stands in stark contrast to testimony presented to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee last week, in which a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and a former U.S. counterintelligence officer told lawmakers that the American government is part of a decades-long coverup to conceal the fact that "we are not alone in the cosmos."

During his testimony, Kosloski gave an overview of his office's activities since it issued a report to Congress and testified in a similar setting last year. "Many reports resolve to commonplace objects like birds, balloons and unmanned systems, while others lack sufficient data for comprehensive analysis," Kosloski said, adding that "only a small percentage of reports received by AARO are potentially anomalous."

Kosloski referred to a UAP incident that occurred in 2013 near Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The infrared video, shot in 2013 by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol helicopter, appears to show an object flying just above the ocean before disappearing into it, or perhaps splitting in two.

"We assessed that it was actually flying over the airport the entire time," Kosloski said. When the object appears to disappear in the infrared video that accompanies the case, it is actually the camera sensing that the object is the same temperature as the water behind it. Instead of splitting in two, it was simply two objects  —  balloons or sky lanterns  —  in close proximity that came in and out of view.

Kosloski also offered how his office was able to close the case on the infamous GOFAST video, shot by a U.S. Navy fighter jet in 2016 off the coast of Florida. In that case, the object's apparent speed in the video was actually due to the parallax effect, or the camera's perspective, Kosloski explained.

Furthermore, the AARO director showed a 2018 video captured by a drone flying over Mt. Etna that he stated is not widely known among the public. "This was a rather difficult case to solve," Kosloski said. "The object was actually 170 meters away from the plume — not flying through it."

During questioning, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) asked Kosloski about whether or not some individuals who have encountered UAP might be reluctant to engage with his office, referring to accusations some UAP disclosure advocates frequently level against AARO. These critics attest that the office is part of an alleged decades-long U.S. government-led campaign of "excessive secrecy" that aims to keep the public in the dark about UFOs.

In response to Gillibrand's questioning, Kosloski defended his office. "Congress has gone out of its way to create the organization AARO specifically to conduct these sorts of investigations, and has uniquely empowered them to have access to all UAP related information, whether that's historic or current, and we take that responsibility and those authorities very seriously," he said.

Gillibrand also asked about a report released by AARO in March 2024, noting that she has been told "it doesn't show any any evidence of secret programs that have aliens."

But Gillibrand pushed back on that assertion. "That's not how I read the report," the senator said. "What I read in the report is the US government took sightings extremely seriously over the last 75 years, and put some of the greatest minds together to analyze these cases, because they assessed them as some deeply unknown phenomena that may or may not cause threats — that may or may not be related to adversaries."

AARO released a report to accompany today's hearing earlier this week. The report, titled, "All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena," examines UAP cases dated between May 1, 2023 and June 1, 2024 as well as historical incidents that were not included in previous reports.

But, like in its other reports, AARO found no smoking gun for alien visitation this year. "AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology," the report notes. Out of the 485 cases that are well within the report's timeframe, 118 were solved and another 174 were slated to be closed, pending a final review.

Still, AARO's 2024 report says that many cases remain unsolved, and that the office continues to study them. However, AARO’s ability to resolve cases "remains constrained by a lack of timely and actionable sensor data," according to the report, meaning there just isn't enough data to conclusively solve cases that lack detailed or multi-sensor observations. In some cases, all there might be to analyze is a single photograph, a few seconds of grainy video or an aviator's written report. Many UAP sightings happen in the blink of an eye as an unknown object zooms past a moving aircraft, for example, so there often isn't enough time to gather photographic or video evidence.

In other cases, the capabilities of the sensors or platforms involved in the UAP sightings are themselves classified (sometimes, even their existence isn't publicly known), so AARO is unable to discuss them in unclassified reports.

Though overall, according to the 2024 report, there is enough data for AARO to state that it has has "no indication or confirmation that these activities are attributable to foreign adversaries."

Today's hearing echoed a previous hearing held last year on April 19, 2023. During that hearing, AARO's previous director Sean Kirkpatrick told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his office has seen "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."

Similarly, the report released by AARO in March 2024 that examined historical UFO cases found "no evidence that any USG [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."

AARO's previous report, released in 2022, examined 510 contemporary UAP reports gathered from government agencies and branches of the United States military. The report found that, while most cases were able to be resolved, 171 remained a mystery.

"Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis," AARO's 2022 report states.

Today's hearing concluded with a discussion of recent incidents in which unidentified drones, or uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), were seen over U.S. military bases and other sensitive installations. Those incidents, Kosloski notes, underscore the need for the United States to have "more persistent monitoring and understand that, whether it is a UAP or a counter-UAS issue, that we need to have that complete domain awareness around our national security facilities."

Update for 6 p.m. ET: The hearing has concluded. See our latest coverage for details from today's testimony.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee will hear from the Pentagon's UFO office tomorrow, and you can watch live.

Director Jon T. Kosloski of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Tuesday (Nov. 19) starting at 4:30 p.m. ET (2130 GMT). A closed-door session off-limits to the public will be held prior to the open session, beginning at 3:15 p.m. ET (2015 GMT).

You can watch the hearing live at Space.com, courtesy of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Department of Defense created AARO in July 2022 in order to serve as a "focal point for all UAP and UAP-related activities and may represent the Department for such activities," the Pentagon said at the time, in a statement.

AARO has already released its 2024 report, which covers sightings of UFOs (or UAP, as they're now known) between May 1, 2023 and June 1, 2024 as well as "all UAP reports from any previous time periods that were not included in an earlier report."

The document states that AARO received 757 total case reports during the period, 485 of which fell within the reporting timeframe. Of these cases, 118 were solved and another 174 are slated for closure pending a final review.

Still, many cases remain unsolved, and AARO continues to study them. However, the report notes that "AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology."

The office's previous report, released in January 2023, came to similar conclusions.

AARO also concluded in the report that it has "no indication or confirmation" that UFO reports are "attributable to foreign adversaries."

AARO's latest findings might not sit well with some in the UFO/UAP community.

That's because, just last week, a quartet of high-profile witnesses — including a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, a former NASA associate administrator and a former U.S. counterintelligence officer — told the U.S. House of Representatives that a wide-ranging and long-running government conspiracy has, for decades, served to "hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos" from the American public.

We are "in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race  — one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies," one of the witnesses stated during the hearing.

AARO was specifically named as being complicit in the cover-up during this hearing. "AARO is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to bring forward the truth about the government's activities concerning UAPs," Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) said during the hearing's opening remarks. "I'm disturbed that AARO itself lacks transparency; even its budget is kept from the public. So if there is no 'there' there, then why are we spending money on it? And by how much? Why the secrecy?"

A release of the Department of Defense annual report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) comes one day after a witness-based Congressional hearing on the topic.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena is required by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022, as amended by the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2023.

"Analyzing and understanding the potential threats posed by UAP is an ongoing collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies," said a DoD statement.

"The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount. We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one," adds the DoD.

Rigorous scientific framework

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is leading DOD’s efforts with others to document, analyze, and when possible, resolve UAP reports using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach.

This year’s UAP report covers UAP reports from May 1, 2023, to June 1, 2024, as well as any UAP report from previous time periods that were not included in an earlier report.

This brought the total cases that AARO has been reviewing to over 1,600 as of June 1, 2024.

According to the AARO report itself, to date, AARO has "no indication or confirmation that these activities are attributable to foreign adversaries."

Wanted: timely, actionable sensor data

AARO is continuing to coordinate with the Intelligence Community (IC) to identify whether these activities may be the result of foreign adversarial activities.

However, AARO’s ability to resolve cases “remains constrained by a lack of timely and actionable sensor data.”

To that end, AARO has begun collections using a prototype sensor system, GREMLIN, for detecting, tracking, and characterizing UAP.

The just-issued report explains that GREMLIN demonstrated functionality and successfully collected data during a test event in March of 2024.

“The next step for GREMLIN is a 90-day pattern of life collection at a site of national security,” the AARO report states.

Partnerships

The AARO report notes that the group continues to address this challenge by working with military and technical partners to optimize sensor requirements, information-sharing processes, and the content of UAP reporting.

“AARO is also expanding engagement with foreign partners to share information and collaborate on best practices for resolving UAP cases,” the report concludes. “AARO will continue to develop partnerships across the USG [US Government], academia, and commercial communities. Through these partnerships, AARO will expand its sensor technology capabilities, analytic tool suites, and the UAP-related sciences spanning the space, air, and maritime domains.”

To dive into the full report — The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — can be read at AARO's website.

UFOs came to Washington again today.

The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth" at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. at 11:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) on Wednesday (Nov. 13). Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is a relatively new catch-all term that includes sightings of unexplained objects or events that take place in the air, underwater, in space, or that travel between those domains. 

Like previous congressional UFO hearings, today's event featured testimony from current U.S. military personnel who claim the American government has for decades hidden evidence of advanced technologies and otherworldly visitors from the public. A multitude of anecdotes were presented about flying orbs coming out of the ocean, disc-shaped objects, and craft "exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal." While such claims are nothing new, what is noteworthy about today's hearing are the pedigrees of some of the whistleblowers who testified, including a former U.S. counterintelligence officer, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and a former NASA associate administrator. All of them stressed the need for more government transparency, less stigma about the UFO topic and new policies to bring UAP data out of the "black" classified world and into the public domain.  

This isn't the U.S. government's first attempt to investigate the recent wave of UFO claims that began in 2017. A similar hearing was held last year, in which a whistleblower told Congress the U.S. government is hiding evidence of 'non-human intelligence.' 

The Pentagon also created the All-Doman Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022 to investigate UAP reports and government data about UFOs, but critics, including some government officials, are skeptical of the office's aims and methods. 

Related: UFO whistleblower tells Congress the US government is hiding evidence of 'non-human intelligence'

"AARO is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to bring forward the truth about the government's activities concerning UAPs," Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) said during the hearing's opening remarks today. "I'm disturbed that AARO itself lacks transparency; even its budget is kept from the public. So if there is no 'there' there, then why are we spending money on it? And by how much? Why the secrecy?"

Other representatives stressed the need for transparency and data analysis today, a common theme of other recent UAP studies. "We have evidence that what we are detecting things, and we know that we don't understand them, and this is worth investigating," Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) said. "I believe we can always be more transparent. To me, this hearing and others are simply about the truth and getting to the facts of what these UAPs actually are."

Luis Elizondo, a former U.S. counterintelligence officer who has been vocal about such claims in recent years, told the assembled representatives at the hearing that "excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public — all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos." 

We are "in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race  — one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies," Elizondo stated during his testimony. 

Elizondo, who claims to have previously investigated UFOs as part of a secret Pentagon program, suggested that the U.S. government create a "whole-of-government" approach to studying UAP, create a national UAP strategy and offer protections so that whistleblowers who are "desperate to do the right thing can come forward without fear."

During questioning, Elizondo was asked if some of the "advanced technologies" that have been seen monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe could be operated by aliens or private companies. "Maybe both," Elizondo replied.

Elizondo also stated point-blank to Rep. Mace's questioning that the U.S. government has programs to retrieve crashed UAP and reverse-engineer them, but avoided giving any specifics in an unclassified public setting such as the hearing.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) then questioned Elizondo, asking the former counterintelligence agent about a document he signed that limits him from speaking publicly about crash retrieval programs. "The document said you can't talk about crash retrieval. Well, you know, you can't talk about Fight Club if there's no Fight Club, correct?"

Like other witnesses, Elizondo stated that the alleged excessive government secrecy around UFOs harms national security. In response to questioning from Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), Elizondo stated that, if UAP sightings turned out to be technologies operated by adversarial nations, it would be "an intelligence failure eclipsing 9/11 in order of magnitude."

Retired U.S. Navy rear admiral Tim Gallaudet offered similar testimony as Elizondo. "We know from last year's UAP hearing and recent statements and publications by credible whistleblowers that UAP, NHI [non-human intelligence], and their technology of unknown origin (TUO) represent a new realization that we are not the only advanced intelligence in the universe," Gallaudet said on Wednesday, according to his published remarks. 

"Unelected officials in the U.S. government do not have an exclusive right to this knowledge about the nature of reality. The American people have a right to that knowledge," Gallaudet said. The retired rear admiral also stressed the national security and airspace safety concerns related with UAP sightings, calling them "extensive."

When Rep. Garcia asked Gallaudet and other witnesses what UAP might represent, the retired rear admiral said he believes they are evidence of a "non-human higher intelligence."

Former NASA Associate Administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships Michael Gold also testified at today's hearing, and previously served on NASA's UAP study team. Gold's testimony was more grounded; for example, he stressed the need for NASA to contribute its authority and expertise toward analyzing what UAP data it might already possess and helping dispel the stigma associated with the UFO topic. 

"Our best tool for unlocking the mystery of UAP is science, but we cannot conduct a proper inquiry if the stigma is so overwhelming that just daring to be part of a NASA search team elicits such a vitriolic response," Gold said during today's hearing. "Therefore, one of the most important actions that can be taken, relative to exposing the truth of UAP, is to combat the stigma, and this is where I believe that NASA can be eminently helpful."

Gold added that NASA has a massive archive of data that could possibly contain evidence of UAP, and suggested that artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms could help sort through the agency's trove of data to help shine light on the UFO phenomenon. In addition, the former NASA associate administrator said the agency should develop specialized instruments that might be able to gather useful data about UAP.

Related: NASA UFO report finds no evidence of 'extraterrestrial origin' for UAP sightings

Journalist Michael Shellenberger also testified today, telling the representatives that there's a "growing body of evidence that the government is not being transparent about what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), formerly called UFOs, and that elements within the military and IC [intelligence community] are in violation of their Constitutional duty to notify Congress of their operations." 

Shellenberger stated that there is a secret program within the U.S. government known as "Immaculate Constellation" whose sole purpose is to collect UFO and UAP reports from military personnel and sensor data and quarantine them away from the rest of the government and military. While he noted that a Pentagon spokesperson has stated no such program exists, Shellenberger recounted prior examples in which the Department of Defense has initially denied knowledge of UAP-related information only to later change its stance and either admit the information exists or release it to the public. 

"The U.S. government appears to know significantly more about UAPs than it is revealing," Shellenberger said at the hearing. "But even those who believe the U.S. government has revealed all that it knows should have no objection to Congressional demands for greater transparency."

To conclude the meeting, Rep. Mace asked each of the witnesses to define what non-human biologics or non-human intelligence mean to each of them.

"I don't think it's a stretch, when you look at the diversity of life on this planet and the size of this universe, to think that there will be more diverse, higher-order, non-human intelligence throughout the universe, and that's probably what's visiting us," Gallaudet said.

Elizondo stated he would take a scientific approach: "The definition would be the ability to react to a stimulus in a manner that requires an intellectual thought process."

Gold, meanwhile, questioned whether non-human intelligence necessarily implies life, suggesting sophisticated artificial intelligence might be responsible for some UAP encounters. Shellenberger simply stated he did not know what they might be.

Related: The search for alien life

In today's hearing, as in other UFO hearings, there was a lot of telling and not a lot of showing. One of the core tenets of these whistleblower testimonies is that much of the credible UFO data is classified and can't be revealed to the public based on the military capabilities that some of that data could reveal. 

Whistleblowers have attested for years that, because advanced or classified sensors and satellites sometimes capture footage or photos of unexplained phenomena or advanced craft, those photos or videos are likewise classified by the U.S. government in order to not reveal America's full surveillance or sensing capabilities. 

Such was the case in 2023 when U.S. military aircraft shot down a mysterious object off the coast of Alaska. The American government has yet to release any imagery from the event, but a Canadian freedom of information request unveiled a photograph earlier this year of a balloon-like object.

Those incidents and others like it, such as a weeks-long drone incursion above Langley Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., were discussed in today's hearing. "The origin of these drones and their operators remains a mystery," Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said. "This incident and other sightings near sensitive military installations highlights the complexity of the UAP challenge facing our intelligence, defense and homeland security committees."

Editor's note: The hearing has concluded. Read our coverage for more details and videos from the hearing.

The U.S. government is holding another hearing on UFOs today, and you can watch it live.

The U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Oversight and Accountability will administer the hearing, titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth." The name of the event refers to UFOs by their new preferred acronym, which is more inclusive of sightings that might take place not only in the air but also in space, as well as those that take place across multiple domains.

The hearing will be held at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington D.C. at 11:30 a.m. ET (1630 GMT) on Wednesday (Nov. 13). You can watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

This marks the second congressional hearing U.S. Congress has put together in order to "further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded," according to a House statement. The hearing will examine the U.S. Department of Defense's strict classification policies when it comes to UAP and related topics, and will explore ways to "make sure the American public is better informed on this topic."

This will be a joint hearing, led by representatives Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who argue that "the American people are tired of the obfuscation and refusal to release information by the federal government," according to the House's statement.

"Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose. We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue," Mace and Grothman said in the statement.

Expert witnesses in the hearing will include Luis Elizondo, a decorated former counterintelligence officer who has claimed for years that the U.S. government is hiding knowledge of UAP, including materials recovered from crashed flying saucers.

"The cover-up and disinformation campaign has been so successful that most scientists do not even know UAP are real," Elizondo wrote in his 2024 book "Imminent." The book also claims that four "deceased nonhuman bodies" were recovered from the infamous 1947 crash in Roswell, New Mexico and that "China and Russia do not have the same stigma and can employ their scientists to work on this topic for them."

Elizondo has also claimed firsthand knowledge of U.S. programs that employ individuals with psychic powers to "remote view" distant locations. Most recently, the former counterintelligence officer held a paid event where a photo was shown that Elizondo claimed was a "real photo" of a "mothership" UFO above a U.S. embassy. Within days, the photo was found to be the reflection of a lamp in a window.

The House hearing will also include Tim Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who unidentified submersible objects, arguing that "these underwater anomalies jeopardize US maritime security." Gallaudet has also told interviewers that his daughter is a "medium" who can communicate with spirits.

Other speakers at the hearing include journalist Michael Shellenberger, who has also claimed the U.S. government is hiding UFO crash retrieval programs, and former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships Michael Gold, who is a member of NASA's independent UAP study team.

According to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson's remarks in September 2024 when the team's report was released, "the top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn." 

"The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," Nelson said.

The Pentagon's UFO office is developing sensor kits to help it collect data in real time on unidentified objects in the sky or in space. 

That's according to Tim Phillips, the acting head of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, a U.S. Department of Defense office aimed at studying unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new term for UFOs that encompasses mysterious objects not only in the sky but also underwater or in space. 

Phillips said that his office is working with government laboratories and academia to develop a highly portable sensor kit known as the "Gremlin System" that can capture data across multiple spectra, according to a report in DefenseScoop.

Related: Pentagon has 'no credible evidence' of aliens or UFOs that defy physics

Phillips added that the Gremlin System has already proven capable of detecting a wide range of phenomena, including in space. "It's picking up a lot of bats and birds. We're learning a lot about solar flaring," Phillips told a select group of reporters on Thursday (March 7). 

"We're really starting to understand what's in orbit around our planet and how we can eliminate those as anomalous objects," he added.

The AARO director said that these Gremlin System sensors could be used to surveil sensitive sites for airspace intrusions, or even keep an eye on U.S. satellites in orbit.

"If we have a national security site and there are objects being reported that trend within restricted airspace, or within a maritime range, or in the proximity of one of our spaceships, we need to understand what that is. And so that's why we're developing a sensor capability that we can deploy in reaction to reports," Phillips said.

AARO plans to present the Gremlin System to Pentagon leaders so that the sensor kits could be deployed in the event of "UAP encounters at militarily significant locations or near U.S. critical infrastructure," DefenseScoop reported.

For those who follow news related to anomalous flying objects, 2023 will be remembered as the year UFOs came to Washington, D.C.

Not in the way we'd all like, though. No, there were no Tic-Tac-shaped UFOs landing on the White House lawn or big black triangles hovering silently in the air above it. Instead, there were new bureaucratic offices and government websites created, pieces of dense legislation deliberated over, and hearings. Lots of hearings.

Throughout the pockets of social media that are most vocal about UFOs, many thought that this year would finally bring about disclosure, the revelation of UFO-related truth in which the U.S. government would finally fess up and reveal what it has allegedly been covering up about unidentified, physics-defying craft and their possible occupants for at least seven decades.

But disclosure didn't happen. While many sensational claims were made that would, if true, indeed bring about ontological shock and a rethinking of our place in the universe, in the end none of these was substantiated with little more than hearsay. As is tradition.

Related: Some UFO records must be released, US Congress says

Government reports and Chinese balloons

The big UFO year began on Jan. 12, when the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its long-awaited "2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." The report, produced by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) that was established in July 2022, included over 500 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, a new term that describes unidentified objects or phenomena in the air, under water, in space or that appear to travel between them.

The much-anticipated report analyzed the reports, finding only 171 that remained  "uncharacterized," or unidentified. "Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis," the report stated. Ultimately, while the report was unable to reach any broad conclusions about UFOs/UAP, it found that many of these sightings "continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat," meaning they could possibly be related to foreign spy activities. 

Just a few weeks later, on Feb. 1, UFOs took center stage in both Washington D.C. and the news cycle when a large white orb was spotted floating over Montana. The object turned out to be a massive high-altitude balloon operated by China. The appearance of such a brazen intelligence-gathering aircraft caused an international stir, and China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs eventually issued an apology.

The balloon was eventually shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 5 and recovered by the U.S. military. In the weeks that followed, several other UFOs were shot down over the northern United States and Canada, some of which were never recovered and remain unidentified to this day  —  at least publicly. 

Soon after, The New York Times reported that similar balloons had intruded in American airspace between 2017 and 2021 and that military and governmental leaders were unaware of them in some cases because they were initially mischaracterized as UAP. "Balloons account for many of the unexplained incidents the Navy and other military services have tracked in recent years. The previous incidents, like other unexplained events, were handed over to a Pentagon task force charged with investigating UFOs and other aerial phenomena," the Times wrote in its report. "As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons."

The furor over the Chinese spy events continued through the early spring, leading up to the first public testimony of the director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office on April 19, 2023. During that testimony, Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO's first director, told members of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services at a hearing in Washington, D.C. that, despite the rather sensational claims in mainstream and social media concerning possible alien visitation of Earth, his office found "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics." 

Instead, most UAP cases "demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, [uncrewed] aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources," Kirkpatrick told the armed services committee.  

The next month, NASA held the first public meeting of its independent UAP study group at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. NASA commissioned the group in 2022 to help examine data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena and make recommendations on how the agency might better contribute to the topic. 

During the meeting held on May 31, group members laid out a roadmap for how U.S. government agencies can "use the tools of science to evaluate and categorize the nature of UAPs going forward," said Nicki Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 

While many different potential approaches for accomplishing this were described and discussed, ultimately the group, like AARO before it, reached the conclusion that UAP will remain mysterious without better data. "To make the claim that we've seen something that is evidence of non-human intelligence, it would require extraordinary evidence," said astrophysicist David Spergel, chair of the study group and former member of the NASA Advisory Council. "And we have not seen that. I think that's important to make clear. "

Still, the public and governmental interest in UFOs by this point had reached such a height that two U.S. Senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), introduced a bill known as the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023, or the Schumer-Rounds amendment, which called for the public release of U.S. government records related to UFOs and/or UAP. 

"For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained, and it’s long past time they get some answers," Schumer said in a statement accompanying the bill. "The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena. We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public."

Allegations get wilder

Undoubtedly, the most out-of-this world UFO event of 2023 came two months after NASA's UAP study group meeting when, on July 26, three former U.S. military personnel testified to the U.S. House of Representatives' Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs. Two of the witnesses, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, are former U.S. Navy aviators who had previously reported highly publicized encounters with unknown objects in military training airspace that have become touchstones for the UFO community in terms of credible sightings from reputable, trained witnesses.

But it was the third witness at the July hearing that caused the biggest stir. That witness, David Grusch, a decorated U.S. military combat veteran and former Pentagon intelligence officer, told the subcommittee that the U.S. government has operated a "multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program," along with a disinformation campaign to keep the public in the dark.

Grusch would go on to state to the subcommittee that "biologics came with some of these recoveries" and that these "biologics" were "non-human," according to individuals with direct knowledge of these crash recovery programs that he had spoken with during his time in the intelligence community.

Naturally, a media feeding frenzy ensued, and Grusch has since become a regular talking head on the podcast circuit and television news programs. Evidence for his claims has yet to surface.

A month later, on Aug. 31, the Pentagon's AARO office quietly unveiled an official government website through which U.S. government personnel can report UFO/UAP sightings "in the vicinity of national security areas" such as military bases or other U.S. government sites. 

NASA's UAP study team would then go on to release a written report on Sept. 14 that reached similar conclusions to AARO director Kirkpatrick's testimony in April. "The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a teleconference held after the agency released the report. "The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are."

The year in UFOs would ultimately end not with a bang, but with a whimper, when in December the U.S. Congress approved legislation containing a portion of the Schumer-Rounds language that ordered that some government records related to UAP must be released. 

However, many UFO disclosure proponents felt that the final version of the Schumer-Rounds amendment was far weaker than what was originally proposed. 

"The most important components of the Schumer-Rounds language were dropped  — an independent Senate-confirmed review board with subpoena power, professional staff to search out records, and other serious resources," Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent researcher who writes on various aspects relating to UAP, told Space.com. "What is being enacted instead is a modest mechanism that is far less likely to result in the location, extraction and disclosure of important UAP-related records that may be tightly held or even long forgotten."

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

For those who have followed the UFO topic for a significant amount of time, none of these developments should feel new. The U.S. government has commissioned and/or conducted several UFO studies in the past, many of which reached similar conclusions as those reported by federal studies and agencies in 2023. 

So, yes, while UFOs came to Washington in 2023, ultimately they left the same way they came: Shrouded in mystery, tainted by sensationalism, and wrapped in the jingoistic and sometimes paranoid language of national security. The U.S. government, at least outwardly, appears no closer to solving the UFO enigma or revealing what it may know about these phenomena to the American public. 

Yet, anyway. Many of those behind the current disclosure movement assure us that despite the legislative setbacks, the fight for the truth  —  if it's out there  —  is just beginning.

Here's hoping we see that big black triangle over the White House in 2024.

The United States Congress just passed legislation that directs the U.S. government to release records related to UFOs.

Some UFO records, anyway. According to new provisions in the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the law that funds the U.S. military and related activities, the U.S. National Archives must collect for release all documents that "pertain to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence." 

None of those terms is defined in the bill, however. "Unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAP, is a relatively a newly adopted and broadly defined term that encompasses UFOs in the sky in addition to unidentified objects underwater, in space or that appear to travel between these domains.

The records are to be released once 25 years has passed since their creation, unless the president directs them to remain classified, and newer records can be released sooner if the agency that created them allows it.

Related: UFO whistleblower tells Congress the US government is hiding evidence of 'non-human intelligence'

The language directing these records is known as the the UAP Disclosure Act, or the Schumer-Rounds Amendment. An earlier version of the amendment contained much stronger language that ordered the Department of Defense (DoD) to declassify records "relating to publicly known sightings" of UFOs without review, but the measure was removed from the legislation that eventually passed. 

Despite the mandate in the bill, some UAP transparency advocates say the failure to pass the original amendment as written is a serious disappointment for those who feel the truth is out there and that the U.S. government has a responsibility to reveal it to the public.

"The most important components of the Schumer-Rounds language were dropped  — an independent Senate-confirmed review board with subpoena power, professional staff to search out records, and other serious resources," said Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent researcher who writes on various aspects relating to UAP. "What is being enacted instead is a modest mechanism that is far less likely to result in the location, extraction and disclosure of important UAP-related records that may be tightly held or even long forgotten," Johnson told Space.com. 

Christopher Mellon, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, called the bipartisan back-and-forth over the NDAA "shockingly dysfunctional."  

"Regarding the UAP issue, DoD and the [intelligence community] clearly have a serious trust issue with important members of Congress who are not backing down and likely to escalate," Mellon told Space.com via email. "I've seen this pattern many times. So, although the Executive Branch feels they dodged a bullet on the Schumer language, until they earn Congress' trust, they are going to be fighting a prolonged and likely losing battle."

As word began to trickle out onto social media that the Schumer-Rounds amendment  was not going to pass as originally written, many UAP transparency advocates claimed that lobbyists working for for aerospace contractors were working to kill the language in the bill, in order to protect an alleged decades-long cover-up of crashed UFO technologies. "An extremely powerful Defense Aerospace lobby is pushing key politicians in Congress to block the Schumer Amendment to the NDAA," Australian journalist and UFO transparency advocate Ross Coulthart wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

However, those familiar with the NDAA amendment and the legislative process that eventually passed it think those claims are merely hearsay. 

"I have seen no evidence of any substantial lobbying activity by aerospace firms against the UAPDA over the past 5 months. One cannot completely exclude some such influence, but any sizable campaign would leave tracks. I don't see them, and nobody has produced a single named congressmember who has referred to such activity, nor any document to support the notion," Johnson said.

Instead, resistance appears to have come from the DoD. According to the New York Times, a "person familiar with the talks who insisted on anonymity to describe them noted that the Defense Department also had pushed back forcefully on wider measures" in the bill.

Much of the current movement to pass legislation that could release U.S. government UFO records stems from a broader disclosure movement that has been building momentum in recent years both on social media and in the halls of Congress, thanks to claims made by former U.S. military and intelligence community personnel.

In July 2022, the DoD formed the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, an office established within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security that was tasked with collecting and studying reports of UFOs/UAP near U.S. military installations or "other areas of interest." 

In April 2023, the office's director told the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services that AARO had found "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."

Even NASA commissioned an independent panel to inform the U.S. government how the agency might help better collect and analyze data related to UAP. "The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in September 2023 when the panel released its first public report. 

"The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are."

Related: The search for alien life

In July 2023, two former U.S. Navy aviators recounted their now-famous encounters with seemingly anomalous objects in military airspace to the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs.

Another witness at the hearing, David Grusch, a U.S. military combat veteran and Pentagon intelligence officer, told the committee that the U.S. government is in possession of crashed UAP and that "biologics came with some of these recoveries."

In response, some of the members of Congress even formed a UAP caucus in support of efforts to compel the federal government to release what records or information they claim it possesses related to UFOs and the alleged "UAP reverse engineering programs" it operates. 

Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN), one of the more vocal members of Congress when it comes to the UAP transparency issue, said that the government has evidence that UFOs can "travel light-years" or at speeds that "defy physics as we know it," even claiming that some UFOs have technology that can "turn us into a charcoal briquette."

ELY, Nevada   — The state of Nevada is the perfect place to watch for strange things in the sky. 

And it's easy to see why as you head north out of Las Vegas and turn onto state route 375, the "Extraterrestrial Highway." This straight stretch of windblown road crosses mostly empty desert, offering vast vistas of open sky and long-distance views of the surrounding mountain ranges.

Dotted along the route are UFO- and alien-themed attractions like the Alien Research Center in Crystal Springs, Nevada, a metal Quonset hut that rises out of the desert like a crashed flying saucer. A 30-foot (10-meter) extraterrestrial statue stands guard over the door, through which can be found aisle after aisle of big-eyed gray alien head knick-knacks, shelves of books on UFO research and ancient alien theories and even a full-size statue of Marilyn Monroe wearing oversized alien-eye sunglasses. 

Related: Annular solar eclipse of 2023 wows skywatchers with spectacular 'ring of fire' (photos, video)

Farther north along the Extraterrestrial Highway is the Little A'le'Inn (pronounced "alien") in Rachel, Nevada, close to the U.S. Air Force's secretive and infamous Area 51 installation within the Nevada Test and Training Range. 

After walking through the sandy gravel parking lot and past a rusty, long-dead tow truck carrying a metal flying saucer covered in sun-bleached stickers and visitors' signatures, one can order the "Alien Burger" and fries from the bartender wearing a shirt covered in a gray alien head pattern. Across from the bar, racks of Little A'le'Inn T-shirts line a wall decorated with signed photos from the who's-who of UFO personalities of the last three decades.

Despite the region's fascination with UFOs, there was a different aerial phenomenon on everyone's mind this weekend as eastern Nevada was crossed by the path of an annular solar eclipse that saw the moon partially block the sun, leaving a striking "ring of fire" overhead. 

The entire region was abuzz with excitement over the event. Eclipse-chasers from all over the world packed into hotels and recreational areas, and local businesses were stocked with eclipse-themed merchandise. The town of Ely, Nevada, some four hours north of Las Vegas, held a "Ring of Fire Eclipse Festival" that featured three days of events including a golf tournament, alien-themed parties and live music.

Just south of Ely along U.S. Highway 50, called the "loneliest road in America" due to its long, desolate stretches of nothing but open desert, lies Great Basin National Park, a 77,180-acre (312-square-kilometer) expanse between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Mountains. The park is home to Lehman Caves, the longest cave system in the state of Nevada, the 13,063-foot-tall (3,982 m) Wheeler Peak, and miles and miles of hiking trails that snake among ancient Bristlecone pines and protected wildlife habitats.

The park hosted two astronomy lectures in an outdoor amphitheater the night before the eclipse, followed by a skywatching party and guided telescope viewing. The park is recognized by the International Dark Sky Association as an International Dark Sky Park, and the skies above it lived up to that distinction on a crystal clear Friday night (Oct. 13) just hours before the eclipse began.

Related: 21 amazing dark sky reserves around the world

The first lecture was given by David Cheney, a mission executive in NASA's Heliophysics Division for the agency's upcoming PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere). PUNCH will provide a global 3D image of the solar wind emanating from the sun. Cheney, who grew up in nearby Ely, Nevada, gave a lecture about the science of solar eclipses, including descriptions of the Earth-moon system and its relationship with the sun. "I actually got to go visit my old schools in Ely yesterday, and share some of this with them. And that was really cool," Cheney told Space.com. "That was a highlight for me."

The second lecture of the night was given by Jason Wurtz, a U.S. National Park Service interpretive ranger. Wurtz's lecture, "Prometheus in the dark: A history of eclipses in Great Basin National Park," walked visitors through thousands of years in the history of Prometheus, a Bristlecone pine that once lived in the park that is believed to have been over 4,000 years old before it was cut down in 1964. The tree saw 24 solar eclipses in its life: 10 total eclipses and 14 annular solar eclipses. The most recent annular eclipses were in 2012 and 1596. 

"I think the biggest thing that I hope that people take away from this eclipse is really a reminder of our place in the universe. We don't get reminded often enough that we are just one planet in this giant cosmos," Wurtz told Space.com. "To see everything line up where you can see from the surface of the Earth to the moon out there, and then the sun much further out. I think that's a really humbling reminder of our place here."

After the lectures, the sky quickly darkened and Great Basin became bathed in the glow of the Milky Way, visible from horizon to horizon. Volunteers set up telescopes and live astrophotography demonstrations for park visitors who braved the frigid temperatures in order to wonder at popular targets like the Andromeda Galaxy or Saturn, bright and clear as it hung among scores of stars under some of America's darkest skies.

It was still cold when those skies began to lighten on the morning of the eclipse in Ely, Nevada, while wispy clouds blew above the recreational vehicles and camp chairs that began to line the route from Ely to Great Basin National Park. As the sun rose over the pine-covered mountains of the Schell Creek Range in the distance, more and more visitors arrived and set up tripods and cameras. Some of the gathered eclipse-chasers wore homemade T-shirts commemorating the event, and many had driven for days just to get a glimpse of the "ring of fire."

The sun first peeked over the mountains a little over an hour before the eclipse. By the time it rose high in a fiery red-and-orange sky, cloud cover was beginning to intermittently obscure the sun. Just as the moon began to darken the top edge of the sun's disk, the clouds grew thicker and blocked it from view, eliciting disappointed groans from the gathered skywatchers. 

After roughly 10 minutes, the clouds cleared, and the eclipse began to enter annularity, its "ring of fire" phase, as the crowds sighed relief. The temperature dropped significantly as the moon moved slowly across the center of the sun's disk, and the mid-morning light took on a muted, twilight-like glow. When the moment of annularity occurred, applause rang out from the crowds of awed onlookers.

Within minutes, it was over. As soon as the eclipse's annularity phase ended and it resumed being a partial eclipse, the crowds began to thin as visitors packed their chairs and paper solar glasses and left. The temperature rose rapidly as the moon exited past the sun's bottom-left edge, and suddenly the skies were normal once again.

After the eclipse, Ely held a "Punkin Chunkin'" festival complete with costumed guests and vendors celebrating the newly-finished celestial spectacle with a live medieval combat demonstration, food trucks and pumpkin-launching catapults. Vendors sold eclipse-themed T-shirts featured cartoonish flying saucers zooming beside the eclipsed sun and commemorative drink koozies depicting the "ring of fire" above the Bristlecone pines that dot the surrounding desert.

No matter how much has changed since one of those Bristlecones, Prometheus, first peeked out of the ground thousands of years ago to experience its first eclipse alongside the area's Indigenous inhabitants, one thing stays the same: Whether it's flying saucers or solar eclipses, the sky and its celestial phenomena continue to captivate the people that call the American southwest home.

If you captured a photo of the annular eclipse and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Travel arranged by Travel Nevada. Solar photography made possible by Unistellar.

Is there anybody out there in space?

It's a question we've all wondered. Given all of the advances in space telescopes, robotic missions to other planets and even the wild headlines related to UFOs and possible extraterrestrial visitation these days, the question can seem more pressing than ever. And for children, the question can feel frightening, fascinating and everything in between, given some of the sensationalism that surrounds the subject.

To help sort out fact from fiction, author and podcast host Laura Krantz has written "Is There Anybody Out There?: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, from Amoebas to Aliens," a new book from Abrams Books for Young Readers coming out on Oct. 3, 2023. The book takes a rational look at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the flyby of interstellar object 'Oumuamua and even well-known examples of UFO lore like the July 1947 crash of either a flying saucer or a secret U.S. military balloon outside Roswell, New Mexico,

Space.com spoke with Krantz to learn about the book, her take on the UFO buzz these days and even some tips on how to talk to kids about aliens.

Related: The search for alien life

Space.com: First off, I have to say that this is a beautifully illustrated book.

Laura Krantz: I just love it. I love the colors. I love this sort of like blocky illustration style. I just I think it turned out really, really well. [Illustrator Rafael Nobre] has a good sense of humor, too. Like he's able to incorporate some of the funnier stuff into like, great photos. Like there's the scene of an alien trying to cook life, I just I love that one.

Space.com: What was the inspiration for the book?

Krantz:  The book is really a spin-off of the Wild Thing podcast. When I started doing the podcast, I wasn't really thinking about kids at all, I was thinking about adults. And I started getting letters from parents who were listening with their kids, teachers who were using elements of the podcast in their classroom to talk about like, evolution, DNA evidence and the scientific method. And I started talking to my agent, and she suggested doing a middle-grade nonfiction book, because that is really an area where teachers love this kind of information and resources for kids. 

But it's interesting to write this kind of stuff. Because when you're doing it for an adult audience, you assume they know what DNA is, they know what evolution is. They know what all these sort of terms mean, at least sort of obliquely. But when you're writing for kids, you're like 'Crap, I have to understand what this actually is, and be able to explain it in plain language!' So it was like getting a crash course in science education.

Space.com: Why do you think it's important for young people to read this book?

Krantz: I think one of the most important things about it is that [the question of alien life] kind of sits firmly in the gray area. There's no answer to the question "Is there anybody out there?" Just like there's no answer to the Bigfoot question. It's like, this is an area to explore. This is an area to think about things scientifically and wonder and hypothesize. And guess what? We don't have a solid answer. 

And in some ways, it's like teaching kids to be comfortable with the idea that there's no answer, because I think we are in a society now where things tend to be pretty black and white, good or bad, right or wrong, one side or the other side. And with this, you just kind of have to be like, 'There might be aliens out there; I can see both sides of this argument.' I can see all different ways this might go. And I still don't know for sure. And I think that that's valuable. 

And then I think the other thing, too, is it's helpful to help. It's helpful for kids to see how science works, that science has such a long timeline, that the work that was done in the '50s and '60s and '70s on space science, many of those scientists aren't around or won't be around to see where the sort of seeds that they planted end up. And I think that that's sort of important for kids to understand — that science is constantly building on itself and revising and resubmitting, and trying to figure it out as best as it can using the evidence at the time. I think those are two really valuable things. 

And then, also, space is cool.

Space.com: I read in your introduction like you were not familiar with the UFO topic before getting into this, right?

Krantz: What really caught my attention was, firstly, the 'Oumuamua story, which I just thought was fascinating. I mean, we guessed that there were things coming in from outside our solar system. But we hadn't really been able to say that for sure. And this is the first moment we were like, 'This thing is from very far away.' And I think that that's just kind of a cool thing to think about — like, this moment in time, we have this realization of just how big the universe is, and what kinds of things are traveling through it. 

And also seeing photos coming out of the James Webb Space Telescope. And granted this that was after this project was mostly finished. But it's hard not to look at those photos and just have your jaw drop with, you know, how amazingly beautiful and yet, kind of terrifyingly awesome they are. A lot of those photos make you feel very small and insignificant, which is, I guess, kind of a good reminder of our place. And in the grand scheme of things.

Space.com: What do you make of the current UFO buzz in the U.S. government?

Krantz: I saw how, like, crazy, everybody went over the AATIP program [an alleged U.S. Department of Defense UFO study program]. And when the announcement came out about that, like, people lost their marbles; the headlines on that were just constant. And so that was the moment where I was like, 'There's something to be done here on this' and sort of take my glancing interest in it and pull in these threads where it's obvious that this is a question that people think about a lot, even if it's not something we're talking about day to day.

I think that it's a perfect opportunity to apply some rational thought. So, for instance, the whistleblower who testified in front of Congress, he said that people told him that they had recovered bodies, but he hadn't seen them for himself. So that to me is the first red flag. It's like, if you're the whistleblower, you need to have been seeing some of the stuff, you can't just use hearsay. Generally, that's not admissible in court, from what I understand about legal proceedings. So I think that should be a rational thing. And in science, too, and in scientific inquiry.

I don't doubt that there's some weird stuff up in the sky, and that pilots are seeing things. I do think there needs to be a recording process for that, that does not have a stigma attached to it. 

Related: UFOs and UAP: History, sightings and mysteries

Space.com: What do you hope kids take away from the book?

Krantz: That wonder is a huge asset. I think it's so valuable. And I think we kind of beat the wonder out of people as they become grownups. It's like, there's these boxes, you have to check in these things you have to do and the wonder kind of slips by the wayside. But wonder is so important, because it gets you figuring out how your world works. And it gets you thinking about things from different perspectives. And scientifically, like the first step of the scientific method is, it's about wonder. Ask a question; what are you wondering? And I think that that is a really valuable thing for kids. 

And I also think it's a valuable thing for adults to wonder about the world around you, to wonder about what life is like for other people to just sort of have this curiosity and questions and continuing to maybe question your own thoughts on things and beliefs. And, you know, it extends beyond science. I think wonder is a skill that we sometimes lose as we get older.

"Is There Anybody Out There?: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, from Amoebas to Aliens," is currently available for pre-order and will be released on Oct. 3, 2023.

NASA has named a new head of UFO research.

Mark McInerney was appointed as Director of UAP Research, a role in which he will oversee the agency's studies into unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, a new term that encompasses UFOs in the sky as well as unexplained objects or events that are observed under water, in space or that appear to travel between any of these domains.

McInerney previously served as the agency's liaison to the U.S. Department of Defense. In this new role, McInerney will coordinate NASA's communications and studies into UAP in order to "establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP," according to a NASA statement. In addition, NASA's new UAP chief will help the agency provide expertise in artificial intelligence and space-based Earth observation satellites to help the U.S. government begin collecting data that it hopes might help explain the UFO phenomenon.

Related: NASA UFO report finds no evidence of 'extraterrestrial origin' for UAP sightings

In a briefing on Thursday (Sept. 14) held to discuss the first public report of its independent UAP study team, NASA leaders initially stated that they would not be naming the director publicly. It's unclear why the agency reversed that decision, but comments made during the briefing suggested that members of NASA's UAP study group had received threats and harassment online. 

"That's in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free, science needs to undergo a real and rigorous and rational process and you need the freedom of thought to be able to do that" Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said. "Some of the threats and the harassment have been beyond the pale, quite frankly, towards some of our panelists. And yes, it's important that science be free as part of that process.

Despite the harassment NASA's UAP study team received, agency leaders are optimistic that this new position will help give UFOs the serious scientific scrutiny the topic deserves. In the statement announcing McInerney's appointment, Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said that the new position director of UAP Research is "a pivotal addition to NASA's team and will provide leadership, guidance and operational coordination for the agency and the federal government to use as a pipeline to help identify the seemingly unidentifiable."

In their report published Thursday (Sept. 14), NASA's UAP study team concluded that current analysis of the UAP phenomenon is limited by poor quality data, a lack of multiple measurements or even basic baseline data.

"The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a briefing Thursday after the report's release. "The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn." 

Update for 10:28 a.m. EDT: NASA's first report by its UAP study team has found no evidence of extraterrestrial origins of UAP reports. Read our full story from today's media conference. 

NASA's independent UFO study team is ready to share its findings.

The agency commissioned a panel of experts in 2022 to examine data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new term for UFOs that now encompasses abnormal objects or events in the sky, underwater or in space that can't be immediately identified. Now, the team is set to release its first report on Thursday (Sept. 14) that will offer suggestions to NASA on how to better collect and analyze data that might help explain the nature and origin of UAP. The agency is quick to note that the report is "not a review or assessment of previous unidentifiable observations," according to a NASA statement announcing the briefing.

NASA leaders, including agency administrator Bill Nelson, will join the chair of the UAP study group, David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, to host a briefing on the group's first report at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Thursday. You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of the agency or on NASA TV.

Related: UFOs will remain mysterious without better data, NASA study team says

NASA's 16-person UAP study team includes former astronaut Scott Kelly, a wide variety of scientific experts from academia, the aerospace and aviation industries, and one science journalist. 

NASA's independent UAP study team has held one public meeting already, on May 31. During that meeting, the group of experts largely discussed ways that better data can be collected to help dispel some of the mystery surrounding UAP. One common theme of the meeting was the need for more and better information. The current UAP data dearth is caused in part by the fact that the capabilities of many of the advanced sensors operated by the U.S. government and military remain classified.

Despite the lack of definitive data, NASA's Dan Evans stressed in the May 31 meeting that studying a topic such as UAP fits within the agency's scientific purview. "First and foremost, it provides an opportunity for us to expand our understanding of the world around us," Evans said. "This work is in our DNA."

The topic of UAP/UFOs has been frequently discussed in the federal government in recent years. In July, two former U.S. military aviators gave testimony concerning encounters with bizarre objects that occurred in controlled U.S. airspace. 

A third witness at the hearing, former Pentagon intelligence officer and U.S. Air Force veteran David Grusch, told the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs that the U.S. government is hiding the existence of a "multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program" and that "biologics came with some of these recoveries." 

When pressed for clarification about the identify of these "biologics," Grusch clarified that he meant "non-human." 

These claims contradict the head of the Pentagon's new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick, who told the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services in April 2023 that his group has found "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics." 

"The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, [uncrewed] aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources," Kirkpatrick told the committee. 

The Pentagon's official office for addressing UFOs has a new website where U.S. government and military personnel can report their own sightings.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) unveiled the new website on Wednesday (Aug. 30). According to a note from the office's director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the website will be used to inform the public about ARRO's findings as well as offer a way for the public to report sightings of UFOs or, as they're now called, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

While the site is still under construction, it features a section where the office will be "accepting reports from current or U.S. Government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of U.S. Government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945." These reports will help the office complete a historical record of such events, as requested by the United States Congress.

Related: UFO whistleblower tells Congress the US government is hiding evidence of 'non-human intelligence'

The site also outlines the office's mission, which it states is to "minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas."

In addition, the site offers a three-part definition of UAP, which it states are objects in the air that can't immediately be identified; objects or devices that travel between different domains such as air, space or water; and underwater objects that are not immediately identifiable or may be related to the first two definitions.

This focus on objects in space and in water is part of the reason the term "UFO" has fallen out of fashion and has been replaced with the more all-encompassing term "UAP." 

In a set of slides offering a more comprehensive overview of AARO's mission, it is stated that the office will study "recovered enigmatic technologies, leveraging cross-sector partnerships and the latest developments in theoretical and applied physics, [and] engineering." 

In July 2023, a U.S. Air Force and intelligence community veteran told a Congressional subcommittee that the American government is hiding the existence of a "multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program." No definitive proof of those claims have come to light, but several members of the U.S. Congress have vowed to get to the bottom of them.

AARO was established in July 2022 in order to "detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and, as necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security," according to a Department of Defense statement. 

Despite collecting hundreds of reports from U.S. military and government personnel, Kirkpatrick stated at a public hearing in April that his office "has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics." 

In a Frequently Asked Questions section on the new site, AARO states that it "uses a rigorous scientific framework and data-driven approach to better understand UAP" and will "follow the science wherever it leads." 

One of the last things you'd expect with stuffy politicians facing off in the first Republican Presidential Primary Debate is a discussion on the controversial subject of UFOs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena as they're now known, but that's exactly what happened last night.

The awkward moment in the debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Wednesday night (Aug. 23) featuring eight potential presidential candidates came when moderator Martha MacCallum took aim at former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to ask his opinion about a president's responsibility to provide the American public with the truth about the UFO topic.

"I get the UFO question?" Christie responded with a smile. Christie was a good sport about the unexpected topic that was specifically lobbed at him, being queried on his own thoughts regarding transparency with the country concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in the wake of intriguing congressional hearings on the subject this past July.

"The job of the president of the United States is to level with the American people about everything. The job of the president of the United States is to stand for truth," Christie replied.

Related: UFO whistleblower tells Congress the US government is hiding evidence of 'non-human intelligence'

"Especially coming from a woman from New Jersey, I think it's horrible that just because I'm from New Jersey, you asked me about unidentified flying objects and Martians. We're different but we're not that different."

This New Jersey connection is in reference to Orson Welles' infamous Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" back on October 30, 1938 when a panicking public believed that hostile Martian tripod machines were actually rampaging around the countryside near Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

The subject of UFOs or UAP has taken center stage in Washington, D.C. recently as federal agencies and even the Department of Defense have begun making public statements that seem to indicate pilots and other military personnel have been encountering anomalous objects that display advanced capabilities with increasing frequency.

The Department of Defense (DOD) even created an office known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in order to detect and identify UAP in American airspace. 

Despite cataloging hundreds of reports, the head of the office told members of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services in April 2023 that AARO "has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."

Then, in July, a U.S. military and intelligence community veteran told a Congressional subcommittee that the American government is hiding a "multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program" and is in possession of "non-human spacecraft." 

I was so confused in the opening minutes of The Greyhill Incident.

Was this space horror game meant to evoke found footage style? Or to be a dark commentary on politics in rural America? Or to bring in the "so bad that it's good" feelings common in the space horror genre?

I found myself figuratively (and literally) stumbling in the dark to find the plot of The Greyhill Incident, which I really wanted to love because it's an indie game and space horror — the perfect combo for me.

But somewhere in the game's opening minutes, I began to lose interest in the characters real fast. "Dad, we need to get out of this cursed place, I hate this neighborhood hole," says a preteen glaring at the 1990s-era television with poor signal. As if overcome by his confusing statement he just lay there, listlessly, as dad rambled something about not believing the government.

Eventually, I (in control of "Dad") got to go outside in search of ... something interfering with the TV. After I whacked Dad drearily against trees, trailers, anything but my objective in the cloistering dark, eventually I found my way and a blurry image emerged of a silver alien craft landing in a nearby field. Now, I thought, the story will get going. Sadly it only got worse from there.

Related: Best space horror games

Refugium Games describes the plot of 'The Greyhill Incident' as "a story-driven survival-horror game about an classic alien invasion [that] takes place during the early 90s." 

The early 90s is indeed an interesting setting for conspiracy-driven stories; without getting into details on this family-friendly site, there were a few unfortunate incidents involving survivalists that (like our characters here) had very negative opinions about the U.S. government.

I thought it would be interesting to see what aliens would add to that historical backdrop, but the conspiracists and extraterrestrials alike were forgettable in both shape and in character. Without spoiling too much of the plot, suffice it to say the aliens not only don't look scary, they also aren't too hard to kill. There's also a strange lack of motive to their actions, which perhaps is the point?

Other self-imposed limitations made the game very hard to navigate. Extremely dark settings and not infrequent graphic aberrations made it hard for me to make sense of anything. While I did watch The X-Files in the 1990s with poor TV reception (as my family didn't have cable) and am used to vague alien settings, the plot didn't make up for the things I was unable to see.

I do want to put in a word in favor for Refugium Games, however, because they're a small, indie developer and so many other big websites have had negative reviews about their new game. 

The team certainly worked hard on this, and after playing the game through, I honestly think with more development time to improve the plot pacing, voice recording, and bit of a graphics touch up would have moved the game to a decent game (at the least) instead of the mess that we currently have. And that may be already ongoing.

The developers have made changes in response to some of the early complaints that made gameplay even more difficult, including improvements to stealth, stamina and the flashlight. So stay tuned, and check in periodically — my review may be happily out of date down the road, but for now, I'd give this one a miss.

The Greyhill Incident is available now on Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Ancient aliens. Astrology. Flat-Earth and UFO conspiracies. These are examples of pseudoscience, a system of beliefs that masquerades as true science but is far from it. To understand how pseudoscience works and why it's so popular, you need a guide to spotting it.

"Pseudoscience" has many possible definitions, and some people argue that the term shouldn't be applied at all. Perhaps the most useful definition of pseudoscience comes directly from the root words: The prefix "pseudo" is taken from the Greek word for "false," so pseudoscience is quite literally "false science."

But there is something about certain practices, like ghost hunting and astrology, that make them look like science even though they lack the underlying structures. Pseudoscience is a practice that, from the outside, looks like science, but upon closer inspection, is revealed to be nothing but. And what makes a practice look like science? To the outside world, science seems to be defined by its complex mathematics, incomprehensible jargon and dizzying array of gizmos and measurement devices.

Related: 25 space conspiracies debunked

Pseudoscience uses that same set of surface-like features; pseudoscientific practices employ their own kind of dense jargon, often feature an incredible amount of math, and even use strange and arcane measurement devices.

The soul of science

But the math, jargon and gizmos are only the "skin" of science — the surface features that are most apparent to the outside world. In other words, those are the tools that scientists use to do their jobs, the same way construction workers use hammers and saws, or lawyers use legal briefs and court motions.

Those tools don't define the job, however. Instead, underneath the surface, science has a much deeper set of practices and traditions that separate science from pseudoscience. 

While a dissection of what makes science special could encompass an entire book, a few key features of the scientific mindset make it stand out. For one, science is rigorous, which means scientists take their ideas seriously and seek to explore the full logical consequences of any hypothesis. Science is also humble, because any theory, even one that has stood for centuries, can be proved wrong at any moment. 

Next, science is skeptical, allowing for the evidence to dictate beliefs — not the other way around. Science is also open, where methods and techniques must be shared and publicized to the wider community. Science is connected, meaning that every statement a scientist makes must be linked to the broader knowledge of the entire community. Lastly, science allows itself to evolve, with new evidence and ideas supplanting earlier beliefs.

Pseudoscience in the world

This distinction between the surface features of science and the deeper core of science allows us to draw a line between pseudoscience and proper science. Pseudoscientific practices keep the surface features (the jargon, math or gizmos) while rejecting the rigor, openness, skepticism and connectedness.

For example, proponents of ancient aliens aren't skeptical and disregard any evidence that runs contrary to their existing beliefs. By contrast, SETI researchers often encourage skepticism, caution and careful analysis of data before reaching any conclusions. Astrologers keep their methods secret. Flat-Earthers don't connect their ideas to the broader understanding of how things work. 

If you encounter a belief system that seems like science at first glance but runs contrary to the underlying spirit of science, then it's probably pseudoscience. For example, if the statements of the belief system claim access to secret, inaccessible knowledge, then it's not open.

If it's static and unchanging, with evidence used to bolster the original belief and nothing else, then it's not evolving. If it's conspiratorial, claiming that the "establishment" is trying to suppress it, then it's not connected to the broader community of knowledge.

Once you gain enough practice, spotting pseudoscience is a snap. It looks like science on the outside but doesn't have the features that distinguish science as a powerful, vital way to examine the inner workings of the universe.

UFOs came to Washington today.

UFOs — or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), as they're now called — have been receiving increased scrutiny from the U.S. government in recent years due to high-profile testimony from credible witnesses. In order to shine light on what some deem to be the pressing national security threat posed by UAP, the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs held a hearing Wednesday (July 26) in Washington titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency." 

Three key witnesses testified at the hearing: Ryan Graves and David Fravor, two former U.S. Navy aviators who reported highly publicized encounters with unknown objects in military training airspace; and David Grusch, a decorated U.S. military combat veteran and Pentagon intelligence officer.

In his opening remarks, Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI) stated that "we must demand transparency from the Department of Defense," adding that "Congress recognizes the subject of UAPs is multifaceted and requires a careful, data-driven approach." Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) went even further: "We need to tell the folks at the Pentagon, they work for us, that government, we don't work for them. And that's exactly the point. This is an issue of government transparency. We can't trust a government that does not trust its people."

Related: Pentagon has 'no credible evidence' of aliens or UFOs that defy physics

Echoing this further in the opening remarks, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) stated that "the American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence and unexplainable phenomena." Moskowitz added that any disclosure of classified information must be done carefully, pointing out how the existence of stealth helicopter technology wasn't publicly known before one was used in the 2011 raid on a compound housing Osama bin Laden. "But we can't allow that to be used as a shield to keep the American people completely in the dark from basic truths," Moskowitz added.

In the witness testimony that followed the opening statements, Grusch claimed he was told of the existence of a "multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program" and was denied access to it, prompting him to file the whistleblower complaint. Grusch, who served as a member of the Pentagon's short-lived UAP Task Force from 2019 to 2021, told the committee that his whistleblower complaint is based on "information I've been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country, many of whom also have shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation and classified oral testimony to myself and many of my various colleagues." 

Moskowitz asked Grusch if the former intelligence community official has any knowledge of "programs in the advanced tech space that are unsanctioned," to which Grusch replied that these programs do exist and are outside of congressional oversight. When asked if he was aware of imagery of crash sites of craft of unknown origin, Grusch said he cannot discuss the answer in an open, unclassified setting.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) pushed Grusch on his claims that the U.S. government is in possession of "non-human spacecraft," asking if previous statements made by Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, were correct in stating the U.S. government had no evidence of non-human intelligence. "It's not accurate," Grusch replied.

Burchett asked Grusch if there has "ever been an active U.S. government disinformation campaign to deny the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena." Grusch affirmed there has indeed been such a campaign, yet said he can't add anything beyond what he has already stated publicly.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) also pushed Grusch on some of these statements. "You've said the U.S. has intact spacecraft. You said that the government has alien bodies or alien species. Have you seen the spacecraft? [...] Have you seen any of the bodies?" Burlison asked.  

"That's not something I have witnessed myself," Grusch replied. But he answered a subsequent question by stating definitively that, when it comes to UAP crash retrievals, "biologics came with some of these recoveries." Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) pushed Grusch if he meant human or non-human. "Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to," Grusch replied.

Grusch added in response to a later question from Burchett that he is aware of "reverse-engineering programs for non-terrestrial craft."

Related: UFOs and UAP: History, sightings and mysteries

In his testimony, Graves told the committee that UAP are severely under-reported in American airspace. "These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine," Graves said. "Military aircrew and commercial pilots — trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification — are frequently witnessing these phenomena." Graves described how Naval aviators operating on the U.S. East Coast witnessed objects that appeared to stay stationary in the face of hurricane-force winds before suddenly accelerating to supersonic speeds.

Despite the extraordinary nature of these sightings and their proximity to U.S. military airspace, Graves said that he and his colleagues, not to mention other pilots who have had similar encounters, have historically been hesitant to report them. "The stigma attached to UAP is real and powerful and challenges national security," Graves told the committee. "It silences commercial pilots who fear professional repercussions and discourages witnesses. It is only compounded by recent government claims questioning the credibility of eyewitness testimony. "

Graves made reference to NASA's recent UAP study group, stating the agency "has a big role to play as far as commercial aviation safety and it's one of their original charges as an organization," given that NASA already operates an Aviation Safety Reporting System.

During Fravor's testimony, the former F/A-18 pilot told the committee that he is concerned by the lack of government oversight when it comes to "processing or working on craft believed not from this world." 

"I'd like to say that the Tic Tac object we engaged in 2004 was far superior to anything that we had at the time time, have today or [are] looking to develop in the next 10 years," Fravor said. "If we in fact have programs that possess this technology, it'd be nice to have oversight from those people that the citizens of this great country elected in office to represent what is best for the United States, and best for the citizens."

In response to a question on whether or not UAP pose a potential threat to U.S. national security, Fravor stated a definitive "yes," adding that "the technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we had." Fravor called it a "travesty" that the U.S. military and/or government doesn't have a centralized repository for reports of UAP.

Grusch was also asked about a possible "interdimensional potential" to the UFO phenomenon. Grusch stated that he's familiar with concepts of "multidimensionality" and the "holographic principle," ideas about how beings might be "projected from higher-dimensional space to lower dimensional," but added that these are only theoretical.

During questioning, all three witnesses stated that it's possible UAP are interested in America's nuclear capabilities, testing for vulnerabilities in U.S. air defense systems or conducting reconnaissance in American airspace.

In closing remarks, representatives underscored how this issue, at its core, is less about hunting down evidence of alleged alien craft, and more about demanding accountability and transparency from the U.S. government. 

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) reiterated the need for using science to try and find answers on the UAP enigma. "I also really believe in following facts and doing your homework and making sure that we follow science as we try to get as much information as possible," Garcia added. "Transparency is a cornerstone of government. We live in a vast galaxy. A lot of unanswered questions."

Update for 1pm ET: The hearing has concluded. See our wrap story for our coverage.

If the truth really is out there when it comes to what the U.S. government knows about UFOs, we may get a little closer to it today.

On Wednesday (July 26), the United States House of Representatives will hear testimony from three witnesses regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, a new term that encompasses not just unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the air, but also any craft or phenomena that are seen in space or underwater that can't be identified.

The hearing will be held by the House's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs and will include testimony from former U.S. military and intelligence community personnel who claim to have come in contact with craft that defy physics and known flight capabilities or have even seen evidence of "non-human intelligence."

The hearing will be livestreamed on YouTube by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee starting at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Wednesday (July 26). Watch it live here courtesy of the committee. 

Related: The US Congress is holding UFO hearings this week. What might we learn?

Wednesday's hearing will include testimony from two former U.S. Navy aviators, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, both witnesses to separate highly publicized encounters with what appeared to be unconventional aircraft operating in U.S. military airspace.

In addition, the hearing will call David Grusch as a witness. Grusch was the subject of a report published last month in which the decorated former combat officer and veteran of the Pentagon's intelligence community claimed to have received "extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." While Grusch's statements have been controversial to say the least, they have received attention from both major news outlets and U.S. politicians.

Some members of the U.S. Congress have also insinuated that there is indeed hidden UFO/UAP knowledge that has been hidden from the public. "The Pentagon and Washington bureaucrats have kept this information hidden for decades, and we're finally going to shed some light on it," Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said in a House Committee on Oversight and Reform statement. "We're bringing in credible witnesses who can provide public testimony because the American people deserve the truth. We're done with the cover-ups."

Graves, who has been vocal about the need to better understand the UAP issue as it pertains to airspace safety, calls these unidentified phenomena an "urgent and critical national security issue" that deserve better scientific scrutiny. "If UAP are foreign assets, we must respond appropriately. If UAP continue to defy conventional explanation — we must invest in scientific research," Graves said in a press statement. 

This congressional hearing is only the latest in a long line of major milestones concerning UFOs/UAP and the U.S. government and its federal agencies. Nearly a year ago to the day, the U.S. Department of Defense created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which aims to collect and analyze all of the data available to the U.S. military and intelligence community related to UFOs. 

In an April 2023 hearing, the director of AARO stated the office "has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics." Those comments now stand in stark contrast to the claims of the witnesses who will testify at Wednesday's hearing.

NASA also recently held a public meeting of its independent UAP study group, and a report from the group is forthcoming.

Editor's note: You can watch the UFO hearing live here on Space.com courtesy of the committee. The hearing will also be livestreamed on YouTube by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee starting at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Wednesday (July 26). 

If you follow the complex and perplexing world of unidentified flying objects, now tied to the term unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, then you're aware that we may be inching toward "full disclosure."

What that means is uncorking the bottle filled to the brim with an elixir of truth, say disclosure activists, that Earth has been on the receiving end of exotic craft of off-world origin. Even more, there are allegations of a covert U.S. government reverse engineering program set up to essentially write an operator's manual on how these alleged anomalous vehicles function.

The drumbeat that the U.S. government is ready to spill the beans on possible alien guests to Earth is louder than ever. But whether it's next week, next year or next decade, what are the social consequences of first contact? Or, at least some outing of historical records documenting evidence of visitors from afar? Are we ready for such a revelation? There appears to be debate on what the ripple effects might be.

Related: UFOs worth investigating despite lack of 'real evidence,' former astronaut Scott Kelly says

Full-body-contact

According to one recent public poll, a majority of those sampled believe the government may be covering up the truth about UFOs. 

Other polls have found that most Americans believe in intelligent life beyond Earth. Indeed, poll data shows an uptick in thinking over the years that there is an off-Earth population of aliens frolicking about out there in the extraterrestrial ether.

But given the specter of full disclosure, are we ready for full-body-contact? 

Better data needed

"Quite a bit of work has been done on the societal impact of discovering radio signals from extraterrestrials beaming a message from a planet circling a distant star," said Steven Dick an American astronomer and author noted for his work in the field of astrobiology. 

"But that is very different from the consequences if they are actually here in the form of UFOs or UAPs. Science fiction tends toward the dramatic," Dick told Space.com. 

"I find it unlikely that the U.S. Government could keep a secret of this magnitude for this long. I am all for studying the anomalous phenomena of UFOs/UAPs. But I am not convinced by the blurry Navy videos that these are spacecraft piloted by ET, or even ET-related artificial intelligence. We need better data," Dick advised.

Worldviews would change

In Dick's opinion, disastrous first contact events with uncontacted cultures are not necessarily the best analogies. There are plenty of beneficial intercultural contacts throughout history, he said, such as trade relations going back to ancient times even beyond the Bronze Age. 

"Whether contact is direct or remote and assuming we survive direct contact, I would say what is certain is that our philosophical and theological worldviews would change," said Dick. "We should not expect extraterrestrials to solve all our problems, but the interchange of information would be very interesting!"

As for the question: Are we ready? 

"Probably not," Dick said, "but new fields of study like 'astrotheology' and 'astroethics' are laying out the options. There is some consensus that religions will survive, but in greatly altered form to take into account that we are not the moral center of the universe or the most intelligent beings. Some religions will be more adaptable than others," he said. 

Copernican moment

John Elliott is coordinator of the SETI Post Detection Hub within the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Elliott sees the societal impact of discovering extraterrestrial life as a profound "Copernican type" moment for humankind. "The impact is likely to be proportionate to its proximity to us and whether it is intelligent or not. It will be the confirmation that we are not the only life in the universe, and our perceived central 'importance' will receive a significant shift in perspective," he said.

Also, such a discovery will indicate that life is probably common throughout the universe, Elliott said. "To what extent extraterrestrial life is intelligent or has preceded us or is now extinct are other questions. Preparation for such an event is therefore not planning for just one possible scenario but many," he said. 

SETI post detection is "probably one of the most multi-disciplinary endeavors humanity has ever undertaken," Elliott added, "not only for assessing the evidence discovered, but also for considering the human social response, impact strategies and protocols." 

Elliott said that the hub's primary role at the university is to serve as a dedicated international "home" for facilitating and coordinating research into a coherent post-detection framework, to work on topics ranging from message decipherment and data analytics to development of regulatory protocols, space law and societal impact strategies, "a project that will be ever evolving," he noted.

Imminent disclosure

"The refrain that full disclosure is imminent is one that has been voiced since almost the very start of the flying saucer era in 1947," observed Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of a forthcoming book on the history of UFOs in the United States.

Eghigian told Space.com that, despite the fact that various states — including the U.S. and the United Kingdom — have released a huge number of classified documents over the years, "it has never satisfied some who will only be content if governments demonstrate that they are withholding information about the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs."

Based on the past, Eghigian said there is little reason to suspect things will be playing out any differently now.  

Different consequences

On the topic of "are we ready for revelation," the scenario of actual alien intelligence contact/confirmation is not in fact one scenario but rather multiple scenarios. 

"Such an event could play out in any variety of ways — from astronomical observations of what appear to be signs of a once existent technologically advanced civilization to the discovery of alien artifacts in space to visitors appearing here on Earth," Eghigian said. 

"Every scenario would likely have considerably different consequences, many of which I suspect would not have much of an effect on most people's lives," Eghigian concluded.

Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is no stranger to the skies.

Kelly, a four-time spaceflyer, one-time space shuttle pilot and three-time International Space Station commander, was a participant in the first public meeting of the NASA study group formed to examine data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new term for sightings of objects or occurrences in the sky, underwater or in space that can't be immediately explained or identified. 

The meeting, held on Wednesday (May 31), saw experts from a wide variety of fields present both analyses of UAP sightings and proposals on how NASA and other government agencies might go about collecting better data to help shine a light on the UAP topic.

At one point in the meeting, after remaining largely silent, Kelly, a former U.S. Navy captain, stood up to share a UAP experience he had while flying an F-14 Tomcat. "I remember one time I was flying in the warning areas off of the Virginia Beach military operating area there," Kelly said. "And my RIO [radar intercept officer] thought — the guy that sits in the back of the Tomcat — 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."

Space.com spoke with Kelly following the meeting to ask more about what the former NASA astronaut and Navy fighter pilot thinks about the current buzz surrounding UFOs/UAP and what sightings might imply about the safety of our skies and the search for intelligent life.

Related: UFOs will remain mysterious without better data, NASA study team says

We asked Kelly what he thought about the numerous former pilots, intelligence officers and government advisors who have appeared on cable news programs and series in recent years claiming that the U.S. government is aware of objects or craft that defy conventional wisdom about aerodynamics, propulsion and physics. 

"What was it Carl Sagan said, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'? You know, they have every right to make extraordinary claims, but without the extraordinary evidence, they're just claims," Kelly said. "In a court of law, eyewitness testimony — I'm not positive on this — but that's considered evidence. In science, it's part of a hypothesis. It's like, 'Oh, we see this!' Let's go investigate it."

Kelly said that the kinds of extraordinary claims associated with some of the reported UAP sightings popularized in the media in recent years, or mentioned at Wednesday's meeting, is largely due to the fact that when flying over water or in space, it can be difficult to gauge objects' speed and size due to the lack of reference points. 

"If you see something that you know is an airplane, and you know generally how big airplanes are, you can tell relative distance," Kelly said. "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." Kelly added that it's not just human eyeballs that are subject to misperceptions, but that many of the sensors aboard fighter jets and other aircraft have the same issues.

Kelly gave an example from when he was flying space shuttles for NASA. During the first few days in orbit, chunks of ice would detach from the shuttle and float nearby. "And oftentimes, like you couldn't even tell what these — because they're all different shapes — you couldn't tell what that ice was and how far away it was. It could be two feet in front of you or, you know, or 50 miles. You don't know because you have no reference. Unless, of course, you knew specifically what something was."

Another example Kelly brought up was a video published in a 2017 New York Times report, titled "GIMBAL," which reportedly showed an encounter between a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet and an unknown object in U.S. military airspace that appeared to rotate while hovering stationary in the air. 

Kelly, however, isn't convinced the video shows anything anomalous at all.

"'GIMBAL,' it looks to me like the FLIR [(forward-looking infrared)] camera is just reaching its gimbal limit," Kelly said. (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."

Another video released by the Washington Post in 2018 just months after the New York Times report, known as "GOFAST," reportedly shows a recording taken by an F/A-18's sensors of an object appearing to soar over the ocean at an incredible speed. 

However, Joshua Semeter, director of Boston University's Center for Space Physics, presented an analysis of the video during Wednesday's meeting in which he argued that by applying "basic trigonometry" using the information in the video's overlay recorded by the jet, the "GOFAST" object is moving only 40 mph (64 kph). "This example also serves to illustrate the kinds of cognitive bias we have to contend with for UAPs recorded from unfamiliar perspectives," Semeter added.

Despite the prosaic explanations for these videos offered by both Kelly and Semeter, time and time again, the three videos released between 2017 and 2018 are cited as evidence of advanced unidentified objects or craft operating in U.S. military airspace. 

This is despite the fact that a form filed in 2017 to request the public release of the videos notes that the videos' subject area is "UAV, Balloons, and other UAS" (uncrewed aerial vehicles/uncrewed aerial systems).

What has followed in the years since the videos' release has been nothing short of a media feeding frenzy that has pushed the topic of UFOs (or, lately, UAP) to the forefront of popular culture and even influenced U.S. government policy. 

As a result of this, and of the government's increased attention paid to UAP reports, sightings of unexplained objects or craft appear to be rapidly increasing, as documented by the "2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" published by the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The document notes that the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) received 366 UAP reports in 2022 alone, many of them from U.S. military personnel.

Kelly thinks one reason that UAP sightings seem to be on the rise is that the topic has become destigmatized, particularly in the military. The former astronaut said when he was flying fighter jets in the Navy, if a pilot returned to their carrier and said they thought they saw a UFO, then "Alien" would be their new callsign for the rest of their career. 

Today, it's much different, and pilots in the U.S. armed services now have formalized processes for reporting unexplained or unidentified phenomena or objects they might see in the air or water. "And I think people should report what they see because there are issues," Kelly said. "I'm not calling into question their integrity at all."

Ultimately, though, Kelly believes that any explanation for unexplained things in the air should be grounded first and foremost in concrete evidence. "I am a person that lives in a world of science and facts and data," Kelly said. "And the most compelling, unclassified cases that we have really don't have any data. They're interesting — interesting stories. I would like to believe they're true. But I can't until someone shows me the real evidence." 

Kelly added that "we're told the classified stuff really isn't any more compelling than the unclassified stuff," either, but that images of reported UAP captured by certain sensors cannot be divulged to the public in the name of national security, as the exact capabilities of those sensors remain undisclosed.

The former astronaut said that in the absence of real data, he believes what many pilots are seeing likely have more prosaic explanations, such as balloons or drones. "You know, there are 800,000 registered drones in the United States. How many unregistered drones are there? I don't know how many, but probably a lot more than there are registered drones. So who knows if people, you know, are using these in ways that they're not supposed to?"

Kelly added that he even has an unregistered drone, but only flies it on his own property to inspect solar panels on his home after hailstorms. 

Read more: Previous Chinese spy balloons over US were classified as UFOs: report

This insistence to rely on evidence and data does not necessarily make one an opponent of the UFO community or UAP disclosure movement, Kelly said. This largely online community of enthusiasts believes the U.S. government is in possession of withheld knowledge of UAP and their origins, whether technological, extraterrestrial or otherwise otherworldly. 

"The community of UFO enthusiasts think I'm somehow against them," Kelly said. "But I actually would think it would be one of the most incredible things if humans ever learned that we are not alone in this universe and that there is intelligent life that has the technology to surmount what we currently believe are the limitations of long-distance space travel because of the physics involved."

The former space shuttle pilot directly addressed some of the common claims of the disclosure movement during Wednesday's meeting, namely that NASA routinely cuts camera feeds from the ISS whenever UAP appear or that the agency is hiding images of extraterrestrial technology. "In my 20 years at NASA, no one either officially or unofficially, in my recollection, ha[s] ever discussed or briefed us or had any kind of discussions about anything that would be considered a UAP or UFO or anything like that," Kelly said.

Kelly acknowledged that those opinions might make him unpopular with the UFO community, and indeed, the division between UFO believers and skeptics was a common topic at Wednesday's meeting of NASA's UAP independent study group. 

Three different speakers at the meeting brought up the fact that group members have been subject to online harassment due to their involvement in the group and what some in the UFO/UAP community perceived as overly skeptical attitudes towards the topic. 

However, one thing the UAP/UFO community and the former astronaut have in common is the belief that whatever the explanation(s) for the phenomenon might be, the topic deserves serious scrutiny. "Because there is an issue," Kelly said. "I mean, we have stuff that's flying in our airspace that's supposed to be for mostly commercial air travel. And it shouldn't be there, or at least we should know what it is. So I do think it's worth the investigation."

NASA held the first public meeting to discuss the findings of its UAP independent study team Wednesday (May 31).

The group, formed in June 2022, aims to examine data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new term that encompasses objects or incidents in the sky, underwater or in space that can't be immediately identified. The group, which has $100,000 in funding, includes former astronaut Scott Kelly and 15 other investigators from a wide variety of fields including astronomy, oceanography and even journalism.

During a post-meeting teleconference, astrophysicist David Spergel, chair of the study group and former member of the NASA Advisory Council, compared the study of UAP to fast radio bursts (FRBs), powerful bursts of radio waves from distant galaxies that were originally thought to be anomalies. "Sometimes anomalies are really interesting and point to novel physical phenomenon. And I think there's a number of interesting lessons learned there," Spergel told Space.com. "You have to decide figure out ways in which you can do dedicated observations and optimize your observational strategy to be able to do that. And I think that's, as we think about UAPs, I think we're informed by previous successes and identifying anomalies."

Related: How big a deal is NASA's new UFO study?

During the opening remarks in Wednesday's hearing, team members stressed that the biggest roadblock in terms of understanding these unidentified phenomena is a lack of data. Nevertheless, NASA's Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research within the agency's Science Mission Directorate, noted that, because public interest in UAP is at a seeming all-time high, it is NASA's responsibility to give the topic the "rigorous scientific scrutiny" it deserves. "First and foremost, it provides an opportunity for us to expand our understanding of the world around us," Evans said. "This work is in our DNA."

Evans stressed that the study is first and foremost about gaining a larger understanding of what is in the air and making the skies safer. "It's this nation's obligation to determine whether these phenomena pose any potential risks to airspace safety," Evans said.

Nicki Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said that the UAP independent study team was commissioned "to create a roadmap on how to use the tools of science to evaluate and categorize the nature of UAPs going forward. This roadmap, of course, will help the federal government obtain usable data to explain the nature of future UAPs."

Fox noted, however, that accessing high-quality data is difficult because the sensor platforms used to capture data are often classified. 

"If a fighter jet took a picture of the Statue of Liberty, then that image would be classified not because of the subject in the picture, but because of the sensors on the plane," Fox said. 

She stressed the need for high-quality unclassified data, which "make it possible for our team to communicate openly to advance our understanding of UAP not only with each other, but across the scientific community and to the public."

Spergel echoed that sentiment, adding that the "current data-collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection."

Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), agreed, saying that, while most UAP reports the office reviewed are easily explained, some do still remain unresolved "primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases."

One of the more disheartening moments in the opening statements came as both Fox and Evans pointed out that many members of NASA's UAP study group have been subject to harassment as a result of their involvement. 

"A NASA security team is actively addressing this issue," Evans said. "We at NASA are acutely aware of the considerable public interest in UAP. However, it's critical to understand any form of harassment towards our panelists only serves to detract from the scientific process, which requires an environment of respect and openness."

During the post-meeting teleconference, Spergel added that it's vital to remain grounded in the scientific study of UAP based on the available data and without leaping to unfounded conclusions. "To make the claim that we've seen something that is evidence of non-human intelligence, it would require extraordinary evidence," Spergel said. "And we have not seen that. I think that's important to make clear. "

Update for 4:30 p.m. EDT on May 31: The first public meeting of NASA's UAP independent study group has concluded. Read our wrap story here or watch the replay below.

NASA will hold a historic public meeting on UFOs today (May 31) and you can watch it all live online in a free webcast.

The agency will hold a meeting of the "independent study group" it formed nearly a year ago in June 2022 in order to study data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new term that encompasses objects or occurrences in the sky, underwater or in space that can't be immediately identified. The meeting will mark the first time the group has discussed the results of its UAP investigation in public. The four-hour meeting will be available to watch online courtesy of a free livestream on NASA TV beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET (1430 GMT).

Following the event, NASA will host an audio-only stream of a post-meeting media teleconference that will include Dan Evans of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, David Spergel, president, Chair of NASA's UAP independent study team and other members of the agency's UAP group.

Related: NASA UFO study team includes former astronaut, scientists and more

NASA created the group in order to examine all of the data it has available that might shed light on the UAP enigma and how it might help "move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward," according to a 2022 statement from the agency.

The 16-person study group includes former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly in addition to a wide variety of experts from academia, the aerospace and aviation industries and even one science journalist. The team is only studying unclassified data, according to a list of frequently asked questions the agency released.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the former associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters in Washington, said shortly after the group was announced that it was formed in part to "take a field that is relatively data poor and make it into a field that is much more data rich and therefore worthy of scientific investigation and analysis."

Related: 10 alien encounters debunked by science

NASA's study group is only one of several U.S. government-funded groups formed to study UAP. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense created an office to study unidentified objects in space, air and water, or even those that appear to travel between them. 

Despite studying hundreds of reported incidents involving UAP, the group's director told the Senate Committee on Armed Services in April that the group has uncovered "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."

The director of the Pentagon's new UFO office shot down hopes that the current buzz over unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) supports claims of extraterrestrial visitation.

Sean M. Kirkpatrick, chosen as the first director of the Pentagon's new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), testified before members of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services on Wednesday (April 19). The hearing had two portions, one closed to the public and one open. 

During the open portion, Kirkpatrick definitively stated that, out of the hundreds of UAP cases his office has reviewed, "AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics." The AARO director acknowledged that this conclusion might be "unsatisfying" to those who believe they have witnessed incontrovertible evidence of physics-defying craft or objects. 

Still, Kirkpatrick stressed, UAP cases most often "resolve into readily explainable sources" when there is a wealth of scientific data at hand.

Related: Pentagon releases its long-awaited 2022 UFO report

"I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous," Kirkpatrick stated in Wednesday's hearing. "The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, [uncrewed] aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources."

The AARO director added that if anyone has any evidence of otherworldly visitation or alternative theories, they should submit that evidence for peer review in scientific journals. "AARO is working very hard to do the same," Kirkpatrick stated. "That is how science works, not by blog or social media."

During the opening portion of the hearing, Kirkpatrick shared a video that his office analyzed reportedly showing what appears to be a spherical object that was filmed by an MQ-9 Reaper drone somewhere in the Middle East. In the video, the object appears to soar through the air with no apparent means of propulsion. 

While the footage certainly is captivating, Kirkpatrick stressed that there simply aren't enough data collected to make an accurate assessment of what the spherical object or phenomenon in the video might be. "This is essentially all of the data we have associated with this event from some years ago," Kirkpatrick told the Senate committee. "It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video."

A report published in January 2023 by the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reached similar conclusions about other incidents. Out of the over 500 UFO/UAP cases examined for that report, many of them were found to "lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty." 

In fact, 163 were attributed to balloons or "balloon-like entities," a conclusion that took on increased significance after the wild saga of the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down by a U.S. military F-22 fighter jet after flying across the country and collecting intelligence along the way. 

Following that incident, the New York Times reported that previous Chinese spy balloons over the U.S. had been misclassified as UFOs.

The term UAP previously stood for "unidentified aerial phenomena;" that was recently changed to "unidentified anomalous phenomena" in order to encompass objects or phenomena that appear in space, in water or even travel between domains.

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Observers spotted UFO look-alike clouds in Hawaiian skies above the Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa volcanoes. 

The photos were taken on March 8 from the vantage point of the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is located near the summit of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The photos capture lenticular clouds, which are usually created downwind of a hill or mountain as strong winds blow over and around rough terrain. 

"We spotted some UFOs today! Or rather, their doppelgangers. Check out these stunning photos several Keckies took of flying saucer-shaped lenticular clouds hovering near Maunakea and Mauna Loa. Did you see them too?" the observatory wrote on Twitter on March 8. 

Related: Keck Observatory: Twin Telescopes on Mauna Kea 

Lenticular clouds — scientifically known as altocumulus standing lenticularus — generally form in the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere, parallel to the wind direction, which gives them their otherworldly appearance. 

These clouds are fairly common over the western half of the mainland due to the Rockies but relatively rare in Hawaii, according to the National Weather Service. 

These strange looking clouds are sometimes mistaken for UFOs due to their smooth saucer-like shape. They formed near Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, which reach above 13,000 feet (3,960 meters) in elevation, because strong winds are forced to flow over and around the peaks of the volcanoes. This, in turn, creates waves in the atmosphere just downwind of both of the summits. 

The photos were taken by employees at the observatory, including Rick Krejci, software engineer; Sherry Yeh, staff astronomer; Avinash Surendran, postdoctoral fellow; and Arina Rostopchina, observing assistant. 

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13.  Follow us @Spacedotcom, or on Facebook and Instagram. 

There is a rich heritage of flying saucer folklore, stories about alien interlopers from afar and reports of recovered vehicles and occupants. 

Some people also believe that there have been, and are now, governmental cover-ups about UFOs. In turn, that conviction can spark calls for "full disclosure," a request to confirm that our planet has been visited by starfolk cruising through the universe.

Fast-forward to today, and take into account new governmental and public group investigations into what are now termed unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP.

The outcome of all this effort is tough to foretell. Maybe 2023 is a turnaround year in assessing UAP and UFOs, shattering the stigma surrounding the topic. Or will the current mood shift, putting such studies onto the fringes again?

Whatever the answer, it's clear that just wearing night goggles won't cut it. 

Related: Unidentified aerial annoyance: Full disclosure or dubious UFO nonsense?

New docuseries

Leslie Kean is a veteran investigative reporter who has spent decades deep-diving into reports of unidentified flying objects. Her blockbuster, co-authored story published by The New York Times in December 2017 was front-page news. It focused on sightings of UFOs, which the U.S. military has recently rebranded as UAPs, and the government programs to investigate them.

Kean thinks this year into 2024 should be a heady time for UFO/UAP revelations. And that belief comes across in "UFOs: Investigating the Unknown," a new docuseries led by Kean. It premieres on the National Geographic TV channel on Monday (Feb. 13), with episodes dropping weekly thereafter.

"At long last, it looks like the truth about UFOs may finally be revealed," National Geographic said about the show.

The whole picture

"This series will provide a credible look at government's relationship to UFOs and provide a context for the millions of people who are not yet informed," Kean told Space.com.

She said that the series deals with facts, not claims. 

"This series is needed now because so much has changed since 2017," Kean added, stressing that the public doesn't know about the "whole picture." 

"We explore the history going back to the 1940s and explore some of the more exciting unexplained UFO cases. If anyone still doubts whether UFOs are real, watch this series! We include interviews with former and current government officials, scientists, Navy pilots, journalists, historians, civilian investigators and civilian witnesses," Kean said.

Series of episodes

"UFOs: Investigating the Unknown" consists of a series of episodes:

• Episode One — "Secret Pentagon UFO Program" spotlights the behind-the-scenes work that led to the 2017 New York Times story and challenges what we thought we knew about UFOs. The episode goes behind the scenes with stories from the Navy pilots who saw mysterious objects apparently tracking their fighter jets. 
• Episode Two — "Giant UFO in Texas" revisits the mass sighting of the Stephenville, Texas, case with new interviews and perspectives. It examines why the once-serious government investigative effort transitioned to a PR campaign to debunk the phenomenon as nonsense, despite evidence to the contrary.
• Episode Three — "Close Encounters at Nuclear Bases" explores the challenging UFO taboo left in the wake of the U.S. government formally ending its UFO-investigation program and examines a years-long mass sighting known as the "Hudson Valley Wave."
• Episode Four — "Citizens Take Charge" looks at a range of citizens who took charge to make sense of continued UFO encounters, including dedicated field investigators, sighting repositories, obsessive conspiracy theorists and former government officials who have risked their reputations to speak out in favor of renewed government involvement.
• Episode Five — "Government Breaks Silence" examines the 2015 Navy pilot reports of strange encounters, the 2022 Congressional hearing following the latest developments around the historic 2021 intelligence report, and considers whether we are entering a new era of transparency and discovery about this mysterious phenomenon.

Suppressed information?

"The series covers the denial and sometimes false statements issued by government agencies over the years to hide the truth about UFOs," Kean says. "Information has been suppressed, and the series provides documentation of that fact." 

In Kean's view, there is still much information being withheld. "Some of that is classified and must remain so for national security protections … but not all of it."

What are these objects? Where do they come from, and why are they here? 

"Those who have witnessed the objects firsthand still grapple with these still-unanswered questions," Kean said. "The stories themselves are intrinsically fascinating, but they also open us up to a deeper perspective on our place in the universe."

"UFOs: Investigating the Unknown" premieres on National Geographic on Monday (Feb. 13) at 9:00 p.m. EST and will stream on Hulu the following day.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, or on Facebook and Instagram. 

The coming year will surely see a persistence of debate, discussion and disbelief regarding  anonymous airborne occurrences.

Today they are branded as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP). But perhaps UAP is an off-shoot of "flying saucers" from afar, and once identified, will satisfy those hungry for a governmental confession that over the decades Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have assaulted our atmospheric, as well as mental airspace.

Whatever is at play here, organizations are taking close encounters with weirdness seriously. 

What confidently looms ahead is an entire year of UAP and UFO banter. Could 2023 become the year of the great reveal, the "truth" that Earth is on the receiving end of full-body contact with other star folk? 

Conversely, will it be one more calendar year that adds up to a nothing burger and confusing brouhaha? 

Related: Pentagon releases its long-awaited 2022 UFO report

Truth revealed?

Soon to hit the airwaves is the multi-episode docuseries, "UFOs: Investigating the Unknown." It premiers on the National Geographic TV channel on Feb. 13.

According to National Geographic, it has been over 50 years that the U.S. government has snubbed the discussion of UFOs, "but now, Navy pilots tell of seeing mysterious objects tracking their fighter jets — vehicles unlike anything they've ever seen before; top-secret Naval videos are leaked that captivate the world." 

The topic has garnered recent U.S. military and congressional investigation. "At long last, it looks like the truth about UFOs may finally be revealed," National Geographic suggests. Indeed, NASA, and several private organizations are flexing their research muscle into appraising the UAP state of affairs. 

More to the point is the ongoing work of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the newly established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). 

The 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is available at ODNI's website.

All this sky-high investigation is meant to get to the bottom of what's up in UFO and UAP sightings.

Exciting data

In the meantime, the upcoming "investigative docuseries" at National Geographic is the product of Leslie Kean, an independent investigative reporter and author of "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" (Crown Publishing Group, 2010). 

Kean says that another ODNI report on UAP is due later this year, to follow the one that was just released on Jan. 12.

"I hope the next one will provide us with more information and case details than the latest one, as I'm sure many others do," Kean told Space.com. A lot could happen this year to make that possible, she feels.

For one, the Galileo Project, led by astrophysicist Avi Loeb at Harvard University, could come up with some exciting data, says Kean. "The Galileo Project is engaged in a systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts. It does not work with classified information or unreliable past data. All discoveries will immediately be made public."

Consolidation of data

Kean underscores the work of the AARO that reports to officials within the U.S. Defense Department and the intelligence community. 

"This agency's job is to get the cooperation of all the relevant military services and intelligence agencies. This collaboration allows for the consolidation of data on UAP from a wide range of locations and official data bases."

Congress will be monitoring this process, Kean adds. "It's my understanding that the consolidation of data is a lengthy process and that this has been the major focus of AARO so far, along with building and staffing the operation."

Gold standard

Joining in on the study of UAP is New York-based Enigma Labs, offering a global platform for sightings, explaining that it's the world's first UAP analytics and community platform. "Come search with us," they say, "we're building the gold standard for collecting sighting data and empowering future observers."

By downloading the Enigma Labs mobile app and perusing their website, users can explore a trove of historical and fresh UAP sightings, both from citizens and documented military cases. 

"The goal of the app is to continue reducing the stigma around reporting a potential UAP sighting and help drive a fact-based public conversation on the topic," explains Enigma. "Enigma is the first tech-enabled platform to standardize sightings reports and make them queryable and accessible to the public."

Alex Smith, founder of Enigma Labs, notes in a statement: "Our platform already has some of the top experts in the field, including aviators, scientists, former military personnel and more, and we are ready to open up our database to a larger swathe of the general population." 

Enticing scientific thinking

Like-minded is the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), a group comprised of over 200 members, including university professors, high-tech and defense industry experts, along with scientists, intelligence specialists and former members of space research organizations.

New federal government interest should be commended, the Coalition says in a statement, "for reducing the stigma in the study of a subject that has long been neglected." 

The AARO has come to the same conclusion that the Coalition's UAP research community has found, that a percentage of UAP "appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities and require further analysis."

Nonetheless, the Coalition calls for more information from the AARO regarding UAP characteristics "in order to entice the broader scientific community to engage in the UAP subject."

Citizen science

Taking note of the fast-paced evolution of private-sector initiatives to scope out UAP is Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University and a well-known UAP/UFO researcher.

"This kind of citizen science work has been going on in 'ufology' since at least the 1960s, and I suppose you could say it's the very definition of ufology," Eghigian told Space.com. However, he thinks it is fair to say that the equipment today is likely superior to what folks had available in those past days.

But as U.S. government officialdom and private-sector enterprises step forward, armed with ambition and equipment, will amassed data on unknown aerial phenomenon be shared and coordinated?

"I think there is likely to be coordination only within the different silos that exist," Eghigian adds, for example across federal government agencies. "Cohesiveness in this area has always been a challenge."

Eghigian supposes that one might make the argument that different initiatives run by different groups with different methods may actually serve the problem better than a one-size fits all approach. "In the end, however, I'm still not sure where all this is heading and what it all adds up to," he says.

Eroding stigma

In viewing the UAP matter broadly — if you see it as more than simply addressing the question "what are they?" — Eghigian feels real progress is being made. 

"Yes, the stigma surrounding the phenomenon is beginning to erode, but it's still there. That said, given the hype and speculation surrounding UAP, dubiousness is not always unwarranted. It's clear that not everyone at the table is necessarily qualified to speak substantively about the issues at hand," he says. 

However, in 2023 alone, Eghigian adds, there is going to be at least three academic conferences on the topic, each one generally focusing on different facets, with input from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. 

"I think this kind of interdisciplinary approach to studying and discussing the matter, always grounded in careful, empirical research, is welcome and should be encouraged," Eghigian concludes.

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The Pentagon's long-awaited 2022 report on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, is finally here. 

The unclassified "2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" was published by the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Thursday (Jan. 12) after a months-long delay. The report was mandated by the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act and was created by ODNI's National Intelligence Manager for Aviation and the newly-established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Input was gathered from various intelligence community agencies and military intelligence offices, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Energy (DoE), and NASA.

In all, the report covers some 510 cataloged UAP reports gathered from agencies involved in the report and the branches of the United States military. The document notes that the majority of these were gathered from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force personnel who reported them through official channels. Ultimately, the unclassified report concludes that, while UAP "continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat," many of the reports "lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty."

Related: Pentagon establishes office to track UFOs in space

Out of these 510 total UAP reports, ODNI assessed 366 that had been newly identified since AARO's creation. Of these, 26 were characterized as uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, 163 were attributed to balloons or "balloon-like entities," and six were found to be airborne "clutter" such as birds or airborne plastic shopping bags. 

That leaves 171 reported UAP sightings that remain "uncharacterized and unattributed," according to ODNI's report. "Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis," the report adds.

While there are no definite Earth-shattering conclusions about the origins of the UAP (as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, have recently been rebranded) seen in the incidents analyzed in ODNI's unclassified report, the document highlights a growing emphasis on airspace safety, prompted in part by the recent proliferation of drones  — some of which might represent intelligence-gathering efforts by the United States' adversaries. 

"UAP events continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity," ODNI states in the report, adding that the agency continues "to assess that this may result from a collection bias due to the number of active aircraft and sensors, combined with focused attention and guidance to report anomalies." 

In other words, military aviators in controlled airspace may be reporting more UAP/UFOs in these areas because there are naturally more sensors scanning the skies around military facilities and training ranges.

Additionally, the report notes that factors such as weather conditions, lighting and atmospheric effects can affect the observation of presumed UAP. The office therefore operates "under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer's accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments."

However, the report notes that some of the cataloged UAP incidents covered in the report may have been caused by operator or equipment error or faults with the sensors used that detected UAP in these events. 

"It is clear that there is an urgent and critical need to improve aerospace safety by dedicating scientific research into UAP," said Ryan Graves, former Navy F/A-18 pilot and chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Integration & Outreach Committee (UAPIOC), in a statement following the release of the ODNI's report. "We must stop unscrupulous speculation, break stigma, and invest in science to address this national safety threat," Graves added.

While improving flight safety in both domestic and military airspace is the principal motivation underlying the creation of the report, the document notes that "there have been no reported collisions between U.S. aircraft and UAP" to date. Furthermore, there have also been no UAP encounters "confirmed to contribute directly to adverse health-related effects to the observer(s)," contrary to many claims made in recent years.

While far from a smoking gun of any kind, the ODNI's report shows that the U.S. government appears to be taking UAP and airspace safety issues seriously following years of media sensationalism surrounding a handful of highly publicized encounters reported by U.S. Navy aviators in training ranges off the coast of Southern California. 

To date, the Pentagon asserts that these cases remain unexplained. 

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. EST on Jan. 12 to include statements from Ryan Graves.

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The U.S. government's brand new UFO-tracking office has been open for half a year but business is already booming. 

Over the last six months, the office — named the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — has received "several hundreds" of new UFO reports from U.S. military personnel, office director Sean Kirkpatrick told the Associated Press. This adds to more than 140 UFO sightings reported by the military between 2004 and 2021, which were previously described in a much-anticipated report from the Pentagon in June 2021.

The new reports, which were filed this year by personnel in the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, describe unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP — the government's preferred name for UFOs — sighted in the air, under water and in space. 

Related: Pentagon establishes office to track UFOs in space

None of the reports, old or new, show any hint of alien activity, Kirkpatrick noted.

Established in July 2022, the AARO's mission is to consolidate and investigate UFO reports filed by the various branches of the U.S. military. By definition, a UAP is "anything in space, in the air, on land, in the sea or under the sea that can't be identified, and which might pose a threat to U.S. military installations or operations," according to a Department of Defense statement released on Dec. 17.

The sudden influx of new reports may be thanks to recent outreach efforts by the AARO, Kirkpatrick said, adding that he wanted to "destigmatize" the process of reporting UAP sightings in the military.

A number of reported sightings have already been resolved, anonymous Pentagon officials told the New York Times in November. Many UFO sightings can likely be attributed to "relatively ordinary" surveillance drones from nations such as China and Russia, the officials said, while others may simply be "airborne clutter" like weather balloons.

Kirkpatrick said that AARO is working on procedures to "weed out" common sources of UAP sightings, such as foreign or domestic aircraft that may leave distinct techno-signatures, or signs they were made using technology. The office plans to release a report imminently with more details about its investigations this year.

This story was originally posted on Live Science.

A university history professor developed a virtual classroom lecture series that probed the history, evolution, and impacts on society of the Unidentified Flying Object phenomenon.

The intent of the five-part course was not to prove true believers or skeptics of ET visitation are right. Rather, the series goal was to develop a deeper understanding of the UFO enigma and the social, political, and cultural developments that now shape it and not pick sides.

As the course description explains, UFOs are making headlines again, with U.S. intelligence services and NASA announcing they're studying more recent reports of sightings. 

"And as has always been the case, the public response has focused on the question of what's going on, a discourse dominated mostly by the believers and the skeptics. But lost in the hype and ruckus is the question of when this all started and how we got to this point," states the course outline.

Related: How big a deal is NASA's new UFO study?

More thoughtful look

Greg Eghigian is a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and led the classroom-like experience that wrapped up late October. The lessons were not undertaken by Penn State, but were hosted by Atlas Obscura Online Courses that are designed and taught by expert instructors.

Why now and what's the rationale for delving into decades of UFO chatter and folklore, along with assessing the newly-termed Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP)?

"This time around, there is no question that there's something different," Eghigian told Space.com. "I have seen a lot over the years and on one hand, it's not all that new."

Moments in history

There have been other moments in history, Eghigian said, where people in authoritative positions, be they in government or academia, have taken the UFO topic seriously enough to publicly say the subject needs a more thoughtful look.

"But why it is gaining a little more legitimacy than usual is the fact the military and intelligence community is onboard. Over the past few years, they have come forward and basically said these are real sightings, not computer glitches, not misidentification. Real objects are being seen and are being captured by instruments," Eghigian said. "We have not heard that kind of thing before in the past."

Eghigian flags the fact that there's a lot of classified information not available for public eying due to intelligence and military constraints.

Loosey-goosey language

For starters, are UFOs and UAPs cut from the same cloth of the unexplained? 

"The language is actually really fascinating," said Eghigian. "When it all started in the 1940s it was 'flying saucers' and then 'UFOs' … and both are deeply flawed as a concept. 'UAP' to me also doesn't solve the problem. By calling it a phenomenon you have broadened it some, allowing it to be really up in the air and loosey-goosey."

By labeling it a phenomenon, Eghigian said that plays well in paranormal community circles. "It has opened up that possibility, that kind of explanation," he said.

Be it flying saucers, UFOs or UAP terminology, as for what moniker should be suitably used, Eghigian comes up dry.

Detective-like fervor

In his sessions, Eghigian noted that after flying saucers were first reported in 1947, observers and commentators were puzzled. 

The mystery of UFOs, the professor advised, gave birth to sleuths and groups who took it upon themselves to explain the phenomenon. Fueling that detective-like fervor was dismissal of eyewitness reports and the ridicule heaped on observers by skeptics, and that only made devotees question what they were being told.

"I think there are those people who will not be satisfied until it's that answer they want it to be," said Eghigian.

Omnipresent question

Within the larger picture of UFOology is the omnipresent question: Are we on our own within the Universe at large? There are those backing the verdict that we're not a "home alone" civilization and knowing that fact means everything would change.

"I'm not sure I believe that," Eghigian said. Actual contact communication, while significant, wouldn't bring about world peace, he said, "as I don't have enough confidence in the human race. That's something history teaches you … to be very cynical about humanity."

Eghigian admitted that sometimes he shares a similar unease expressed by the late Stephen Hawking about alien encounter and how that might not necessarily serve us and serve our own interests as a species.

"I don't know what would come out of it in the end," Eghigian added.

Close encounters with the New World

Looking to centuries past, the history professor sees the European encounter with the New World as case in point. It was the age of exploration, but also the age of conquest. "Looking to serve self-interest, 'we're here and this is now ours' doesn't provide a comforting lesson of mutual compromise and conciliation," Eghigian cautioned.

In his Atlas Obscura series, "Close Encounters: Tracing the History of UFOs," Eghigian said his approach was exploring the human side of the topic and what it says about us — humanity.

As human beings trying to grapple with this subject over generations, how has society taken it to today's present level, Eghigian said, "because, ultimately this is part of human history. As I keep saying to people, nobody escapes being a part of the stream of history."

Disinformation, fake news

Still, Eghigian emphasizes that we are living in an age where disinformation and fake news is basically a part of our steady diet of information being distributed. He is concerned about this state of affairs, one that has people very selective about the experts they want to listen to … and the ones they want to summarily dismiss.

"There has not been in UFOology what I call a hierarchy of knowledge and information. That's something that those of us in the academic world recognize," Eghigian said.

The fact that NASA has undertaken its own UAP study is important and unusual, Eghigian said. "It's pretty eye-opening. It is always a good thing when you have civilian scientists being asked to chime in, who are not beholden to the military and to be secretive about things. One could expect, hopefully, for far more transparency and more openness about results."

National security issues

The mysterious element of what's behind UFOs and UAPs is very porous, open to different influences by those engaged in appraising the phenomenon, Eghigian feels. That's why UFOs have easily been folded into New Age philosophy, from technological utopia arguments, interdimensional beings, demons and the work of Satan to even a little psychic spoon bending along the way, he said.

There's another source that's part of the UFO picture — no matter how out-of-focus that photo might be.

Eghigian senses that the new kind of geopolitical, international anxieties that surround spying is helping to nourish UFO interest. "We live in this age of where data is stolen, government secrets have been stolen, Russia and China are spying, with drones and drone technologies used for these purposes, along with nefarious actions in Russia and in China that are undermining elections, not just in the U.S. but elsewhere." 

This 'Big Gulp' of concerns, Eghigian stated, has helped prompt certain politicians to take UFOs seriously. "I don't think they were sold by people just saying these might be aliens. This was about national security issues. And that's the stuff they hang their hats on."

In the long historical sweep of UFOs and now UAPs, "it's a new chapter for sure. New life has been breathed into this phenomenon. So here we are again," Eghigian concluded. 

Intelligence agencies in the U.S. have spent the last few years analyzing footage of hundreds of recent UFO encounters, and they want the American people to know: It's still not aliens.

According to several U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) officials who spoke anonymously to The New York Times last week, many recent sightings of UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), as the government prefers to call them — are likely just observations of foreign surveillance operations or airborne clutter, such as weather balloons.

Several UAP incidents have been officially identified as "relatively ordinary" Chinese surveillance drones, the anonymous officials said. China has previously stolen plans for advanced U.S. fighter planes, and is interested in how the U.S. trains its pilots, the DoD officials added.

Related: NASA UFO study team includes former astronaut, scientists and more

Other UAP sightings recorded by military aircraft, which appear to show airborne objects moving in seemingly physics-defying ways, are likely the results of optical illusions. This includes the infamous video known as "GOFAST," which was recorded by a U.S. Navy aircraft and leaked to the media in 2018. (The video, along with two other leaked films of military encounters with UAPs, was eventually declassified by the government.)

While the object in the GOFAST video appears to be zooming over the water at incomprehensible speeds, this is just an optical illusion created by the angle of the recording relative to the water, the DoD officials told The Times. In reality, the object is moving at no more than 30 mph (48 km/h), the officials added.

A classified UAP report delivered to Congress this week by the DoD's intelligence agencies likely includes the findings reported by The Times. The new report adds new details to cases described in a document that officials publicly released in June 2021, describing 144 alleged UAP incidents reported by U.S. government personnel between 2004 and 2021.

The 2021 report acknowledged that, due to a lack of high-quality data, most alleged UAP encounters could not be conclusively explained. However, the report offered several blanket explanations for UAP in general, including "technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity," as well as "airborne clutter" such as birds and weather balloons. 

Nowhere in the report were aliens or extraterrestrials mentioned — however, that did not stop alien conspiracy theories from arising, due in part to the government's general lack of transparency about UAP incidents.

Sue Gough, a DoD spokesperson, told The Times that the government was committed to sharing whatever UAP information it could without putting national security at risk. Government officials also tend to refrain from discussing UAP incidents publicly because there is simply not enough data to conclusively explain them, Gough added.

"In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as 'unidentified' simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution," Gough told The Times. "We are working to mitigate these shortfalls for the future and to ensure we have sufficient data for our analysis."

As the DoD continues its investigation into UAP sightings, NASA has also launched an independent UAP study team, which will operate from October 2022 to mid-2023. According to NASA, the team will focus on collecting and analyzing as much UAP data as possible, in order to develop new methods for identifying the unidentifiable objects in America's skies.

Originally published on Live Science.

The U.S. Navy holds unseen videos of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as the Department of Defense (DOD) prefers to call them — but will not release the footage publicly because it would "harm national security," a Navy spokesperson wrote Wednesday (Sept. 7).

The admission came in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the government transparency site The Black Vault, which has previously shared thousands of pages of UFO-related documents received via FOIA requests to the CIA and other government agencies. The Black Vault filed the FOIA request to the U.S. Navy in April 2020 — just one day after the Navy declassified three now-infamous videos shot by Navy pilots showing high-tech aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways. The Black Vault requested that the Navy now turn over any and all other videos related to UAP.

Related: NASA 'going full force' to gear up for UFO study

More than two years later, the government responded with a letter that both confirmed that more UAP videos exist and denied the request to turn them over due to national security concerns.

"The release of this information will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities," Gregory Cason, deputy director of the Navy's FOIA office, wrote in a response letter. "No portions of the videos can be segregated for release."

Cason added that the Navy was able to declassify the three UAP videos released in April 2020 only because the videos had been previously leaked to the media and had already been "discussed extensively in the public domain." The Navy deemed it possible to officially release the footage "without further damage to national security," Cason wrote.

Interestingly, in its response to The Black Vault's request, the Navy did not make any attempts to conceal the existence of additional UAP videos. There are clearly more videos of inexplicable UFO encounters in the Navy's archives, but how many and what they depict will have to remain a mystery for now.

It's clear, however, that the U.S. military takes the potential threat of UAP very seriously. In May 2022, the DOD held its first public hearing on UFOs since the 1960s. The hearing primarily discussed a June 2021 Pentagon report that revealed U.S. Navy pilots had reported 144 UAP sightings since 2004. More recently, the DOD announced that it will receive federal funding to open a new office focused exclusively on managing reports of UFO sightings by the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force.

Originally published on Live Science.

The skies over Kyiv are swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs), according to a new report from the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. 

Of course, given that Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a months-long war that relies heavily on aircraft and drones, it's likely that many of these so-called UFOs are military tools that appear too fleetingly to identify, a U.S. intelligence agency has speculated.

Published to the preprint database arXiv, the report — which has not yet been peer-reviewed — describes recent steps that Ukrainian astronomers have taken to monitor fast-moving, low-visibility objects in the daytime sky over Kyiv and the surrounding villages. Using specially calibrated cameras at two weather stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka, a village about 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the south, astronomers observed dozens of objects "that cannot scientifically be identified as known natural phenomena," the report said.

Related: NASA 'going full force' to gear up for UFO study

Government agencies tend to refer to such objects as UAP, short for  "unidentified aerial phenomena."

"We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear," the team wrote. "We see them everywhere."

The researchers divided their UAP observations into two categories: "cosmics" and "phantoms." According to the report, cosmics are luminous objects that are brighter than the background sky. These objects are designated with birds' names — such as "swift," "falcon" and "eagle" — and have been observed flying solo as well as in "squadrons," the team wrote.

Phantoms, by contrast, are dark objects, usually appearing "completely black," as if absorbing all light falling onto them, the team added. By comparing observations from the two participating observatories, the researchers estimated that phantoms range from 10 to 40 feet (3 to 12 meters) wide and can travel at speeds of up to 33,000 mph (53,000 km/h). For comparison, an intercontinental ballistic missile can reach speeds of up to 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h), according to The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

The researchers did not speculate as to what these UFOs may be. Rather, their paper focuses on the methods and calculations used to detect the objects. However, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), it's likely that at least some UAP are "technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity." 

Given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, it's reasonable to suspect that some UAP described in the new report may be linked to foreign surveillance or military technologies.

According to the ODNI report, other possible explanations for UAP include "airborne clutter," such as birds and balloons; atmospheric phenomena, such as ice crystals; or classified government projects. Neither the U.S. nor Ukraine reports raise the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors.

The U.S. government has openly renewed its interest in UAP investigations since 2017, when several videos taken by U.S. Navy aircraft leaked to the media. The now-infamous videos showed unidentified aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways, with no explanation.

The government subsequently declassified the footage and recently revealed that more military footage of UAP encounters does exist, though the Department of Defense (DOD) will not be releasing them due to "national security concerns." Earlier this year, Congress approved funding for the DOD to open a new office focused exclusively on managing reports of UFO sightings by the U.S. military. The authors of the new UAP report out of Ukraine added that the country's National Academy of Science is interested in contributing to this ongoing research.

Originally published on Live Science.