- As a scientist working on the search for life in the universe, one of the most common
comments I see in this channel relates to UFOs, now often rebranded as UAPs. In the last few years, the interest in UFOs has only risen, thanks to some surprising revelations from parts of the US government, as well as numerous ex-government
personnel coming forward. I felt like this topic was
important to discuss on here in the spirit of transparent dialogue, because when we don't talk about it, conspiracies and misinformation have a tendency to fill the vacuum. So what do astronomers such as myself, who search for life in the universe, actually think about the
recent flurry of new stories? Let's start with clearing
the air a bit here. I think there is a widespread perception that scientists are unwilling
to discuss this topic at all. As if they consider the
idea of alien visitation to be fundamentally non-scientific or even the subject of ridicule. But I don't think that's true. In all of my interactions
with my colleagues, I found them to be
open-minded, thoughtful, and engaged. A good example of this was in a recent Scientific
American article published by SETI scientists, Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq-Misra, who correctly point out that if we consider aliens on exoplanets to be within the realm of science, then aliens in space or
even in our atmosphere must equally be so. There's no magical distance from the earth at which suddenly something
stops becoming science. So let's just first dispel the idea that scientists consider this topic to be somehow off limits
as a matter of principle. Okay, fine. But there is a difference between principles and practicalities. In a real world sense, how can science ingest claims like UFOs? This is frankly a very
challenging case study for the scientific method, because put bluntly, the reliability of the claimed
evidence is itself uncertain. Now, it has to be said that that is a highly unusual situation for researchers to be faced with. So perhaps a good starting
point for this video is just a walkthrough how
science normally would proceed. Let's take astronomy as our example. We typically start with
some interesting hypothesis, and then we go to the telescope
to collect observations to test it or compare to
archival observations. That's the first distinguishing
characteristic of science. Hypotheses are not accepted unless supporting
evidence can be provided, which necessarily means that said hypotheses must
be actually testable. Next, we analyze the data using transparent and
reproducible methodologies, allowing us to test
hypotheses using the data, and then report our findings as well as typically the raw data itself. Now, a second characteristic
of a modern scientific claim is that it is usually attached to some statistical evaluations of the confidence and uncertainty. A pair of especially important numbers are the true positive rate, which is how often we'd correctly identify the phenomenon of interest
via injection recovery tests, and the false positive rate, how often would we'd
erroneously claim the phenomenon in control data where it
absolutely does not exist. Keep those in mind for what follows. After this, the paper is reviewed by peers as in other reputable astronomers
with relevant expertise to check for any obvious major flaws in the arguments being made. This is the third characteristic
of modern science, peer review, to solicit experts to
skeptically interrogate these scientific claims. Look, nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes, and so having some checks
and balances is crucial. Next, if the claim is of
sufficiently high interest to the scientific community
or even the wider public, then another team will inevitably want to skeptically interrogate the claim, and so they will produce their
own independent analysis. Now that could be using the
same data as the original team or often by collecting independent data to verify or reject the claim. So the fourth characteristic
of modern science is a higher level of peer review performed by the broader community. Now, if a hypothesis survives
its entire process intact, then it becomes provisionally accepted. But of course, all
hypotheses are up for grabs. Even decades later, they are still being
skeptically interrogated. So in this framework, an accepted scientific claim is one that has passed intense scrutiny where both the methods
and data are made public and multiple independent
supporting evidences have been provided by
multiple independent sources. You know, making data public is great for evaluating scientific claims, but it has to be said, there is some data that we
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incog.com/coolworlds today. Okay, back to the video. With our science 101 complete, let's now direct the machinery of science to the question of UAPs. The problem here is that essentially, all of the presented evidence thus far, falls outside of the norms
of scientific analyses. To see this, let's consider three prominent examples that have been highlighted in the news over the last few years. First, we have the US Navy
videos released by the Pentagon showing three objects that the US Navy were unable to identify, hence the label UAP. Second, we have personal
testimony of several pilots, perhaps most famously David Fravor, detailing accounts with phenomena that they were also unable to identify. And third, we have the
recent bombshell claim by ex-intelligence officer, David Grusch, that the US government is in possession of something like a
dozen alien spaceships. This is not an exhaustive list, but arguably captures the
three most news-grabbing cases. Now, I'm not gonna discuss
these claims in detail. If you want that, there are plenty of
breakdown videos on YouTube that dissect these. Instead, I'm just gonna
discuss how these claims might get ingested into
the scientific framework, which is really the point of this video. For our purposes, the relevant fact that
amongst these three cases, only one of them is actually
accompanied with released data that we could at least plausibly integrate in a scientific framework. I'm not gonna lie, the three Pentagon videos
really grabbed my attention when I first saw them. Here, we have seemingly
legitimate UAP data from a credible source. But of course, the immediate question is whether these could simply
be something fairly mundane like a balloon, a bird, or a distant aircraft, for example. Taking these videos in isolation, there are at least plausible, if somewhat improbable
alternative explanations that do not involve alien spacecraft. Look, given the hours of recording, unlikely events can and will
sometimes be recorded on film. I mean, anybody on YouTube knows that. I did an interview with
Mick West a few years back who is able to explain and reproduce what we see
in the Pentagon videos without aliens, and I think you should check that out to make of your own mind. The poor quality video,
brief nature of the clips, and lack of public
auxiliary data like radar makes these frustratingly ambiguous. This isn't to say that
the data are definitively not showing alien spacecraft in motion. That could possibly be, but the current evidence presented is insufficient to
conclusively determine that. Nobody is happy with ambiguity. Scientists in particular despise it. But without a full data dump
of all the video archives, the GPS information, the associated radar data, the software used to record those videos, and indeed much more, we are unfortunately stuck here. A frequent comment by UFO
proponents at this juncture is that the Pentagon videos
aren't the be all and end all. There is also the personal testimonies of the pilots themselves. And indeed by extension, the recent claims by David Grusch also fall into the category
of personal testimony. And this is where it gets really tricky for science to proceed. First, I want to acknowledge that what makes these
testimonies interesting is the fact that they come from
ostensibly credible sources. Fravor is a highly trained military pilot, and Grusch is an ex-government
intelligence officer, both with many years of
well-respected service behind them. And of course, there's also other sources, some anonymous and some not, who have also provided
supporting testimonies to these accounts, such as other pilots,
observers, radar operators, and government whistleblowers. But regardless, the evidence being discussed here is still personal accounts, word of mouth. A challenge in discussing this openly is that some might have a
hostile knee-jerk reaction to any skepticism of these testimonies. The implication is that any
skepticism of these accounts translates to insinuations that
these individuals are lying, delusional or even incompetent. To this, I would simply say that we cannot engage
in scientific discourse if the presented evidence is somehow immune from
skeptical interrogation. That is at the very core
of how science works. This is not motivated by some desire for character assassination
of these individuals, but rather it is a foundational component to the very act of scientific inquiry. If claims cannot be questioned, then we are not doing science. It resembles something
more like religious dogma at that point. And I don't think that anybody
involved truly wants that if they seriously think about it. So yes, we have to be willing to unapologetically
skeptically question the claims or else there's simply no path forward within the scientific framework. Once we concede that, what we are really admitting
is that in scientific parlance, there is a non-zero false positive rate. So that means that there must exist some instances of
erroneously reported UAPs due to some kind of misidentification of a natural or simply mundane phenomenon. Take the case of a pilot
reporting a UAP as a toy example. Amongst the US military branches, there are approximately
28,000 trained pilots, with pilots typically flying something like 200 hours per
year outside of deployment. So put together, that is
5.6 million hours per year. Please don't get too hung
up on the numbers here, we are just ballparking
as a pedagogical example. Now let's assume that military pilots are
incredibly reliable observers, such that the rate of
their misidentifications leading to erroneous UAP reports equates to one case in
every 10,000 hours flown. Doing the math, that would give us about
560 false reports each year, which is actually fairly close to the 742 UFOs reported per year in the famous Project
Blue Book report on UFOs by the US Air Force. Now consider that a further vetting stage is applied by government investigators that are able to remove 95% of these as having a clear natural explanation. Again, that's the number that's
similar to Project Blue Book as well as the recent NASA
UAP taskforce investigation. Applying a 95% cut drops us down to about 28
anomalous things per year. So these are events flagged as a UAP by both a trained pilot and
subsequent investigators, and yet despite that, they are all in fact by definition natural or mundane phenomena
in this hypothetical scenario. Finally, the incident
reported by David Fravor occurred almost two decades ago. So over that time, we'd expect roughly 500
spurious events like this. So these example numbers show how it is quite possible for even highly trained military pilots with a remarkably low
misidentification rate to still produce hundreds
of erroneous UAP reports over the years. Events which have even survived independent scrutiny afterwards. What I hope this exercise
illustrates more than anything is how crucial the false positive rate is. I assumed 0.01% in that scenario. But if it were 0.1%, then there'd be 10 times more
spurious events than this. To have scientific evidence
then of a real UAP population, we would have to detect more UAPs than that expected from
pure false positives. If instead we found it
was a similar amount, then we would conclude that
it is perfectly consistent with simple misidentifications combined with large number statistics. Like monkeys on a typewriter. With millions of hours of
variations and combinations, there will inevitably
be some compelling prose randomly regurgitated. It's simply a numbers game. Now, of course, the whole problem is that when it comes
to personal testimony, it is extremely difficult
to accurately quantify the false positive rate of
these eyewitness accounts. I assumed 0.01%, but really
that's a complete guess. And of course, this gets even harder when one considers variability
between individuals as well as the possible presence
of bad actors in the mix. Now having multiple independent observers would surely decrease
the false positive rate. Yes, I agree. No doubt. But crucially, that is merely
a qualitative statement. We actually need to quantify these rates in order to make progress here. Yet more, the rate is surely temporally
and spatially variable as the number of drones and
balloons flying each year continues to rise, complicating things even more. As I hope is becoming clear, this whole situation is very different from that with astronomical observations where usually we can
observe a control set, some artificial stars, or test our algorithms on
simulated control cases, any of which would allow us to reliably measure the
false positive rate. In principle, one could do this for pilots and maybe even ex-intelligence officers, but in practice, this is extremely difficult to implement. And without it, we're essentially stuck. It's not that the topic itself
is inherently non-scientific, but rather that the tools of science simply cannot make progress
in the described scenario. On top of this, there's
another huge problem here, and that's interpretation. As I'm sure you well know, the U in UFO or UAP doesn't mean aliens, it simply means unidentified. Even if you could calculate
a false positive rate, a true positive rate, and show that there exists a statistically significant
population of UAPs, all you have done is established
that something exists that cannot be explained
by current knowledge, and that's something could trivially be some previously unknown but non-alien phenomenon. I think this possibility is being casually dismissed
by many UFO proponents who too easily jump to aliens
to explain such reports. But to astronomers, we are intimately familiar with the folly of claiming aliens when
you encounter something that you've simply never seen before, not a god of the gaps
but an alien of the gaps. Percival Lowell was convinced that streaks and Mars were alien canals. The first pulsar discovered was playfully called little green men 1. And many considered Boyajian's Star must be an alien mega structure
when first discovered. But in each case, of course, there were no aliens. There were simply new natural phenomenon. If history teaches us nothing else, it's that we should not be so arrogant to assume that we understand
nature in her totality. She constantly surprises us and reveals how limited
our knowledge truly is. So in my interpretation
of the scientific method, the unknown and possibly unquantifiable false positive rate of these claims, coupled with ambiguity
in their interpretation, makes them at present simply too uncertain to make any substantive conclusions about. Again, just to emphasize, this doesn't mean that it is not aliens, but the reliability and reproducibility of the available methods and data is far from the norms that we would expect for even fairly frankly, low stakes, mundane scientific
claims, let alone aliens. I sincerely hope this
situation does change though. I would love to see a
complete video archive, releases of the software
used behind these videos, studies quantifying the
pilot false positive rates, and just in general more
transparency on these topics. And I think that is
happening, which is great. But for me, I'm going to need to see
a lot higher quality data than that which we have seen thus far in order to establish a convincing case for alien visitation. But enough of my thoughts. What do my colleagues think? How do other astronomers and more broadly, the SETI
community think about this? Which to be clear includes
many interdisciplinary fields. Recently, Marissa Yingling
published a survey of 1,460 faculty across 144
major research universities exploring academic views on UAPs. Concerning the Pentagon videos, over half of those surveyed expressed that their primary
reaction was curiosity. Almost 20% said skeptical, and that roughly 20% were indifferent, and the remaining were
either confused, excited, or something else. Asked whether the release
increased the credibility of UAPs, 30% reported not at all, another 30% said slightly, 20% said moderately, with the rest saying
significantly or greatly. From this survey, one of the more surprising resources is that of those who responded, 18.9% said that they or
someone close to them had seen something unexplained, which matched the description of a UAP. So taken at face value, this report supports the
notion that a lot of academics are following UAP stories with interest. There's not some unified
front of ridicule or scorn. On the other hand, there are plenty of selection
effects to think about here. For one, only 3.9% of those emailed
actually completed the survey, which is obviously a very
low participation rate. An obvious concern here is that those who already
believe in UAPs beforehand are more likely to respond to this survey, thus biasing these numbers. For a point of record, although over 40,000 faculty were asked to participate in this survey, I certainly did not participate, nor do I ever recall seeing
this email in my inbox. It should also be noted that scientists make up only
a minority of those surveyed. Less than a quarter of those who responded come from physics, astronomy,
biology, chemistry, or related fields. It's unclear whether the remainder
have scientific training. So these results are useful for understanding how some
self-selecting fraction of US academics think about UAPs, but it doesn't really
answer the question posed in this video, how do scientists think about it? So I conducted my own
little informal survey of some colleagues working
in the field of SETI, the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence. To me, this is surely
the most relevant group, given that they should apriori
have thought about this the most deeply given their field of concentration. Now, obviously my survey should be taken with a huge grain of salt because it hasn't gone through peer review or followed rigorous standards of polling. I simply wanted to ask
colleagues I know and trust, including many leaders in the field, what do they think about this? I got a response from everyone I emailed, and only one declined
to answer the survey, leaving me with 10 completed surveys. So keep in mind, this is
small numbers statistics. But I will say that
although I'm gonna keep the names of my participants anonymous, these are the people
in the field right now dominating the scientific discourse. So just keep that in mind. I asked them three questions. First, should astronomers study UAPs? Are they a part of SETI? Three said yes, one said they were indifferent, four said no, and two said, in principle, yes, but in practice, no. For that last category, the sentiment was that there's no reason why UAPs couldn't be a
part of science one day. It's just that the existing
data is sadly inadequate. Next, I asked them how
scientifically interesting are UAPs from a scale of zero to 10. The results are pretty polarized here. Seven said 2 or less, but two participants said 8 or higher, and one felt unsure. So overall, definitely a bit
more negative on this question. I think most were okay with
some small fraction of effort being spent on this question, but in a relative sense, it's a rather low priority
compared to other approaches. In question three, I asked them what their reaction
was to the Pentagon videos, mirroring the question that
Yingling asked in her survey. 8 of the 10 SETI scientists said that they were unconvinced by them, saying such things as that they were likely
manmade, military vehicles, or just simply not aliens. I will note some nuance here that one of them said that their
initial reaction was shock, but then after watching Mick West videos, they became less convinced. And a second said that although they were
initially unconvinced, after speaking to the pilots directly, they became more intrigued. Of the remaining two
of the SETI scientists, one said they were puzzled and another said they
hadn't seen them at all. As you can see then, there's a diverse range of
views and opinions here. But broadly, I think there is an open-mindedness about the idea of studying UAPs, but at the same time a consensus that the current data is
not currently convincing, which I think mirrors
my comments made earlier in this video. As we all know, there are new stories running on UAPs on an almost weekly basis at this point. So my opinion may certainly
change if new evidence comes in. And you know what? That's how science should be. We don't make definitive judgments until the evidence is conclusive and we change our minds
guided by new information. But speaking for myself, I'm gonna need to see reliable data with quantifiable false positive rates, reproducible methodologies, and archival data
sources to be moved here, which is the same way that I would treat any scientific claim. So although I'm skeptical for now, I'm open-minded. And hey, I think this would genuinely be the most exciting discovery
we could ever make. So let's keep our eyes open. I do think UAP is bringing to
focus fundamental questions about how we interpret evidence in an unbiased and consistent manner. In fact, over the last few months, I've been working on a new paper to try and develop such
a unified framework that could treat everything, from fossils or Mars to Radio SETI, from UAPs to buyer signatures. And on top of that, we have projects in my team
looking for engineered stars and alien artifacts on the moon. So please, no one accuses us of not being interested in this question. But I will say that the stigma
of alien hunting is real and this kind of work is
incredibly difficult to fund, which is why I am so
grateful to supporters, to my research team, the Cool Words Lab, who allow us to pursue this
kind of challenging work. So lemme just take a quick moment to thank our latest two supporters. That is Patrick Muzyka
and Alphonso Harrison who have pledged in making this happen. As always, if you have
the resources to spare and think we are worth it and want to help out our research team, then please consider making
a tax deductible gift by checking on the link
in the description. To finish, I'm gonna play us out with a few interviews I
did with some colleagues at a recent SETI conference held at Penn State just a few weeks back. So you can hear from them
directly about this topic. Please do let me know
down below in the comments what do you think. Where do you land on this discussion? And as always, thank you so much watching. Stay thoughtful and stay curious. - Adam Frank, University of Rochester, professor of astrophysics. I'm all for an open agnostic search for investigation of UAPs. I don't think they have anything to do with life on other planets because we've never seen any evidence that would point to that
extraordinary conclusion. - Hi. I'm Dawn Gelino, I'm the deputy director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute - Dawn, what do you think of UAPs? Are they scientifically interesting and are you studying them? - I do think they're potentially
scientifically interesting. Although we don't have a lot
of scientific data on them. We have hearsay and
people's personal accounts. - I'm Anamaria Berea. I'm an associate professor
at George Mason University. I think they are amazingly
scientifically interesting, not because they are related to aliens or extraterrestrial life, but mostly because it's
something we don't know what they are about. And as scientists, we want to find out if it's an interesting
atmospheric phenomenon, if these are about cognitive
biases or what they are. So yeah. It's very interesting to find
something new in science.
