A few days after I blogged about UFOs and the much anticipated government report on it, the New Yorker had a lengthy essay on how the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously. Unlike most people like me who rarely ever get away from terra firma, the military's pilots fly high above in the atmosphere. The reports from its pilots became too many to ignore.
The government may or may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma. But, in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo. For many, this has been a comfort. In March, I spoke with a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who said that about a decade ago, during combat, he had an extended encounter with a U.F.O., one that registered on two of his plane’s sensors. For all the usual reasons, he had never officially reported the sighting, but every once in a while he’d bring a close friend into his confidence over a beer. He did not want to be named. “Why am I telling you this story?” he asked. “I guess I just want this data out there—hopefully this helps somebody else somehow.”
The object he’d encountered was about forty feet long, disobeyed the principles of aerodynamics as he understood them, and looked exactly like a giant Tic Tac.
The military has a security interest in this, of course. What do scientists think?
Not much.
And therein lies a serious problem, writes Avi Loeb.
Loeb is the Harvard astrophysicist who argued that the interstellar object Oumuamua might have been the remnant from another civilization somewhere else in the universe. Scientists promptly ridiculed him. Even America's friendliest and well known astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, mocked the argument.
It seems as if scientists do not want to consider the possibility. Loeb writes that scientists and the scientific establishment are not doing us any favors by preemptively shutting down investigations.
Finding extraordinary evidence requires a commitment of extraordinary funds. This was true in the successful searches for the Higgs boson or gravitational waves, and it is definitely true in the so-far unsuccessful search for the nature of dark matter. Lack of evidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, the result of not investing enough in the search. All four proposals for explaining the anomalies of ‘Oumuamua in the context of a natural origin contemplated objects that we had never seen before in the solar system, including a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg, a tidal disruption fragment or a dust bunny. Therefore, by taking a close-up photograph of an ‘Oumuamua-like object in the future, we will learn something new about the nurseries that give birth to objects that we never imagined before ‘Oumuamua’s discovery. Our scientific knowledge will benefit irrespective of whether these objects are natural or artificial in origin. Only one scenario will maintain our ignorance—that of “business as usual” and lack of interest in ‘Oumuamua’s anomalies.
The chance that Earth is the only place in the universe with intelligent life, as we understand it, is way lower than the probability that we are not alone in the universe whose vastness we are yet to comprehend. Not too long ago, most of humanity believed that we were at the center of it all. Galileo muttered under his breath "And yet it moves," after surrendering to the Catholic Church and recanting his claim that Earth moves around the Sun. Wouldn't we want to allocate funds for scientists understand these unexplainable aerial phenomena, instead of muttering under our breaths, "and yet they move"?
