Are UFOs or UAPs real?

Something weird is happening — something that, even as an astronomer, I once struggled to explain. 

Fighter pilots are seeing strange shapes fly around in seemingly impossible ways, and they’re catching it on camera. The U.S. government is not only admitting to knowing about these sightings, it’s holding hearings in Congress and putting together task forces to figure out what’s happening. At the same time, people are resigning from national security positions to speak up about a government cover-up. They say aliens have visited Earth.

If you’re wondering what’s really going on here, you’re not alone. Now, more than ever, people have been asking about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or as they’re called today, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The truth is, there are a lot of aspects of UAPs that aren't common knowledge. Here's what I've learned over the course of my career, both as a journalist and as an astronomer researching planets around other stars.

Why can’t science explain UAPs?

This is probably the most common question I hear about UAPs, and the answer is that science actually explains UAPs all the time. Almost every UAP gets solved eventually. They end up being meteors, bright planets in the night sky, lighthouses, optical illusions like the autokinetic effect and parallax, ball lightning, funny-looking clouds, and, yes, balloons (the famous Roswell incident, for instance, turned out to be a crashed balloon from a top-secret nuclear surveillance program). 

And a lot of UAPs end up being drones and planes. Sightings are far more common near military training areas, where state-of-the-art aircraft are often on display — think everything from hypersonic missiles and silent helicopters to planes that may be able to blend into the sky around them. 

Those are just the things we know about, too, while the hundreds of billions of dollars going into secret engineering programs have probably invented a thing or two in recent years. Such technologies can be developed and deployed by different parts of the U.S. government without any communication, which probably also leads to UAP sightings within the military.

These sightings capture our imagination because it seems like they rule out everything “ordinary” — so something extraordinary, like aliens, has to be the answer. There are always a lot of possibilities that can explain UAPs, though, including other extraordinary ones. Without evidence that specifically points to an extraterrestrial origin, there’s no reason to think aliens are the most likely option left. 

So, if scientists seem like they’re getting stumped by a UAP, it’s not because they don’t have ideas. But since most UAPs get solved, the ones we’re left to focus on are — by definition — the hardest to figure out. That could mean they just have the worst data, or were caused by especially rare coincidences. 

For example, one of the most famous UAP sightings was recently explained as the combination of a meteor, a foggy lighthouse, and some deer making weird noises. Stuff like this might sound far-fetched, but when you take into account that thousands of UAPs have already been explained by simpler coincidences, it’s not such a stretch to think that a few might be caused by more complicated accidents. 

There could still be some UAPs that are caused by things we haven’t discovered yet, too. We just don’t know.

What about the Pentagon UAP videos?

These recordings definitely look eerie. They were taken by cameras on fighter jets, and they appear to show objects flying in ways that no human technology can. Some of the fighter pilots even say they saw the UAP themselves. How could anything but aliens possibly explain that? 

There are a few possibilities. For one, we don’t know for sure what’s actually real in this footage. The jets that took the videos are constantly filtering and processing what they see, and that can lead to weird signals that aren’t really there. Some of the strange things these UAPs appear to be doing probably just come from the way the videos were recorded.

In that case, maybe the jets did see something real, but they didn’t do any of the seemingly impossible stuff we saw on camera. They could have been regular aircraft, tests from a different branch of the military, or drones sent by another country to examine U.S. defenses. Or maybe the jets' computers were deliberately tricked in a test of electronic warfare. People forget about this, but most of these videos were taken when the military was trying out new sensor technologies in the field for the first time. 

As for the firsthand accounts, we know from solved UAP cases that sometimes intelligent people who mean well (even experts like scientists and pilots) accidentally describe things wrong, and that can sometimes make UAPs harder to figure out. That doesn’t mean we should dismiss anyone who has seen a UAP — we should absolutely take people seriously when they say they’ve seen something. It just means we have to subject firsthand accounts to scientific scrutiny, like everything else.

What about the government officials speaking out?

A few different people have recently been speaking up about government UFO programs. The most famous are probably Luis Elizondo, who claims to have led a Pentagon program dedicated to studying UAPs, and David Grusch, who is a former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Grusch has said that the government has recovered crashed alien spacecraft, and even dead alien bodies, then murdered people to cover it up. 

But Grusch has yet to give a single piece of direct evidence to back any of that up — he just says he was told of the proof by someone else. The fact that Grusch used to occupy a pretty high-up position in the government isn’t good enough proof in itself, either. With hundreds of thousands of people working for the U.S. national security establishment, it’s not hard to find a few people who believe things without evidence. 

After all, Grusch and Elizondo aren’t the first people to come forward like this. Every time, we only get second- and third-hand accounts of an alien conspiracy, but never any direct proof. 

So you really think we’re alone in the Universe?

No — like most astronomers, I think there’s probably life out there somewhere. But there are problems with the idea that alien life is visiting us on Earth. 

Say these aliens are trying to communicate with us. It seems very, very unlikely that their technology would be just advanced enough to bring them here and impress us, but not so advanced that they couldn’t just announce themselves clearly. On the other hand, if the aliens are trying to be stealthy, what are the chances that they’d be exactly advanced enough for us to notice them, but only through fleeting glimpses in ambiguous videos? 

Plus, wouldn’t it be a huge coincidence for aliens to travel across the galaxy to visit us, only to appear in a way that fits exactly what we expect from sci-fi books and movies?

Why don’t scientists take UAPs seriously?

Scientists are eager to look into any mystery they think might lead to cool new discoveries — but, at least so far, little new science has come from attempts to study UAPs. Since most cases end up being things like balloons and optical illusions, scientists tend to focus their efforts elsewhere.

As a NASA report on UAPs recently said, though, that doesn’t mean there aren’t discoveries out there to be made. If something ends up really resisting conventional explanations, scientists will absolutely look into it in hopes of revealing something new about the Universe. To get there, we have to follow the evidence and the scientific method. We should never rush to any explanation, one way or another.

And we shouldn’t forget that scientists are actively searching for alien life beyond Earth. We’re sending probes to places like Mars, Venus, and the ocean-filled moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We’re discovering planets around other stars and looking for signs of life in their atmospheres. As you read this, telescopes are even scanning for alien civilizations and listening for their communication signals. So, no matter what astronomers think about UAPs, we take the possibility of alien life very seriously. 

We’re looking up at the sky and wondering, just like everybody else.