Where are we on UFOs and national security? ( Washington Post )

                          

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts spent last week on a much-needed vacation — but that doesn’t mean we stopped reading technical journals. And for good reason — I was eagerly anticipating the ODNI’s congressionally mandated report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

I was hardly the only one. The anticipation of the report produced a small cottage industry of longform stories — 60 Minutes, USA Today, Politico and the New Yorker, to name the most obvious ones. The tenor in most of these stories was about how the existence of unidentified flying objects had previously been a much-maligned idea and now seems to have gone mainstream. There’s even a lobbyist.

The surprisingly bipartisan enthusiasm for the subject of UAPs merits a cautionary warning, and that is exactly what the Atlantic’s Sarah Scoles provided in her preemptive takedown of how the media would cover the report: “Reporters have taken sources at their word without corroborating data, let documented contradictions slide by, and glossed over the motivations of both outside agitators and government insiders. Reports of UFOs always come with a dearth of information; right now, we need to weigh what little we have carefully and stick to the standards of skepticism that we would apply to anything else.”

With all of that ballyhoo, the actual report was bound to be a letdown. The first tell is that it’s only nine total pages and only five pages of actual text. The national security bureaucracy cannot change a towel dispenser in the Pentagon without a 20-page memo, so this is thin by normal standards and ultrathin by federal government standards.

Furthermore, the report did not say “aliens,” “extraterrestrials” or any combination of words to that effect. Instead, the report, while confirming overlapping sensor evidence of UAPs, lists five possible explanations. The first four are: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, American high tech and foreign high tech. The last category is “other,” which presumably includes, you know, the aliens.

So what did we learn from this report? A few things:

1) ODNI is practicing decent social science. Props to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for recognizing that this is not a monocausal story. It states that “there are multiple types of UAP requiring different explanations.” Furthermore, it is smart enough to know what it does not know. The report refuses to assign different UAP sightings into different buckets because, to repeat a theme, the office doesn’t know which bucket each sighting fits into.

2) The overwhelming majority of UAP sightings are not ETs. The report lists 144 events originating from federal government sources, 80 of them with multiple confirmation by independent sensors. Within that data, only 18 cases included instances in which “observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics.” Don’t get me wrong, 18 is a lot more than zero, and maybe some of the other UAP reports wind up belonging to this category. But we are not talking about a copious amount of data to work from.

3) There will be more data. Yay! The most encouraging sign about the report is the acknowledgment that the task force intends to augment and standardize its data collection. Most of the incidents are from the U.S. Navy, but the report acknowledges that the U.S. Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration are starting to develop procedures for collecting similar incidence reports. The report itself will further reduce the stigma against such reports. Furthermore, the task force, “intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management.”

So, no, the report is not really a game-changer. But the process of mandating a report has been. The stigmatization of UAP incidents has been dramatically reduced. The national security bureaucracy seems geared up to collect more data. This is an issue where Congress seems keenly interested. Strange as it may sound in 2021, the UFO question appears to be an instance in which the system has worked.

Daniel W. Drezner 

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