Alien Conversations
How to make UAPs respectable
Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have long been SETI’s elephant in the room. Astronomers seek evidence of ET intelligences by searching for exo-planets and listening for signals from alien civilisations
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But should the search effort be restricted to outer space? What if anomalous phenomena exist in the Earth’s atmosphere or even on the surface of the planet? Are SETI looking down the wrong end of the proverbial telescope?
For many years the complimentary fields of SETI and UAP have been engaged in a merry dance around each other. Meanwhile the wider academic community dismisses the latter as a pseudo-science, lacking robust academic rigour. A charge that - to me at least - seems baffling and contradictory, given SETI’s long belief-driven quest to find evidence that we are not alone. A quest that can ultimately be traced back to 19th century when astronomers listened for radio signal from Martians.
This was the vexed issue at the centre of a one-day colloquium held at Durham Law School on Friday 24 March. Convened by Professor Michael Bohlander, the day included presentations from SETI and UAP researchers and cultural historians with no axe to grind - a category in which I define my own position as a folklorist and journalist.
The University of Durham location was a good choice for the colloquium. It is the home of the patron saint of northern England, St Cuthbert. His shrine dominates the impressive medieval cathedral and he was no stranger to mysterious aerial phenomena.
Indeed Durham Cathedral’s official guidebook says Cuthbert, a Northumbrian born around 634, once guarded sheep in the Scottish border hill country. But ‘one night he saw a light descend from the night sky and then return; believing it to be a human soul, he took it as a sign to enter the monastery’.
Like many others St Cuthbert’s life was transformed by an extraordinary experience: he saw something in the sky that changed his life. But in the 7th century Anglo-Saxon world his experience could only be framed in a Christian religious context, as an angelic visitation.
In the 21st century our anomalous lights in the sky take the form of what psychologist Carl Jung called ‘technological angels': flying saucers and UFOs (or UAPs as they are now called in polite society).
Delegates at the colloquium frequently touched upon the link between religious visions and UAPs. But the overall theme was how to make UAP research respectable in the world of academia with its siloed, competing ‘ologies’ and extreme risk aversion when it comes to the allocation of resources to fringe subjects.
Despite the fact that the US Pentagon has allocated $22 million to a UAP project and is now pouring vast sums into its newly-launched UAP task force, funding bodies continue to react in horror when presented with bids to scrutinise the most pervasive unsolved contemporary mystery. So much for academic curiosity!
Outside the USA Professor Hakan Kayal is a leading German space scientist who is trying his best to apply a scientific methodology to this vexing phenomenon. Kayal founded the IFEX UAP research programme at the University of Wurzburg in 2016. In addition to designing satellites and space systems, IFEX receives UAP reports from the general public and undertakes field investigations of the more impressive cases.
As in the UK, Germany has no central government department that carries out this taboo task - so it is left to a few courageous and curious scientists to fill the gap.
Professor Kayal listed the possible outcomes of such inter-displinary work as the detection of secret technologies and/or new natural phenomena (ball lightning and atmospheric plasmas, for instance) and the discovery of ET intelligence. Or perhaps all three.
But what is lacking, all the delegates agreed, was ‘reliable physical data’. In my own presentation on the British Ministry of Defence’s UFO archive I described the flawed methodology used by the author of the Condign UAP report in 2000 to produce conclusions from a mass of unsorted, unreliable data. As a result, the only recommendation from his report that was adopted was to remove defence intelligence from the study of UAPs!
One of my slides quoted a Defence Intelligence scientist who admitted, in an internal MoD memo from 1995, that ‘few people are likely to believe the truth that lack of funds and higher priorities have prevented any study of the thousands of reports received’ (DEFE 24/3152). Another official has scribbled the word ‘Ouch!’ in the margin.
On the ET question, Dr John Elliott’s presentation SETI, Sherlock and the Devil was a sobering reminder of the task that faces the nascent disciplines: finding a needle in a proverbial haystack.
He posed the question: what is the search space for our own back yard (the Milky Way)? The figures are mind-boggling: ‘100,000 light years in diameter, 1000 light years thick, 400 billion stars…[and] probably as many planets, if not more’.
Dr Elliott is one of the founders in the SETI post-detection hub at St Andrews University that aims to prepare humanity for future contact with ET civilisations and the inevitable impact that will have on human society and religions. He is acutely aware of the credibility issue and the importance of ‘scientific rigour’.
The St Andrews team recognise the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to SETI and UAPs,. That includes both physical and social scientists and Dr Elliott says he has detected a shift in academic acceptance of these topics.
For his part, organiser Professor Bohlander said the focus on scientific method is blocking the study of large areas of human experience. His talk on ‘alien encounter narratives in a forensic environment’ was based upon an hypothetical legal case in which man involved in a car crash used the defence ‘I was distracted by a UAP’ as an example.
The final speaker, MIT physicist Professor David Pritchard, joined us online after a few technical hitches were resolved. He listed past examples of collisions between scientific teams and UAP data such as the University of Colorado study of 1968-69. Then he tried to answer the question ‘how to convince skeptical scientists?’. This resulted in three examples: real-time networked UAP observations of the type proposed by Avi Loeb, investigative reporting of outstanding cases such as the Nimitz flap of 2004 and building government support by engaging with supporters in high places (St Cuthbert might come in handy here).
The colloquium ended with plans for a Aliens Conversations #2 and a possible edited collection of papers if the subject continues to grow and attract multi-disciplinary scholarship.
Another speaker, Mike Cifone, offered his newly-launched Society for UAP Studies as a co-ordinating body along with its journal Limina (from liminal: UAPs being transitional in nature in epistemological and ontological terms).
All in all, an enterprising and inspiring day, thanks to Professor Bohlander and the Durham Law School for the invitation to speak. The final word should go to David Pritchard, quoting from an email to the organisers:
‘As you get into this further you’ll have to give up your belief that some things are unbelievable…I think the level of strident disbelief is not based on a corresponding body of careful research yielding negative results’.