{"id":595049,"date":"2023-10-20T20:45:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T17:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-big-idea-why-we-should-take-ufos-seriously\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T20:45:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T17:45:29","slug":"the-big-idea-why-we-should-take-ufos-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-big-idea-why-we-should-take-ufos-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"#The Big Idea: Why We Should Take UFOs Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nWhether you call them UFOs, UAPs or flying saucers, Canada should treat the objects that fly in our skies as scientific phenomena, not pop-cultural quackery\n<\/div>\n
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(Illustration by Pete Ryan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Most kids go through a space phase. But mine kept going after I watched NASA launch its Gemini and Mercury spacecraft on TV. And it kept going after I joined my high school\u2019s UFO club in Winnipeg. When I enrolled at the University of Manitoba, I opted for a science<\/a> degree; I wanted to be an astronomer. I would have been happ<\/a>y to spend all of my days looking up.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time, my professors were receiving tons of calls from civilians about UFO sightings. Convinced they were nonsense, they stopped picking up. I asked if they\u2019d pass the calls along to me. All through my freshman year, I fielded reports from UFO spotters and sometimes even visited them at their homes. Their sightings were mostly things like stars and planes\u2014honest mistakes. But others, like one family\u2019s tale of a \u201cFerris wheel of lights,\u201d didn\u2019t have simple explanations. One professor asked me to give a presentation on what I\u2019d heard. Hundreds of people packed the auditorium. I became the \u201cUFO guy\u201d overnight.<\/span><\/p>\n

As UFO enthusiasts go, I\u2019m not the one saying, \u201cAliens are here stealing our water and abducting people.\u201d I often get flak for being too much of a skeptic. I\u2019ve always looked at UFOs\u2014which are separate from aliens\u2014as a scientific problem, one that should be researched using proper tools and rigorous methods. Since the \u201980s, I\u2019ve produced the Canadian UFO Survey, an annual collection of sightings from all across the country. It pulls data from government documents and reports from pilots, police and civilians, then breaks them down by criteria like number of witnesses\u00a0 and \u201clevel of strangeness.\u201d Between 700 and 1,000 reports are filed in Canada every year, two to five per cent of which defy categorization. Roughly 10 per cent of all Canadians have experienced sightings, and that number only includes those who report. Whether you call them UFOs or UAPs\u2014unidentified anomalous phenomena, a term that\u2019s gaining traction\u2014they\u2019re real entities worth studying seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

A number of recent, high-profile incidents kicked off our latest UFO frenzy: last February, an American military jet shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina, then three more benign objects over Lake Huron, Yukon and Alaska within a week. UFOs were also the subject of a two-hour American congressional hearing in July, followed by a Mexican congressional hearing in September (complete with fake alien remains presented by a local journalist).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As our airspace becomes more commercialized, with package-delivery drones from Amazon Prime Air joining Elon Musk\u2019s internet-providing Starlink satellites in the sky, there will be more and more valid reasons to track UFOs. A major one is safety: airline pilots, for example, regularly report UFO sightings, which often turn out to be civilian drones. However, if they\u2019re seeing lights or other curiosities\u2014ones invisible to air-traffic control\u2014that\u2019s a huge concern. Whether these sightings indicate a malfunctioning of a plane\u2019s collision avoidance system, a pilot with tired eyes or a true UFO, they could present a danger to passenger safety. UFOs are also a matter of national defence. Objects that matched descriptions of last spring\u2019s infamous spy balloon were spotted floating over parts of Canada <\/span>months <\/span><\/i>before the balloon was officially acknowledged by the U.S. military. We need to pay better attention.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first fix should be to the way the Canadian government handles sightings. Right now, a patchwork network of agencies accepts reports; many do, and they don\u2019t communicate with each other. The Royal Canadian Air Force passed<\/span> official <\/span><\/i>control of the file to the National Research Council, or NRC, in the \u201960s, when UFOs were no longer deemed purely a security issue, but a scientific one. (Sightings usually turned out to be meteors.) The NRC delegated some incidents to RCMP detachments for local investigations, then gave up the file in 1995 for cost reasons. After that, the UFO file became an administrative hot potato, eventually landing in the hands of Transport Canada and Nav Canada, a non-profit that manages the country\u2019s aviation incidents. Nav Canada isn\u2019t subject to access-to-information requests, so right now, there\u2019s a giant black hole around what\u2019s being investigated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Canada should establish a central repository where new UFO reports can be collected and analyzed. Every year, that office should produce a public report, much in the same way the Supreme Court of Canada releases its annual year in review. This summary should include sightings from civilians\u2014farmers, birdwatchers, even accountants who happen to glance upward during their daily commute. Science has always been advanced by the observations of regular people.<\/span><\/p>\n

The broader scientific community will also need to participate in UFO studies to provide Canadians with proper data. There\u2019s already good news<\/a> on this front. This past September, NASA released a 33-page report that called for better UFO data gathering, possibly aided by AI technology<\/a> and open-source smartphone apps. Also earlier this year, news broke that Canada\u2019s Office of the Chief Science Advisor had launched the Sky Canada Project, the Canadian government\u2019s first known UFO research effort in three decades. The goal is to examine how UFOs are tracked in Canada. (The results are expected in 2024.) These developments open the door for the use of scientific tools, like video surveillance, remote-sensing technology and telescopes. They can help us identify what we see, and also answer questions like how long it was there and how it moved. Scientists like tangible, replicable data, not anecdotes. These tools could provide it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to see Canadian post-secondary institutions include more UFO-focused coursework in their disciplines\u2014and not just in astronomy. Engineers, for example, could speculate on the technical details of how interstellar travel<\/a> might work. There\u2019s been some UFO research at Canadian universities, like the University of Toronto\u2019s Institute for Aerospace Studies. But for the most part, ufology\u2014the study of UFOs\u2014has remained within the \u201cinvisible college,\u201d among scientists who\u2019ve conducted research for interest\u2019s sake, without institutional support.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the issue of misinformation: when scientists dismiss the validity of studying UFOs, Canadians don\u2019t become less fascinated by them. We\u2019re just forced to settle for less-reputable, fringe sources of information. (One Sky Canada document, for example, lists \u201cpreventing conspiracy theories\u201d as a priority.) We get caught up in the wild speculation on Reddit<\/a> or X, or watch <\/span>Encounters<\/span><\/i>, Netflix\u2019s new and popular (but incomplete) UFO docuseries<\/a>. Pop-cultural touchstones, like <\/span>Star Trek<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Unsolved Mysteries<\/span><\/i>, feed our fundamental desire to know whether or not we\u2019re alone in the universe. But the civic duty of scientists is to give us the facts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am, of course, intrigued by the idea of aliens. A number of Canadians, including myself, are currently working on the Galileo Project, an international research project based at Harvard. Its goal is to systematically search for extraterrestrial life; I\u2019m advising the team on how to obtain better UFO data. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll meet any little green men in my lifetime, and the possibility that aliens are visiting Canadians is remote. But it\u2019s not zero. Like any science buff, I believe the truth is out there.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n