Last year, as the topic of UFOs was exploding back into the mainstream, NASA convened a panel of outside experts, the UAP Independent Study Team, to assess the unclassified evidence the government had collected. (UAP, for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” is the government-approved euphemism for UFO.) The group was a science-nerd murderers’ row whose purpose was to help the space agency handle a subject that had long attracted conspiracy theories — but which was also grounds for legitimate questions, considering the unexplained objects people had been observing and recording with increasing frequency. Heading the 17-member panel was Dr. David Spergel, a longtime Princeton professor of astrophysics who in 2021 took over as president of the Simons Foundation, a $5 billion nonprofit that supports basic science research. The group held a public meeting to discuss its work in May and released its final report last month. Among its top-line findings was that it had found no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs, but that more data would be needed to settle the matter conclusively — including data from civilians who capture unidentified phenomena. It was a circumspect conclusion that, predictably, did little to satisfy true believers on either side of the UAP divide.
Intelligencer spoke with Spergel at his office at the Simons Foundation’s building near Madison Square, where he discussed why NASA got involved in the hunt for UFOs, what the odds of finding aliens are, and whether David Duchovny really believes that the truth is out there.
Why did NASA want to get involved in UFOs?
This starts with the Navy starting to declassify a bunch of images. The most famous one is the “Tic Tac” [filmed by a U.S. Navy fighter off the coast of San Diego], which is about 20 years old now. You look at those incidents and you say, “There’s something weird going on we don’t understand.” Then, having delved into the incident a bit, you realize that you wish they collected better data. What we’re left with is hard to interpret. NASA is a scientific agency. It’s charged with investigating the unknown. And the head of NASA announced, “We’re going to weigh in on this.”
After looking at evidence declassified by the Pentagon’s UAP organization, AARO (“All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office”), the panel concluded that most reported UAPs were either balloons, drones, or airplanes. What does that tell you?
The number of drones that are up at any given moment is enormous — they’re just monitoring fires and gas pipelines and helping farmers monitor crops. There’s also a ton of balloons. It turns out that small amateur balloons below a certain size didn’t have to be reported to the FAA. There’s probably some regulatory cleanup needed to make sure that balloons at low altitudes are not a threat to pilots.
Why is the U.S. government interested in publicly investigating UAPs now, after 70-odd years of inaction?
The Chinese balloon incident is very illustrative. There’s a class of events that are associated with unusual objects seen around U.S. Navy planes, particularly in the Pacific. It’s clear that the Chinese have an active program of monitoring the U.S. fleet. Understanding that class of events is absolutely within the military’s area of responsibility.
That world is moving really quickly. One of the things we’ve seen in the war in Ukraine is the enormous role that drones play. Recently, two Russian ships were badly damaged and potentially sunk by drones that acted in ways that the Russians did not anticipate. So the U.S. military is very concerned with what China is developing in drone technology. Regardless of whether a given event is something fabulous or not, you want pilots to report things they see and not be stigmatized for reporting anomalies. I speculate that those Chinese balloons had been seen by Navy pilots before and weren’t reported because there was a stigma associated with reporting weird things.
How many UAP reports has the government investigated?
Right now, what we have is 800 events that AARO has looked at and studied, and they’ve explained many of them. The set of events they’ve explained is too small for machine learning. You’d like to have 100,000 reports of balloons by people taking multiple pictures of each one so that you can learn what balloons look like from different angles. That way, for any anomaly someone reports you can quickly say that’s a balloon or it’s not.
Of those 800, how many are still interesting?
One or two percent.
What was one of the incidents that made you think, I don’t know what’s happening here?
Actually, the “Tic Tac.”
One of the frustrating things about that video is that there’s so little accompanying data to provide context, like other footage from another angle or sensor.
One of the things I discovered is that they didn’t keep the film. The way they recorded data was effectively on VCR tapes. You remember how you’d record your favorite TV shows over one another? It turns out that on every flight they used the same recording tape. A lot of the data isn’t hidden, it’s lost. The military was basically not taking these things seriously.
The panel’s report advises NASA to release a phone app that would allow people to record UAPs in a way that would generate the most useful data. How would that work?
Your cell-phone camera wants to enhance the picture so it looks better. For recording data, you’d rather not have that. Also, you could do things in the metadata to reduce the probability of spoofing — you don’t want people to edit in pictures of E.T. My hope is that an app would create a set of public data, and then citizen scientists could go through it and see what’s there. You can have an open discussion. If someone sees something and says, “This is weird,” it can be discussed. It removes some of the element of conspiracy.
You’re a serious scientist. Did you ever think you’d find yourself investigating UFOs?
I actually see this as an opportunity for science education. There are a lot of people fascinated by the subject because the question of “Are we alone?” is fundamental. It’s a question that not only scientists ask, but lots of people. So there’s a lot of public interest in UFOs.
That’s an understatement, I would say.
There’s passion. There are people who approach this as a question of belief. For some people it’s almost blasphemy to bring rigor to this question.
At the panel’s public meeting you mentioned that some of the panelists had been harrassed.
I take it primarily as a sign of the social decay associated with social media. People are very comfortable launching and echoing attacks on other people. They feel that if you’ve entered the public domain in any sense, that gives them the right to belittle and attack you. And unfortunately, a lot of the harassment is addressed toward the women on the panel. I was told that if you look at the YouTube feed of our press conference, there was incredible misogyny addressed toward Nicky Fox, who’s the head of science at NASA.
One of the challenges you’re facing is that pseudoscience and misinformation are so prevalent now. Can you use good science to push back against bad?
I hope so. It could be an opportunity to convey to the public and teach people that involve people in how we act as scientists. It’s a hard struggle. We saw this with COVID vaccines. Look at the way people accepted ivermectin as a valid treatment for COVID. They just were so doubtful of authority, they didn’t understand that there is a process that has led to a lot of drug safety. We have developed tools for the careful testing of ideas. One of the things we do as scientists is to check one another’s results. We redo the experiment. We check the calculation. There’s this notion that we share an underlying reality that we can try to understand. We all make mistakes, but there’s an honest effort to get at what’s going on. It’s why fraud in science, which does happen, is so disturbing, because it goes against what we’re trying to do.
One of the challenges to scientists and science educators is to figure out how to convey this to the public. There are people who say, “I’ll do my own research.” In a way, we’ve taught them half the story, because while you do want to be able to understand on your own, none of us can understand everything, so we have to have some degree of faith in the expertise of others. If I need surgery, I have to put my faith in the surgeon, even if I don’t understand every detail of the medical operation. Most people fly in airplanes without understanding what keeps them up.
But for a lot of people, expertise itself is grounds for suspicion.
That’s a cultural question: Why have we come to doubt expertise in many areas? I think we see the cost of this very directly with COVID. Some of the fault lies on experts. I think that the public-health Establishment made a big mistake at the start of COVID when it said that it was likely not transmitted by air, but by touch, and we were all washing our vegetables at first. Something that we as scientists have to learn is that when you don’t know, you have to say that you don’t know.
There were some early fumbles, to be sure. But then those mistakes were fed into a right-wing disinformation feedback loop and used to undermine public trust in the authorities’ expertise.
There was an attempt to undermine public health. It was a strange alignment between politics and science. But the same thing is true on the left. There’s this anti-vaxx movement that started on the left, and kids die because they’re not getting vaccinated.
A signature of these anti-scientific movements is that they’re very tribal, and they tend to code left or right.
One of the interesting things about UFOs is I don’t think there’s a left-right divide.
The spread of pseudoscience and anti-science has made me wonder if there is something about science that’s deeply inimical to human nature, namely the necessity of saying, “I don’t know.” When you look at the “Tic Tac” video and see insufficient data to reach a conclusion, there are plenty of people who say, “We can’t explain it in terms of known human technology, it must be extraterrestrial.” The human mind wants to have an answer, and it is motivated to see the answers it wants to get.
The way our brains work is we have to constantly construct models from incomplete data. Say you’re sitting and you hear some rustle in the woods and you think, “Maybe that’s a lion.” You should run. We’ve been selected by evolution to be people who, when we hear something or see something that might be a lion, always assume it’s a lion and run. Because even if we’re wrong, nine times out of ten, we’ll survive. While those early men who did not run and said, “Let’s collect more data,” they got eaten. So we have not been selected to make careful decisions.
It’s a discomfiting feeling to say, “I saw this thing and I can’t explain it.” But it’s also sort of exciting. There was a popular X-Files–era poster that says, “I want to believe.” If somebody wants to believe, I mean, who are you to take that away from?
David Duchovny was my classmate. I saw him just a couple months ago.
No kidding. What was his take? What does he say now?
David is an actor. This was a role he played.
But he’s a smart guy, too. I’m sure he has an opinion.
He doesn’t believe. But, you know, what David told me, which perhaps isn’t so surprising, is that he still encounters people who think he’s an alien investigator, who don’t understand that The X-Files was not a documentary. And I think that just shows how people misunderstand reality, if they think David Duchovny isn’t an actor with a whole series of interesting performances.
What would you say to someone who is deeply suspicious of the government and thinks your supposed failure to find alien UFOs is just a cover-up?
My experience with government agencies is if they have some information that would cause their budget to increase, that information leaks. If NASA had some evidence of aliens, they would be able to vastly increase their budget by leaking this information.
What are the chances that, if you get all the data you’d like and are able to process it in the way you envisage, that you’ll find something extraterrestrial?
The nearest stars are typically a billion years older than the sun or a billion years younger. So any extraterrestrial life form is probably a billion years less advanced than us or a billion years more advanced. A billion years less advanced, it’s bacteria. If it’s a billion years more advanced, I don’t think people can grapple with what they would be like. If you brought someone from 1,000 years ago to a street in New York, they’d be blown away.
Do you think that, just by making your data public and opening the discussion of it to the public, you can push back against pseudoscience?
That’s the hope. I mean, I don’t think we will solve the problem. But it takes a step. It’s important to say to people, “Look, we’re not dismissing your claim that you saw something strange. Don’t feel that because you reported seeing something strange that you’re crazy. It’s interesting you saw something strange. Let’s collect more data on the strange thing. Let’s see if other people collect it. That’s how we figure stuff out.” And if we get that message across to some fraction of the people, that, I feel, would be a success. If we figure out the nature of more of these events, that’s even more of a success. If it turns out to be something truly exotic, fabulous.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
