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The hunt for alien life. It is an endeavour that has inspired scientists to send data-collecting
rovers to the surfaces of other planets. Astronomers have listened out across the sky
with radio telescopes. Messages and data-carrying satellites have been launched out the other way.
Countless people have poured countless hours into searching for even the slightest signs
that we are not alone. We have done all of this because, in the infinite vastness of our universe,
it is incomprehensible to some of us that we represent the only time that life has arisen.
And it could be the profoundest discovery humanity has made so far, if we learned that we are not.
Of course, there are many people out there who claim that while humanity has been seeking
evidence of alien life, that same life has been spending its time seeking to discover us.
Some have claimed that aliens have already visited us, and are even here currently, hiding
and invisible. Here, sadly, the evidence starts to get questionable. There have been so many hoaxes,
faked videos filmed on grainy, shaky cams, or even genuine mistakes where natural phenomena
or satellites are taken for UFOs, that many people are now a little wary of entertaining
such theories. There have even supposedly been times when the US Government has deliberately,
subtly propagated UFO conspiracy stories to draw attention away from their real top-secret
technological projects, like the stealth bomber. All in all, ascribing extra-terrestrial origins
to these phenomena is often factually incorrect, and poor science. Just because
we do not understand something does not mean we should jump to the idea that it must be aliens…
And yet, if that’s true, why did NASA, the US Navy, and other agencies in the US government
join forces in 2022 to investigate the growing number of UFO sightings? The answer surprised me.
It’s because it turns out they have no reasonable choice. There is now such a growing wealth of
evidence – good, sound, scientific evidence from multiple powerful detection devices and reliable,
regular military pilot accounts of phenomena that cannot be explained by modern technology or
our understanding of science - that the rational thing to do is to investigate with an open mind.
However strange it might be to admit, it is no longer reasonably possible to do anything but
agree that something weird is going on. Now, it is only a question of asking: What could it be?
I’m Alex McColgan, and you’re watching Astrum. And today I will show you exactlywhat has caused
the US government to start taking Unidentified Flying Objects meandering through their skies much
more seriously. The first UFO sighting in modern times was by an American businessman named Kenneth
Arnold in 1947. As he looked out across Mt. Rainer, Arnold claims he saw nine crescent shaped
silver objects travelling at several thousand km per hour through the air. He likened them to
“saucers skipping on water” in the way that they moved. He initially thought they might be secret
military jets, but later he and other witnesses of these crescent craft wondered if they might
have been extra-terrestrial in nature. The media picked up his turn of phrase about the saucers,
and the idea of “flying saucers” entered the national consciousness. Before long, other
people started reporting alleged UFO encounters. The US became enraptured with the idea of UFOs.
However, the US military did not take this idea quite so seriously. While initially
they were understandably alarmed at the report of unknown aircraft moving around in their airspace,
particularly coming right after World War II, the programs they set up to investigate UFOs were
eventually shut down in 1969. Project Blue Book, the last of these programs, collected 12,618 UFO
reports, but ultimately concluded that they were almost all misidentifications of natural phenomena
or just man-made aircraft. With such a damning report to go on, the US Government officially
pulled funding from the project, and investigation into UFO sightings officially ceased.
Partly as a result of project Blue Book’s findings, a certain degree of stigma became
associated with seeing a UFO. Anyone who claimed to have done so was often ridiculed or considered
crazy. It came down to a question of evidence. If aliens were real, and were visiting our planet,
where was the proof of their existence? Of course, to answer that, we need to define what we consider
to be reliable proof. Let’s imagine that a person came up to you and claimed that they’d seen a
silver disk shoot across the sky at a speed far faster than any airplane was capable of.
Would you consider a single person’s account to be proof that he’d seen an alien spacecraft? Well,
not necessarily. Human memory is unreliable. Even if you trusted the character of the person in
question enough to believe that they weren’t lying to you, they might be misremembering details,
or maybe had misjudged how fast the “spaceship” they saw was going due to some optical phenomenon.
“Ah,” they cry, “but I recorded it on film!” You look, but unfortunately, the video they
provide is grainy, and only gives you a blurry glimpse of the spacecraft. Is that proof?
Again, you might well be sceptical. Even if this video is not a deliberate hoax (and it’s so easy
to fake films these days), it could be a digital artefact of some broken pixel in the camera. And
it still could just be some natural or man-made phenomenon neither of you had seen before.
So, what would be a good proof of alien spacecraft? Ideally, for me,
I would like evidence that was seen by multiple, trustworthy people – the more, the merrier.
It would need to be recorded by multiple pieces of hardware, to eliminate the risk of it just being
glitchy technology. And it would have to evidence characteristics that completely ruled out it being
any man-made phenomenon or natural event. Best of all, it would be repeatable. If it kept occurring,
it would provide more opportunities for study, to rule out other causes.
Which brings us to the event that started things all off again, in 2004, and the USS Nimitz.
The Navy aircraft carrier was travelling through the ocean near Southern California in November
on a routine training exercise. Another nearby vessel called the USS Princeton had
recently received upgrades to its radar, and had started noticing strange aircraft in the area.
These crafts descended from 80,000 feet to 20,000 in a blistering speed,
before vanishing out of sight entirely or later shooting back up again. After a few days of this,
the Princeton called the Nimitz, asking them to send someone to see what was going on.
Two F/A-18F Super Hornet jets were scrambled. Each jet had a weapons camera, but no weapons as this
was only meant to be a training exercise. Each jet had two pilots on board. Upon arriving at the
scene, all four pilots quickly spotted what they were looking for. A strange tic-tac shaped object
was moving weirdly, zipping back and forth above a frothy, boiling patch of water in the sea below
them. It had no visible means of propulsion. No wings. No rotors. It was about the size of a jet,
and a whitish colour. The object suddenly stopped its zig-zag. It had seen them. It whipped around,
and travelled up towards the jets, as if it were intending to meet them in the air;
but then rapidly accelerated away, faster than anything the pilots had ever seen before.
Baffled by what they’d witnessed, the pilots returned to base,
only for the radio operator to inform them that they’d begun tracking the craft again – except,
it was now over 60 km away. It had got there in under a minute of leaving the pilot’s view.
This was an object seen by 4 trained, professional pilots on the clock, aircraft cameras and modern,
advanced ship-based radar from one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world.
This ticks many of the boxes for good, reliable sources of evidence. This report was logged,
and nothing else was initially done with it. You might just point to this being a strange story,
if it wasn’t for this authenticated footage that we have of it, confirmed by the US government in a
Freedom of Information request. But the strangest thing about this was that it kept happening.
The phenomenon is currently repeating. Navy and air force pilots were spotting strange objects
in the sky so frequently, some were claiming that it was almost a daily occurrence. Many were
embarrassed to mention what they’d seen, fearing ridicule. That said, it became so common that the
Navy started handing out cards to be kept in Navy pilot kneeboards in their cockpits about what to
do in the event of such a sighting. Between 2004 and 2021, 144 reports came in from Navy personnel
of seeing unidentified objects in the sky, 80 of them being observed by multiple sensors,
11 accounts of near misses with jets, and only ever 1 being positively identified.
Between 2021 and 2022, sensing that there might be something to all this after all, the Navy began
destigmatising reporting and started actively encouraging its pilots to record what they saw.
247 new reports came in, and an additional 119 incidents were reported to have happened in the
past. Sure enough, that’s 1 almost every other day. In total, the number of unidentified objects
had risen to 510. So, what were these objects? Their natures, and probably their origins,
varied. Some behaved like drones, with the Navy detecting radio signals coming to and from them…
only, they stayed up in the air far longer than any drone on the market was capable of doing.
Some were more like aircraft, travelling in formations, exhibiting unheard of acceleration.
Some could both fly and submerge underwater, seemingly at will. Some acted like balloons,
albeit with unknown means of remaining up in the air, sometimes defying wind currents by remaining
completely motionless, or even moving against it. No doubt, of those 510, some will simply be
glitches in technology. This strange triangle in the sky is thought to not really be that shape.
Instead, the unique design of the night goggles is thought to be distorting the light from this
apparent drone, in a similar effect to lens glare, but uniquely tailored to this technology.
However, it’s still concerning that the Navy does not know what these “drones” were doing circling
a US Navy vessel while it did training exercises at night. The Navy started calling these objects
UAP’s, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, in the hopes of removing negative connotations
associated with UFOs, and this has changed again recently to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
And while they do not want to assume that this is alien in origin, they’re also not ruling it out.
They reported their findings in a congressional hearing on the 17th May 2021, and now are
regularly (and somewhat transparently) publishing reports for the general public about the ongoing
investigation, provided it doesn’t give away too much about classified sources or technologies they
are working on. Right now, they are attempting to simply collect as much data as possible,
knowing that it will lead to better science. And that right there is the biggest shift of all.
When you see the US government reaching out to the wider community to ask “What are
these things we keep seeing?” it certainly confirms that there is something to see.
All in all, it certainly makes you wonder. Of course, this all might end up being technology
belonging to rival nations. After all, governments around the world are always developing new, secret
technologies, and they’re hardly likely to admit to them. However, it’s telling that America does
not seem to believe that these things are theirs, according to the UAP task force’s report. Neither
do they know of them belonging to other countries. Perhaps I’ll leave you with this final quote
by NASA chief Bill Nelson. NASA is one of the agencies working with the UAP Task Force to figure
out the nature and origins of these phenomena. They are lending the task force experts, to help
rule out any natural phenomena that NASA is aware of. But what do you think? Could these phenomena
have innocent, human explanations? Or are you convinced that there’s something more to them,
something that can only be explained by alien life? Post in the comments below what you think,
and let me know if you’ve enjoyed this topic. If so, I can explore this subject
more, particularly when the US government releases their next report later this year.
In the meantime, Earth is not the only place people are searching for alien intelligence.
Astronomers in observatories around the world scour the skies for hints and clues of life out
there. The sponsor of today’s video - Curiosity Stream – has a great series called “Curious Minds:
Space” that explores the subject in their episode “Are We Alone in The Universe?” as well as asking
what it would mean for humanity if we ever found out that we weren’t; potentially a scary thought.
But Curiosity Stream isn’t just limited to extra-terrestrials. Their vast library
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I really enjoy their content. They’re cheaper than other subscription services,
and if you use our promo code ASTRUM, you can get an additional 25% off your subscription cost. Head
on over to curiositystream.com/ASTRUM, or click the link in the description below to check it out!
Thanks for watching. I also have a playlist delving into the fermi paradox and wow signals.
If you like to ponder what’s out there in the expanse of space, this playlist is for you.
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