I Look for Aliens for a Living, and No, I Don’t Study UFOs
Turned out my “aliens” were actually a subtle glitch in the camera and telescope we were using that took a while to hunt down. I was privately embarrassed, but fortunately I hadn’t told anyone outside my team about it until we had figured it all out. That caution came about because as a SETI (or search for extraterrestrial intelligence) scientist, I’m a professional skeptic. I always treat my results—especially my “huge if true” results—with the most skepticism I can muster.
I’m often asked what I think about UFOs. In fact, I’m often told by UFO enthusiasts that I should be studying them, because they might be alien, and it’s silly for us to use telescopes to find aliens when they might be right here in the atmosphere! Shouldn’t my professional curiosity as a SETI scientist drive me to learn much more about them? I’ve also been accused of being hubristic, closed-minded, and incurious because I won’t study them or admit that they could be alien.
But I actually have thought hard about it, and I’ve decided: I’ll pass, for a few reasons. You see, there are a few big differences between SETI and the study of UFOs as potential alien spacecraft. (By the way, some of the people who work on UFOs call them “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, and many say they are interested in them regardless of what they turn out to be—alien, experimental U.S. military aircraft, foreign surveillance drones, or something else entirely. And, of course, there are likely various different explanations for the many mysterious lights in the sky.)
