With three words, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer President Donald Trump to open a potential Pandora’s box of science news: “Now are the UFOs,” Prominent Democrats posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, in reference to unspecified flying objects.
Although it remains to be seen whether Schumer’s proposal is dangerous or simply an attempt to embarrass a Republican president, experts agree that he raised a provocative question. Since Trump already ordered Drafting documents Regarding the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., could, in theory, spill government secrets about UFOs, formerly called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
In fact, as military pilots Keep reporting UAP sightingsAnd it has the government Exploratory panels were held In the case. As of 2023, experts admit Receive dozens of UFO sighting reports Each month, though only 2% to 4% of these require further investigation.
For these reasons, experts who spoke to Salon said they support Schumer’s call for UFO document notification, though they urged the public to temper their expectations.
“Keep in mind that secret wording does not necessarily come with explanations.” Americans for a Safe Spacethe world’s largest UAP advocacy organization told Salon. She added, “The best case is that with transparency, people can see the mystery of the UAP for themselves and the hard data is made available to the scientific community to try to get some answers.”
“There are thousands of classified UAP records across government agencies that will be subject to disclosure through the Executive Order.”
Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University Avi Loop He told Salon that it’s always a good idea for scientists to have as much information as possible about their “cosmic neighbourhood,” even if it includes institutions that are more or less coming to the party. It took until 1992 for the Vatican to acknowledge that astronomer Galileo Galilei was right nearly four centuries ago about the sun being the center of our solar system. Although scholars in general have already accepted that Galileo was correct, it is still significant for institutional reasons that the Vatican admitted his error.
“We will never get to Mars if we think it orbits the Earth,” Loeb said. “It is time to find out whether we are at the intellectual center of the universe.”
He added: “The worst-case scenario, from my perspective as a curious scientist, is that all of this stuff is man-made. That would be rather boring, as far as I’m concerned.”
Regardless of whether UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin or not, Morris points out that it would benefit ordinary citizens to better understand them as a matter of public safety.
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“Today we already know that unidentified objects and unscheduled anomalous phenomena (UAP) in our airspace with advanced performance characteristics represent a threat to national security and aviation safety, and exposing these records would draw attention to the domain awareness gap that has existed for years,” he said. The US security establishment remains in a “Cold War mentality” where it is focused on tracking ballistic missiles and fast aircraft rather than emerging threats like drones and such things.
“There are thousands of classified UAP records across government agencies that will be subject to enforcement charges through the Executive Order and include high-definition video, sensor data, official reports, and persuasive testimony regarding unidentified objects with anomalous characteristics and (secret) government programs that have studied them,” Morris said.
However, as Loeb noted, even if one of these things was not man-made, the declassification would be revolutionary.
“Even if one in a million beings are of extraterrestrial origin, it could tell us that we are not alone and be the biggest scientific discovery in human history,” Loeb said. “As a scientist, I love access to any data that points to a non-human origin for technological objects.” He added that, as a professional astronomer, he spends every day participating in exactly these types of research projects.
“My day job is studying what lies beyond the solar system,” Loeb said. “I lead the Galileo Project at Harvard, which is building three new observatories that are expected to track more than a million objects in the sky this year.”
Harry Reid, the late senator and Democratic majority leader who made waves in 2021 by calling for… Crafting UFO drawingsarticulated at the time a non-scholars’ perspective on the subject.
“I believe it is crucial that science leads when studying UFOs,” Reid wrote at the time. “Focusing on little green men or conspiracy theories will not get us far.” Acknowledging that millions of people will believe in conspiracy theories no matter what, he added that “ultimately, the ambiguous debate can be divided into sincere belief in science versus sincere belief in extraterrestrial organisms. I side with science.”
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