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According to a 2022 YouGov poll thirty-four percent of Americans believe that UFOs are proof of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Others believe that these are flying objects that our government won’t (for security reasons) or can’t identify. Still others don’t know what to think.

The NOVA documentary WHAT ARE UFOS?, premiering on PBS Wednesday, January 22, also available for streaming on pbs.org/nova, Nova on YouTube, and the PBS app, investigates all of this. During the Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour in Pasadena, California, former U.S. Navy Lieutenant and F/A-18F pilot Ryan Graves, producer/ director / writer Terri Randall, NOVA co-executive producer Chris Schmidt, author / UFO analyst / Metabunk founder Mick West, Dr. Shelley Wright, professor of Astronomy, Astrophysics and Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and NOVA co-executive producer Julia Cort come together with ASSIGNMENT X to talk about their findings and their ongoing questions.

Wright says, “First off, I think we all agree on the definition of a UFO, which is an Unidentified Flying Object. There is a new acronym for that, which is a UAP, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. This has been mandated for use within NASA, and within government agencies.”

The group come from diverse backgrounds, as West points out. “We represent different factions of people who are interested in UFOs. I am interested in investigating UFO cases. Ryan is more into promoting the safety of pilots.”

Wright elaborates, “I’m an astrophysicist. I’m very interested in life in the universe, and I look for technology signatures, communications across long distances, so I’ve been interested in the topic of alien life, near and far.”

How did the WHAT ARE UFOS? project come together?

Cort explains that NOVA has “done tons of shows over the years about our search for life beyond Earth. People love these stories. NOVA started in 1974, and there was a show in our very first season called THE SEARCH FOR LIFE, with Carl Sagan. So, we’ve been following that story, but we’ve done very few stories on UFOs, because, with a few limited exceptions, scientists would not touch this topic. And there was not a whole lot of hard data.”

What’s changed, Cort continues is, “In the last few years, with more stories coming out, with the release of videos and data, the reports from military pilots, there was a real movement, and attention from both the government and scientists, to really take a serious look at these events, and use the tools of science and engineering to try to understand what they are. So, we thought it was a perfect time to do a story on this.”

“It’s a new way to look at space exploration,” Randall says, “just much closer to home. People are so interested in this topic – what can we bring as NOVA and as a science show to help people understand what may be up there? And so, that really became a driving force, to find ways to apply science to a subject that doesn’t have science applied to it very often.

As for what they’ve learned from speaking to people about their beliefs regarding UFOs, West relates, “I’m fairly involved in the UFO community, and there’s a core group of people who really believe very, very strongly that UFOs are real [and] represent something not human. And there is also a significant percentage of people who have actually had some kind of personal experience with UFOs.”

West continues, “That’s what makes this topic particularly challenging to investigate, is that a lot of the events that [are made public] happen are based upon personal testimony, as well as sometimes photos and videos, but a lot of it is about deeply personal beliefs that people have. It makes it very difficult for an investigator to interact with those people. So, it’s been a challenging thing, not only from a technical aspect, but also from interacting with people without hurting their feelings, doing it respectfully.

Wright observes, “I would say the majority of scientists do not believe that these are of extraterrestrial origins. Although, in the science community, we haven’t really explored it. Within the public, I think, like Mick said, there is a large number of people that are very interested in this topic, and may feel this.”

West, who is British, feels that “Americans have a unique cultural take on UFOs because of the background of historical UFO events like Roswell that happened in the U.S., and a lot of the culture of UFOs is reflected in movies. The Hollywood influence is part of the way people perceive it. But the actual percentage of the number of people who believe in UFOs is probably fairly similar in the U.K.”

The reason the scientific community has been wary of investigating the alien angle, Wright says, is essentially fear that they will not be taken seriously on this topic or any other. “I think for scientists, it’s been a really tough road to travel. And if you’re a scientist, and you’re curious about an unidentified flying object, can I identify it, that’s a really interesting thing to research. But if it is an alien spacecraft, they’re going to not want to go there. And I think that’s been a real problem historically. ‘Okay, there are things up there, pilots are seeing them, they’ve seen them for years. Let’s try to figure out what this is,’ versus, ‘Oh, if you start to study that, you believe E.T. is here.’”

Graves says that the pilots, both commercial and military, who speak with him about their experiences, are looking for information themselves, but “often feel very uncomfortable broaching the conversation. They don’t like being in a position where this information could potentially embarrass them if they choose to pursue it. So, they often don’t speculate. There are some who have had some pretty powerful experiences, and that has changed their view of the world, frankly, but the vast majority are very hesitant to engage on this in any type of E.T. versus non-E.T. question. They’re just saying, ‘Hey, here is something that we’re observing,’ and they’re really looking for help to understand what it is.”

The pilots do not believe that our government is testing classified equipment on them, Graves adds. “We have very strict controls in how we test classified systems and equipment, and when pilots are operating within their training ranges, they would not expect to be exposed to some type of very secret technology for a number of years on end without being potentially briefed into it. That would be a major security, as well as safety, violation. Their primary concern lies with whether this is a potential national security concern from our adversaries that could be potentially flying objects within our airspace, testing our response, observing our tactics. So, there’s a general concern that something needs to be done about whatever these are.”

The U.S. government, at the behest of Graves and others, has now set up a system where pilots can report concerns to the “proper channels,” as Graves puts it. “As such, we don’t receive as many reports from military pilots, now that that’s been set up.”

Even within the WHAT ARE UFOS? makers and participants, there are facts some cannot disclose to the others. Wright points out, “Some of the technology that’s on these fighter jets is classified in terms of how it works, so there’s a certain amount Ryan can tell me, and there’s a certain amount he really shouldn’t tell me.”

What makes something qualify as a UFO or a UAP? West explains, “Most of the time, it’s because there isn’t enough information about it. We know, in a lot of cases where we do get more information, it resolves into something more mundane, but there are a lot of cases where we simply don’t have enough information to tell what it is.”

Wright elaborates, “Usually, it’s the shape of the object that’s seen, and it usually behaves in a way that the person or sensor that’s looking at it [sees as] anomalous. It may accelerate really quickly, move really quickly, or you can’t identify a propulsion system within it. So, it’s behaving in a way that our technology today may not be able to do.”

Graves concurs. “I would say that is pretty aligned with how aviators think about it as well. We’re up there identifying things. There are things we can recognize and there are things we can’t recognize, and a lot of the things that we cannot recognize are also not that exciting to us, because they are pretty close to our understanding of what we would expect to see. But other times, there are things that are very far removed from what we would expect to see, and appear to be displaying characteristics that would be beyond what we would expect to see from a traditional aircraft. There are certainly always going to be cases of misperception and confusion, but there are also cases where the pilots have communicated very high confidence that they saw something that was quite spectacular, and they don’t know how to make sense of it.”

In other words, sometimes it may be an unconventional-looking drone that’s still behaving like a drone, so it doesn’t qualify for further study.

“Exactly,” says Graves. “Compared to, ‘I can’t quite figure out what that is, because it doesn’t look like a drone, but it’s as fast as my fighter jet, and it doesn’t have a clear propulsion system.’ That’s when it gets harder to really make sense of, and that’s when we have to go back to the drawing board and say, ‘Hey, we wish we had more information about this incident.’ So, that’s really why I’ve been pushing with my organization, Americans for Safe Aerospace, to provide a safe space for pilots to be able to come forward and report their experiences, so that we can get more of that data, and hopefully start to provide pilots with the proper tools, so that they can ensure that they are not being distracted by things that are potentially prosaic or, if there is something interesting for a matter of national security or science, that we actually have the tools to identify it and potentially learn more about it.”

It’s also a matter of pilot safety, Graves notes. “If there are objects operating in the airspace that are not part of that flight, they’re not part of that mission, and not part of the airspace that we would expect, it’s a massive uncertainty for us. It could be potentially a foreign adversary that is utilizing tools in order to spy on us, it could be something more prosaic, like perhaps a fish-spotting drone from a ship down below, but regardless, those can take out our aircraft quite quickly, and so, it’s a concern as a matter of aviation safety.”

One recent example of this is the drone that collided with and disabled one of the aircraft involved in fighting the Palisades fires.

How do experts go about determining if something is extraterrestrial technology, as opposed to never-before-seen human technology?

Wright says, “One of the first ways you would do it is likely look at the type of atoms and molecules that make up whatever artifact that is. Within our own solar system, we have particular ratios of metals and other things, so you’d want to see if there’s an extraterrestrial origin for any of those aspects that have been built into it. You would of course be interested in looking at the propulsion system of it. Are they using energy resources that are aligned with our present twenty-first-century technology? We identify what these objects are made of.”

West thinks it “would be great if we could actually get a crash to analyze. Almost the first step that we need to take is to demonstrate that there are things in the airspace that are doing things that are anomalous. A lot of the reports that we get and the data that we have is limited, and it’s just from one sensor, or two sensors that were in the same position.

“What you really need,” West continues, “is to be able to get multiple views on the same object. If you can do that, you can triangulate where that is in space, and then figure out exactly how fast it’s moving and in what direction it’s moving. If you get those parameters, you can determine if that’s something that human technology can actually do. So, if you can demonstrate with radar and cross-triangulated video that something is actually moving in a very anomalous way, that would demonstrate it’s possibly something outside of human technology, or something very new in human technology.”

Sometimes our current observational technology can backfire in terms of making something mundane look unprecedented, West notes, as shown in the beginning of WHAT ARE UFOS?. “These green triangles were appearing in the viewfinder. Navy personnel originally thought they were looking at actual triangular-shaped drones in the air. because there was a drone scare, there were drones being seen off of these Navy ships. But eventually, people in my group, Metabunk, figured out that it was just an artifact of the camera. The camera had this triangular aperture, and it was a bit out of focus, and it was making these lights in the sky, including stars, appear triangular, and this was something that was confirmed later by the Pentagon. It was night vision, an image intensifier, so it made things look a little unusual, and they were filming it with another camera, looking up at this night vision binocular. They didn’t even think it was a UFO, really, they thought it was triangular drones, but it wasn’t even that.”

There’s also the question of whether there are people who have answers but may not be able to give them publicly, not because the answers themselves would be controversial, but because the equipment that provided them is classified. Schmidt says, “I think one of the things we’ve learned talking to this group is that sometimes the government is blocking access to things, not because the thing itself is particularly mysterious, but because the thing that made the recording could potentially give away information about the kinds of sensors that are at their disposal and what they’re able to record.”

Schmidt offers a hypothetical by way of explanation. “If you had an image of something that could later be determined to be at some unbelievable distance, or be a Stealth fighter that shows up brightly, the government doesn’t necessarily want anybody to know that they’re able to take that image, right?”

Randall agrees. “Sean Kirkpatrick, who is the former head of this department of the DoD [Department of Defense], said that if you took one of the military sensors that are on these fighter jets, and you took a picture of a Coke can, that image would be classified until you could get rid of all the metadata on it that could reveal how the sensor works. So, sometimes things are classified just to project the technology, so your adversaries don’t know what you’re working with.”

The purpose of WHAT ARE UFOS?, Randall says, is “to inform the public about what we know, and what we don’t know, and the kinds of tools that we use to try to figure this all out. Clearly, we don’t have all the information. There’s plenty that is not available. But we have more information than we used to have. So, we really want to bring the public up to date, and help them understand how scientists and engineers are thinking about this problem.”

Schmidt opines, “What makes us what to do a film like this is, we think, ‘Okay, we think our audience is really curious about this. And we think we can really help dig into it and unpack and answer some questions about what’s going on in.’ And I think the thing that makes this an interesting film to do now, not necessarily this minute, but generally now, is that for fifty years, all the non-eyewitness, just testimonial evidence of UFOs were just photographs, or maybe a VHS video that somebody took. Now there’s all this other data that corroborates the idea that there are actual physical objects there, and you have eyewitnesses, you have maybe traditional video capture and photographic capture, but then when you also have radar and infrared and other things, it starts to belie the idea that this is either just a psychological phenomenon or a camera artifact.”

Also, Wright adds, “Even reading those articles and seeing these images that have been released – they’re very confusing. Yes, of course they seem weird, but part of that is about the sensors that are used. What is this image? What do we know about how it was created and what it represents? And so, we can actually go much further to explain what that object might be, and what are the possible explanations for creating that two-dimensional image that you’re seeing in the video.”

Do the filmmakers feel that the way they approach their subject encourages civil discourse?

“We’re not saying, ‘It’s this or that’,” Randall contributes. “What can science tell us? That’s the question that we ask, because it’s NOVA. So, if somebody believes that aliens are here, maybe they’ll find some information in what science can tell us, and maybe they won’t, but we’re not investigating their belief, we’re looking at science.”

Schmidt points out, “We have the same audience demographic that PBS NEWSHOUR does, politically and so forth very evenly divided, and we know that we are able to talk about divisive topics in our films without turning off a big chunk of our audience. Maybe it’s trust, maybe it’s just the way we approach doing it – climate change, things like that – so I hope, with this film, it’ll be the same thing. We’re not shutting off the possibility that it’s aliens, but it does, I suppose, really lean on what we can talk about from the evidence. We don’t have an opinion on stuff that we don’t have any evidence for.”

Given all the high-tech tools involved, how do the filmmakers explain things in a way that a general audience can understand?

“I think of it as ‘UFO 101’.” Randall replies. “What are some of the basics? What’s on a fighter jet? Especially what the pilots are seeing, because these are seasoned pilots who are seeing things that they can’t identify, and they do have these images. What do these images tell us? What can we tell the audience about how the images are taken? Because that’s a beginning step of understanding what we’re seeing.”

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Article:  NOVA: WHAT ARE UFOS?:  Filmmakers and experts give the scoop on what we know and don’t know about this mysterious phenomenon in new PBS documentary

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