STOEP CHAT

at Action Ads 22 June 2023

NASA searches for UFOs

Did any of you check out the night sky as youngsters, looking for UFOs?

We did, and not so long ago I remember a sighng in the Cederberg where a bunch of adults saw an extraordinary light that we could not explain. It was big, round and white and appeared while we were all stargazing (fabulous place for that) and moved fast across the night sky and then was gone. (Not the moon!)

I guess most of us don’t really think these strange sighng are UFOs with extraterrestrials on board, but it’s fun to make believe somemes.

So I was really surprised to learn that the very serious US space agency NASA has a team of sciensts looking for UFOs. Only they don’t use the term Unidenfied Flying Objects, but call them UAPs, Unidenfied Anomalous Phenomena. The term UFOs has a sgma of being slightly whacky

NASA is responsible for the United States’ space programme. It landed the first people on the moon, put that lile rover machine on Mars, got the Internaonal Space Staon going and so much more. They are the leaders in space science and technology and commied to rigorous scienfic research.

Airy-fairy UFOs were definitely not on their radar

But now they are. The team of 16 sciensts is looking for “events in the sky that cannot be idenfied as aircra or known natural phenomena”

Who would have thought?

Then on May 31st NASA held a televised public meeng of the UAP team where the public could ask quesons online.

One of the sciensts really put their task into perspecve when he said: “We’re starng from an almost impossible situaon because we don’t know what we’re looking for”

They were asked if there were a possibility of life beyond Earth.

NASA replied that a “key priority” was to search for life elsewhere in the universe.

“NASA is exploring the solar system and beyond to help us answer fundamental quesons, including whether we are alone in the universe.”

Part of the research is to look for “bio-signatures” which are any sign of life, exisng or exnct. They also look for “techno-signatures”, any sign of technology that could indicate the existence of an advanced civilizaon elsewhere in the universe.

Disappoinngly, NASA says to date they have found no credible evidence of other life in the universe.

Would sciensts recognise technology from a civilizaon that could have evolved a billion years before us? If you showed a cell phone to sciensts 500 years ago, they would have no understanding of what it was.

The BBC reported that David Spergel, head of Nasa’s UAP team, said data is oen difficult to interpret. He spoke about a burst of puzzling radio waves picked up by researchers in Australia.

“People couldn't figure out what was going on. Then they started to noce a lot of them bunched together around lunch me.’

It turned out that the sensive instruments were picked up by signals from a microwave used to heat their lunches.