Next month, the highly anticipated report of the Congress Task Force on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) will be released – the culmination of years of investigation and decades of reports of unexplained UFO sightings by military pilots.
Many officials have expressed concern about these sightings, arguing that they could be backed by adversaries invading US airspace without their knowledge.
And now even a NASA scientist has expressed his point of view.
In an article in the Washington Post, planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Ravi Copparapu argues that instead of starting with “what” about UFOs, it would be more effective to start with “how we can figure out, what it is”.
“This is where scientists known to be absent from the current UFO conversation come in,” Copparapu said. For too long, he said, the topic of UFOs has been ignored as a groundless conspiracy, caused by “a vacuum of knowledge that is filled with unscientific claims due to a lack of scientific research.”
The news came after several military pilots spoke of strange objects that seemed to defy the laws of physics, moving without visible vehicles at speeds many times the speed of sound.
“This is technology that is at least 100 to 1000 years ahead of us,” retired US Navy pilot Sean Cahill told CNN earlier this month.
“We have had a massive intelligence failure and we have an unknown threat that we need to investigate,” Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, told CNN in the same interview.
But instead of arming ourselves against an almost invisible threat, according to Copparapu, we must first figure out how to better understand what the pilots saw.
He says we should take UFO sighting reports (UAPs) as seriously as we look at the surface of Mars for signs of life.
“Exploration of Mars has proven challenging, involving scientists from a variety of disciplines,” he said. “The same should be done for the study of UFO sightings.”
According to Copparapu, we just need more data from visual, infrared, radar and other observations by scientists from various fields of science. Such a scientific approach could ultimately “go a long way towards removing the UFO taboo.”
“Ultimately, understanding the nature of UFOs is a scientific problem,” he concludes. “This is how we should treat this phenomenon.”
