Tag: SETI Institute

NASA Needs Your Help in the Search for Alien Life

Article by Becky Ferreira                                  October 2, 2020                                 (vice.com)

• Since the 1990s, scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets throughout our galaxy contain a dizzying variety of extraterrestrial environments, some of which may host life.

• On September 29th, NASA launched the citizen science project ‘Planet Patrol’ on Zooniverse, inviting volunteers to join the hunt for new exoplanets by examining images snapped by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which has been in orbit around Earth since 2018.
• Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the SETI Institute in California, said the project has already attracted more than 1,600 participants who have collectively delivered 100,000 individual classifications in just three days.

• “Citizen science projects are a great way to engage our built-in, never-ending curiosity about the world we live in,” says Kostov. Planet Patrol can also “promote a sense of a community pursuing the common goal of understanding the universe and our place in it.”

• The TESS satellite is designed to spot exoplanets as they pass in front of the stars they orbit, causing the star’s brightness to fade slightly. If these light dips occur at regular intervals, it’s a good sign that a planet may be present. Once the existence of an exoplanet has been confirmed, scientists can conduct follow-up observations that reveal basic properties of the distant world, including whether it might be habitable. For this reason, exoplanet-hunting is an important component of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

• Scientists use automated software and machine learning to sift through the hundreds of thousands of pictures TESS takes each year. These systems can flag likely exoplanets to a certain extent, but they have trouble recognizing “imposter” false transit events. For instance, binary systems that contain two stars can produce a light dip, or instrument and/or astrophysical noise that distort the TESS images, which automated processing software might accidentally catalog as an exoplanet candidate. “The human eye is very good at quickly and reliably spotting such image distortions,” says Kostov.

• Planet Patrol participants are tasked with evaluating the quality of TESS images used to distinguish between potential false positives and bona-fide planet candidates. It’s the latest of several exoplanet-hunting platforms that have benefitted from the time and dedication of amateur space enthusiasts, such as Planet Hunters and Exoplanet Explorers. Says Kostov, “My hope is that the project sparks a continuous interest in exoplanets in particular and in astrophysics in general.”

 

Since the 1990s, scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit stars other than the Sun, revealing that our galaxy

                       Veselin Kostov

contains a dizzying variety of extraterrestrial environments, some of which may host life.

Now, NASA is inviting volunteers to join the hunt for new exoplanets by examining images snapped by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which has been in orbit around Earth since 2018.

On Monday, NASA launched the citizen science project Planet Patrol on Zooniverse, enabling anyone with an internet connection to spot and classify likely exoplanets in TESS’ starry images.

Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the SETI Institute in California, said the project already has more than 1,600 participants who have collectively delivered 100,000 individual classifications in just three days.

“Citizen science projects are a great way to engage our built-in, never-ending curiosity about the world we live in—be it our own planet or a planet a hundred light years away,” said Kostov in an email.

Planet Patrol can also “promote a sense of a community pursuing the common goal of understanding the universe and our place in it,” Kostov added, which is especially welcome at a time when many people are stuck at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

TESS is designed to spot exoplanets as they pass in front of the stars they orbit, which is known as a transit. Transits cause the star’s brightness to fade slightly, and if these light dips occur at regular intervals, it’s a good sign that a planet may be present.

 

1:02 minute NASA “Planet Patrol” video (‘NASA Goddard’ YouTube)

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NASA Awards SETI Institute Planetary Protection Support Contract

July 10, 2020                           (nasa.gov)

• Upcoming NASA science missions such as the Mars 2020 and Europa Clipper missions, and NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission, NASA’s Artemis program’s Gateway lunar orbital outpost, Human Lander System, and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, all will need to be in compliance with planetary protection standards. ‘Planetary Protection’s’ role is to protect both Earth and mission destinations from biological contamination.

• NASA has awarded the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a $4.7 million ‘indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity’ contract for five years to head NASA’s Planetary Protection Program beginning July 1st. To ensure compliance with planetary protection standards, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The SETI Institute will work with NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection to provide technical reviews and recommendations, validate biological cleanliness on flight projects, provide training for NASA and its partners, develop guidelines for implementation of NASA requirements, and disseminate information to stakeholders and the public.

• “The depth of mission experience and breadth of knowledge on the SETI Institute team will help NASA meet the technical challenges of assuring forward and backward planetary protection on the anticipated path of human exploration from the Moon to Mars,” said Lisa Pratt, NASA’s planetary protection officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

• “[P]lanetary protection [has become] an increasingly important component of mission planning and execution,” said Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute. “We are proud to be NASA’s partner for this mission-critical function, protecting Earth from backward contamination, and helping ensure that the life we may find on other worlds, didn’t come from our own.”

• NASA and the SETI Institute have worked together on planetary protection for more than a decade and have developed a strong relationship and core competency in this area. SETI Institute scientists have extensive experience in understanding microbial life and how it can affect missions, even in the extreme conditions of spaceflight and extraterrestrial environments.

• [Editor’s Note]   “SETI Institute scientists have extensive experience in understanding microbial life and how it can affect missions”? Really? Isn’t SETI the deep state pseudo-agency puppet that has been monitoring radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial signals since Frank Drake in 1960? Is this the same SETI who had to turn to private financing because of the ridicule they were taking from Congress? Now we learn that these astronomers who peer through telescopes all day, also have a knack for detecting microbial contamination on NASA spacecraft traveling to and from the Moon and Mars. The only thing that SETI has ever been tasked to do is to pretend to search for intelligent ETs and never find any, when everyone knows that they’re all around us and have been for the past century. Now, another deep state pseudo-agency puppet, NASA, is giving SETI the responsibility of preventing REAL microbial contamination in REAL space? Is this a joke? Or is it just a money transfer between two deep state toadies for some other agenda?

 

        SETI’s Bill Diamond

NASA has awarded the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a contract to support all phases of current and future planetary protection missions to ensure compliance with planetary protection standards.

The SETI Institute will work with NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection (OPP) to provide technical reviews and recommendations, validate biological cleanliness on flight projects, provide training for NASA and its partners, as well as develop guidelines for implementation of NASA requirements, and disseminate information to stakeholders and the public. The role of OPP is to promote responsible exploration of the solar system by protecting both Earth and mission destinations from biological contamination.

        NASA’s Lisa Pratt

“The depth of mission experience and breadth of knowledge on the SETI Institute team will help NASA meet the technical challenges of assuring forward and backward planetary protection on the anticipated path of human exploration from the Moon to Mars,” said Lisa Pratt, NASA’s planetary protection officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Planetary protection preserves environments, as well as the science, ensuring verifiable scientific exploration for extraterrestrial life. Some of the upcoming NASA science missions that will be supported by this contract include the Mars 2020 and Europa Clipper missions, and preparations for NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission. In addition, future human spaceflight exploration under NASA’s Artemis program, such as the Gateway lunar orbital outpost, the Human Lander System, and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, will be supported under this contract, as part of America’s Moon to Mars exploration approach.

The contract is a fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum award value of $4.7 million over a five-year period that began July 1.

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ET Life as We Don’t Know It

 

Article by Wade Roush                           April 7, 2020                            (scientificamerican.com)

• This blog article’s writer, Wade Roush, has written a book entitled Extraterrestrials which attempts to explain why, after sixty years, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has never found a hint of advanced extraterrestrial life. At its inception in the 1960s, SETI assumed that the best way to discover ET was by monitoring radio and optical frequencies. But as Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute wrote, “[S]o far, in our quest to find ET, we have only been searching for other versions of ourselves.” The flaw in SETI’s approach is that it has been too ‘Earth-centric’ and ‘human-centric’.

• SETI’s focus has been on exoplanets within the “habitable zone” of a star system, where water remains in liquid form. But we didn’t understand how adaptable life can be. We’ve found life in places with crushing pressures and scalding temperatures, and even inside nuclear reactors where living organisms feed on radiation.

• In 1985, when Roush was a college journalist, he was ‘star-struck’ while covering a Harvard symposium inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (or META), which was attended by his heroes Carl Sagan and Steven Spielberg. It felt like the launch of a voyage that would finally turn science fiction into science reality. If you’d told the assembled scientists that 35 years would go by without SETI, META, or any of its successors detecting even a hint of an ET signal, they’d have reacted with disbelief.

• It’s time to move beyond the idea that extraterrestrials would think like us or use technologies like ours. We should continue to listening for technosignatures and look for industrial biosignatures on exoplanets, but we should also expand the search beyond familiar sun-like stars and red dwarfs. Beings who evolved in exotic environments might have very different sense organs and neural systems. We need to get outside of our own heads and think more like aliens. We need new observing and filtering systems that look for the kinds of messages that exotic beings might be sending.

• [Editor’s Note]  Now that SETI has wasted sixty years’ worth of funding searching in vain for extraterrestrial signals, scientists are preoccupied with debating ‘why’. There is no doubt that SETI is funded and run by the deep state. Carl Sagan himself was a member of deep state UFO control group, Majestic 12. So, from the perspective of its cabal overlords, SETI’s perfect record of finding and reporting absolutely no sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life for six decades has been an unmitigated success. For sixty years, they’ve been trying NOT to find ET life in the galaxy as part of the deep state’s objective of convincing the public that extraterrestrials do not exist. They don’t want the public knowing that the deep state government routinely works with alien beings, utilizing alien technology exclusively for the benefit the cabal ‘elite’. And ‘journalists’ like Wade Roush are either naïve and uninformed, or they are compromised deep state puppets.

 

In 1985, when I was a baby journalist writing my first college newspaper story, I covered a symposium at Harvard inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (META), a computer system designed by physicist Paul Horowitz to sift through millions of narrow radio channels for signals from other civilizations.

Carl Sagan was on hand that weekend to represent the Planetary Society, which had helped fund the project. So was Steven Spielberg, who’d written a

                Wade Roush

$100,000 check. Having grown up on Sagan’s Cosmos and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, I was star-struck. But I was also thrilled to witness what felt like the launch of a voyage that would finally turn science fiction into science reality.

No one at the symposium was rash enough to predict whether or when Horowitz’s project would succeed. But if you’d told the assembled scientists that 35 years would go by without META or any of its successors detecting even a hint of a signal, they’d have reacted with disappointment and disbelief. The aliens ought to be out there; they ought to be broadcasting; we ought to be able to hear them. But a 2020 Astronomical Journal paper detailing a search of 1,327 nearby stars at the highest sensitivity to date found zero candidate signals. So how is it that the Great Silence—to use the title phrase from astronomer Milan Ćirković’s 2018 book— continues?

Well, having just written my own book about the history of that question (Extraterrestrials, MIT Press, April 2020), I’ve come to suspect that there’s something missing in our approach to the search for off-world intelligence. This search is built around the hope that if technological societies are out there, they’re communicating (1) using the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum we can most easily scan from Earth’s surface, namely radio and optical frequencies, and (2) using encoding schemes such as pulse modulation that we can easily recognize. Those assumptions made sense in the early days of SETI in the 1960s, when the field was still a quirky offshoot of radio astronomy.

But today they seem fatally Earth-centric and human-centric. As Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute wrote in a paradigm-busting 2016 Astrobiology paper, “[S]o far, in our quest to find ET, we have only been searching for other versions of ourselves.”

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Aliens Likely Have a Brain the Size of a Planet Compared With Us, Leading UFO-Hunter Says

 

Article by Shaun Wooller                         February 15, 2020                         (thesun.co.uk)

• Dr Andrew Siemion of the University of California (pictured above) has launched a project using a huge telescope in New Mexico to hunt for advanced extraterrestrials. (see yesterday’s ExoArticle)  Siemion expects this enormous telescope array to find evidence of intelligent beings before others find so much as a simple bacteria.

• His team, which includes folks from the SETI Institute, will tune in to tens of billions of radio signals above our heads, filter out the “noise” ie: signals from Earth and other known sources, and explore a larger area than other teams have around a planet.

• Dr Siemion told a conference audience that he believes aliens exist. Siemion expects to discover a radio signal from a distant civilization emitted as they search for us or as part of their daily life. “Our solar system is 4.7 billion years old and the universe is 13.5 billion years old,” noted Siemion. “So, surely the first civilization that we encounter [is] likely to have had technology far longer than we have, and would be much more technologically sophisticated.”

• Siemion thinks that the first aliens we encounter will have been around the galaxy billions of years longer than humans. They are likely to be extremely intelligent and more advanced than we humans. They will “undoubtedly” be more clever than humans. They may be floating around in something like the Star Wars’ Death Star with technology that makes our gadgets look Stone Aged.

 

The first aliens will have been around billions of years longer than humans, according to Dr Andrew Siemion, who is leading the search for ET-like creatures, and are likely to be extremely intelligent and more advanced than humans.

And he warned they will “undoubtedly” be more clever than humans, with technology that makes our gadgets look Stone Aged.

They may be floating around in something like the Star Wars’ Death Star that makes our technology look Stone Age, he claims.
Dr Siemion told a conference he believes aliens exist.

He added: “Our solar system is 4.7billion years old and the ¬universe is 13.5billion years old.

“So, surely the first civilisation that we encounter are likely to have had technology far longer than we have, and would be much more technologically sophisticated.”

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The ‘Very Large Array’ in NM Will Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life

 

Article by Georgina Torbet                           February 15, 2020                               (digitaltrends.com)

• A collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SETI Institute will use the NRAO’s “Very Large Array” (VLA) of radio telescopes (with operations center in Socorro, New Mexico) to search for the presence of extraterrestrial life in the universe by such indicators as laser beams, structures built around stars, constructed satellites, or atmospheric chemicals produced by industry.

• In a statement, Andrew Siemion, Chair of the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said “The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky. This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

• NRAO Director Tony Beasley stated, “As the VLA conducts standard observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting.” “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

• Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute said that “Having access to the most sensitive radio telescope in the northern hemisphere for SETI observations is perhaps the most transformative opportunity yet in the history of SETI programs,” giving SETI researchers the opportunity to search further than ever before. “We are delighted to have this opportunity to partner with NRAO, especially as we now understand the candidate pool of relevant planets numbers in the billions.”

• [Editor’s Note]   Well this should be a huge waste of time and money for a few more years as SETI continues to search the skies in bad faith, desperately trying not to actually find any sign life in the universe, which is its true deep state objective. For if SETI ever admitted that there are signs of an extraterrestrial presence all around us, and has been for decades if not millennia, then they would be exposed as the frauds they are and find themselves out of a job.

 

        Andrew Siemion

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is getting a boost through a collaboration that will use existing

                 Tony Beasley

radio telescopes to search for indicators of life elsewhere in the universe.

A new collaboration has been announced between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SETI Institute, to add SETI capabilities to the NRAO’s radio telescopes. To begin the project, an interface will be added to the NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to search for events or structures which could indicate the presence of life, such as laser beams, structures built around stars, indications of constructed satellites, or atmospheric chemicals produced by industry.

“The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting

              Bill Diamond

unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,“ Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

As well as adding the new interface, the data collected by the VLA will be analyzed for signs of life. “As the VLA conducts standard observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting,” NRAO Director Tony Beasley said in the statement. “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Showed That Aliens Might Be More Than Science Fiction

Listen to “E51 8-03-19 A Private Tour of Roswell with a UFO Expert Looking for the Truth” on Spreaker.

Article by Brandon Specktor                       July 20, 2019                      (livescience.com)

• On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Four days later, the astronauts were quarantined aboard the USS Hornet for a 21-day isolation period. This was to ensure that no potentially hazardous lunar microbes had hitchhiked back to Earth with them. The NASA scientists found no microbial aliens on the astronauts themselves or in the 50 pounds of lunar rocks they brought back.

• Senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak (pictured above), thinks that the Apollo 11 Moon mission did bring back aliens, in a sense. “Today, about 30 percent of the public thinks the Earth is being visited by aliens in saucers, despite the evidence of that being very poor,” says Shostak. “I think the Moon landing had something to do with that.” Live Science.com recently spoke with Shostak to find out more about how the Moon landing changed the scientific community’s pursuit of aliens and the world’s perception of them.

• LS: What did the Moon landing teach humans about extraterrestrial life?  Shostak: Not too much. By 1969, most scientists expected the Moon would be dead. The Moon has no atmosphere, no liquid, and temperatures that range from hundreds of degrees to minus hundreds of degrees. “It’s awful!” But the Apollo missions showed that you could travel from one world to another on a rocket – and maybe aliens could, too. Suddenly, the universe was a little more open.

• LS: In 1969, did scientists think there might be aliens somewhere else in the solar system?  Shostak: Mars was the ‘Great Red Hope’ of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. People were very optimistic in 1976 when the Viking landers plopped down onto Mars that there would be life. There wasn’t. These days, scientists will suggest looking at the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, such as Enceladus, where geysers shoot possible microbial material right into space, so you don’t have to land a spacecraft on the surface to find it.

• LS: What did the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) look like around 1969? Shostak: Modern SETI experiments began in 1960 with astronomer Frank Drake and his Project Ozma, where he searched for inhabited planets around two stars using a radio telescope. (After four years of searching, no recognizable signals were detected.) By 1969, SETI research was being conducted informally by people who were working with telescopes in their spare time, looking up the coordinates of nearby stars and hoping to pick up radio waves. It wasn’t really organized until the NASA SETI program began in the 1970’s with a budget of $10 million a year. In 1993, a democratic congressman from Nevada killed the SETI funding, in spite of the fact that the NASA program profited from the public’s fascination with aliens more than from anywhere else.

• [Editor’s Note]  Previous articles have established that Seth Shostak and SETI are Deep State assets whose objective is to lull the public into complacency by reassuring them that every planet and heavenly body, besides the Earth, is ‘dead’ and unable to support life beyond possible microbial life. Lately, SETI and Shostak have been shilling for the restoration of Deep State government funding, so they can line their pockets while maintaining the ongoing Deep State cover-up of a teeming extraterrestrial presence on, within, and orbiting our planet.

 

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on Earth’s moon for the first time in human history. Four days later, they — along with Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins — were locked up on an American battleship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The triumphant astronauts were in quarantine. Per a NASA safety protocol written half a decade earlier, the three lunar visitors were escorted directly from their splashdown site in the central Pacific to a modified trailer aboard the USS Hornet, where a 21-day isolation period began. The objective? To ensure that no potentially hazardous lunar microbes hitchhiked back to Earth with them.

Of course, as NASA quickly confirmed, there were no tiny aliens lurking in the astronauts’ armpits or in the 50 pounds (22 kilograms) of lunar rocks and soil they had collected. But despite this absence of literal extraterrestrial life, the Apollo 11 astronauts still may have succeeded in bringing aliens back to Earth in another way that can still be felt 50 years later.

“Today, about 30 percent of the public thinks the Earth is being visited by aliens in saucers, despite the evidence of that being very poor,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute — a nonprofit research center focused on the search for alien life in the universe — told Live Science. “I think the moon landing had something to do with that.”

Shostak has been searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe for most of his life (and, fittingly, shares a birthday with the Apollo 11 landing). Live Science recently spoke with him to find out more about how the moon landing changed the scientific community’s pursuit of aliens and the world’s perception of them. Highlights of our conversation (lightly edited for clarity) appear below.

LS: What did the moon landing teach humans about extraterrestrial life?

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The Most Credible UFO Sightings and Encounters in Modern History, According to Research

by Callum Paton              April 17, 2019              (newsweek.com)

  • Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have been recorded since ancient times. But it was Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of flying saucers near Mount Rainier in 1947 that launched the modern era of UFO sightings. The U.S. military immediately moved to discredit Arnold’s claims, along with any other claim of the existence of an extraterrestrial UFO. “The (Arnold) report cannot bear even superficial examination, therefore, must be disregarded,” the Air Force Materiel Command wrote.  With Project Blue Book, the Air Force went on to discredit every single UFO sighting until the project’s end in 1969. 
  • However, the civilian scientist who helped to run Project Blue Book, Allen Hynek, claimed that the Air Force had underplayed the credibility of UFOs. He went on to devise a classification system for grading UFO sightings – ‘close encounters of the third kind’, etc. 
  • Taking its cue from Hynek, Newsweek magazine created its own rating system for UFO sightings on a point-based system. They points are awarded, or subtracted, based on factors such as witness credibility, photographic/video evidence, flight attributes, proximity, physical effect, and discredit by the government/military.  The writer also used input from the Scientific Coalition for UFOlogy (SCU) composed of 45 UFO ‘experts’. 
  • SCU board member Robert Powell says that some 6,000 UFO encounters are reported every year. “Ninety-eight percent or more of sightings are basically misidentifications of airplanes or Chinese lanterns, or a variety of different things,” Powell told Newsweek. Chiming in, Seth Shostak, the Senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek, “Could the rest be alien craft?  Maybe, but that’s like saying that the 40 percent of homicides committed in New York City that are unsolved could be due to alien murderers. Possible, but not likely.” 
  • Here are 25 UFO sightings and their ‘credibility rating’ according to this Newsweek writer: 
  1. Roswell Incident – Roswell, New Mexico July 1947: Hundreds of witnesses claim an alien craft crash landed near a ranch with one or more dead extraterrestrial beings inside. In 1997, the Air Force released a report denying everything, and declaring “case closed”. Credibility Rating: -2
  1. Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting – Mount Rainier, Washington June 1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed nine “circular-type” objects flying in formation at twice the speed of sound. It was dismissed out of hand by an Air Force investigation. Arnold maintained his account until his death in 1984. Credibility Rating: 0  
  1. Levelland UFO Case – Levelland, Texas November 1957: Multiple witnesses reported seeing an egg-shaped object or a large flash of light moving across the sky in the small Texas town. The sighting was later discredited by the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, claiming the phenomenon had been caused by severe electrical storms and ball lightning. Credibility Rating: 0 
  2. Stephenville, Texas Sighting – Stephenville, Texas January 2008: Multiple witnesses reported seeing inexplicable objects moving through the sky or bright lights. Naval Air Station Fort Worth at first said that no planes had been active from that base that night. Then they retracted and claimed that those were their planes after all.  Credibility Rating: 0
  1. NASA Curiosity Rover Photograph – Mars March 2019: Ufologist Scott C. Waring claims to have spotted a UFO on Mars in images beamed back from NASA’s Curiosity Rover. Credibility Rating: 1 
  2. The Washington, D.C. Flap – Washington, D.C.  July 1952: On two separate occasions Air Force F-94s were scrambled over Washington after UFOs were sighted on radar at Andrews and Bolling Air Force bases. The bogeys cruised at between 100 to 130 mph before zooming off at incredible speed, outrunning the military jets. Credibility Rating: 3
  1. Valensole UFO Sighting – Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France
    July 1965:     Maurice Masse claimed he saw two humanoid aliens land a spherical UFO in a field and exit the craft. The French farmer said he was left paralyzed when one of the beings pointed a cylindrical instrument at him. The pair then flew away after briefly inspecting the surroundings. Credibility Rating: 3
  1. Delphos Ring Incident – Delphos, Kansas November 1971: Sixteen-year-old Ronald Johnson claimed to have seen a glowing object hovering over a specific area close to his family farm in the early evening. When he went to fetch other witnesses the object had vanished. However, an eerie glowing ring was found where the UFO had been. Another witness corroborated to police the sighting of the strange flying object. Credibility Rating: 3
  1. Loring Air Force Base Sighting – Loring Air Force Base, Maine October 1975: On two successive nights service members reported seeing a cigar-shaped UFO hovering over Loring Air Force Base, which was also seen on radar. The government attributed it to “unidentified helicopter(s) flying out of Canada.” Credibility Rating: 3 
  2. Val Johnson Incident – Marshall County, Minnesota August 1979: On the morning on September 11, 1979, Marshall County sheriff’s deputy Val Johnson encountered what he described as a white ball of light hovering a few feet above the ground while driving on a rural section of a State Highway.  “[S]uddenly it was in the car with me”. Johnson woke up in a ditch half an hour later. His patrol car had suffered superficial damage and he had burns around his eyes.  Credibility Rating: 3 
  3. Cash-Landrum Sighting – Dayton, Texas December 1980: Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Colby Landrum claim they were followed by hovering disc with a single fiery thruster as they drove home in eastern Texas. When the trio abandoned their car they felt intense heat generated by the UFO. All three claimed to suffer health problems in the aftermath of the encounter.  Credibility Rating: 3 
  4. Trans-en-Provence Case – Trans-en-Provence,Var, France  January 1981:  Renato Nicolaï, a 55-year-old farmer, observed a saucer-shaped UFO land on his property at a distance of about 50 yards. The lead-colored vessel then lifted off from the ground and flew towards a nearby tree line. The case is considered remarkable because of scorch marks left by the machine, documented and extensively analysed by French authorities. Credibility Rating: 3
  1. Belgian UFO Wave – Belgium March 1990: Over a number of days, scores of individuals reported seeing strange lights in the sky over Belgium. Belgian Air Force F-16s claimed to have seen nothing.  But the European media   exploded when an image of one of the triangular UFOs emerged, which was then revealed to be a fake. Credibility Rating: 3 
  2. Phoenix Lights Phenomenon – Phoenix, Arizona March 1997: Hundreds of witnesses saw “otherworldly” lights move across the night sky over Arizona, Nevada and northern Mexico. The sighting consisted of a giant V-shaped craft with lights and a series of stationary orange and red lights hanging in the sky. Arizona’s governor at the time, Fife Symington, said. “It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery.”  Credibility Rating: 3 
  3. McMinnville UFO Photographs – McMinnville, Oregon  May 1950:  Paul Trent captured images of a UFO on camera after his wife spotted a slow-moving metal disk near their farm. The images were printed in Life magazine. The pair maintained their account until their deaths. Credibility Rating: 4
  1. Shag Harbour Sighting – Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada October 1967:  Multiple witnesses, including pilots, reported to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that they had witnessed a UFO with many flashing lights flying over the shoreline. A dozen or so witnesses said they saw a glowing orange sphere crash into the water and then slip beneath the surface. No wreckage was ever found.  Credibility Rating: 4 
  2. The 1976 Tehran Incident – Tehran, Iran September 1976:  Two Iranian F-4 interceptor aircraft reported their equipment jammed as they approached a star-shaped UFO over the Iranian capital. Ground control equipment at Mehrabad International Airport was also affected by the strange craft. The pilot Parviz Jafari said he attempted to fire on the UFO but was unable to cause any damage. “My weapons jammed and my radio communications garbled.” Credibility Rating: 4
  1. Coyne, Mansfield Helicopter Incident – Mansfield, Ohio October 1973: Four crew members of an Army Reserve helicopter recorded a near collision with a UFO near Charles Mill Lake. The incident was corroborated by witnesses in Richland and Ashland counties who described an object or a ball of light moving in a manner inconsistent with human flight. The crew on the helicopter, piloted by Lawrence Coyne, reported seeing a 60-foot-long, cigar-shaped object with a bright green light.  Credibility Rating: 4 
  1. Nancy France Sighting – Nancy, Grand Est, France October 1982:  A biologist, M. Henri, and his wife observed a UFO that hovered for 20 minutes over their garden. The egg-shaped vessel had a shiny metallic appearance. Henri attempted to photograph the craft but found his camera had jammed. After the UFO regained altitude it moved at a speed and trajectory impossible for man-made aircraft. Credibility Rating: 4
  1. Japan Airlines Flight 1628 Incident – Alaska November 1986:  The pilot, Kenji Terauchi, and crew of a Japan Airlines cargo flight from Paris to Tokyo reported seeing strange flashing colorful lights that followed their aircraft over Alaska while the plane cruised at 35,000 feet.  Credibility Rating: 4
  1. Chicago O’Hare Airport Sighting – Chicago, Illinois November 2006: On an overcast day, United Airlines staff and pilots at Chicago O’Hare Airport reported seeing a flying saucer hovering over the airport terminal. The vessel then shot up into the air so quickly that it punched a hole in the clouds. The FAA called it a “weather phenomenon” and did not further investigate the incident.  Credibility Rating: 4
  1. Rendlesham Forest Incident – Suffolk, England December 1980: Between December 26-28, 1980, U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at RAF Bentwaters reported seeing strange lights near Rendlesham forest. The incident was never investigated. However, radar operators at the base recounted how they had observed a UFO moving too quickly for normal human flight.  Credibility Rating: 5
  1. Aguadilla Airport Incident – Aguadilla, Puerto Rico April 2013:  A UFO was seen flying at low altitude across the Rafael Hernandez Airport runway in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft captured infrared video of the episode that was given to the Scientific Coalition for UFOology (SCU). The video shows the vessel travelling without lights below tree-top altitude, at speeds close to 100 mph.  Credibility Rating: 6
  1. USS Nimitz Tic-Tac UFO Incident – California Coast November 2004:  U.S. Navy pilot Cmdr. David Fravor recalled seeing “something not from this earth” – a tic-tac shaped vessel moving at great speed – while commanding a U.S. Navy strike fighter squadron during exercises some 60 to 100 miles off the coast of Baja California. He recounted observing. A separate Navy jet crew tracked the object and filmed it for more than a minute. The footage was publicized by the New York Times following following the Pentagon’s acknowledgement of its Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, a recent study of UFO sightings.  Credibility Rating: 6
  1. F/A-18 Super Hornet GO FASTER Video – East Coast 2015:  The third video recently released by the Pentagon shows the high-speed flight of an unidentified aircraft at low altitude by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet off over the Atlantic off of Virginia.
  • [Editor’s Note] All of these UFO incidents, with the exception of Scott Waring’s UFO on Mars, are credible and true, and are excellent accounts to look into.  This arbitrary rating system, however, is simply the mainstream media’s way of assuring the public that they are on top of the UFO phenomenon, and, as usual, there is nothing here to be concerned about.  But should anything new happen that might change this perspective, the mainstream media will be there to tell the people what to believe.

 

The modern era of UFO sightings began in 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and pilot from Idaho, spotted what he believed was a formation of flying saucers near Mount Rainier in Washington. Encounters with unidentified flying objects have been recorded since ancient times, but Arnold’s sighting hooked the American public. It was the encounter that launched a thousand theories.

The U.S. military attempted to discredit Arnold’s claims. “The report cannot bear even superficial examination, therefore, must be disregarded,” the Air Force Materiel Command wrote in a now-declassified document.

As reported sightings increased and UFO obsession spread like wildfire, its flames fanned by the notorious Roswell incident, the military attempted to douse the issue. A series of UFO studies commissioned by the U.S. Air Force culminated in Project Blue Book, which wrapped up in 1969 and found no evidence of the presence of extraterrestrial vehicles on Earth or in the skies above.

The Air Force clearly hoped to put an end to the UFO craze—but the studies had the opposite effect. Josef Allen Hynek, who had overseen the Air Force efforts, broke with the military, claiming the importance of UFOs had been underplayed. His scientific analysis forms much of the basis of modern UFOlogy and his close encounters classification system is the benchmark in grading the credibility of UFO sightings.

In devising our own credibility rating system for UFO sightings, Newsweek built upon Hynek’s foundations. The astronomer and preeminent UFOlogist valued sightings that involved multiple or highly credible witnesses. We have also incorporated advances in technology into our scale. The advent of cameras and infrared devices on aircraft have presented new kinds of evidence for sightings.

The credibility scale works on a point-based system. One point is given for sightings with multiple witnesses, another for an expert witness (a pilot, air traffic controller, military or government official). One point is awarded for picture evidence and an additional point for film of a moving UFO. Unidentified flying objects can often be explained away as foreign aircraft, so an additional point is given for UFOs seen to be flying in a manner inconsistent with flight as humans know it.

Hynek also prized close encounters. Close encounters of the first kind—sightings of an object less than 500 feet away—are given one point. Close encounters of the second kind, a UFO event where a physical effect is felt (a car light breaks, extreme heat is felt, scorch marks on the ground), are given two points. Finally, close encounters of the third kind, instances where an animated pilot is seen, earn three points.

A system for removing points has also been incorporated to account for cases where military or government bodies have discredited the sightings. Three points are removed in these cases, as the baseline for credibility in the scale begins at three.

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