Panic over mysterious drones says more about humans than UFOs

Growing panic over mysterious drones taking over the skies of the mid-Atlantic states reminds us that in the centuries-long hunt to identify UFOs, humans are usually the weak link.

America faces real national security challenges in the new era of unmanned aerial vehicles in warfare. But a mysterious drone invasion over New Jersey isn’t one of them.

It turns out that just as eyewitnesses often spoil the details of, say, a car crash on the street corner, we are notoriously unreliable when it comes to identifying and reporting UFOs . Upon investigation, a huge percentage of “sightings” turn out to be the planet Venus or other astonishingly bright astronomical phenomena; people on the ground regularly misjudge distances in the sky, so that even objects miles away are perceived as close.

The problem of UFO mistaken identity is largely why the military and scientists now more accurately refer to such sightings as UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena – a label intended to mean that many observations may not be “objects” at all, but rather “objects”. Rather, these are known or still unknown astronomical and atmospheric phenomena.

Even experienced aviators make mistakes. On October 1, 1948, World War II veteran and North Dakota Air National Guard pilot Lt. George Gorman pursued him in his P-51 fighter after spotting the bright light of a UFO which passed in front of him in the sky. Fargo. At speeds of over 400 mph, he engaged him in a dogfight for nearly 30 minutes, the ball-shaped UFO swinging and weaving around him as he executed turns he estimated aerodynamically impossible.

He eventually broke off the engagement, without ever identifying the bogeyman. “Just as we were about to collide, I guess I got scared,” he told investigators, later adding: “It’s hard to believe your own eyes when something without wings moves away and leaves you motionless.”

Investigators later determined that Gorman was chasing a launched weather balloon about 10 minutes before spotting it. The balloon was just floating in the night sky, and it was diving and running all around it.

J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer and godfather of “ufology,” who spent a quarter century working with the Air Force on its UFO studies and coined the phrase “close encounters of the third kind.” , told an interviewer late in his career: “Pilots have been known to swerve their planes violently when they suddenly encounter a very bright meteor that they think is on a collision course, but which later turns out to be be 50 to 100 miles away.”

There’s a reason why people who are serious about studying UAP try to take humans out of the reporting loop: At a congressional hearing last summer, Ryan Graves – a former Navy aviator who had his own experiences meeting the UAP and now runs an advocacy organization called Americans. for Safe Aerospace – offered a more reliable alternative to the grainy, black-and-white (but supposedly revealing) photos that litter the Internet: sensors.

Similarly, Avi Loeb, a professor of astronomy at Harvard and a leading advocate of UAP studies, says we need to understand much better what a “normal” sky looks like before we try to determine what is “abnormal.” . As Loeb told me last year: “Trust the data. People are a waste of time.

I have always been fascinated by the self-centered confidence that underlies so many UFO reports, that people’s first instinct when they spot a bright, moving light in the night sky is not to assume evidence – say, a star, meteor, satellite or satellite. distant airliner – but instead of imagining that after an alien ship travels thousands of light years through interstellar space to visit Earth, the aliens would choose that moment on a random Tuesday evening to revealing yourself to someone on a dark rural road or in a suburban backyard. Occam’s Razor, the useful medieval theory that the simplest explanation is usually the best, would tell you that the sound of beating hooves is more likely to mean horses than zebras.

This instinct stems in part from something fundamental. The question “Are we alone?” “” is one of the three most fundamental questions that have fascinated humans since the first caveman campfires, a question that ranks alongside “What happens after death?” and “Is there a God?” as the deepest and potentially life-altering mysteries we struggle with. Who wouldn’t want to answer to one of the big three by taking out the trash late at night?

Beyond that, our cultural fascination with UFOs comes from the fact that it is a rare realm where we can all contemplate the deepest frontiers of knowledge. As an ordinary person, I can’t add much to the already advanced scientific and mathematical questions of our time: I’m not likely to solve wide-aperture string theory at a weekend barbecue, and my tinkering in the garage is unlikely to yield results. to humanity the secret of nuclear fusion.

And yet, as the New Jersey drone mystery reminds us, every time any of us look out our kitchen window, gaze up at the sky in our backyard, or drive down an empty highway, we may believe that we might see this glowing light that changes everything.

Garrett M. Graff, a Washington Post columnist who writes about leadership, is a journalist, historian and author of nine books, including “Watergate: A New History.”