After a long wait and lots of wild speculation, the Pentagon finally released its report on everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects last Friday. Unsurprisingly, the contents were a bit underwhelming. Of the 144 UFO sightings analyzed — most from the past two years, after the Navy and Air Force revamped their unidentified aerial phenomena reporting process — security officials could only provide answers on one sighting. The object in question was a big, deflating balloon. “The others remain unexplained,” the report states.
It’s an apt metaphor for those who hoped the report might offer hints about extraterrestrial life, or at least details on some spiffy new technology from Russia or China. But this isn’t the government’s final word on the subject: The report also states that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense will update Congress within 90 days on how they intend to improve their UFO reporting strategy and implement new technology to better understand the strange objects in the sky.
Dr. Avi Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist and the founder of the Black Hole Initiative, hopes this moment can serve as a reset for our approach to UFOs, allowing the U.S. to start putting science ahead of politics. Earlier this year, Loeb chatted with Intelligencer about his hypothesis that ‘Oumuamua — the first known interstellar object detected near Earth — could be an extraterrestrial spacecraft. With the release of the Pentagon report, Loeb has been advocating for the government to take a more scientific approach to its own study of UFOs. In an interview this week, Loeb laid out some recommendations for the government’s next steps, whether the objects turn out to be terrestrial threats or, as he put it, evidence that there are “smarter kids on the block.”
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