Ask Ethan: Could we determine if UAPs/UFOs are aliens? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Sep, 2024

Although a great many unidentified sights have been seen in the skies, none have conclusively demonstrated the presence of aliens. So far.

Whenever we’re outside on a clear, starry night, our eyes are inexorably, almost irresistibly, drawn skyward, as if we can’t help ourselves from pondering and contemplating the great expanse of space that lies above us, separated only by our thin atmosphere. Yet within that atmosphere, many sights appear that often confound us: streaks of lights, sometimes flashing and sometimes steady, sometimes colored and sometimes white, frequently appearing to move at angle that make it difficult to know precisely what the nature of this object is or how far away it truly is from us. Most of these phenomena turn out to have mundane explanations, but for a few of them, their presence remains unexplained.

Could these hard-to-identify objects, normally called an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) or an unidentified flying object (UFO), be signs of something beyond what modern science has the ability to explain? Could they even, potentially, be the result of activity by intelligent extraterrestrials? We shouldn’t let our imaginations run wild; we should figure out how to answer these questions scientifically…