A screenshot from a Navy video published by former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge's company "To the Stars Academy" shows what the Navy is now calling an "unidentified aerial phenomenon." (U.S. Navy)
(Tribune News Service) — Mysterious images captured by U.S. Navy jets, and recently released by the government, have sparked widespread speculation about alien visitations and the possibility that, finally, the truth really is out there.
As a result, the U.S. government is expected to release on Friday a highly anticipated, unclassified report about more than 100 encounters between military fliers and unidentified flying objects.
Noted astronomer Nicholas Suntzeff, speaking with a Texas A&M publication, cautions people against high expectations.
“I can’t rule out we have visitors from other planets, but we need clear evidence,” he said. “We need a clear photo, for instance. So far, we do not have such evidence.”
The New York Times earlier this month said the government report will state that intelligence experts “cannot explain the unusual movements [of UFOs] that have mystified scientists and the military.”
Suntzeff points out that all of the videos released by the Defense Department are fuzzy, and that we should be wary of such images.
He notes that in one video, the object or objects captured by the U.S. Navy fighter plane “are at the positions of the stars near the constellation Taurus and the planet Jupiter. Also, this UFO blinks in the same way a commercial aircraft does. It was taken off the coast of Los Angeles, where there is lots of air traffic. It is an out-of-focus video taken with an infrared camera. This is one example of an explanation that fits the data.”
Suntzeff says in another video “a pilot says the UFO resembled a large Tic Tac mint and that it was defying the laws of physics over the ocean and moving fast. The problem here is that we don’t know how far away it was. If it was high above the ocean, then the apparent motion is likely due to the airplane and not the object. This is called parallax. You can often find answers like this, and so on. So I am not optimistic that we will be shown extraordinary evidence where there is no natural explanation for what is seen.”
The astronomer knows this is not the message a lot of people want to hear. But, he says, “there are often simple, but boring answers.”
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