UFO: ‘No extraordinary evidence, just allegations,’ says former astronaut

On Wednesday (31), as reported by the NASA held a public conference to present the first results of investigations of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) carried out by a specialized study group of the agency.

The focus of the session, which lasted around four hours, was to present “final deliberations” before the team released an official report, expected at the end of July.

In parallel with NASA’s studies, the US Department of Defense (DoD) (Pentagon) also has a specific office dedicated to monitoring what the US government prefers to call “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP).

Among Wednesday’s conference attendees was former US Navy Captain Scott Kelly, who is also a former astronaut with four space missions under his belt: his first, as pilot of the space shuttle Discovery, in 1999, and the other three, as commander of expeditions to the International Space Station (ISS).

At one point, after being silent for most of the meeting, he asked to speak to share an experience he had while flying an F-14 Tomcat supersonic fighter. “I remember one time I was flying in the alert areas of the Virginia Beach Military Operating Area and my RIO [oficial de interceptação de radar] – the guy in the back of the Tomcat – was convinced we had passed a UFO. I did not see. We turned to look – it turned out to be a Bart Simpson balloon.

Then a journalist from the site space.com asked Kelly what reported sightings, mostly by civilian and military aviators, might imply about the safety of the skies and the search for intelligent life, and what he thought of countless former pilots, intelligence officers and advisers to the US government. House is aware of objects or vessels that defy conventional wisdom about aerodynamics, propulsion, and physics.

“As Carl Sagan said, ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ You know, they have every right to make extraordinary claims, but without extraordinary evidence, it’s just allegations.” “In a court of law, eyewitness testimony is considered evidence, which I disagree with. But in science, it does part of a hypothesis. It’s like, ‘Oh, we see that!’ So let’s investigate.”

For Kelly, the sort of extraordinary claims associated with some of the reported UAP sightings that have been featured in the media in recent years, or mentioned at this week’s conference, are largely due to the fact that when flying over water or in space It can be difficult to judge the speed and size of objects due to a lack of reference points.

“If you see something that you know is an airplane, and you generally know how big airplanes are, you can tell the relative distance,” he explained. “But when you have no reference points, whether in space or flying over water, you’re really prone to optical illusions.”

Not only are human eyes prone to misperceptions, he said, but many of the sensors aboard fighter jets and other aircraft face the same difficulty.

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Source: Olhar Digital