Where did the flying saucers go?
The UFOs that looked suspiciously like pie plates? The photos of spaceships that might have been props from a bad 1950s sci-fi movie, like the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space?
There seems to be a new breed of UFOs out there. They look different. Even their name has changed; instead of UFO, the U.S. government now uses the term UAP, short for unidentified anomalous phenomena or unidentified aerial phenomena. Indeed, the U.S. government is concerned enough that the Pentagon created a special organization in 2022—the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO—to investigate these mysterious objects.
In April 2023, AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick presented the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities with an analysis of the data on military UAP reports to date. What emerged was a bewildering array of UFO characteristics.
Of the 650 cases being reviewed by AARO, 52 percent involved objects that were round or spherical, Kirkpatrick testified. The remainder were “all kinds of different, other shapes.”
The most typical profile was of a round object of 1 to 4 meters (3.3 to 13.1 feet) wide, that appeared white, silver, translucent, or metallic. Their speed varied from zero to Mach 2. Most were observed flying at altitudes of 15,000 to 25,000 feet, though this might only be because terrestrial aircraft, which report many of the UFO sightings, fly in that altitude band, Kirkpatrick said.
In addition, these objects could only be detected intermittently by radar. They usually had no thermal exhaust plumes, like the kind emitted by jet aircraft.
Kirkpatrick first showed two videos, identified only as somewhere over South Asia, that were taken by MQ-9 Reaper attack and surveillance drones in January 2023. The first video was taken by an MQ-9 Reaper drone whose camera was observing another Reaper flying nearby. An object appears to fly past the second Reaper at high speed. The second video, which lasts more than two minutes, appears to show an object flying zigzags. The government concluded that the UFOs were actually just video glitches.
But more puzzling was another video (featured above) taken in July 2022 by an MQ-9—the Pentagon only identified the location as the Middle East, though Iraq or Syria would be the most likely areas for U.S. drone activity. A small, silver sphere appears to streak over the landscape as it is tracked by the drone’s camera. The incident is listed as unresolved. “It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify it, just based off of that video,” Kirkpatrick said.
Images of strange flying objects are hardly new. During the UFO hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s, there were many such photos and reports, often coming from rural farmers and commercial pilots.
The outcry—and concerns that Earth might actually have been visited by technologically superior aliens—prompted the U.S. Air Force to launch Project Blue Book. Of the 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 that were investigated, most turned out to be balloons, aircraft, natural phenomena, or hoaxes. Only 701 were listed as unidentified. None of these unidentified objects were found to display “technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge,” nor was there evidence of extraterrestrial origin.
But what’s troubling about today’s UFO sightings is that the observers cannot be dismissed lightly. “The majority of new UAP reporting originates from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force aviators and operators who witnessed UAP during the course of their operational duties,” noted the 2022 annual UAP report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
For example, U.S. Navy fighter pilots in 2014 and 2015 reported seeing objects flying at hypersonic speeds—faster than Mach 5—and at altitudes as high as 30,000 feet, but without emitting any engine or heat plumes that would be characteristic of jet aircraft. Videos taken by cameras aboard the fighters show what appear to be saucer-like craft, even as the pilots express surprise and awe at what they were seeing.
Equally significant is the new technology recording UFOs. A military pilot of the 1950s or 1980s might only have made an eyeball observation, or perhaps snapped a photo with a pocket camera. Today’s fighter jets are equipped with sophisticated sensors, including regular and infrared cameras designed to detect, track, and record fast aerial objects. These videos don’t just capture imagery and the voices of the pilots: they also show location, time, and other precise data.
It’s one thing to dismiss a graphic account of aliens abducting a hitchhiker. It’s another to dismiss reports from trained fighter pilots or robot aircraft, backed by images recorded by military-grade sensors.
Yet as is so often the case with UFOs, military technology only leads to yet another dead end. The sensors on a Navy F/A-18 fighter may be advanced, but they are designed for air combat, not establishing the identity of a flying object.
“All of these sensors don’t necessarily respond the way you think they do, especially out in the world and in the field,” Kirkpatrick noted.
The video above was taken by a U.S. Navy pilot in 2021. It was presented to the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee on May 17, 2022, by deputy director of naval intelligence Scott Bray in an open hearing on UAPs.
So in the end, what can we deduce from this evidence? Is Earth being besieged by a wave of spherical extraterrestrial craft? Are we getting glimpses of secret technologies being tested by the Pentagon, or Russia, or China?
The recent furor over high-altitude Chinese spy balloons—some of which were shot down by U.S. jet fighters—was a reminder that the skies are always filled with flying objects. In addition to thousands of research balloons, there might be 10,000 commercial planes airborne at any moment, and up to 100,000 flights per day globally.
Under the circumstances, it’s easy to make mistakes. “Observers often only see a fraction of some phenomenon from a particular angle, and this is often what leads to misinterpretation,” Iain Boyd, a professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado, told Popular Mechanics. “These same issues apply to military sensors, which tend to see only a piece of the overall picture.”
Even so, modern technology only reinforces the conclusion that most UFO sightings have innocent explanations. “Given the significant proliferation of cameras and sensors such as cell phones, it is perhaps telling that unexplainable images are still extremely rare,” Boyd said.
Better answers may be forthcoming. For example, AARO is working on standardized procedures for military pilots to report UFOs. Boyd argues that civil aviation also needs to improve reporting procedures, and that AI can help process the data.
But perhaps we are asking the wrong question. If we can’t say what these UFOs are, can we say with some confidence what they are not?
In that case, we can always go by the science. “Within our understanding of the laws of physics, there are certain phenomena that are not possible,” Boyd said. “Such as traveling at very high speeds through the atmosphere without heating the object, accelerating without a propulsion system, and so on.”
“When an event is witnessed that appears to defy these laws,” Boyd added, “my immediate interpretation is that there is something either incorrect or not fully understood about the observation.”
Michael Peck writes about defense and international security issues, as well as military history and wargaming. His work has appeared in Defense News, Foreign Policy Magazine, Politico, National Defense Magazine, The National Interest, Aerospace America and other publications. He holds an MA in Political Science from Rutgers University.
