Wanted: A Science of UFOs | Alexander Wendt | TEDxColumbus

Thank you all for coming. My name is Alex Wendt. I'm a professor of political science here at Ohio State. Before that, I taught at Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of Chicago. I'm well known in my field of international relations, and I have a serious reputation that I have no intention of squandering today. And I say that because what I'm going to do today is break a taboo, a taboo deeply held in the scientific and academic community especially, but also in the government, the news media, and all modern institutions of modern society hold this taboo. And the taboo is on taking UFOs seriously. And by that I mean three things. First, there's a taboo on admitting in public that UFOs exist, that they're real. Second, that some of those UFOs might be extraterrestrial. And third, it's also forbidden to do science on UFOs to find out one way or the other. And I want to say a few more words about that last point because it's kind of surprising when you think about it. Human beings are incredibly curious creatures. We will study anything we do not understand if given the possibility. In fact, we are so curious that we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building giant radar telescopes to look for signs of intelligent life around distant stars for which there's no evidence whatsoever. But when it comes to UFOs, not a cent. The scientific community has never done any serious sustained systematic study of UFO phenomena. And that's in spite of the fact that if it were found that some UFOs were ETs or extraterrestrials, it would be one of the most important events in human history. And yet scientists give us only silence and or ridicule for people who are UFO believers. And of course, that's because they believe that UFOs don't exist. So my first challenge in challenging this taboo is to make the case that UFOs actually are real phenomena. And to do that, I need to start with a very clear definition of what a UFO is. Most of us, when we hear the term, we automatically associate UFOs with ETs. Although it turns out they're probably gray, but little green men who pilot UFOs. And that equation of UFO and ETs is fundamentally mistaken. A UFO is nothing but an unexplained aerial phenomenon. And you can divide these into roughly two groups. The larger group is cases where with a bit more study, a bit more probing, we could probably figure out that the likely explanation for this UFO was a stealth fighter or a drone or some kind of natural phenomenon, satellites or whatever. Those are uninteresting UFOs. Let's call them temporary UFOs. The kind of UFOs I'm interested in, let's call genuine. And this is about 5 to 20% of the cases that we have. And these are cases of UFOs that don't have an obvious conventional explanation. These are the ones that I'm interested in for the rest of the talk today. And what I want to do now is bring in the authority of the U.S. Navy to help me make the case that genuine UFOs are real. And to do that, I need to do a bit of background and talk about pilot reports. Civilian and military pilots have been reporting UFOs since World War II. Some pilots have reported their incidents to their commanding officers or whatever. Many pilots have not because of fears of ridicule and so on. But in the past few years, fighter pilots especially in the United States and elsewhere have begun to become more and more vocal about what they perceive as the safety hazards that UFOs pose to their personal operations in the sky. In particular, UFOs routinely penetrate prohibited military airspaces. And more from the pilot's point of view of concern, UFOs sometimes fly dangerously close to pilots themselves, literally 50 feet away. And so pressure from the pilots led the U.S. Navy this year, and this was a big story in the New York Times, led the U.S. Navy to an official policy change on how they handle UFO reporting. In the past, they would always ignore their pilots' reports. Now they are working on a procedure to require their pilots to report something. So the U.S. Navy has taken a big step in this way. And in justifying this policy change publicly, one thing they've done is they've released two very short clips, video clips, of UFOs that their fighter pilots had taken. They probably have dozens or maybe hundreds of these clips, who knows, but these are the two they've released. They're about a minute long, and I want to just play them for you so that you can get a sense of what a genuine UFO looks like. There's a fleet of them. Look on the ASA. But against the wind. The wind's 120 knots from the west. Oh, thank you. It's not on us, though, is it? It's not on us. Look at that thing. It's rotating. Did you watch Moving Target? Oh, shoot. All right, so those are two UFO reports from fighter pilots just from a couple years ago. If you notice, in the very first one, the guy said, did you notice there's a fleet of them out there? So it wasn't just one. It was a whole fleet of those things that was flying. But whatever you or I may think is in those videos, the Navy has officially classified them as unidentified. And what that means is that they've done some homework, and they've basically ruled out all the standard conventional explanations for these two cases and probably many other cases as well. And so what they're in effect saying is there's something on that video. It's real. It's not a hoax, or it's not an illusion. There's something on that video, those videos. It's real, but they just don't know what it is. So to my mind, the Navy has just proven or at least established that genuine UFOs are real. Now, are they ETs also? That's a totally separate question. It's quite possible that even those genuine UFOs have no ETs involved in them at all. But it's important in this respect to, I think, listen to the pilots. Well, actually, on the UFO ET question, the Air Force said nothing, or the Navy said nothing about ETs at all when they released those videos, neither pro nor con. So nobody has a clue. But it's important, I think, to listen to the pilots because they have reported many times UFOs having aerodynamic capabilities that seem to far exceed anything possessed by human societies. For example, right turns at 5,000 miles an hour, extraordinary rates of acceleration, and so on, things that seem impossible according to our laws of physics. On the other hand, just a little over a century ago, our laws of physics told us that air travel was impossible, much less space travel. So imagine a civilization that's just 1,000 years ahead of us, which is really just a blip historically. Imagine what kind of technology they would have, much less a civilization that is a million years ahead of us. To us, what they could do in our skies might look like complete magic. So I think if we're totally honest with ourselves, we have to admit first, with the Navy, that genuine UFOs are real, and secondly, that we really have no idea, that we are ignorant, not only of what the UFOs are, but we're ignorant of whether or not they are ETs. And that leads to my punchline, which is that if any UFOs are ETs, then we are not only ignorant, but in my view, we are truly stupid if we're not using science to try to find out what's going on. And because the first question that comes up, if they are here, if, if they are here, the first question that comes up is, well, why? And there are a lot of options here, which we have no clue about, but just consider a couple examples. It might be an Independence Day scenario. So they're here to exterminate us, and they just haven't gotten around to it yet. On the other hand, they might be here to help with climate change, but they're reluctant to land on the White House lawn because they know that if they do so, there'll be a panic in the streets, the stock market will collapse, and governments will lose control. Either way, any kind of up-close personal contact between human beings and an alien civilization here on our planet would be an extraordinarily profound and probably disruptive event for all of humanity, okay? And that alone, to me, justifies investing in a science of UFOs to find out what this is, what all this is about. So what would such a science look like? There are different models for this that have been proposed. The one I like is the idea of a ground-based network of automated surveillance stations, each of them equipped with the Sky cameras, like this guy, but also other simple instruments, and they would monitor the sky 24-7, looking for UFOs, and if anything comes along, they immediately start recording as much data as they can, okay? Ideally, the government or the scientific community would build such a network, but they are still in UFO denial. Those are heads in the sand right there. So we're unlikely, I think, to see governments funding UFO research anytime soon, despite the Navy admitting that UFOs are real, okay? The good news, though, and ironically, is that this is not rocket science, okay? The camera technology we have today is extremely sophisticated and also surprisingly cheap. So in my view, it would be possible to organize and build the building of such a network through a scientific nonprofit, funded essentially through the Internet by crowdfunding, okay? Either way, a top-down science or a bottom-up science, it seems to me that applying some science to this phenomenon would tell us something more than we know now, which is essentially nothing, okay? So two last final points. First of all, why is this a taboo at all, okay? Why is it that pilots, scientists, even political scientists need to worry about their reputations to talk about this issue in public, okay? Why don't we treat UFOs the way we treat everything else that we don't understand, which is the scientists all go rush and try to study it? But in this case, the scientists won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. And I think a clue to this idea of why the taboo exists is in the word taboo itself, because taboos are about fear, cultural fears, usually. And I think my suggestion here is that perhaps the reason this taboo is so powerful is that we are afraid, subconsciously, of what we might find out if we actually opened up the door of science and tried to understand what these phenomena are, okay? But that leads to my second point, and the last thing I'll say, which is that in my view, the first responsibility of academics is to tell the truth. And the truth is we have no idea what UFOs are, and no one in a position of power or authority is trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and I think raises the question of whether the people should try to find out for themselves first instead. Thank you.