Earlier this year, the U.S. military and intelligence community issued a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, also called UFOs). Before the report’s release, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stated, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for.”
The attention-grabbing part of this statement is the reference to "satellite imagery." I — and the hundreds of scientists engaged in studying UAP — have never seen any publicly released data on this. We would be extremely interested in analyzing any data on objects that enter the Earth's atmosphere and do not follow ballistic orbits like meteors. But no such data is currently available to open scientific analysis.
Of course, Ratcliffe’s quote is an insufficient basis for substantive scientific inquiry. But unclassified data, assembled by non-governmental satellites, could be made available to open scientific analysis.
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