An Alien Update from a Top Scientist Scanning the Universe for Life

Adam Frank, who scans the universe for signs of life, offers advice about extraterrestrial visitors on Earth

If you want to test whether Americans are losing their capacity to hold onto reality amid hype (whether on climate change, pandemic risk or the rest), it’s worth keeping track of, yes, the ebbs and surges in UFO UAP ET discourse.

The latest surge came after a (mischaracterized) podcast comment about alien life from former President Obama prompted President Trump to order the declassification and release of more government documents.

Google search for “obama trump alien”

Another surge will come in early June around the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” feature.

With these occasional attention-seeking blitzes in mind, I want to direct you to the Everyman’s Universe newsletter of my physicist friend Adam Frank, who’s also the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. He just posted valuable reality checks there and on his Forbes column. (Adam Frank will join me in a Sustain What show on March 18 at 1pm Eastern; details soon.)

Here’s an excerpt from his newsletter:

[W]e’ve already had 3 years of breathless congressional hearings on UFOs that have produced zero proof of anything. The best thing about the hearings has been pilots, who’ve had sightings, can make their reports public. I am all in for an open, transparent scientific study of UAPs/UFOs. Being able to report sightings without blowback is step one in that process. As I always note, however, personal testimony is the worst form of evidence. So, on its own, it’s a dead end.

But the rest of the hearings have been nothing but extravagant hearsay. Claims that alien starships are sitting in government garages are treated as ground truth without a single shred of evidence.

Have fun exploring a heap of videos and other files here.

Here’s more from Frank in a related Forbes column:

It’s been three years since Congress started taking testimony on UFO/UAPs, and they’ve given us lots of noise but no light. We’ve been shown many blurry videos along with breathless claims of how mysterious they are. But for some of those videos, even a little bit of physics training leads to reasonable explanations….

Even more importantly, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon’s task force studying individual UFO claims, has shown that the vast majority of sightings (more than 90%) can be identified. Many of the rest don’t have enough data to even get a proper study started. Those that remain truly “unexplained” are the interesting ones. They, however, are few and far between, which is news that never really comes out of the hearings.

The second clickbaiting item on the hearing’s agenda is testimony from ex-officials making truly extraordinary claims about alien spaceships and alien bodies hidden in government garages. But witnesses can offer zero proof of their claims. In fact, often they can’t even say they’ve directly seen the alien spaceships or the alien bodies. What’s left is a case of “I know a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy who said he saw the spaceship.”

That is not how science works.

So, when it comes to the greatest, most-important claim in all human history, (we’re being visited by aliens), we’ll need more than fuzzy blob videos and unprovable stories. If disclosed government documents just give us more of this stuff, we will be stuck. It will be like the endless speculation over the JFK assassination. If that’s all we get, then 10 years from now we’ll still be having the same arguments over the same vaporous UFO evidence trails.

Boring rality behind heated narrative tussles

Because nothing has changed since 2022, you might benefit from advice given on my Sustain What webcast back then from some deeply-dug-in journalists and experts on unexplained flying phenomena and the rest. Here’s the post link and an excerpt and the YouTube post of our conversation:

Keith Kloor, a fine science journalist I’ve known for decades, has been fearless and relentless in showing how a few figures in this mess have stoked the fires under the issue. Follow his Substack columns and, in particular read this one: “Why UFOs Will Never, Ever Go Away Hint: It’s not because of Hollywood, the History Channel or sci-fi shows.”

Please track his @keithkloor tweets today for more, and read the content along this thread from last week:

Not long before I launched this Sustain What dispatch on Bulletin, I hosted an informative Sustain What webcast with Kloor and others on media mania sparked by the 2021 trove of encounters and recordings made by military aircraft. The title was a question: “UFOs and the Media - Is This Time Different?“

The answer so far, remains, no. Please watch:

The other guests were Kate Dorsch (@HPSKate), a science historian at the University of Pennsylvania whose Ph.D. thesis was “Reliable Witnesses, Crackpot Science: UFO Investigations In Cold War America, 1947-1977“; Sarah Scoles (@ScolesSarah), a journalist and author of “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers”;; and Seth Shostak (@SethShostak), a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute (read his 2021 NBC essay: What UFO enthusiasts hope will be in the Pentagon’s report — and what’s more likely).

Sarah Scoles made a point that’s worth emphasizing again:

“This whole wave has been largely created by a very small group of people - these few government insiders.... - who have succeeded largely in making it seem like the entire government is worried about UFOs every day....”

As with Kloor, I encourage you, if you’re interested in reality, to track efforts by Mick West (@mickwest) to battle swarming UFO enthusiasts on X/Twitter.

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If you got this far, here’s Adam Frank with Lex Fridman on life out there: