Taking UAPs Seriously

Why the changing conversation about unidentified aerial phenomena may be asking us to reconsider humanity's place in the universe.

For most of my life, I regarded the subject of unidentified flying objects as one of the easiest intellectual questions to dismiss. Not because I had carefully examined the available evidence and concluded there was nothing to it, but because I had inherited the same cultural assumptions as almost everyone else. The topic belonged somewhere between science fiction and conspiracy theory. It was populated by blurry photographs, sensational documentaries, late-night TV shows and stories that always seemed just beyond verification. Serious people simply did not discuss it. If they did, the conversation often became about their judgement rather than the evidence they were attempting to present. Looking back, I find that reaction far more interesting than any individual sighting because it reveals something uncomfortable about how we decide which ideas deserve our attention. We like to think evidence alone determines what enters respectable conversation, but history repeatedly suggests otherwise. Ideas often acquire reputations long before they receive fair investigation, and once that happens, separating the evidence from the stigma becomes remarkably difficult.

Ridicule has always been one of society’s most efficient defence mechanisms. It protects us from wasting time on countless implausible claims, but it can also discourage curiosity before curiosity has had the opportunity to do its work. Throughout history there have been ideas that deserved ridicule, ideas that deserved acceptance and ideas that simply deserved investigation. The difficulty, of course, lies in distinguishing between them. Continental drift was dismissed for decades because it seemed absurd that entire continents could move. Meteorites were once considered impossible because respectable scientists could not accept that rocks fell from the sky. The suggestion that invisible organisms caused disease encountered fierce resistance despite mounting observations. None of these examples demonstrate that today’s controversial subjects will eventually be vindicated, nor should they. They simply remind us that social consensus and objective reality have never been identical. Ridicule is useful for maintaining cultural norms. It has proved considerably less reliable as a method of discovering the truth.

For most of the twentieth century, unidentified flying objects occupied precisely that uncomfortable space where serious inquiry became almost impossible. Genuine anomalies became intertwined with elaborate conspiracy theories until the distinction between them almost disappeared. Extraordinary claims were presented with extraordinary confidence despite little supporting evidence, while sceptics increasingly concluded that the entire subject deserved dismissal. The result was an intellectual vacuum. Rational investigators avoided it because association alone threatened their credibility, while those who remained often became progressively more certain of conclusions extending far beyond what the available evidence justified. Somewhere between those extremes, the possibility of simply admitting that some observations remained unexplained almost disappeared from public conversation.

Yet over the past decade something has shifted. Military pilots have publicly discussed encounters they cannot explain. Governments have acknowledged that certain incidents remain unidentified. Congressional hearings have examined the subject without provoking the universal ridicule they almost certainly would have received twenty years earlier. Scientists who previously regarded the topic as professionally untouchable have begun arguing that unidentified phenomena deserve systematic investigation rather than automatic dismissal. None of these developments establish the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. They do not prove that unknown craft are traversing our skies. What they do establish is something subtler but still important. The people most qualified to assess certain categories of evidence increasingly appear willing to admit that not every observation fits comfortably within existing explanations. That alone represents a remarkable cultural change.

I sometimes wonder whether we have misunderstood what scepticism is supposed to accomplish. Genuine scepticism is not the habit of rejecting unfamiliar ideas. It is the discipline of withholding judgement until sufficient evidence becomes available while remaining willing to revise one’s conclusions as new information emerges. Dismissal operates differently. It reaches a conclusion before the investigation begins. One seeks better evidence. The other seeks reasons not to examine it. Those may appear similar from a distance, but they represent entirely different approaches to knowledge. If science has any defining characteristic, it is surely the willingness to remain intellectually uncomfortable for longer than our instincts would prefer.

Many people quite reasonably point out that “unidentified” does not mean “alien.” I agree entirely. An unidentified object is simply something that has not yet been identified. It may eventually prove to have an entirely ordinary explanation. Human perception is unreliable. Cameras distort reality. Atmospheric conditions create convincing illusions. Instrumentation fails. Memory changes over time. Every one of these possibilities deserves careful consideration before any extraordinary conclusion is entertained. The history of science contains countless examples of mysteries that eventually yielded perfectly mundane explanations. It would therefore be irrational to leap from uncertainty to certainty simply because the unknown is inherently fascinating.

What interests me far more is why the conversation so often stops there. Explaining that unidentified does not mean extraterrestrial is perfectly reasonable. Concluding that unidentified therefore deserves no further investigation is something entirely different. Scientific progress has never depended upon pretending anomalies do not exist. Quite the opposite. Anomalies are often where discovery begins. Most eventually dissolve under closer examination. A small number change our understanding of the world entirely. The challenge has always been determining which is which, and that determination requires investigation rather than instinct.

For years I regarded the subject in precisely those terms. I considered extraterrestrial intelligence almost certainly to exist somewhere in the universe while simultaneously believing there was no compelling reason to think it had anything to do with humanity. Those positions felt entirely compatible. The universe appeared unimaginably vast, making intelligent life elsewhere statistically plausible, while the distances involved seemed so immense that meaningful contact appeared extraordinarily unlikely. Had you asked me where I stood a decade ago, I would have described myself as curious but unconvinced.

That position began to change, although not because of any single dramatic event. There was no revelation, no document, no witness whose testimony suddenly overturned everything I thought I knew. Instead, my thinking evolved gradually as several independent lines of reasoning slowly converged. The cultural conversation changed. Governments became more willing to acknowledge unresolved incidents. Military personnel with distinguished careers described experiences they had previously avoided discussing publicly. Scientists who once ignored the topic began arguing that it warranted careful study. None of these developments proved anything extraordinary, yet collectively they altered something fundamental. They shifted the question from whether every report could immediately be explained to whether it remained intellectually responsible to assume they all eventually would be.

Around the same time, I experienced something that complicated my own thinking. On multiple occasions, while looking out across the Atlantic coast of western Europe, I observed groups of bright objects at considerable altitude behaving in ways I could not readily explain. I am deliberately cautious in describing those experiences because I do not regard them as evidence for anyone else. They are observations, nothing more. Cameras rarely capture such moments as our eyes perceive them. Distance becomes almost impossible to judge against an empty sky. Apparent motion can be deceptive. Human beings are remarkably poor at estimating scale under unfamiliar conditions. Every one of those limitations deserves acknowledgement before drawing conclusions, and I continue to consider them today.

What changed was not that I suddenly believed I knew what I had seen. Quite the opposite. What changed was my confidence that I already understood enough to dismiss similar observations made by others. Before those experiences, unidentified aerial phenomena belonged to the abstract world of newspaper articles and internet debates. Afterwards, they became an unanswered question occupying a very different place in my own thinking. I stopped asking whether every report could be explained and began asking whether I had been too eager to assume that they could.

There is a subtle but important distinction between saying, “I know what I saw,” and saying, “I no longer know enough to dismiss what others claim to have seen.” The first statement ends a conversation. The second begins one. Mine has remained open ever since.

The more I reflected upon that uncertainty, the more I realised that the larger question had remarkably little to do with unidentified aerial phenomena at all. Long before considering government reports, military testimony or personal observations, we are confronted by a much simpler question. What should we actually expect the universe to look like if we approach it without assuming humanity occupies a privileged position within it?

Our own galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. Modern astronomy suggests that planets are not rare exceptions but ordinary features of stellar systems. Beyond the Milky Way lie hundreds of billions, and perhaps trillions, of additional galaxies stretching across the observable universe. Around countless stars, chemistry unfolds according to the same physical laws that produced life here. We still do not know how frequently biology emerges, how often intelligence follows or how commonly technological civilisations develop. Those remain open scientific questions. Yet unless one of those transitions proves almost impossibly unlikely, the sheer scale of the cosmos strongly suggests that intelligence has arisen elsewhere many times.

Notice what this argument does not require. It does not require belief in UFOs. It does not depend upon classified documents, government whistleblowers or extraordinary eyewitness accounts. It follows simply from the size of the universe and the assumption that Earth is not uniquely exempt from the same processes operating everywhere else. Indeed, I increasingly find the opposite proposition more difficult to accept. The idea that among perhaps trillions of galaxies, our species alone represents the universe’s only intelligent observers strikes me as requiring a far more extraordinary chain of coincidences than the existence of other civilisations.

This, I suspect, is where many conversations become confused. People often assume that acknowledging the overwhelming probability of extraterrestrial intelligence automatically commits someone to believing that extraterrestrials have visited Earth. It does not. Those are entirely separate propositions requiring entirely different standards of evidence. I remain convinced that confusing those questions has damaged serious discussion for decades. The first arises naturally from astronomy. The second belongs to an entirely different category of inquiry.

Where my own thinking began to evolve further was in considering timescales rather than distances. Human civilisation, as we typically define it, occupies only a few thousand years. Modern science spans perhaps four centuries. Spaceflight occupies little more than half a century. Against the age of the universe, these are effectively invisible moments. If intelligent life has emerged elsewhere even a tiny fraction of the time, then some civilisations may be millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years older than ours. At that point, we are no longer discussing technology slightly beyond our own. We are attempting to imagine capabilities separated from us by spans of time so immense that comparison itself may become almost meaningless.

Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Whether or not that observation is literally correct, it contains an important warning. Human imagination is shaped by human experience. We instinctively project our present understanding into the future, yet history repeatedly demonstrates how poor we are at anticipating genuinely transformative advances. A smartphone would have appeared supernatural to someone living two centuries ago. Artificial intelligence capable of writing software, analysing scientific literature or holding conversations would have seemed equally implausible only a generation ago. If we struggle to imagine the world two hundred years ahead, what confidence should we have in imagining a civilisation millions of years older than our own?

If my thinking had stopped there, I would probably still describe myself as unconvinced. The existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe tells us remarkably little about whether it has ever interacted with humanity. It is one thing to believe we are almost certainly not alone. It is another to suggest that another intelligence may already have crossed paths with us. That remains an extraordinary proposition, and it should remain one. The standard of evidence ought to reflect the magnitude of the claim. I have no interest in lowering that standard because doing so ultimately harms the very conversation I believe deserves serious attention.

At the same time, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with another form of certainty. It is the certainty that because we cannot yet explain something publicly, we already know enough to conclude there is nothing there worth examining. That strikes me as an oddly unscientific position. Science has never progressed by insisting reality conform to our existing expectations. It has progressed by allowing reality to challenge them. Every major advance in our understanding has required the humility to admit that the universe was under no obligation to resemble the picture we had constructed of it. Every time we have assumed we had reached the limits of knowledge, nature has quietly reminded us that our confidence exceeded our understanding.

One criticism appears again and again whenever this subject is discussed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree completely. In fact, I think the phrase has become so familiar that we often overlook what it actually demands. It does not say extraordinary claims should never be investigated. It does not say anomalies should be ignored until someone arrives carrying indisputable proof. It simply reminds us that confidence should be proportional to evidence. That is not an argument against investigation. It is an argument for conducting investigation well. The mistake, in my view, is assuming that because extraordinary evidence has not yet entered the public domain, extraordinary possibilities can already be dismissed with complete confidence. Those are not equivalent conclusions, because the absence of publicly available evidence is not itself evidence that no extraordinary explanation exists. It simply means the question remains unresolved.

The same applies to what is commonly known as the Fermi Paradox. If intelligent civilisations are likely to exist, where is everybody? It is one of the most fascinating questions in modern science precisely because nobody knows the answer. Perhaps technological civilisations destroy themselves before developing meaningful interstellar capabilities. Perhaps intelligent life is astonishingly rare despite the size of the universe. Perhaps the distances involved make physical exploration impractical. Perhaps advanced societies lose interest in expansion altogether. Perhaps we are searching for signatures that only make sense from the perspective of a civilisation at our own stage of development. The list of possibilities is remarkably long, and every proposed solution serves mainly to illustrate how little we truly know. What has always struck me as curious is the tendency to treat the paradox itself as evidence against extraterrestrial intelligence. It is not evidence against anything. It is simply the recognition that our current understanding remains incomplete.

The longer I have reflected on these questions, the more I have realised that popular culture has probably shaped our expectations far more than science has. We instinctively imagine another civilisation arriving in spacecraft that resemble sophisticated versions of our own. We assume communication would occur through methods we recognise. We imagine exploration because exploration is what humans do. Yet every one of those assumptions is profoundly anthropocentric. They reflect our own technological stage rather than any universal principle. If another intelligence exists and has had millions of years to develop beyond us, then the likelihood that its methods would resemble ours may be remarkably small. The mistake is not believing such a civilisation would appear strange. The mistake is believing we already know what that strangeness should look like.

My own conclusion has therefore become more cautious in one sense and considerably more speculative in another. I am less certain than ever about specific explanations. I do not know whether some unidentified phenomena represent advanced technology, misunderstood natural processes, classified human projects or something else entirely. I cannot honestly claim to know. What I have become increasingly convinced of is that our existing framework may simply be too narrow. I find it entirely plausible that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. I also find it increasingly difficult to dismiss the possibility that some form of non-human intelligence may already be known to us in ways we do not yet fully understand. That is not a conclusion I expect anyone else to accept simply because I have reached it. It is the conclusion I have arrived at after years of watching the conversation evolve, reflecting upon my own experiences and asking myself whether my scepticism had quietly become something closer to habit than inquiry.

Whether that conclusion ultimately proves correct is, in many respects, less interesting than what it would mean if it did. We often talk about the discovery of another intelligence as though it would simply be another scientific breakthrough, comparable to finding a new particle or detecting life beneath the ice of a distant moon. I suspect it would be something entirely different. It would alter not only what we know but the framework through which we understand ourselves. Some discoveries expand knowledge. Others redefine the observer. This would almost certainly belong to the second category.

For thousands of years humanity has constructed its understanding of itself around an assumption so deeply embedded that we rarely notice it. We have always regarded ourselves as exceptional. Religions place humanity at the centre of creation. Philosophers have debated what distinguishes us from every other living thing. Our legal systems, moral frameworks and political institutions all assume that human intelligence occupies a category entirely of its own. Even science, despite dismantling many older certainties, has largely left that assumption intact. We learned that Earth was not the centre of the Solar System. Later we discovered that the Solar System itself occupies no privileged position within the galaxy, and that our galaxy is merely one among incomprehensible numbers scattered throughout the observable universe. Each discovery reduced our geographical importance without fundamentally altering our belief that humanity remained intellectually unique. We accepted that we occupied no special place in space while quietly continuing to assume we occupied a special place in existence.

Imagine, for a moment, that this assumption also proves temporary. Imagine discovering that intelligence is not a singular event in cosmic history but one expression of a process that has unfolded repeatedly across the universe. Imagine learning that some of those intelligences began their own histories millions of years before our earliest ancestors walked upright. Such a discovery would not diminish humanity any more than the existence of ancient civilisations diminishes modern achievements. Shakespeare would still have written Shakespeare. Newton would still have described gravity. Einstein would still have transformed physics. The Apollo missions would remain among the greatest accomplishments in human history. None of our achievements would disappear. What would change is the context in which we understand them. Humanity would no longer appear as the sole author of intelligence in the known universe but as one chapter in a much larger story.

History suggests that these moments of humility are often accompanied by remarkable intellectual growth. Copernicus did not simply rearrange planets; he transformed humanity’s relationship with the cosmos. Darwin did not merely explain biological evolution; he fundamentally altered our understanding of ourselves. Neither discovery made humanity less remarkable. They simply revealed that our previous picture of reality had been incomplete. Every major scientific revolution has expanded our knowledge while simultaneously reducing our confidence that we occupied a uniquely privileged position within existence. If another intelligence exists, then history suggests we should expect precisely the same pattern to continue. We may eventually look back on human exceptionalism in much the same way we now look back on geocentrism: not as foolish, but as an understandable conclusion drawn from limited information.

It is striking that humanity finds itself contemplating these questions at precisely the same moment it is attempting to create intelligence of its own. Artificial intelligence is forcing philosophers, neuroscientists and engineers to revisit questions that remained largely abstract for centuries. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? Can reasoning exist without subjective experience? At what point does sophisticated computation become something deserving of moral consideration? These are no longer questions confined to philosophy departments. Increasingly they shape technological development itself, and every improvement in AI reminds us that qualities we once regarded as uniquely human are proving more difficult to define than we imagined.

Whether artificial intelligence eventually becomes conscious is, in one sense, almost beside the point. It has already forced us to confront an uncomfortable possibility. Intelligence may be far less uniquely human than we once believed. If we are beginning to share aspects of cognition with machines of our own creation while simultaneously considering the possibility of intelligence elsewhere in the universe, then humanity may be entering an era in which the defining question is no longer whether we are intelligent, but what intelligence actually is. We may discover that the most profound scientific question of the twenty-first century is not whether other minds exist, but how many different forms a mind can take.

The same observation applies to religion, although perhaps not in the way many people assume. It is often argued that confirmation of another intelligence would destroy religious belief. I find that prediction surprisingly unconvincing. Religious traditions have survived heliocentrism, evolution, cosmology and quantum mechanics because they attempt to answer questions science was never designed to address. Purpose, morality and meaning do not disappear because our map of the universe becomes more accurate. They simply become more difficult, more nuanced and, perhaps, more interesting. Another intelligence would undoubtedly challenge many theological assumptions, but challenge has never been the same thing as destruction. History suggests that belief systems evolve. They rarely vanish overnight. If anything, another intelligence would expand the questions religion seeks to answer rather than eliminate them.

If there is one conclusion I have become increasingly confident about, it concerns neither extraterrestrials nor unidentified aerial phenomena. It concerns secrecy. If governments possess compelling evidence relating to genuinely unexplained phenomena, then continued secrecy becomes increasingly difficult to justify indefinitely. During the Cold War there were understandable reasons to protect technologies, intelligence capabilities and methods of observation. Those concerns have not disappeared, and I do not pretend that every classified programme should suddenly become public. National security remains a legitimate responsibility of governments. Yet there is an important distinction between protecting methods and permanently withholding knowledge. Some discoveries belong to nations. Others belong to civilisation.

The structure of DNA did not belong to Britain. Relativity did not belong to Germany. Evolution did not belong to England. Once discoveries reach a certain level of significance, they cease to be national achievements and become part of humanity’s collective understanding. If compelling evidence exists that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of intelligence or our place within the universe, then eventually that evidence should become available to the world’s scientific community. Physicists, astronomers, engineers, materials scientists, biologists, historians, philosophers and increasingly AI researchers would all bring different perspectives to the same evidence. Humanity has consistently solved its greatest mysteries by expanding the number of minds working on a problem rather than restricting them. If the question concerns humanity’s place in the universe, then humanity itself should ultimately be allowed to participate in answering it.

Perhaps I am wrong. I have tried to keep that possibility in view throughout writing this essay, and I hope I continue to do so. Every conclusion should remain vulnerable to better evidence. If ordinary explanations eventually account for every unresolved observation, then I will gladly accept them. Reality has no obligation to conform to my expectations, and one of the greatest strengths of science is its willingness to abandon attractive ideas when better explanations emerge.

What I have become equally sceptical of, however, is certainty in the opposite direction. The certainty that there is nothing left to discover. The certainty that every anomaly already has an ordinary explanation. The certainty that humanity has reached the limits of what nature is capable of producing. History offers remarkably little encouragement for that kind of confidence. Every generation inherits assumptions that feel permanent until they suddenly are not. Every scientific revolution begins with questions that respectable people once considered settled. The universe has repeatedly turned out to be larger, older, stranger and more imaginative than humanity expected. We have spent centuries discovering that we occupy a smaller place in reality than we once believed, yet every one of those discoveries has expanded rather than diminished what it means to be human. Humility has never been the enemy of progress. More often than not, it has been its beginning.

I cannot say with certainty that another intelligence has visited Earth. I cannot demonstrate that some unidentified phenomena represent anything beyond the limits of our present understanding. Those remain open questions, and they should remain open until the evidence warrants stronger conclusions. What I can say is that I no longer believe the most interesting question is whether every unexplained observation can eventually be explained away. The more interesting question is whether our assumptions about ourselves have quietly become the greatest obstacle to recognising something genuinely new.

Perhaps centuries from now our descendants will look back on this period and conclude that we worried unnecessarily about shadows that turned out to be entirely ordinary. That would be a satisfying scientific outcome because ordinary explanations are still explanations. Or perhaps they will wonder why a civilisation capable of mapping the cosmic microwave background, detecting planets around distant stars and building increasingly intelligent machines spent so long treating one of the oldest questions in human history as something unworthy of serious conversation. Either possibility seems preferable to refusing to ask the question at all, because if the history of science has taught us anything, it is that the universe has always been under no obligation to satisfy humanity’s expectations. The question is not whether reality will surprise us again. It is whether, when it does, we will possess enough humility to recognise that the next great discovery may not simply change what we know, but change who we believe ourselves to be.