UFO Sightings: How Scientists are Trying to Capture More Data | NOVA | PBS
qho0N3vv7Gw • 2025-03-14
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Kind: captions Language: en [Music] when it comes to sightings of UFOs by military pilots and the public how can science help separate fact from fiction from the very days that Galileo first lifted his telescope to the sky and made measurements of the moons going around Jupiter everybody else could then reproduce those measurements and go oh yeah he's right and that confirmation is what has made the scientific method so powerful over the last 400 years the thing we need is is data and we need real data and we don't have it astronomer AI lob is collecting more data in a novel way we just constructed an observatory at Harvard University we are monitoring objects that fly overhead and trying to make sense with them this collection of instruments is part of Harvard's Galileo project the Galileo project is developing several sites that are spread across a geographical region where each site has an array of sensors Optical cameras infrared images there's audio from infrasound to Ultrasound there's radar it's a wide array of instruments to basically look at the sky all the time to to see if you find any anomalies some instruments have otherworldly names like this one called doll after the cyborg aliens featured in The Doctor Who series inside dock there are eight infrared cameras they get a full picture of the entire sky at all times in the infrared when something of interest is identified by the main set of cameras we zoom on it in the sky and this is the camera that can move around and look at the object of Interest automatically based on the computer system that we develop you can imagine if you have a camera pointing overhead you're going to see a lot of things that are identifiable so they use machine learning what people call artificial intelligence that can recognize the Gnomes recognize the birds the airplanes the balloons leaves all the known things and sort of reject those filter them out and then what you're left with is the anomalies you're left with things that you cannot understand the things you can't identify so far we have been operating in this Observatory for several months and we saw hundreds of thousands of objects in the sky none of them appears to be anomalous but even if one in a million came from outside of this Earth that would be big news to humanity and will change our future and that's what drives my science and there's another way we can collect more data with a little help from the public it would seem like they're going sideways in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at Enigma Labs a staff of software designers and UFO enthusiasts are developing a first ofit kind crowdsourcing app the goal is really to bring people together to share their uip experiences and their sightings we get a lot of starlink and SpaceX rocket videos but at the same time people are submitting things that cannot be explained this I've got one that I can't figure out maybe you can help me out this is really cool just this light comes floating in and then it h but wait but why why does this slowly right yeah those are fireworks Isaac right those are probably fireworks probably smoke rising up and smoke rising up mhm but in just a second it will get weirder what isn't that weird brigh oh it's getting brighter yeah it keeps getting brighter and it's a broad beam of light so it's not a star so what do you think about maybe drone but I mean look how still it is it doesn't have blinking lights I mean it doesn't look like a drone this is a good one I don't know I don't know what that is apps like this could one day be a source of data for scientists to study we're not relying just on did you see something we're asking your cell phone to make a measurement it's going to record the position of the phone on the the planet because we all have GPS's in it and because it has little compass in it it will also tell us what direction we're looking at so we can actually do scientific experiments with actual data because our modern cell phones are so good now at recording numbers as scientists we also want to get to the bottom of this the answer is get more data and the way you're going to get more data is that you're going to have more eyes on the sky thanks for sticking around don't forget to subscribe to see more videos from Nova and click the Bell icon to make sure you don't miss anything see you again soon
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