UFO Sightings: How Scientists are Trying to Capture More Data | NOVA | PBS
qho0N3vv7Gw • 2025-03-14
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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
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file updated 2026-02-13 12:59:29 UTC
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